Thanks to Saul Sternberg, Bob Levinson and Alex Chernavsky.
Last night I slept great. I woke up feeling very rested. I can remember only three situations when I woke up feeling more refreshed. (a) On a certain camping trip. (b) When I was on my feet for ten hours. (c) After eating a lot of pork fat. I cannot simulate camping trips, and standing ten hours/day was very hard. The pork-fat effect was repeatable, in the sense that I slept better after eating pork fat, but I never ate that much pork fat again. It was too much.
Why did I sleep so well? I can think of several possible reasons.
1. Random noise. Let’s say there are 20 factors that affect my sleep and they just happened to all line up in a good direction.
Another set of possible reasons derive from what was unusual about yesterday. I can think of five things:
2. I had yogurt and blueberries and honey about 6:30 pm. (In addition to 1 tablespoon honey at bedtime.)
3. I forgot to hang a blackout curtain that darkens my bedroom. Usually I hang two. Last night, by mistake, only one.
4. I started eating dark chocolate daily two days ago. Maybe the good stuff in it (the flavones) accumulates in the brain so that the good effects get larger day by day.
5. I watched faces in the morning a half-hour later than usual. Usually I start watching them at 6:00 am. Yesterday I started at 6:30 am. I had forgotten about this difference until I looked at my records.
6. I switched to a new brand of honey (from a German brand to a Canadian one).
#1 is unlikely. #2 vaguely corresponds to the idea that honey helps us sleep because it supplies energy. Maybe honey at 6:30 fills up the liver (with glycogen) and honey at bedtime goes into the blood. But I’ve eaten plenty of meals at 6:30 without any obvious effect. Maybe they were too low-carb. I don’t know if making my room very very dark (two curtains) is better than making my room dark (one curtain) but there is no obvious reason making my bedroom less dark would improve sleep (#3). I have never heard anyone say chocolate (#4) improved their sleep. Morning faces did improve sleep but the mood improvement was much more obvious (#5). I’ve tried several brands of honey; there was no obvious difference between them, arguing against #6.
As the day wore on I found myself in a good mood but not a great mood, arguing against #5.
I’d say #2 is the most plausible, the rest less plausible, with #1 the least plausible. But I will test all of them.
More (a day later) I did #3 (only one curtain), #4 (chocolate), #5 (later faces), and #6 (new honey) again. I did not sleep exceptionally well. That makes #1 and #2 more plausible.
In a 2010 forum discussion I found this:
SLEEPY HEAD I read that honey helps you sleep. I’ve tried it the past few night and have slept very well! I have had trouble falling asleep and staying asleep since I was born. I even take Ambien sometimes and still stay awake alllllll night long. I can’t believe how well I slept the past 2 nights. Just take one teaspoon of honey before bedtime and sleep like a puppy!
USER 967048 I took honey again last night and slept awesome. I have found that 2 tablespoons work the best.
USER 968407 I took honey again last night and slept like a baby again! This really works!
USER 602568 I’ve been sipping a cup of milk with a couple teaspoons of honey on nights I can’t sleep. It always works. But I thought it was the warm milk. I didn’t realize the honey was the key ingredient.
More evidence that as little as one teaspoon produces a big improvement. One teaspoon of a common food can greatly improve something as important as sleep!
In a recent post called “Government as useful irritant” I said five factors increase innovation: 1. Freedom. 2. Benefit. 3. Resources. 4. Pain. 5. Stability. The effect of government isn’t simple. It might freedom — to the extent the coercion outweighs the protection — and of course corrupt governments make it harder to benefit from your innovation. On the other hand, governments often provide resources, pain and stability. Several of the factors are contradictory — pain and stability, for example — which makes it hard to produce optimal conditions, at least without paying attention to what actually happens.
A article I read soon after that (“Snowden and Greenwald: The Men Who Leaked the Secrets”) had two relevant examples. One of my points was that increasing inequality reduces innovation bad because it means the people at the top get more and more comfortable, which reduces their desire to innovate. The more inequality, the more of the population falls into two categories: 1. Too poor to innovate (not enough resources). 2. Too comfortable to innovate (not enough pain).
Greenwald saw the value of pain:
After graduation, he accepted a job in the litigation department of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz . . . “I could not thrive or even function in a controlling institution like that. There’s a huge dichotomy between people who grow up with alienation, which, for me, was invaluable, and people who grow up so completely privileged that it breeds this complacency and lack of desire to question or challenge or do anything significant.
Snowden had all five factors in large amounts. He had freedom because his bosses paid him little attention and, because of his IT talent, it was easy to get a job. He also had a lot of money. Obviously he had great resources, including IT talent, knowledge and access. He had pain because he was disgusted by NSA overreach and Obama’s failure to improve things. He had stability because he had a steady job. The money helped here, too. Because the revelations are so large, he benefits a lot, even if there is also a very big cost.
After I posted that tofu made me stupid — made me slower on a reaction-time test — a reader named Ann, who lives in Florida, said she had discovered that her migraine headaches were caused by soy. How she discovered this:
I was 49 years old and in that hot flashes stage of life, had read that soy could help alleviate them and tried a soy capsule not at a meal, immediately noticed sinus pressure and itchiness.
So I started reading all labels and eliminated soy from my diet and my migraines and sinus headaches went away! The hot flashes eventually went away on their own. I was losing whole days every month to the migraines. Every now and then the soy sneaks in at a restaurant but not as bad as before. Whenever anyone says they have migraines I always suggest looking at soy. Regretfully my daughter has the same issue, but she has way fewer headaches after eliminating soy.
I used to blame a lot of my headaches on allergies, never thinking it could be something I was eating. At age 60 now, my cholesterol numbers are excellent and I weigh 122 pounds when so many of my friends are overweight.
I asked how long it had taken to discover this.
I had been having migraines for years, 10-20, but in the mid 90s they got worse (could have coincided with more soy in food). Saw a doctor but he just prescribed imitrex which helped but did not prevent them. He never suggested looking for a food cause. It was dumb luck or divine intervention that I tried that soy capsule in 2001 or 2002. I am often amazed at how much better I feel health wise since then. Since soy is in so much processed food my diet is very basic “real” food. Raw fruits and veggies, plain nuts, fresh meat, real cheese, eggs, yogurt, any desserts I make from scratch with real butter. I’m always excited when I find a cracker that doesn’t have soy since that’s usually my bread substitute.
Let me repeat part of that: A doctor she saw because of migrains did not suggest trying to find an environmental cause. The same thing happened to a woman I wrote about for Boing Boing. Her doctor just prescribed one drug after another. Her migraines turned out to be caused by cleaning products. Not knowing that migraines often have environmental causes is like not knowing the germ theory of disease.
Few soy eaters realize the dangers of soy, as far as I can tell. I wrote to one of them, Virginia Messina, a nutritionist who has said “there is no reason to believe that eating soyfoods is harmful to brain aging.” She has not replied.
A long list of possible migraine triggers (from the UC Berkeley health service) does not list soy, although it does mention soy sauce. It says soy milk should be safe. In a 2006 interview, one headache doctor recommended avoiding all soy. In the comments to this, a woman says:
SOY is the biggest trigger for my migraines. For years I suffered daily from migraines but after watching EVERYTHING I eat and reading all labels and avoiding SOY as best I can I am doing better. The biggest problem is that SOY is in everything!!!! I think one day they will find out how bad it is for us.
Imagine that. Putting something that damages the brain in everything.
Thanks to Allen Jackson and Phil Alexander.
After I’d been taking bedtime honey for 3-4 weeks, I began to notice changes in addition to better sleep and more strength. One was a sense of increased well-being throughout the day. Not better mood, not more energy, just somehow better. Another was better motivation. It was easier to do everything — pushups, putting stuff away, and so on. My life was not perfectly constant, however, so I could not be sure these changes were due to the honey.
I asked Jason DeFillippo of Grumpy Old Geeks about this. Bedtime honey really helped him. He replied:
I have noticed that during the day I can concentrate for much longer stretches but I was chalking that up to the sleep. I think the motivation you’re talking about is definitely starting to manifest itself quite a bit more as well. I’m putting more effort into my business than I have since I started it 2 years ago and haven’t really thought about it being a side effect of the honey but it’s possible. Amazing things happen when you haven’t slept properly for 20 years and can now sleep through the entire night.
After he mentioned concentration, I realized I had noticed the same thing: I could do work that required concentration for longer periods of time. In contrast to Jason, I had slept well for many years before starting the honey — or so I’d thought.
Some people find that bedtime honey does not work, at least initially. One reader wrote:
I tried it out for several days now [1 tablespoon of honey], and it produces in me a similar effect as when I go to sleep when I have drunk several beers before. I wake up several times during the night, vivid dreams, and feel less rested in the morning rather than more.
I suggested a smaller dose — 1 teaspoon, which may be effective. He tried it:
I have taken a teaspoon of honey now for three days and my experience so far is that it is better than a tablespoon of honey. I vaguely remember that I dreamed but do not remember about what. Today I also noticed that reading in the train was easier than before, despite waking up earlier, I felt I understood and retained more of what I was reading. What I find most surprising over these three days is that I don’t use my glasses as often as before.
So if a tablespoon causes you to wake up in the middle of the night, try a smaller dose. I haven’t yet tried a range of doses.
Cliff Styles, a 66-year-old man living in Huntington Beach, commented that his sleep got much better after he stopped eating wheat. I asked him why he gave up wheat. He replied:
I had a morning cough that was very nasty, I didn’t smoke, but had read a fair amount about food allergies and that reading suggested an allergic reaction as the cause. I tried several things, over a period of years, including eliminating alcohol for several months of the year (modest help to allergies and depression), reducing sugar consumption (big help to mood swings), with some success. I had been reluctant to eliminate wheat because it seemed benign and I loved all the wheat products, but at one point in reading about food allergies I came across the idea that we develop allergic addictions to foods we eat regularly — and I was probably eating wheat more than three times a day, seven days a week. I made no connection to the sleep apnea and snoring in the allergy research, in fact I took the sleep apnea and snoring for granted, and thought the nightmares were the product of psychological problems.
I decided to experiment with eliminating wheat. Well, it was like I imagine going off of heroin might be like — chills, body aches, flu-like symptoms for four or five days, then all the symptoms cleared up — and the cough went away. My wife was skeptical, so after a few weeks, I went back to eating wheat, the cough promptly came back, she was convinced, I was more certain, went off wheat permanently. I will once in a while indulge, but the quick return of the cough gets me back to the wheat-free diet. The wheat reaction is so pronounced that many friends have noticed my reaction, since I tend to indulge at social occasions.
The sleep benefit happened quite unexpectedly. After quitting wheat, my snoring eased a bit, and the sleep apnea went away, though now I do not remember how quickly, but I think it was pretty fast. Another side benefit is that I lost about 15 pounds of belly fat, and it stayed off for years. My wife notices that when I indulge in wheat now, my snoring gets worse that night, whereas I won’t necessarily notice this myself.
So what was the impetus and chain of causation? A symptom (a nasty cough, you’d think I was a pack a day smoker, especially in the morning), reading about food allergies, self-testing and seeing a result on the cough, and only then getting the benefit to sleep. At no time did I undertake the test of eliminating wheat in order to cure a sleep problem, that was just a very, very fortunate side effect.
How much sleep apnea is due to food allergy? Sleep doctors do not consider this possibility. Here is an example where the food allergy was dairy. Here is another example. Here someone claims “The commonest causes of obstruction sleep apnoea are allergy . . . and being overweight.”