Category: sleep

Science in Action: Why Did I Sleep So Well? (part 5)

Seth Roberts7 Comments

I have been sleeping much better than usual. Sharp easy-to-notice improvement. After the first time this happened I made a list of 9 possible reasons (lifestyle changes that might have been responsible). I later added one I’d overlooked: standing on one foot to exhaustion a few times.

Yesterday I stood on one foot to exhaustion four times, twice in the morning and twice in the evening. It took about three minutes each time (12 minutes total). Didn’t make any of the nine other candidate changes. And I slept much better than usual. So it is beginning to look like just that one factor is responsible. The one I almost forgot but also the one that seemed most plausible after i remembered it.

Directory.

Science in Action: Why Did I Sleep So Well? (part 4)

Seth Roberts13 Comments

I repeated the two things that remained on my list as possibilities for why I slept so well a few nights ago: 1. Looked at my face in a mirror a half-hour earlier than usual with a better sound source. 2. Stood on one foot until exhaustion (6 times). Lo and behold, I slept great. Now I’m pretty sure one of these two, or their combination, is responsible.

An unexpected twist is that I only slept 5 hours. Usually I’d still feel tired after that little sleep. But I feel like I slept 7 or 8.

I suspect the standing, not the faces, is the cause. Which would be ironic. Of the treatments I’ve studied by self-experimentation and found helpful, standing 9 or 10 hours, which greatly improved my sleep, was the most difficult. I loved what it did to my sleep. I still remember how wonderful it felt to be so well-rested the next morning. Even so I stopped doing it. As an experimental treatment, it was hard to measure how long I stood. As a lifestyle change, it was really hard to arrange so much standing. Whereas standing on one foot to exhaustion six times might be the easiest effective treatment I’ve studied (if it’s effective). Easy to measure, nothing to buy, no logistical problems.

I may try to repeat the earlier observation a few more times — as a kind of gift to myself — but now the main thing I want to do is separate the effects of the two factors, i.e., test one without the other.

Directory.

Science in Action: Why Did I Sleep So Well? (part 3)

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Yesterday I did two of the 10 or so possible things that might have caused me to sleep really well recently: (a) looked at my face in a mirror earlier than usual with voices behind the mirror (Factor A) and (b) stood on one foot until exhaustion (twice) (Factor B). And last night I slept better than usual — not quite as great as the first time but still really well. This seems to narrow down the possibilities to:

  • Factor A only
  • Factor B only
  • Factor A and Factor B

I have doubts about Factor A. After I figured out that seeing faces in the morning improved my mood, I tried for months to find the right “dose” (right time, right length) to improve my sleep. I didn’t find it. Whereas Factor B is merely a new version of something that has improved my sleep countless times, so much that I’ve noticed its effects when not looking for them. The effect might have been less clear last night than the first time because I only stood on one foot to exhaustion twice. The first time — I wasn’t paying attention, of course — I think I did it three or four times.

So today I did it six times. It was curiously exhausting. After I felt recovered (about an hour later), the rest of the day I felt really good, cheerful and energetic — better than after yoga. That doesn’t make a lot of sense. If I do something that makes me sleep better, shouldn’t it make me more tired?

Directory.

Science in Action: Why Did I Sleep So Well? (part 2)

Seth Roberts13 Comments

A few days ago (Tuesday night) I slept unusually well, presumably because Tuesday day had been unusual in some way. I made a list of nine possible reasons.

Today I realized I’d forgotten something: 10. Stood on one foot more than usual. To pass the time while looking at my face in the mirror I had stood on one foot while stretching the other leg, pulling my foot up behind me. I was curious how long I could do this so I did a few trials with each leg where I did it until it became too painful. I lasted about 2 minutes on one leg and 2.5 minutes on the other.

This might seem trivial — and I forgot about it. But standing on one foot continuously for a relatively long time surely stressed my leg muscles much more than usual. Previous research convinced me that standing many hours improves sleep. Maybe this “extreme standing” produces the same hormonal effects in a few minutes as normal standing does in ten hours. That would be wonderful!

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How Should We Fight Infections?

Seth Roberts15 Comments

In the latest New Yorke r, an article by Jerome Groopman is about the emergence of even-more-antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

I asked him what we should do to combat these new superbugs. “Nobody has the answer right now,” he said. “The fact of the matter is that we have found all the easy targets” for drug development. He went on, “So the only other thing we can do is continue to work on antibiotic stewardship.”

All the easy targets, huh? Here’s an easy target that hasn’t been exploited: Why are colds more common in the winter? Many diseases are more common in the winter. I believe it’s because sleep is worse in the winter. While you are asleep is when your body does its best job of fighting off infection. When I vastly improved my sleep — by standing much more, and by getting more morning light — I vastly reduced the number of easy-to-notice colds that I got. I still got cold infections, I think, but they merely caused me to sleep more than usual for a few days.

Several years ago I noticed an introductory epidemiology course in the UC Berkeley School of Public Health was taught by someone I knew. I called him. “Is your course going to cover what makes our ability to fight off infection go up or down?” I asked. No, he said. That is the usual answer. The question of why colds are more common in the winter is not part of the traditional study of epidemiology.

The connections between sleep and fighting off infection are so strong I’m pretty sure I’m right about this (that colds are more common in the winter because sleep is worse). Why, then, haven’t sleep researchers looked into this? Strangely enough, they may not have thought of it; I haven’t come across this idea in any book about sleep I’ve read. (If you’ve seen it somewhere, please let me know!) Justifications of sleep research tend to revolve around car accidents, which are often caused by too little sleep.

More. My point is not that poorer sleep causes more colds in the winter; it’s that it’s an easy target. Suppose you think the colds/winter connection is caused by less Vitamin D in the winter. An experiment in which one group gets Vitamin D supplements in the winter and another group doesn’t is easy to do, given the great health implications.

Less Carbs –> Better Sleep?

Seth Roberts6 Comments

I haven’t heard this before:

My insomnia seems to have gone. This may be something to do with my bold adherence to Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s low carb diet. I have not drunk and barely eaten a single gram of carbs for the last two and a half weeks. I am ten pounds lighter and I sleep like a baby. . . . I am attaining a steady seven and a half hours of unconsciousness nightly. This hasn’t happened in at least ten years, possibly more. I have also become optimistic, amiable and energetic.

Perhaps drinking less alcohol improved his sleep. This has nostalgic interest for me. A turning point in my self-experimentation came when I analyzed my data and saw that I started sleeping less exactly when I lost weight (by eating less processed food). In a complicated way this helped me discover that eating breakfast caused me to wake up too early.

Thanks to Dave Lull.