Category: sleep

Life Imitates Art School

Seth Roberts4 Comments

I had lunch with Lisa Goldberg, an adjunct professor in the Statistics Department at Berkeley. Her application area is finance. She said that people in finance have at least as much contempt for academics as academics do for people in finance. Thorstein Veblen, of course, wrote about the latter — people looking down on useful work — but not the former. Perhaps his views were skewed by being an academic himself. I blogged earlier about how students in each major at a San Francisco art school look down on the students in some other major.

Lisa also said she sleeps well. I was surprised — hardly anyone says that. It turns out she exercises heavily. She swims or runs seven days a week and when she swims, she swims 2000 meters. As a former swimmer, I know that’s a lot. When I exercised, there was no clear effect on my sleep, apart from falling asleep faster. I still woke up too early in the morning. Maybe I wasn’t exercising enough. Anyway, it’s one little data point supporting my conclusions from standing on one leg.

Science in Action: Why Did I Sleep So Well? (part 14)

Seth Roberts10 Comments

Two more people have gotten results similar to mine. From a comment on an earlier post:

I’ve been doing these exercises – standing on one leg – and it’s helped my sleep immensely. About a year ago, I went through a pretty traumatic experience that disrupted my sleep patterns. The end result was that I couldn’t sleep for longer than 3 or 4 hours at night without waking up. For several months, the lack of sleep was like living in a nightmare, and prescription drugs just made the problem worse. I finally decided to go off medication all together and change my attitude, which worked wonders – I could get back to sleep after I woke up – but I’d still only sleep in 4 hour chunks.

About a month ago, I began doing these exercises, and now I’m sleeping 6 to 7 hours at a time. It’s amazing; and on the days I don’t do them, I don’t sleep well at all.

It’s amazing how easy they are to do – if I find myself standing in line, meeting friends for a happy hour, or even watching tv, I’ll do them.

Last night I told a friend to do them while he was at a happy hour, and this morning, he said he slept “like a log.”

As Pale Fire says:

If on some nameless island Captain Schmidt
Sees a new animal and captures it,
And if, a little later, Captain Smith
Brings back a skin, that island is no myth.

I have started to measure my sleep with a SleepTracker so I will have another way to measure the effects, in addition to (a) how rested I feel when I awake and (b) how long I sleep.

More The SleepTracker — my second, the first didn’t work — worked correctly for the first three nights but failed on the fourth.

Treadmill Desks

Seth Roberts11 Comments

As far as I know, I was the first person to have a treadmill desk. I wanted to be able to stand more easily. I had found that if I stand a lot I sleep better. I reasoned it might be easier to stand a long time if you are walking than if you are standing still.

Treadmill desks are now becoming mildly popular, the New York Times reports. I had nothing to do with this. They were popularized by James Levine, a Mayo Clinic endocrinologist, who believes that calorie burning is a good way to lose weight. I used my treadmill desk for a few years. There were two big problems: 1. The noise bothered my neighbors. The Times article says these desks tend to be placed in common areas, where that would be less of a problem. 2. It was tiring. After one or two years I mainly stood on it and rarely walked on it. Finally I replaced it with a standing-height desk.

The article describes non-weight-loss benefits: Walking makes it easier to concentrate.

“I thought it was ridiculous until I tried it,” said Ms. Krivosha, 49, a partner in the law firm of Maslon Edelman Borman & Brand.

Ms. Krivosha said it is tempting to become distracted during conference calls, but when she is exercising, she listens more intently.

“Walking just takes care of the A.D.D. part,” she said.

Allen Neuringer, a professor of mine at Reed College, found that movement helped him learn. I think an urge to be active builds up during inactivity just as thirst builds up when we don’t drink. Being able to be active while you work gets rid of that distraction — and no doubt is healthier in other ways than sitting all day. I would like to be able to use a computer while I am free to move around the room (or larger spaces) and move my arms, not just walk forward with my hands on the keyboard. I’d like to be able to write this blog post while strolling through my neighborhood, for example.

Thanks to Marian Lizzi.

Science in Action: Why Did I Sleep So Well? (part 13)

Seth Roberts15 Comments

When I talk about how standing on one leg has helped me sleep better, the inevitable question is how much standing? After I became sure the standing was making a difference, I started to record the durations. I always stood on one leg until it became a little hard to continue. As my legs have become stronger, this has taken more time, as this graph shows:

During the early days on this graph, I didn’t include time-of-day information. I usually stood on one leg three or four times per day. More recently, I have included time-of-day info and now stand on one leg only twice most days. In all of the cases shown on the graph, I was pulling my other leg back behind me at the same time, stretching the muscles. (If I don’t stretch the other leg, I can stand one-legged much longer.) In the very beginning, I only stood one-legged 2-3 minutes.

I’m sleeping better than any other period in my adult life. My sleep was pretty good before this period but the difference is still huge. Not only am I sleeping better, I suspect I’m also sleeping less (as happened when I improved my sleep by standing a lot).

I suppose one-legged standing counts as “exercise” — that source of so many claimed benefits (longevity, weight loss, less heart disease, etc.). I read today that exercise is supposed to improve your brain. But the differences between what I am doing and what is usually recommended are as large as the difference between the Shangri-La Diet and other diets:

1. Conventional exercise: Requires expanse (for walking) or, usually, special equipment (e.g., gym). Takes one hour or more, when you count changing clothes and showering, not to mention the drive to and from the gym. One-legged standing: Can do almost anywhere. Takes less than 30 minutes, so far.

2. Conventional exercise: Requires discipline if you want a decent workout in a reasonable amount of time. One-legged standing: Almost no pain involved. I can watch TV or read something at the same time.

3. Conventional exercise: Supposed to be aerobic if you want the main benefits. One-legged standing: The opposite of aerobic.

3. Conventional exercise: Some benefits accrue slowly, such as weight loss. Others are hard or impossible to detect, such as longer life. Runners’ high goes away, in my experience. One-legged standing: Benefit clear the next morning. Because I am strengthening muscles I use all the time (when I walk or stand) I notice my vastly increased leg strength all the time.

4. Conventional exercise: You want to get stronger. One-legged standing: You don’t want to get too strong or else it may take too long to get the effect.

5. Conventional exercise: Often difficult to measure increased strength. Hard to measure improvement in swimming, racquetball, or aerobics classes, for example. One-legged standing: Easy to measure increased strength.

6. Conventional exercise: Helped me fall asleep faster, but didn’t solve the problem of too-light sleep. One-legged standing: Utterly solves the problem of too-light sleep.

Could the benefits of conventional exercise have anything to do with the fact that it vaguely resembles one-legged standing?

Directory.

Science in Action: Why Did I Sleep So Well? (part 12)

Seth Roberts11 Comments

Over the last week I’ve found that standing on one foot till it becomes difficult just twice during the day is enough to produce much better sleep that night. Maybe the effect is larger with three times but not enough to make much difference.

It now takes 8-10 minutes of one-leg standing (with the other leg stretched back behind me) before it gets difficult. When I started, it took 2-3 minutes.

Directory.

Science in Action: Why Did I Sleep So Well? (part 11)

Seth Roberts15 Comments

I’m now sure it’s the one-legged standing that’s improving my sleep. The new way of seeing faces in the morning doesn’t seem to matter. In case you want to try this, I’ve found that if I just raise one foot slightly I can stand one-legged much longer (about twice as long) than if I stand one-legged and pull the other foot behind me (stretching my leg muscles). I think this means the stretching pose is twice as effective per minute as the non-stretching pose; it produces the same effect in half the time.

It’s only been a few weeks, but my legs are already much stronger. Walking long distances (such as 4 miles) is easier and so is standing for long periods of time. My notions about exercise are changing, too. Before this, I thought of exercise having three types:

1. Strength. Exercise a muscle, it gets stronger. Benefits: stronger muscles can do more, look better.

2. Flexibility. Improved by stretching, e.g., yoga. Benefit: less chance of injury.

3. Aerobic. The Cooper idea. Improved by running, swimming, etc. Benefit: apparently reduces risk of heart attacks, perhaps reduces risk of other diseases. (Some people do it to lose weight, of course.) To measure aerobic fitness, The Cooper Institute stress-tested executives and found that those with better stress-test scores had lower mortality in the following years. Stress-test fitness was a better predictor of mortality than obesity — some people were “fit but fat”.

The one-legged standing seems to be a whole new category:

4. Soporific. When you stress a leg muscle a lot, presumably one or more chemicals are released that both (a) cause the muscle to grow (the well-known effect of exercise) and (b) cause you to sleep more deeply at night (the effect that interests me). In contrast to Types 1-3, there’s no need for the concept of fitness here because you don’t slowly go up and down in a measure of effectiveness (i.e., become more or less fit). Rather each day you are high or low on this measure, and the next day you start fresh. In contrast to Types 1-3, where the benefits accrue slowly (over weeks and months), the benefits are obvious the next morning (you feel better-rested) and the next day (you’re less tired). In contrast to Types 1-3, there is no connection with athletics (such as Olympic events). Conventional exercise is integral-like: It’s the sum over days that matters. Whereas this exercise is derivative-like: The benefits derive from doing a little more today than you did on previous days. The psychology is different, too. The benefits are so large relative to the cost that there’s no motivation problem. Deciding to do it is about as hard as deciding to pick up a $!0 bill. Deciding to do conventional exercise is a lot harder.

Directory.

Science in Action: Why Did I Sleep So Well? (part 9)

Seth Roberts2 Comments

From Nassim Taleb’s web notebook:

I was going to have dinner with Seth Roberts in San Francisco. So, out of curiosity, I tried his diet [ clipping my nose and consuming two large tablespoons of flaxseed oil ] . . . When someone who observed me with a noseclip asked: “what are you doing?” , I gave my answer “trying to be healthier.” It elicited a smile: “Why don’t you dance outside on one leg for ten minutes? That too may work very well.”

Strange strange coincidence.

Why Did I Sleep So Well? directory.

Science in Action: Why Did I Sleep So Well? (part 8)

Seth Roberts6 Comments

My recent experience suggests that if I stand on one foot until it becomes slightly difficult about four times/day I will sleep much better. Two days ago I measured how long those four bouts of one-foot standing actually were: 6.2 (left foot), 4.3 (right), 4.8 (left), and 5.2 (right) minutes. The median is 5.0 minutes. When I started doing this, about two weeks ago, each bout was about 2 minutes.

It doesn’t seem to matter when I do them. Now I do two in the morning and two in the evening. Fits perfectly with a subway commute. You’ll want to be forced to stand.

In the evening I have a pleasant sense of anticipation: I will fall asleep and wake up feeling really good. I have never before felt this way. I have slept this well before, when I stood 9 or 10 hours/day. The sheer difficulty and all-consumingness of doing that, I now realize, got in the way of anticipating the benefits.

Something else curious is that one-foot standing leaves no mark — I can’t tell at 3 pm how many bouts I’ve done so far just by noticing how I feel. Unlike water or calorie consumption: If I don’t drink anything I’ll get thirsty. If I don’t eat anything I’ll get hungry. But if I don’t get enough of this particular byproduct of exercise I’ll never notice.

Science in Action: Why Did I Sleep So Well? (part 7)

Seth Roberts3 Comments

I’ve continued to sleep extremely well. I’m sure there’s something to this. I’m almost sure it’s because of the one-legged standing.

Here are some technical details. I usually do four bouts of one-legged standing, two in the morning and two later. During each bout I stand on one leg, pulling my other leg up behind me. Sometimes I touch something to balance myself. Usually I watch or read something at the same time. Each bout lasts until it’s hard to continue — until it becomes slightly painful. At first the bouts lasted about two minutes, now they last about four minutes. I enjoy it more when I time it with a stopwatch.

I haven’t yet systematically varied the number of bouts but I suspect one is too few to get the full effect and four is plenty. I’m still trying different ways of arranging them throughout the day. Doing all four at once is too tiring — it takes too long to recover. Maybe it’s best to do two whenever’s convenient during the day and then do two more in the evening when it’s okay to be tired.

Directory.

Why Did I Sleep So Well? directory

Seth Roberts7 Comments
  1. Initial observation, 9 possible causes
  2. Another possible cause: standing on one foot
  3. Sleep almost great, narrowing possible causes to two.
  4. Sleep great again, narrowing possible causes to two
  5. Sleep great again after only standing on one foot
  6. Someone else gets similar results
  7. Technical details
  8. How long I stand
  9. Eerie coincidence
  10. Patterns of discovery
  11. Comparison to other sorts of exercise
  12. What’s a good dose?
  13. How much I’ve been standing Comparison with conventional exercise.
  14. Two more people get similar results
  15. How long I stand (continued)
  16. Replication details
  17. The amount of time needed stops increasing