Category: sleep

Science in Action: Why Energetic?

Seth Roberts5 Comments

Last night I slept unusually well, waking up more rested and with more energy than usual. I slept longer than usual: 7.0 hours versus my usual 5.1 hours (median of the previous 20 days). My rating of how rested I felt was 99.2% (that is, 99.2% of fully rested); the median of the previous 20 days is 98.8%. Because the maximum is 100%, this is really a comparison of 0.8% (this morning) with 1.2% (previous mornings); and the comparison is not adjusted for the number of times I stood on one leg to exhaustion, which improves this rating. During the previous 20 days I often stood on one leg to exhaustion six times; yesterday I only did it four times. Above all, I felt more energy in the morning. This was obvious. I have just started to measure this. At 8 am and 9 am, I rate my energy on a 0-100 scale where 50 = neither sluggish nor energetic/energized, 60 = slightly energetic/energized, 70 = somewhat energetic/energized, and 75 = energetic/energized. My ratings this morning were 73 (8 am) and 74 (9 am). The median of my 9 previous ratings is 62. The energy improvement (73/74 vs 62) is why I am curious. I would like to feel this way every morning.

What caused it? I had not exercised the previous day. My room was no darker than usual. My flaxseed oil intake was no different than usual. I had not eaten more pork fat than usual. However, four things had been different than usual:

1. 2 tablespoons of butter at lunch. In addition to my usual 4 tablespoons per day.

2. 0.5-1 tablespoons of butter at bedtime. Again, in addition the usual 4.

3. 1 tablespoon (15 g) coconut butter at bedtime. Part of a longer study of the effect of coconut butter. Gary Taubes suggested this. I had eaten 1 T coconut butter at bedtime 13 previous days. On the first of those 13 days, I had felt a lot more energetic than usual in the morning. On the remaining days, however, the improvement was less clear. I started measuring how energetic I felt in the morning to study this further. Last night was Friday night. On the previous two nights (Wednesday and Thursday) I had not eaten the coconut butter. Maybe absence of coconut butter followed by resumption of coconut butter is the cause.

4. Fresh air and ambient noise. Following a friend’s suggestion, I opened one of my bedroom windows.

My first question is whether the improvement is repeatable. If so, I will start to vary these four factors.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Questions About One-Legged Standing and Sleep

Seth Roberts5 Comments

Rajiv Mehta asked some questions about using one-legged standing to improve sleep. I do three sets of two (left leg, right leg) each day.

Q. How do you spread out your three sets (have you found some minimum time between sets, say 3 hours)?

A. I make sure there’s at least 4 hours between sets. The effect was weaker with only 2 hours between sets. The time of day doesn’t matter but for convenience I usually do one set in the morning, another set in the afternoon, and a third set in the evening.

Q. They say exercise before bed is not a good idea. Do you make sure your last set is at least X hours before bed?

A. No. If anything this particular exercise will make you more sleepy, not less.

Using the Tonic app for this.

 


Christine Peterson’s Zeo Research

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Christine Peterson’s poster of her Zeo research was one of the highlights of the QS conference for me, as I said. Here’s why.

The correlation between Sleep Stealer score and time awake. When her Sleep Stealer score was 5 or less, she was awake about an hour during the night. When her score was more than 5, she was awake about two hours — a big difference. There should be a big difference, but you could fail to see it for a thousand reasons. The large difference is a validation of the whole thing — above all, an indication that her Zeo is working correctly.

Even when her Sleep Stealer score is low, she is awake a long time. This means there are major determinants of sleep depth not captured by the Sleep Stealer score. With the right Sleep Stealer score — assuming the correlation reflects cause and effect — she can improve from two hours to one hour (one hour difference) but that leaves one hour. This implies that the determinants of time awake not in the Sleep Stealer score are just as important as those that it contains.

Even when she is at the best level of important factors, she is awake a long time. When she had no drinks, she was awake 56 minutes/night. When other people didn’t disrupt her sleep at all, she was awake 54 minutes/night.

The average wake time for women 50-59 is half an hour. That’s a lot of lost time, day after day, night after night. Note however that the data is from Zeo users, who may have worse sleep than average.

It only took three months to collect the data. This isn’t on the poster. Yet this is a solid contribution, in the sense that I learned from it. With perhaps nine months of data and better data analysis, it might be publishable. The main point such a paper would presumably make is that even when you do everything right (Sleep Stealer score = 0) you’re still awake a lot. This point is nowhere in the sleep literature.

Christine, if you would like to sleep better I suggest:

  1. Don’t eat breakfast until at least three hours after you wake up.
  2. Get at least one hour of sunlight early in the morning — e.g., 6 to 7 am. You can do this by working outside. (I work outside several hours every morning.)
  3. Stand on one leg to exhaustion four or more times per day. (I do it six times/day.) You can do this while reading — it should not reduce your free time.

 

 

 

The Romance of Tracking

Seth Roberts5 Comments

I am at the First Quantified Self Conference in Mountain View. The attendees are much more relaxed and cheerful than at the academic conferences I’ve attended, presumably because they chose to come. Some are from Europe. My overall take is that the conference’s theme is the romance of tracking, in the sense that the typical presentation is something like: isn’t it wonderful that I’m measuring this? Or hypothetical. (Of course, the research presented at typical academic conferences is almost never shown to have practical value.) I think this is entirely reasonable. In my experience, it is very hard to learn something clearly useful and takes a long time. For example, I measured my sleep for about 10 years before figuring out how to improve it.

Sean Ahren‘s presentation was one of the best I heard, and illustrated the difficulty. He has Crohn’s Disease. He wondered if hookworms would help. Day by day, he measured how much pain he felt, and for some of the time took hookworms. There was no clear difference between the two periods (with and without hookworms). He learned plenty of useful stuff — how easy/difficult it was to do the measurements, what the data look like, the apparent ineffectiveness of one brand of hookworms – but when contrasted with the goal of learning how to reduce pain from Crohn’s, it doesn’t seem like much. Perhaps the average Crohn’s sufferer would say it’s great you’re doing this but think how does this help me? I think his observations lasted about 8 months. Perhaps if he continues for 6 years, by then the amount of learning will be larger and more tangible. Overall it’s a good example of the way scientific progress and job don’t mix well. When you have a job, you make tangible progress quickly: you fill someone’s order, for example. They wanted something, you gave it to them. Tangible. Whereas trying to clearly improve one’s Crohn’s Disease might take ten years. Too long if your motivation is connected to making a living. Too long for professional scientists.

At a breakout session on sleep experiments, I learned that someone had great success wearing blue-blocking glasses (which look orange) after 9 pm. Something I want to try. I’ve heard about these glasses before but these results were especially impressive. The glasses quickly reduced how long it took him to fall asleep. Someone else was told he had sleep apnea. But when his acid reflux got better, so did his sleep.

You can read about many talks, including mine, in great detail at Ethan Zuckerman’s blog.

“Stuff of Seth”: Faces/Mood and Anticipatory Waking

Seth Roberts5 Comments

After trying the Shangri-La Diet, Jazi yechezkel zilber found that other aspects of my research (“stuff of seth”) were relevant to his life:

Years ago, I was part of a community where people would be up early praying etc. For an hour and then eat together. I noticed that going there in the morning was good for me, but was puzzled by the effect. I hypothesized it was the social effect per se.

At some point, I stopped this (what the hell do I have with religion and prayer?) and noticed that I got depressed. I remember that the depression came with a delay. It was funny to see it, as I could not make sense of it. But this I remember well. The depressive effect was not the same day as not going to the prayers but tomorrow (or later?).

I was not having early awakening then. Afterwards, I started having periodically early awakening, I cannot remember the frequency, but it was there and annoying. Now when going to the community, I had two hours between awakening and eating. Whereas at home I would eat immediately after waking. Another thing that puzzled me was how I came to wake up naturally *before* my scheduled wake-up time. I used to wake up much later. With food anticipation it makes perfect sense. I woke up two hours before conditioned feeding.

The Amish have extremely low rates of depression — and eat communal breakfasts. The story about early awakening reminds me of a student who told me when you told us this in class I didn’t believe it but lately I started waking up too early and was puzzled until I realized I had changed my breakfast.

Health Care Stagnation: Sleep

Seth Roberts8 Comments

The January 2011 issue of Bottom Line/Health has an article called “Dirty Drugs” about popular drugs with bad side effects. It is based on an interview with an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard named James Rudolph. It contains the following:

Insomnia. Most OTC drugs taken for insomnia, including the allergy medicine Benadryl and sleep aid Sominex, contain diphenhydramine. It can cause constipation, difficulty concentrating, urinary retention, and trouble with eye focus — and stays active in the body for 12 to 18 hours, which can cause next-day grogginess.

My advice. Avoid taking diphenhydramine for insomnia.

Better. Practice good sleep habits. Examples: Go to bed at a reasonable hour, and maintain the same schedule every night. Exercise regularly but not within two hours of bedtime — it will make falling asleep more difficult. Take a warm bath before bed to help you relax.

I agree, insomnia drugs are bad news. But the “better” advice could be a hundred years old.

Effect of one-legged standing on sleep. Six signs of the profound stagnation in health care.

Effect of One-Legged Standing on Sleep

Seth Roberts22 Comments

In 1996, I accidentally discovered that if I stood a lot I slept better. If I stood 9 hours or more, I woke up feeling incredibly rested. Yet to get any improvement I had to stand at least 8 hours. That wasn’t easy, and after about 9 hours of standing my feet would start to hurt. I stopped standing that much. It was fascinating but not practical.

In 2008, I accidentally discovered that one-legged standing could produce the same effect. If I stood on one leg “to exhaustion” — until it hurt too much to continue — a few times, I woke up feeling more rested, just as had happened when I stood eight hours or more. At first I stood with my leg straight but after a while my legs got so strong it took too long. When I started standing on one bent leg, I could get exhausted in a reasonable length of time (say, 8 minutes), even after many days of doing it.

This was practical. I’ve been doing it ever since I discovered it. A few months ago I decided to try to learn more about the details. I was doing it every day — why not vary what I did and learn more?

One thing I wanted to learn was: how much was best? I would usually do two (one left leg, one right leg) or four (two left leg, two right leg). Was four better than two? What about three?

I decided to do something relatively sophisticated (for me): a randomized experiment. Every morning I would do two stands (one left, one right). In the evening I would randomly choose between zero, one, and two additional one-legged stands. Sometimes I forgot to choose. Here are the results for three sets of days: (a) “baseline” days (baseline(2), baseline(3), baseline(4)) before the randomized experiment and during the experiment when I forgot and (b) the “random” days (random 2, random 3, random 4) when I randomly choose and (c) a later set of days (“baseline 4″) when I did four one-legged stands every day.

Each morning, when I woke up I rated how rested I felt on a scale where 0 = not rested at all (as tired as when I went to sleep), and 100 = completely rested, not tired at all.

 This shows means and standard errors. The number of days in each condition are on the right.

The main results are that three was better than two and four was better than three. The three/four difference was large enough compared to the two/four difference to suggest that five might be better than four. The similarity between random 4 and baseline 4 means that the amount of one-legged standing on previous days doesn’t matter much. For example, on Monday night it doesn’t matter how much I stood on Sunday.

These differences were not reflected in how long I slept. Below are the results for “first” sleep duration, meaning the time from when I went to sleep to when I woke up for the first time — which is when I measured how rested I was (the graph above). On a small fraction of days, I went back to sleep a few hours later.

These results mean that one-legged standing increased how deeply I slept, what you could call sleep “efficiency”.

I also computed “total” sleep duration, which included first sleep duration, second sleep duration, and nap time the previous day (e.g., nap time on Monday plus sleep Monday night). If I took a long nap, I slept less that evening. Here are the results for total sleep duration.

The results also support the idea that one-legged standing made me sleep more deeply.

The randomized experiment had pluses and minuses compared to a simpler design (such as an ABA design, where you do each treatment for several days in a row). The two big pluses were that the conditions being compared were more equal and you could simply continue until the answer was clear. The two big minuses were that I often forgot to do the randomization and lack of realism. If I decided that four was the best choice, I’d do four every day, not in midst of two’s and three’s.

Overall, it was clear beyond any doubt that four was better than two, and clear enough that four was better than three (one-tailed p = 0.02). The results suggest trying larger doses, such as five and six. I’ve only done six once: before a flight from Beijing to San Francisco. It was one of the few long flights where I slept most of the way.

If you try this and you do more than one right and one left, leave plenty of time (two hours?) before the second pair, to allow the signaling molecules to be regenerated.

“Reading Seth Roberts Puts Me to Sleep”

Seth Roberts3 Comments

… is the charming title of this post by Adam Stoffa. Actually, reading me keeps him asleep. Adam read my long self-experimentation paper and came across my discovery that skipping breakfast reduced early awakening. He had early awakening:

I would wake up sometime between 0400 and 0430. Six hours of sleep was not good. This was a problem that needed my attention.

Like me, he was eating breakfast around 7 am and waking up three hours earlier. He ate a big breakfast. He decided to make breakfast later rather than skip it.

I started experimenting with a late breakfast in August. I was traveling through multiple time zones at the time. So I had no idea whether it was working. But by the time I got back to Korea, eating a late breakfast was becoming a habit.

After recovering from my jet lag, I noticed that the experiment was working. Now, I wake up and get out of bed between 0600 and 0615. Sometimes, I still wake up in the middle of the night, but after a quick bathroom break, I’m right back to sleep. I get to work at 0800. After working for an hour, I take a break and eat (e.g. 3 hard boiled eggs, +/- a cup of cashews or macadamia nuts, and a smoothie). This regiment has been working well for eight weeks and shows no signs of weakening.

Yay!

Breakfast Not All Bad

Seth Roberts6 Comments

I stopped eating breakfast when I discovered it made me wake up too early. My Tsinghua students are reading the paper in which I describe my breakfast research. One of them, a freshman, wrote:

When we [entered] Tsinghua University, the first task we should finish was the military training. [New students have a few weeks of military training.] We were asked to be gathered at 8 o’clock, and then we would do a lot of trainings. As the training was hard and tiring, we all had to eat breakfast in the morning. And I remembered in those days, we all slept well and were early-awakening. When the trainings were over, we began our classes. The time was also 8 o’clock, but many times we didn’t have breakfast in order to save time. Gradually, our awakening time become later and later. Even we set an alarm clock, we felt really reluctant to get up. For a long time, we wondered about that but no idea appeared. Now I got the answer, it has something to do with the breakfast. When I told my roommates, they were indeed surprise. Everyone was curious about why, and I was also interested in that. Maybe if the last day you had breakfast, the next morning your body will still have the motivation to call you up to eat breakfast.

Yes, if you eat at a certain time of day, you will tend to be awake that time of day. The effect has been heavily studied in animals, where it is called anticipatory activity.

Gelatin and Sleep

Seth Roberts2 Comments

I found that pork belly improved my sleep. Pork belly is mainly fat, but is it as simple as that (pork fat improves sleep)? Thomas Seay brought to my attention claims about gelatin by Ray Peat. One was that it improved his sleep:

For years I hadn’t slept through a whole night without waking, and I was in the habit of having some juice or a little thyroid to help me go back to sleep. The first time I had several grams of [commercial] gelatin just before bedtime, I slept without interruption for about 9 hours.

Seay tried gelatin himself and found it improved his sleep. I asked him about this.

What do you do?

I take Great Lakes Unflavored Gelatin. I take about 5 or 6 tablespoons a day (2 tablespoons per meal) usually in hot water. So, that amounts to about 35-42 grams/day. You can also put it in juice or make an aspic with it. Another person I know who takes it only needs to take two tablespoons a day, just prior to sleep.

What effect has it had?

It helps me to sleep more hours uninterrupted. This did not require a build-up over weeks. It happened the first time I took it.

You sound like you’ve stopped taking it. How long did you take it? Why did you stop?

I have taken it off and on. (Usually I would take it one week on, one week off). I have noticed that after a few days it causes constipation FOR ME. Another person I know who has tried it has not noticed this effect. Presently I am experimenting with segmented sleep (getting up for an hour or two in the night and then returning to sleep), so I have stopped taking any sort of supplement, including the gelatin. Prior to this, I had done the gelatin for about 4 months.