Category: sleep

What’s “Natural” Sleep? (more)

Seth Roberts14 Comments

This morning I woke up feeling very refreshed and in a good mood. I’d slept about six hours. I’d fallen asleep within seconds of turning off my bedside light. This is what usually happens. I almost always sleep this well. Yet I don’t avoid caffeine during the day (I drink a lot of tea) nor artificial light at night (I do avoid fluorescent light at night). For a large chunk of my life my sleep was much worse. I never woke up feeling well-rested. I often woke up quite tired but unable to fall back asleep. A few hours later I’d fall back asleep and sleep a few more hours, much like the biphasic sleep called segmented sleep. Which is more natural — my current sleep or segmented sleep? As I blogged, several scientists have said that segmented sleep is more natural.

I’m returning to this topic and sort of repeating myself because sleep is so important, “ almost everyone I [a NY Times writer] know complains about sleep,” and the common cold so common. (When I improved my sleep I stopped getting colds.) Here, in chronological order of discovery, is what I’ve learned improves my sleep:

1. Aerobic exercise. When I started swimming, I noticed that I fell asleep much faster — within a minute rather than within several minutes. Aerobic exercise didn’t solve the bigger problem of waking up tired, however.

2. Skipping breakfast. This reduced early awakening. If you have any doubts about this, read about anticipatory activity in lab animals.

3. Seeing faces in the morning. Perhaps this deepens my sleep. It certainly makes it easier to go to bed in the evening (I stop wanting to do anything) and makes me wake up optimistic and looking forward to the day. The difference in how I feel when I wake up is like the difference between black and white and color. These days I watch about an hour of bloggingheads on a 22″ monitor starting around 6 am.

4. Standing. I stand on one bent leg to exhaustion at least twice. Before that I got a similar effect by standing 8 hours or more, which was too hard to do every day.

5. Morning light. Every morning I go outside about 8 am. I try to stay outside at least 1 hour and ideally more.

6. Animal fat. I eat half a stick of butter (60 g) per day.

Maybe the 3 tablespoons of flaxseed oil I drink every day also helps.

Each one of these six factors probably reproduces Stone Age life, when people got a lot more exercise, didn’t eat breakfast, chatted with their neighbors in the morning, etc. Were all six factors set at Stone Age levels for the Western Europeans that Ekirch writes about or Thomas Wehr’s subjects (both of whom had segmented sleep)? Of course not. Had all six been at Stone Age levels, the segmented sleep seen by Ekirch and Wehr might have disappeared. As my segmented sleep disappeared.

My sleep still has room for improvement. When I stood for 9 or 10 hours I woke up astonishingly well-rested. I felt scrubbed free of tiredness. In the middle of the day, eight hours later, I would marvel how rested I felt. The problem with standing more now is that if I stand on one bent leg more than twice per day my legs get stronger and stronger and it starts to take a long time (e.g., 20 minutes) to reach exhaustion. I’m also unsure about the best amount of animal fat. More might be better.

Comments that the night is long and sleep is short ignore that we can see by moonlight and starlight and that people chat after dark. In contrast to this experiment with no artificial light, by J. D. Moyer, the things I do to improve my sleep produce no bad effects. And I sleep only six hours per night, which Moyer found isn’t nearly enough.

Thanks to Heidi for the Moyer and NY Times links.

What’s the “Natural” Pattern of Sleep?

Seth Roberts16 Comments

According to this influential article by the historian A. Roger Ekirch,

Until the close of the early modern era, Western Europeans on most evenings experienced two major intervals of sleep bridged by up to an hour or more of quiet wakefulness.

This is called segmented sleep. Supposedly this is “natural”:

In a natural state, humans do not sleep a long consecutive bout throughout the night. The natural condition is bimodal – two bouts of sleep interrupted by a short episode of waking in the middle of the night.

And if you don’t like sleeping this way you are ignorant:

The modern assumption that consolidated sleep with no awakenings is the normal and correct way for human adults to sleep leads many to approach their doctors with complaints of maintenance i nsomnia or other sleep disorders. Their concerns might best be addressed by assurance that their sleep conforms to historically natural sleep patterns.

An amusing therapeutic approach. Whatever the problem, simply say “your problem conforms to historically natural patterns”.

I found that if I ate more animal fat I slept better. It is entirely possible that if all those Western Europeans walking up in the middle of the night had eaten more animal fat — as their ancestors may have several hundred thousand years ago before big fat-laden game animals were hunted to extinction — they would have slept through the night.

I found several ways to improve my sleep. After my sleep got a lot better — in particular, I stopped waking up in the middle of the night — I stopped getting colds, surely because my immune system was working better. The connection between sleep and immune function is obvious. Given a choice between (a) my immune system had returned to ancient levels of efficacy or (b) my immune system was working better than ever before in the history of the species, I’d bet on (a). Those Western Europeans with segmented sleep were in poor health, I’m sure. Perhaps their sleep was one sign of this.

Two Faces Better Than One?

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Here I describe my discovery that seeing faces on TV in the morning improved my mood the next day. The details of the effect suggested that the ideal stimulus is what you’d see during a conversation. For a long time I used the C-Span show Booknotes as the main source of the faces. I watched it on a 25-inch TV. More recently I used my own face in a mirror. It was readily available and perfectly life-size. I listened to a podcast or book at the same time.

A few months ago, Caleb Cooper commented saying that he’d found that looking at two faces every morning seemed to work better than looking at one face. He found that Bloggingheads.tv expanded to full screen on a 24-inch monitor (measured diagonally) produced close-to-life-size faces, which is what he wanted.

This interested me for several reasons: 1. It might make the effect stronger. 2. Bloggingheads.tv has a big selection, offering control over size. 3. I disliked looking at my face for long times. 4. It seems more naturalistic than looking at my own face.

I’ve been trying this with a 22-inch monitor (which I already had). Perhaps 24-inch would be better. The effect does seem stronger, as Caleb said.

I asked Caleb several questions about his experience.

How did you get started doing this?

I think it started when I read your posts about standing and sleeping. This led me to read your paper on self experimentation and sleep. Like you, I often suffered from early awakenings where I would wake up around 2-3 hours early, still feeling tired but having a hard time going back to sleep.

Based on what I learned from you and other sources, I tried out the following; got a pair of blue blocker clip-ons for my glasses which I put on about two hours before bed; ordered an Apollo goLite blue light emitter that I use for about an hour in the morning, I would sometimes take 1/3 mg of melatonin nine hours after waking up, and 3mg half hour before bed, and I started standing on a high difficulty Thera-Band balance pad on one leg while looking into a mirror for 30 minutes in the morning.

What made you think it was worth a try?

Well, why not:) Most self experimentation can be easily done for practically no cost, while the potential upside is significant. There’s also satisfying curiosity, expanding self knowledge, gaining mastery over your mind and body… You had a plausible theory, had collected suggestive data, and I’d already found the appetite suppression effect of the Shagnri-La was very real, so you had a track record of introducing ideas worth paying attention to.

What happened at first?

It felt to me like my sleep modestly improved, sleeping through the night longer and having the energy to get up and go much sooner after waking. This was awhile ago though, I didn’t keep any data, and I was adding and dropping different things, so my experience doesn’t have a high enough confidence interval for drawing any general inferences.

When did you make those changes?

I’d guess around sixteen months ago.

After you made those changes (“got a pair of BlueBlocker glasses…”) did your mood change?

It improved in as much as waking up feeling rested makes you feel a lot better than trying to get up while still tired.

Tell me something about yourself (job, age, etc.).

I got into medicine through Clinical Massage Therapy. Being a high school dropout I wanted something I could get into quickly, then sink or swim on my own. Massage is one of the few fields the university-accreditation complex hasn’t sunk its tentacles deeply into (a mixed blessing; for an autodidact it lets you quickly start a great career, but the field really needs a bifurcated certification track to separate medical massage from relaxational spa massage). I live in the Pacific Northwest, near the site where they developed the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Despite all the lingering nuclear waste, it’s a nice, mid sized metro area. I’m in my mid twenties.

Good Sleep on Long Flight

Seth Roberts18 Comments

Today I flew from Beijing to San Francisco, an 11-hour flight. For the first time ever on a long flight, I slept well even though I had to sleep in my seat. (When I’ve been able to stretch out on several seats or on the floor, I’ve slept okay.) I slept so much the flight felt short — like it was four hours long. When we landed in San Francisco, I felt great. As if I hadn’t traveled at all. This has never happened before. Instead of going straight home, I did some errands.

Why did I sleep so well? It surely helped that the flight started at 4 pm Beijing time, to which I was well-adjusted. But I’ve never before slept well sitting up, no matter what the flight time. I think this time was different because I did two things I’ve never done together before:

1. Lots of one-legged standing. Around 2 pm I stood on one leg to exhaustion 3 times (right leg, left leg, right leg). Around 7 pm I did it again: left leg, right leg, left leg. Six times is a really large dose, too large to be used every day because my legs would get too strong. Usually I do two or four times. I think that the two bouts (in this case, 2 pm and 7 pm) need to be widely spaced so that signaling molecules released into the blood by the exertion can be replenished.

2. Lots of cheese. Around 7 pm, I ate about a quarter-pound of Stilton. With a milder cheese I might have eaten more. It isn’t just the animal fat, I think something in milk makes me sleepy.

Around 8 pm I started trying to fall asleep. It didn’t seem promising, I only felt a little tired and not completely comfortable, but after maybe 4 minutes with my eyes shut, I fell asleep for most of the rest of the flight.

Better Thinking By Standing

Seth Roberts7 Comments

Dan Wich, a faithful reader of this blog, told me that my work had helped him. I asked for details. He wrote:

I have a desk job and began to experience back pain that was aggravated while sitting. So I bought a desk designed for both sitting and standing, and spent most of my time standing.

I was on the lookout for improved sleep patterns because of your experiments, and I noticed similar results. But the biggest benefits I observed were unexpected. First, my ability to focus and prioritize improved while standing; sitting for long periods made me more likely to avoid challenging tasks. Second, I felt more creative while standing, avoiding the problem-solving tunnel vision I’d often get after sitting for a while.

Being able to switch between standing and sitting without changing anything else has led me to dismiss other causes for those mental benefits. And I wasn’t expecting to receive them, making me doubt the placebo effect is at work. So, I think I can corroborate your results of improved mental function while standing.

The Data-Driven Life

Seth Roberts6 Comments

Gary Wolf’s article about self-measurement in the New York Times Magazine is here. I am quoted in it. The story I identified with most is Bo Adler’s. He has sleep apnea:

“Here’s what they told me was the normal surgical course of treatment,” Adler explained. “First they were going to cut out my tonsils, and if that didn’t work, they would break my jaw and reset it to reposition my tongue, and finally they would cut out the roof of my mouth. I had one question: What if my case is different? They said, ’Let’s try the standard course of treatment first, and if that doesn’t work, then we’ll know your case is different.'”

I started long-term self-experimentation because I woke up too early in the morning. The notion of taking drugs for it — what a doctor would prescribe — was too horrible to take seriously, just as Adler resists the idea of surgery before less harmful solutions have been ruled out. Adler hopes he can learn something about sleep apnea his doctors don’t know, just as I hoped I could learn something about early awakening nobody knew. Eventually — ten years later — I managed to.

Back to the (Recent) Past

Seth Roberts4 Comments

My work is all about how the past was better for us. People stood more; so they slept better. They ate more animal fat; so they slept better. They saw more faces in the morning and fewer faces late at night, so their mood was better. Their food had more bacteria growing on it, so their immune and digestive systems worked beter. And so on.

Past meaning 100,000 years ago. In Beijing, I am moving from one apartment (A) to another apartment (B). Apartment A is in a modern building, Apartment B is in a building maybe 40 years older. To my surprise, Apartment B is clearly better than Apartment A. The biggest improvement is that Apartment B has all-incandescent lighting. Apartment A was all-fluorescent. Exposure to fluorescent light in the evening can interfere with the faces-mood effect because it can resemble sunlight. Incandescent lamps are so much cooler than the sun that the light they emit is very different. Another improvement is that Apartment B, unlike Apartment A, has a sun deck. So it’s easy to get lots of sunlight in the morning — important for sleep and for the faces-mood effect. The third improvement is that Apartment B, like Apartment A, is on the sixth floor — but Apartment B is a walk-up. Walking up six flights of stairs will tire out my legs so that when I do one-legged standing (to sleep better) I won’t have to stand as long before getting exhausted. When I lived in Apartment A I could have taken the stairs, but I never did.

MSG and Nightmares (continued)

Seth Roberts9 Comments

I am staying in a nice hotel near Shanghai. Last night I dreamed that my stuff (suitcase, etc.) had been put in the hallway outside my room. As — in the dream — I was walking to the front desk to complain, I realized I must be dreaming. This couldn’t possibly have happened, I thought. It was that realistic. Later that night I had another mild realistic nightmare — about missing the bus.

I rarely have dreams like that. During the day I’d had a lot more Chinese food than usual. Two big meals. (Lunch, at a restaurant, had included yogurt, incidentally.) Without my friend’s experience I would have never connected the Chinese food and the nightmares.

Sometimes Black Really Is White

Seth Roberts6 Comments

Jenny Holzer, the artist, says, “ I get up about four times a night and go back to sleep, or not.” I suspect she’s not eating enough animal fat. At my local Beijing supermarket yesterday, I asked a butcher to cut the meat off a piece of pork fat. Reverse trimming. At the moment, I think about 180 g of animal fat/day is a good dose. I’m much less concerned about amount of meat. Another instance, I thought to myself, where I want the opposite of everyone else. But that’s far more true in America than here. In China but not America, I can buy pork belly at any supermarket; in China but not America, there is vast selection of pickles and yogurt at any supermarket.

MSG and Nightmares

Seth Roberts11 Comments

At a dinner for foreign teachers at Tsinghua, I met a Canadian woman who teaches English literature. Soon after she moved to China, she started having nightmares every night. For dreams, they were unusually linear and realistic. They were nightmares in the sense that they felt “sinister”. This hadn’t happened to her before. It was especially puzzling because she was having a good time.

On a forum for foreigners in Beijing, she asked what might be causing the problem. MSG, she was told. All Chinese restaurants use MSG. She started cooking her own food. The problem went away. Whenever she ate a restaurant meal, the problem returned. The time between meal and sleep made a difference. The dreams would be more vivid if she slept soon after the meal.

Here is a discussion of the MSG/nightmare link with many stories about it. I believe we like the taste of MSG because glutamate is created when proteins are digested by bacteria. We like glutamate because we need to eat bacteria to be healthy. Bacteria are too big and varied to detect directly; it’s much easier to evolve a glutamate detector. The problem is that now you can have glutamate in your food without bacteria. Apparently cooked tomatoes and garlic are other sources.

With PubMed I found two relevant articles. One reported an experiment where hyperactive boys got better when additives, including MSG, were removed from their food. The other is a review article about the effects of MSG that mentions sleep.

I’m sure from the personal stories that MSG causes nightmares — and therefore probably also causes other problems. (That glutamate is a neurotransmitter makes the MSG-nightmare link even more likely.) Here are researchers from the Scripps Clinic in San Diego saying MSG is safe:

Since the first description of the ‘Monosodium glutamate symptom complex’, originally described in 1968 as the ‘Chinese restaurant syndrome’, a number of anecdotal reports and small clinical studies of variable quality have attributed a variety of symptoms to the dietary ingestion of MSG. . . . Despite concerns raised by early reports, decades of research [this review was published in 2009] have failed to demonstrate a clear and consistent relationship between MSG ingestion and the development of these conditions..

What the woman I met did in a week or so (establish that MSG has bad effects), medical researchers — at least, judging by this review — have failed to do in 41 years (“decades of research”). Just as dermatologists have been unable to figure out that acne is caused by diet.

More about the dangers of MSG.