I struggled with sleeping for 20+ years, now I easily wake up early.
The biggest game changer: Sunlight in your eyes within 30 minutes of waking up. Try morning walks for 1 week (without sunglasses) and your life will be changed.
For me I had to also really avoid light at night. F.lux or Windows Night Mode is not enough. You gotta suffer with strong indoor lightblocker glasses, or use e-ink or something at night.
And in the winter there sometimes isn't enough sun. You need a LOT of lightbulbs to make up the difference. A minimum of 10 100-watt bulbs in my experience, and even more is better.
The real test if this will help you: think back to a time when you were camping, or maybe a child at a summer camp in the woods, or a vacation somewhere without lots of light at night and where you got lots of sun in the morning. Did your sleep schedule naturally shift to become more regular? If it did, then light therapy has a very high chance of helping you.
Absolutely changed my life in a positive way. I routinely just want to fall sleep now around 10pm if I slip those on around 6:30-7.
Before i wore the blue light blockers. I’d often lie awake until 12-1am while watching my partner sleep. It was so distressing.
Plugging in some rough numbers, that seems equivalent to a ~170W LED flood light. A 200W version is $70 from Amazon (e.g. [1]). Are the emitted wavelengths crucial or is such a lamp on a timer a viable way to get early "sunlight" in the winter?
1: https://www.amazon.com/Waterproof-Daylight-Security-Floodlig...
You just made me feel I might be on the brink of a startling discovery. Holy hell, I have tried a lot to improve sleep. I haven't tried this. And while there was one confounding variable in my case with camping, it did indeed shift my sleep rhythm to the day/night cycle of the country I was in!
Indeed. You can measure ambient light with your phone: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.vonglasow.michael.satsta...
Pointing my phone towards the sun gives upward of 4000 lux, whereas the two bulbs in my room barely add up to 1000 from 1m away.
I don't think the sun rises for another hour after I wake up for work.
I live in Florida - our license plates don’t call it the sunshine state for nothing - but even here the sun doesn’t rise at 5am. Short of blasting my retinas with bright lights soon after reveille, I don’t see where I’m going to obtain sunlight this early in the morning.
(It’s 07:21 local time now, and the sun is just now coming up. It’ll be a beautiful sunrise, but I’ve already been awake 2.5 hours…)
Do you think one of those "simulates natural light" LED lamps are actually equivalent in terms of faking real sunlight?
I don't feel it's bright enough to mimic true sunlight, but it is much brighter than typical light sources. Especially at full brightness on a nightstand.
I've never had problems waking up, so can't speak to those who do. But I would absolutely say it made the experience of waking up smoother and more pleasant.
I'd describe it as a normal waking being jarring, even without alarm, where I have a brief moment of confusion as my brain snaps into consciousness.
Whereas with the light almost every morning was a smoother transition, where I rose to consciousness more gradually, while still sleeping, and then basically opened my eyes already awake.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Philips-Simulation-Headspace-Subscrip...
However I can confirm that sunlight in the eyes is a great way to stay awake during long road trips (ie sunglasses can make me drowsy).
It seems like this might be a passive way to add in some of the benefits of "morning walk in the sun" and "avoiding screens at night", and one that might be more robust to winter. Obviously the lifestyle improvements stemming from going for a walk and not doomscrolling twitter go beyond the light hitting you.
Sure, that's super easy in summer. I wake up naturally no problem when the rise is up. I've thought many times of getting sun-equivalent lights that I can schedule to turn on for this reason.
Heads-up for those who care: It's a commercial podcast with sponsors, trojan ads and all, sadly.
I guess you alrready know this but 11000 IU is a massive dose of D3 and probably isn't healthy long term.
For some of us, insomnia is a multi-factor disease. So I had to do All The Things. My sleep hygiene regiment is a superset of everything listed here.
Ultimately, I needed proper diagnosis and then treatment of my sources of chronic pain to attain somewhat healthy sleep patterns. Pinched nerves, aka "bone spurs", in my spine.
I definitely had to jump thru all the hoops to get to this point.
My levels of 25(OH)D3 are optimal. It takes slightly over what the real average TUL should be because of my mass and apparently poor absorption.
Edit: Cortisol levels are fine. I also had a complete HPA/G/T workup by an endocrinologist. The results were unremarkable. I even had testing for pheochromocytoma, although this does not rule out other types of adenomas.
Most people are noticeable calmer and sleep better when they start supplementing magnesium. Magnesium deficiency is extremely common, and even if you eat a really good diet with lots of whole grains and vegetables you might not be getting quite enough (but in that case about half the above dose may be enough to top you off). Anyway, it won't hurt to try and it's not expensive... if it helps, the cost-benefit is huge.
One is activation of the There is a possibility of an autoimmune disease like lupus or MS causing dysautonomia. I also have inappropriate sinus tachycardia and hypertension without obvious causes. All roads point towards the autonomic nervous system.
Anecdotal, but several accounts I heard from people I know (and some I’ve read — even in this HN discussion, but the most n=1 scientific is gwern) indicate you need to take the vitamin D early in the day or it would harm your sleep quality. It also makes sense biologically, given that you need sunlight to generate it yourself.
Again, anecdotal - but detrimental to my sleep if taken after midday. If I can’t take it until 10am, I skip that day
Under Dr supervision, daily vitamin d can be much higher. For example, the Coimbra Protocol for multiple sclerosis can be as high as 40k daily.
Don’t do this without the advice of a doctor and regular serum level testing.
As far as the study goes, it was significant at a p 0.05 level so will wait for replication.
You probably never noticed it, or your pills have low-strength dosages (400 IU), which are quite common to find in pharmacies, and personally I don't even bother with those.
• Vitamin A: 5,000 IU (upper limit of 10,000 IU)
• Vitamin D: 600 IU
• Vitamin E: 22.4 IU
The NHS provides some guidance on doses here: https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/vitamins-and-minerals/vitamin-...
Often (at least for me) the feeling of needing to pee is greater than the actual need to pee. Realizing this, it's easier to hold it in until morning.
Physical activity can also help. My theory is that it can help sitting at a computer all day can sometimes cause me to retain fluid and that it's the retained fluid that is being processed when lying flat. If you notice your calves/feet/etc being slightly swollen this could be a sign.
I also pee a lot at night, otherwise.
The key is to go outside, get some natural light and sun on your skin. Most of us reading this are vitamin D deficient year after year.
Covid has had an advantage on anyone lacking proper vitamin levels.
That's at least 10 hours of sleep per day, for a large part of the year.
It's also no sleep at all, in some parts of the year, for some countries.
So 9am and 5pm respectfully for me I guess.
That being said the key to it all for a relatively healthy person is mental and physical fatigue and lack of stress.
On the other hand... my wife used to live near loading-unloading train station and worked at 2 jobs for some time. Takes her 10 minutes to fall asleep regardless.
Try doing the same in New York, to say nothing of places like Stockholm.
Getting outside a bit is a great advice most everywhere, though. It's not always going to produce a lot of vitamin D, when you wear clothes mostly covering your skin, but it has other advantages.
At winter time it get really dark really fast and usually there is only sunlight for a couple of hours per day.
First caffeine-free weekend I had terrible headaches, than came weeks of strong urges (I felt I was an addict). In these weeks I just fell asleep on the couch or even at my desk at work. I slept a lot these weeks, during the day, early in the evening, like my body had catching up to do.
Now I'm fine, I sleep like a baby. I feel really good and have strong concentration.
On moments I have a 'coffee urge' I take a little walk outside, for 10-20minutes. My colleagues know by now, I'm the guy who goes out once or twice a day for a little walk...
Try it for a few months!
Found one coffee or tea a day made me feel much more relaxed at end of day.
The first few weeks without caffeine are rough, then I just turn into a more boring version of myself: I go to bed early, have consistent energy levels throughout the day, and I'm a little less intelligent.
I don't really want my energy levels smoothed out throughout the day: getting out of the gate quickly in the morning and getting ahead of my goals for the day is far more important to me, and having a few hours each day where I'm really "on" is better than my brain being a little sluggish forever.
I don't personally have issues sleeping through the night though. (But with caffeine I do shift my sleep a bit later).
Cutting caffeine does seem to be a reasonable place to start for people who are having sleep issues, or anxiety, but for me I've decided the pros vastly outweigh the cons.
The only difference is that after a month or so, I go back to coffee - just at a greatly reduced volume. That first cup is absolutely heavenly.
If you're interested, I found a not-quite-coffee alternative that seems to satisfy my craving. It's a dandelion root substitute, the brand I drink is Dandy Blend. More like instant coffee than a good ground bean coffee but it does the job.
Hope I can find this in Europe. Here we have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cichorium. It is not very bad, but I don't like it much either, I miss some bitter tones. Now I think about it, I can try experiment with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angostura_bitters
Same here but mostly brown hair except red in the beard. I suspect it's not limited to red haired folks but that the gene occurs in people with relatively northern ancestors (Ireland, Scotland, Scandinavia).
IIRC there were lots of red haired people in the continental Celtic population too. Would they have the same adaptation for less need of sunlight?
Also makes me wonder how the Inuit manage.
EDIT yeah here is the reference [1]:
> In the food-production theory, the cereal-rich diet of Neolithic farmers lacked vitamin D, so Europeans rapidly lost their dark-skin pigmentation only once they switched to agriculture, because it was only at that point that they had to synthesize vitamin D from the sun more readily.
[1] https://www.livescience.com/42838-european-hunter-gatherer-g...
I've heard red-beards often referred to politely as gingerchins. Which is oddly fun to say.
Having worked for Scandinavian insurance companies, I can tell you that life insurance near to the arctic circle is much higher as people find it hard living without lots of light.
The current recommendation is keeping serum levels at least above 30, and more like 40-60. Many many people aren’t in that range.
Changed to take the supplements in the morning and the insomnia went away.
Edit: Here is the study. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23665342/ - only a single study but still interesting
Vitamin D group: 6.75 (2.97) Placebo group: 9.73 (3.04)
Cohen's D: 0.99 (>0.8 is regarded a large effect size)
Side note: The translation "Petersburg’s Sleep Index" instead of "Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index" just cracks me up though! =)
And in the conclusion they add
> Based on the results of the present study, at the end of the study sleep score (PSQI) reduced significantly in vitamin recipients as compared with placebo recipients (P < 0.05). This difference was significant even after modifying confounding variables (P < 0.05).
It’s 44 vs 45 why don’t they use the simple language they started with. It would have been great if they also said how many people felt better by placebo alone.
In the location where this study was done, what kind of lives to these people lead?
Do people living in more relaxed, sunny, quiet, dark-at-night environments sleep better than people who live in cities with constant street noise, much less direct sunlight, and more light pollution at night?
