I am also curious about this. The best sleep I ever had was when I was teaching an early morning class. Part of my morning routine is a short run, so this meant I was regularly waking up at 5am. I fell asleep regularly at 9pm when I was on this schedule. I use a sleep band [1] to track sleep, and it was the only time when I've been able to consistently get "high scores" on it.

[1] https://www.garmin.com/en-US/p/1650098/

Seconding that the time you get up, and light exposure then and during the day, has a massive impact. If you habitually sleep in late, then "going to bed early" does not work as you'll lack sleep pressure. It's putting the cart before the horse. You have to treat it the same way we do jet lag; when we travel to the other side of the world, we adjust by just gritting through the morning. Takes few days to shift.

I do that, it seems like a self-reinforcing pattern I end up in after messing up my sleep schedule. I take a sleep aid (like Zzzquil) for a bit to get back on schedule. Caffine before 1pm or so helps too.

Chance is you are not breathing in your sleep. You have Apnea or UARS and are slowly suffocating. Easy tells: you look like shit in the morning and it takes hours for you to normalize, you sometimes wake up all sweaty, you tend to open window ASAP in the morning "to get rid of the stuffy air", you are confused and/or have headache in the morning.

If you want to make sure, get a sleep study done.

Why do you think you are avoiding the bed as if you were afraid of dying in there. Exactly! You literally are.

I’ve read so much on magnesium and believe in the benefits of supplementation, but when I try it (regardless of type) I end up feeling devoid of energy and borderline depressed for three days after.

There’s plenty of evidence that people used to sleep very early, and have a period of activity in the night, before having a second period of sleep.

I follow the same schedule as you do, and also work remotely, and usually take a single 1-2h nap somewhere between 12pm - 3pm. It makes me have two moments of “morning productivity”, which works very well for me.

In the end, listen to your body.

The article never says anything about causation. It says sleep regularity is a predictor of mortality. That means if you find someone who already has poor sleep regularity they're more likely to die sooner, not that if you force someone into a bad sleep schedule they will become more likely to die sooner.

> Perhaps someone who has a consistent schedule is hypothetically more likely to make healthier choices on average

At least they aren’t shift workers

This is a shifted circadian rhythm. If you get up late, you'll be sleepy late; additionally, blue-light exposure at night (from screens) suppresses melatonin production and can delay onset. The fix isn't to "go to bed early" first, it's to get up early and get exposure to sunlight then and during the day, and the sleep pressure in the evening will follow in kind. This is further facilitated by giving yourself time in the evening to wind-down away from screens, by having a ritual/routine (an hour at least) such as preparing breakfast, reading, doing yoga, whatever.

Think of it like jet lag. If you travel to the other side of the world, you rapidly shift schedule in accordance with your habits (the timing of your meals, light exposure, activity, socializing etc), whether that be night or day. These inputs more than ever influence morning-ness or evening-ness qua chronotype, with the advent of limitless evening light and entertainment.

>Couldn’t this effect be classic cause vs correlation?

Sometimes changing the correlated item, also affects the cause, through a link of causual changes.

E.g.: "Night visits to the fridge linked to high cholesterol".

Now, that's just correlation: it's not the visiting of the fridge, it's the snacking.

But if you read that and stop visiting the fridge, you likely reduce your snacking too as a side effect, and thus lower your cholesterol, without consciously trying to address the primary cause.

As someone when a poor sleep schedule, the inability it stick to a routine in this area tends to show up in every area… exercise, diet, etc.

I would imagine that someone with a very regimented life tends to stick to a lot of healthy habits. They aren’t going out to the bar every night, then waking up at 6am for their morning routine.

tfa: "Results were adjusted for age, sex, ethnicity, and sociodemographic, lifestyle, and health factors"

My doctor said "you have to earn your sleep". I had the same problem until:

- two pieces of fruit per day

- two portions of vegetables per day

- half an hour of outside sunshine per day

- twice per week exercise until you sweat

- no sleep during the day

- get out of bed every morning around the same time

- no processed food!

Or maybe if you are sick you don't sleep as well.

> Do you think our ancestors slept exactly 8 hours a night from 10pm to 6am?

Yeah I pretty much do expect that (but more like 6 or 7). They were awake a few hours after sunset by fire light, then get up fairly early. I certainly don't imagine them napping during the day, when they could be working together to get food, unless it's a climate where it's too hot to do anything in the middle of the day.

Studies of modern hunter gatherers seem to back this up e.g. [1]

It's widely known that Victorians would have two sleeps over night, with a productive period in the middle, but this seems to be a misconception based on a passing remark in one court case. Even if true, this is a post-industrial society with unhealthily long working hours and I don't think we should be copying their sleep patterns.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096098221...

I was in the same boat as you and it seems I solved it.

What I did :

- LSD (microdosing + a semi dose one year ago) did absolute wonders on my anxiety (which was what kept me energetic). I would then describe myself as having a general anxiety disorder and I now describe myself as chill af. It's amazing. I'm still stressed out by things but that's normal and not my default mode anymore.

- Prolonged-release melatonin keeps me asleep for the whole night

- Took the habit of reading in the bed. I'm so tired that most evenings, I have a really hard time to read 5-10 pages, I must fight to keep my eyes open.

I've tried this but naps make me groggy for the rest of the day, or sometimes I get confused thinking it's the next day. What's your secret to waking up refreshed from a nap?

Yeah, this type of observational data often falls over when you dig into the details. And yes, they say they adjusted for a number of variables, but even if hypothetically they perfectly adjusted for all possible confounding variables (highly unlikely IMO), it's possible that the causation simply runs in the other direction: poorer quality sleep and variable sleep cycles could just be a symptom of illness or being generally unhealthy, not the root underlying cause.

I thought the same. If your life is so in order that you routinely sleep on the same interval, perhaps your life is not as stressful as others who sleep more chaotically

Sleep apnea symptoms are initially similar to ADHD. Apparently a ton of kids gets mis-diagnosed with ADHD while they are slowly suffocating because they have UARS. Stimulants mask it.

they had controls

Bad example because yes it does make the car slow down.

Racing stripes would be a better example. Though negligible, a hand out the window does have a causal impact on speed.

On the other hand racing stripes have zero impact, but do correlate to the speed of the car.

usually these studies are done across a very narrow sample of Earth's population. often from similar region or country etc. Which dont get me wrong, is a lot of stuff to process for such a study, but the number is statistically insignificant. many more similar studies would need to show identical results.

this one selected about 100k people from a dataset of around 500k. All from one country/region (UK)

furthermore they dont measure sleep but they estimate if someone was maybe asleep based data from an accelerometer. so they cannot measure what sleep state someone acheived or if they were actually really sleep or just u know staring at the ceiling in an existential crisis....

Maybe you can't stop the car that way, but if you feel that kind of wind on your hand you should worry that your car is going fast.

If you did read the paper, you'd have noticed that people who slept more regularly in this research were also wealthier, and more physically active. They did say they adjusted for these variables, but who knows. Maybe they didn't adjust them enough, maybe there are more covariates they didn't consider.

The confounding variable I think is most important is that many people have an internal clock that is shifted or lengthened relative to other people in the same house.

If others in the house prefer to sleep from 10-6 and you prefer to sleep from 12-6, but others start making noise a 6, your sleep quality in the last two hours is destroyed. Then over time, it just results in poor sleep regularity, as you cycle between exhaustion and trying to sleep according to your internal clock.

I feel like your example is flawed, I just can't put my finger on it.

Maybe it's because I don't see how sleep regularity is a factor you can change as willingly as visits to the fridge, or maybe its because I don't see why people wouldn't just eat more before heading to bed.

It could also just be that I find a treatment of symptoms to be less desirable than causes.

My PhD advisor likes to drink a coffee just prior to falling asleep. That way the caffiene slowly kicks in and wakes him up. I can't do this--I already have trouble sleeping and I feel the effects of coffee quickly.

But to answer your question-- for me, washing my face helps a lot. I don't know why. Not that I nap all that often.

Pretty much my thoughts. People in lots of pain don't have a regular schedule to do anything, including sleep.

I wish your doctor's advice worked on me. I'm in the same boat as the person you're responding to, and I follow all this advice as well.

I am groggy but I drink a Coke Zero and within 10-20 mins I feel great. Whereas without sleep I would be flagging.

Kinda funny seeing this reply side to side with the "I just took LSD" one

What I wonder is even if they did the perfect adjustments, what would have been driver for different sleep regularity.

E.g. considering some common causes like work stress - if they did the causation and compared people who did the same type of work, and they controlled for stress levels then why did one group of people have sleeping regularity issues more than compared to others?

Like there has to be some other driver then that they didn't control for, as in personality, environmental or physical difference?

Most people do want to have healthy sleep, the ones who don't usually have something causing those issues.

okay, I'm curious, have you build an addiction? or do you think you can keep on reducing the dose and stop using it but still have the benefits. I've read somewhere that LSD can kind of re-wire your brain

Nearly all predators spend large portions of their day sleeping, why would humans have been different?

Did they explain how exactly they adjusted those results?

I my younger self had a terrible sleep schedule. I suffered pre-occupied thoughts of either what did or was about to happen.

I have a very consistent sleep schedule now and it is a real pleasure. I my sleep schedule has 2 or 3 3-4 hour stretches of solid sleep. I make my own schedule now so sleep is usually available when I'm ready.

Also just the general timezone stuff, genetics ~ I've moved from the right end of a timezone to the left end, it's been killing me.

> Like, John Carmack said that he NEVER burned out, never went into a dark corner (verbatim from his interview), and everyone agrees that he works like a machine.

> https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/2069799283369345247

That's because he was the one burning people out while he was there living out his hobbies.

Do you have non24 sleep disorder? Eliezer Yudkowsky has it and @exfatloss150 . Both have written about how they manage it.

100 the same.

I tried magnesium before but didn’t see any effects after a week so threw in the towel. Then I read a comment by someone here that had the exact same symptoms as me (brain wouldn’t turn off), explained the underlying cause, suggested L-threonate, and explained that it’s a long-term deficiency and might take some time to build up sufficient reserves.

I have had insomnia my entire life, since I was a child. I would go to bed around midnight and fall asleep at 3am, if I was lucky. I simply could not get my brain to disengage.

Within a month of supplementation, I thought I noticed a bit of improvement. By two months, my insomnia was gone. Not better. Gone. I fall asleep within minutes now.

> As a software developer, I am used to finding and fixing the underlying problem instead of relying on the quick fixes these doctors were offering me.

I'm skeptical that avoidance of "relying on the quick fixes" generalizes to software developers as a whole :)

Try Trazadone. I've struggled with sleep my whole life and now, after 45 years, I can finally say I have the problem thoroughly licked.

If it's of any help to you: if TFA is true, I should be dead already. I've got the absolute most fucked up sleep schedule. Thankfully I've got a lovely wife who accepted it (to be honest as it's been like that since I was 20 y/o, she knew...).

To me burning the midnight oil is my way of life.

In a past life, two decades plus ago, I used to write books: I'd write at night, when all is quiet. I'd go buy two or three warm "croissant" at 6:30am when the shop would open, then I'd go to bed.

And I love the hours later at night that then becomes early in the morning to get work done.

Because I'm such a night owl (not to party nor drink at all), I've got a different view on, for example, city life. Or rural area life. Things are different in the middle of the night.

Last night I had something that needed solving: went to bed at 8am.

My wife shall never ever take an appointment for me in the morning.

If it's of any comfort to you, I'm still fit and made it to 53 y/o so far and my doctor laughs at me when I go see him, saying I'm totally fine.

Anyhow seeing the old wreck my fater is at 78 y/o, I kinda came to peace with the notion that it's okay'ish if I don't make it that far.

Those with fucked up sleep schedules: you're not alone.

P.S: if I wasn't such a night owl, I'd never have met my wife... Long story but the butterfly effect: 25 years ago, coming back from my editor (who was also a night own) at something like 3am I decided to stop at a club knew but to which I'd never been, for there was some forms of life still awake too. There I met a girl, which became my girlfriend for a while. I kept in touch with her and through her I met a friend: a crazy dude. And through that crazy dude I met my wife. So had I not decided to stop at 3am at that club, I'd never have met my wife. So there's that.

I sometimes think about the same. Its a sad truth that if you bad days those days may be at the worst moment. Sleep definitly helps for a good mind but also exercise!

I guess it just seems extremely obvious to me that people who live a predictable-enough life to sleep and wake at the same time every day are less likely to face mortality than people with schedules so chaotic they sleep at different times regularly. It’s still good science to do, but without a solid cause or two, I don’t think anything helpful is actually being revealed by this study, at least from a layman’s perspective.

What about speed holes?

You think blocking the wind from hitting your hand slows the car down?

> the number is statistically insignificant ... they dont measure sleep but they estimate if someone was maybe asleep based data from an accelerometer

These two goals are kind of at odds with one another. We can only get insight into depth of sleep achieved if we bring you into a sleep clinic, but we can't do that for a significant sample size...

> ... you should worry that your car is going fast.

Only if we know of an intervention that will likely slow the car down and the risks+cost of that intervention justify the benefit.

Otherwise, we worry without purpose.

EDIT: I will say that there is a philosophical question here related to "basic research" / "pure science" / "fundamental science." Usually just "knowing new things" eventually proves valuable, especially in a long timeline. So in that sense, TFA could be important.

This describes a lot of people with young kids pretty accurately

Original comment assumes the size of my hands is not 50m^2. Very presumptuous.

>I don't see how sleep regularity is a factor you can change as willingly as visits to the fridge

In some cases it might be hard (e.g. insomnia), in others it might be as easy as e.g. changing your schedule, or stopping binge-watching/gaming/doomscrolling late, or some such change.

>It could also just be that I find a treatment of symptoms to be less desirable than causes.

It is more opaque.

But the point is not that it's necessarily easy. It's rather than even if X -> Y is mere correlation, by forcing yourself to fix X (even if hard), the resulting changes might also help with Y.

And technically "bad sleep" here isn't necessarily a symptom either. It can be a co-effect of the same symptom.

Would love to see a causal model [0] to help better understand all of the mediators considered as well as confounders. I'm close to finishing up an interesting read from Judea Pearl/Dana Mackenzie - The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect [1]. Talks alot about Causal Models, Causal Inference, the 3 ladders of causation, etc. I liked the graphical approach to help outline exactly how one thinks about direct and indirect effects and how it facilitates counterfactual analysis and causal mediation analysis.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causal_model

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Why

> As always with a lot of these: it's not saying causation.

But what they are saying is, it would be valuable if it was causative wiggles eyebrows

Last sentence of the abstract:

> Sleep regularity may be a simple, effective target for improving general health and survival.

Sometimes it is a cause vs causation. Sometimes the scientist didn’t adjust for a variable that clearly would impact both fields they were measuring. To make such a claim, I think it’s appropriate to name that hypothetical third variable. Otherwise the comment is so general it applies to all statistical studies.

Watch male lions they sleep when they want, laze about all day until they need to eat. Or you can be a deer caught in the corporate wage slave, alarm clock prisoner headlights.

The study is clearly about correlation and not causation, but still the term "important predictor" keeps triggering me. People can't sleep due to stress or noise or disease (e.g. coughing), and while "predictor" seems to be normal science lingo I feel it nudges the conclusion of this study into the direction of causation instead of very clearly saying that it is pure correlation.

Nobody goes to bed and wants to wake up 2 hours later.

Carmack always seemed to have a really strong idea on what was important for him to work on. How much of that is mental toughness vs having a believable purpose?

Believable is important because you have to internally 100% without a doubt believe that what you're doing is the right thing to be doing now.

As soon as the "what ifs" starts to creep in for the big picture items or goals, that can destroy everything. I'm not talking about running into technical implementation problems along the way (those can be fun), it's more like "did I pick the right language for this?" level of questions that sit in the back of your mind.

Personally when I find something to work on that I like and will have what I think is a favorable outcome, it's easy to put in 8-10 real 100% laser focused hours into a task every day, even if it spans weeks or months. I'd like to think most people can do this too, the hard part (for me at least) is having these things to work on.

> Putting your hand out of the window and then blocking the wind with a book doesn't make the car slow down.

Technically the book would add drag and the car would slow down but likely imperceptibly to a mere mortal

>Putting your hand out of the window and then blocking the wind with a book doesn't make the car slow down.

...yes it does?

I've found my sleep regularity to be pretty malleable. It can become a habit. When I was in grad school I went to bed at midnight and woke up at 7am. Once I started running more in the mornings, I gradually shifted to going to sleep at 9pm and waking up at 5am.

The first couple days or week will feel pretty bad, but if you give yourself enough time then you'll shift your sleep schedule around. Now I get tired at 8:30pm and fall asleep at 9ish like clockwork. grad school me would have considered that insane considering I'm doing less work on average during the day. My day is just shifted now so that I do more stuff in the mornings and really relax in the afternoons, which is the opposite of before.

A key is actually giving yourself enough time to fall asleep. Most people think they can hop into bed and just get 8hrs, when you actually need to hop into bed around 30mins beforehand and really relax with a book or something.

I also think it's important to not stress about sleep a lot. Unless you're literally feeling miserable or have apnea, I think it's better to just let yourself relax if you wake up in the middle of the night. Sometimes I'll snap awake at 2am and just read for 2hrs, then get 2 more hours of sleep and generally feel fine.

You are not alone.

Recalling from college neuroscience classes and subsequent reading of research, the studies show the ordinary human sleep cycle when unrestrained adds about a half hour per day, so 24.5 hours is 'natural'. Long-term studies with all time cues carefully removed ended up with subjects on a ~50 hour sleep schedule, as in awake 36-38 hours and sleeping 12-14hrs.

This is also why it is easier to travel across time zones to the west than to the east.

I also have sleep drift problem and consistenyly had it for the past 7 years.

I discovered that it helps when I actually put in effort to fix my sleep schedule. Like getting off screen 1 hour before I sleep. Boxing bedtime to 23:00-08:00. And similar things.

It is just really difficult to fix for me but it doesn't feel impossible. I have made progress in last 6 months but trying different methods and only some portion of that progress stays permanent.

Also have the same experience fighting depression-like symptoms and anxiety. It just takes a lot of time and is difficult. Some people just don't have these problems and I do but this doesn't mean I am genetically attuned to be like this and I can't do anything. It is just difficult.

> Sleeping pills can cause dependence, and they often treat the symptom rather than the underlying cause.

I found gwern's take on Melatonin interesting: https://gwern.net/melatonin

A small excerpt:

> One might object that they do not wish to tamper with their natural sleep, even if melatonin is a normally-secreted hormone.

> Sad to say, I would point out to such readers that they are already profoundly tampering with their natural sleep cycle, and indeed, all of Western civilization is tampering with it; most of my readers do not even sleep multiple times during the day, as ‘Nature intends’ and as humans have usually slept through history, but rather in a single 7–9 hour long block.

> [...]

> Finally, there are multiple lines of research suggesting chronic sleep deprivation is prevalent among young adults (including historical comparisons). It is striking that unemployed adults sleep a full hour longer than the employed , and that when normal adults are placed in settings without artificial light like camping or without any time indicators, they sleep longer than before - exactly as if they were sleep deprived.

I had that my entire life, and then one day started having the strangest medical condition where it is literally impossible to sleep past ~6:30am.

It sounds unbelievable but you’d have to experience it to understand. But the end result is it “fixed” the delayed sleep issue.

I’d give just about anything to be able to just sleep and keep sleeping, but on the up side now I’m an early bird with extreme regularity and quite like it.

> A special form of magnesium called magnesium L-threonate may be especially helpful for the brain because it appears to raise brain magnesium levels more effectively than some other forms.

The study that made this claim was performed by the person who patented magnesium L-threonate and sells it at a high price. They go after any company that tries to sell cheap generic versions. The study was in mice and only showed small increases.

Magnesium L-threonate doesn’t get absorbed into your body and go into your brain as a lot of the supplement podcasts and social media posts have been implying. Magnesium supplements like this dissociate into their components in your digestive tract. Magnesium and threonate get absorbed separately. So if magnesium L-threonate has some special properties, it would be because threonate does something to improve absorption or maybe has other effects in the body, but that’s a big if. Remember that the person claiming it works better has been making a lot of money off of that one study.

If you have the cash and don’t mind paying the price then there’s no reason to switch. Many people find that magnesium glycinate, which is cheap, works just as well if not better. Glycine supplementation has been found independently to improve sleep, so taking a magnesium supplement that dissociates into magnesium and glycinate might be helpful in its own way.

Magnesium builds up in the body. Some people are deficient and get strong effects from initially correcting the deficiency. Take high doses for too long and you can start accumulating enough to get into excessive magnesium range, which brings problems. That was previously a rare observation but it’s occurring more as people get into magnesium supplements from podcasts that encourage constant high dose protocols and repeat claims that everyone is severely deficient. Keep the dose moderate.

> And they all wanted to put me on prescription sleeping pills. I said no to that. Sleeping pills can cause dependence, and they often treat the symptom rather than the underlying cause. As a software developer, I am used to finding and fixing the underlying problem instead of relying on the quick fixes these doctors were offering me.

“Sleeping pills” could mean a lot of things. Few doctors will put a patient on long-term hypnotics with high dependence liability like Ambien in the 2020s. Most doctors are hesitant to prescribe them at all in the current environment, and when they do it’s short term. I would be very surprised if you went to multiple doctors who offered to prescribe you something like that as a new patient without a complicated history. Even the people with significant long term insomnia complain about how hard it is to get doctors to prescribe those.

What they usually recommend is weaker medications with somnolence as a side effect, but the effect is weaker and doesn’t target pathways prone to addiction. Trazodone, doxepin, and a few others are common. These are not in the same category as what people think of as “sleeping pills” like Ambien that have higher dependence and addiction liability. They should not be dismissed together as one big category of drugs that are all bad for you.

> Magnesium supplementation solved my sleep issues.

Which type, if you don't mind my asking? And how long did it take before you felt the benefits? I took it for a month once (forget which type) an hour before bed and nothing changed.

For me glycine helps amazingly. It's an amino acid that the brain needs during sleep. I take about 5 grams in water about an hour before I go to sleep. I'm not sure how much the glycinate in magnesium glycinate has the same effect.

Oddly, it has the opposite effect as sleeping pills on me, it doesn't make me sleep more but I'm more rested when I wake up. It even happened a few times that I only slept 5 hours but still could focus well at work and bike intensively for an hour in the evening, without glycine that was impossible.

At 20 euro/kg I think I'll take it for the rest of my life, and it probably will add a few years to my life.

Are you? Would be happy to die by 65-70 instead of struggling through 80s…

Magnesium is a great supplement in general. You can definitely have too much in your system and that is undesirable, but a bit before bed time along with 1-3mcg of melatonin work well for me. It is nice after workouts. I use magnesium glycinate in powder form, which is more bioavailable than some forms as well.

I also find sauna before bed is good. I have a bed chiller so I can crank up the sauna before bed and not sweat a lot. Generally if I sauna and take the aforementioned supplements I sleep well. Exercise also seems to help me out a lot. If I exercise during the day, and a 4-5 times that week in general, I tend to sleep well.

Your comment sounds like an AI-generated advertisement.

My thought exactly. For people who struggle with this, and conventional wisdom doesn't seem to stick, what are we supposed to do?

I find magnesium great - but I also like 5-HTP which I find also helps me sleep if I take it with a little food about 30 mins before bed. I find I feel a lot calmer when taking it - and it helps my ADHD - though I don't take it for too long, as I never like to take anything for too long.

Research papers are written to be read by other researchers, not laypeople. If you have no scientific background and want to read up on a topic that you are not familiar with, you'll have to find other sources of information.

No they didn't. A control group inherently implies the researchers made an intervention in the first place (or else there was a "natural experiment" where people were randomly placed in group or another). That didn't happen here, as this was purely an observational study.

We could pick a company car in my previous company (it's a tax thing). We could pick any color, apart from red, because the insurance forbade it - red cars get into more accidents. Somehow that must have made it all the way to the policy without someone asking "is it the red car or the kind of person that picks a red car that causes more accidents?"

I think the point is that while it does act as negative acceleration there isn't a causal relationship with the actual speed of the car, which is mainly related to how far the gas pedal is pressed.

But what color is that bike shed ??? /s

I don't know if they can have controls for "specific activity that changes their sleep schedule".

In the past few years I went from having relaxed 11AM daily meetings to rigid 8AM meetings, and my sleep has suffered immensely. But nothing else in my life has changed, so it wouldn't show up in my socioeconomic data.

LSD has risks, especially if you're already prone to certain kinds of mental illness (you might not know it), but addiction isn't really one of them.

Going for a walk can also rewire your brain, but doing so on LSD will probably rewire it more quickly. Whether that's good or bad depends on whether you do a good job with the rewiring. It comes down to how well you trust yourself.

Bears sleep about 7-8 hours/day, similar to humans.

only if the book is being held by someone in the car.

Presumably, the example missed the part where they stated the book was being held in front by an outside agent, because that is the only way it would make sense.

Considering the importance of the subject, it still seems important to bring this out, especially if there's conclusions that if you have irregular sleep you are significantly increasing your odds of dying earlier. I think intuitively we can know how important sleep is and I desperately want to sleep better. It's fine to speak of it being predictor etc, and all that, then they end the abstract with "Sleep regularity may be a simple, effective target for improving general health and survival.", which is technically fine since they use "may", although later articles based on the study will likely make the statement more confident.

But I guess what might be slightly triggering is claiming that it's a "simple" target. Don't I wish I could sleep on command and better?

So a clear question is - why do people choose to sleep or why do they naturally sleep irregularly?

Because for that there must be a logical cause in the first place. They say they control for mental health and all that, but is it then that ultimately it comes down to preference in their mind? I'd think most people want to sleep in healthy way.

Basically - if they were able to control for all possible confounding variables, what exactly was the cause of irregular sleep?

Anecdotally I can say that I sleep more irregularly the more stress there is, and stress could easily affect health, but if they controlled for stress, what then?

I guess ultimately they are saying it's a desirable target to measure, so it's fine in that sense. They are not really saying that choosing to sleep irregularly is what is causing the issues.

You are spot on. I see all this in me, too. Very interesting to encounter your take.

I try to turn what-ifs into actions. Instead of a what if rumination it is a small task, or a small trial of something, or a move in general forward rather than not. Not even remotely close to doing this well all the time, but I notice an overall boost in mood and productivity when I reorient my mint to progress rather searching in the uncertainty space.

Artificial light has a huge effect on drowsiness for me. This is quite noticable when I am out in the woods, camping in a tent. After sundown, I have about an hour left before I get so drowsy that I cannot keep my eyes open. Back home, indoors, I can stay awake almost indefinitely.

Do you even bother to click on links before asking a question?

There is a whole paragraph on "Statistical analysis" that even provides five supplementary methods (S1.5, S2.2 and S2.4-6) if you want detailed information.

McElreath's Statistical Rethinking is also a great reference for causal thinking and modeling.

But they choose to. Alcohol, caffeine in the afternoon, just not realizing blackout curtains matter, lights or displays on in the room... you can't help someone who isn't making bad choices, but most people can make simple choices that improve their sleep a lot!

People are different. What you find easy and trainable, someone else will find it doesn't require training and someone else will try as hard as they can and won't succeed.

You might find some benefit from an app like Wavekength[1] that uses iPhone camera to coach your light exposure, based on current+desired circadian rhythms.

Disclaimer: I made the app.

[1] https://www.impulsearc.com/wavelength/

Good points, if I am careful about caffeine and do all of that it's not unmanageable. Being outdoors and camping and getting good physical activity is the best I found. But it's a struggle for me.

> Also have the same experience fighting depression-like symptoms and anxiety. It just takes a lot of time and is difficult. Some people just don't have these problems and I do but this doesn't mean I am genetically attuned to be like this and I can't do anything. It is just difficult.

Should I mention that "neurodivergence" and different sleep pattern genes have a large co-morbidity? E.g. many people with anxiety / ADHD / dyslexia / depression / etc have a very high likelihood of having delayed sleep or other genes.

What about female lions?

Assume the book is the same form and size as the hand (though very thin).

I agree with Gwern in that I think for the vast majority of people, short-term melatonin supplementation is useful and can cause little harm, and it is extremely safe as far as supplements go.

But I don't think it does anyone any favors to oversell the idea that it has "few" or "no" side effects -- it has mild side effects, most commonly reported in the literature are daytime fatigue, headaches and GI symptoms, and also nightmares. Mild doesn't mean it isn't a nonstarter for some people.

It's also important to remember that there are major gaps in what we know about melatonin; notably the effects of chronic supplementation are not well-studied, but earlier final awakening has been documented and this is quite commonly reported in anecdata -- I can contribute a datapoint there, as can most people in my circles who have used it.

To be clear, melatonin is great and useful, but as someone with a rare lifelong chronic sleep disorder who is intimately familiar with this substance, I think it's most useful when we're clear on what we know, what we don't know, and what actually are the limitations on a substance.

Just because downing a bottle of it probably won't cause systemic organ failure or otherwise any kind of medical emergency in most people doesn't mean there aren't tradeoffs to consider when using it, especially if you are sleep-challenged

Everyone is different so I'm not suggesting this as a general cure-all, however I'd like to relate my own personal anecdotal experience.

I've always had insomnia since I was a kid and I just chalked it up to "being a night owl." As a teenager, I mostly solved this by living in a permanent fog during the week and "catching up" by sleeping in on the weekend. As an adult, I was suffering greatly from chronic sleep deprivation because adults (mostly) don't have much control over when they can wake up to start the day.

Around 10 years ago, I started taking 5mg melatonin. It's going to sound like I'm overselling it, but it changed my life. It _very reliably_ makes me sleepy 1-2 hours after I take it. If I forget to take it, I am fully awake until the wee hours of the morning. Is it important to note that (for me), after I take it, I have to engage in some passive activity like (calm, non-shouty) YouTube repair videos or reading. Also, the "window of sleepiness" is at most about 30 minutes and if I decide to power through it, I will come out the other side fully awake again. Melatonin does not "force" me to sleep, only highly encourages it.

I was skeptical of melatonin for the longest time. Generally, I rarely see much if any positive effect from supplements. But (for me!) this stuff really works. If anyone reading this is on the fence, I highly recommend giving it a try. (With the acknowledgement that it takes about a week to get into a solid sleep schedule if yours is currently disorganized.)

But you can just apply this to anything. I feel unlike unless you're an insider with skin in the game, your criticism doesn't land other than a generic surface one.

To be clear, I apply an equal deep skepticism to most fields that aren't math (in the sense of a priority) or physics (in the sense that you aren't trying to study the entire world, but a specific set of phenomena that you can reliably control enough + repeat to run intervention on), whether the results agree with me or not. Maybe a bit of intellectual closed-mindedness. But then that means that me, personally, I can't in good faith use the criticism as a proper 'debunk' argument - at best it's a heuristic to avoid spending cycles to evaluate it (which is 'rational' behavior, as much as I hate that word, IMO).

Watch birds they fly when they want. Or you can be a slave worm bound to the earth. The choice is yours

I have had a similar experience. I would find my sleep schedule constantly drifting later and later, which made it harder to wake up in the morning, so I would self medicate with caffeine which made me anxious, which contributed to the same cycle. But even when I stopped taking caffeine I always found it difficult to actually go to bed at the same time every day.

What finally worked for me were red light glasses. I wear the True Dark Twilights Classics (though I’m sure there are other brands on the market) for 2-3 hours before bed time and I’m actually sleepy. Way more effective than taking melatonin tablets ever was in my experience. And I haven’t even had to substantially change my screen usage either (though the glasses do make everything come out monochrome, which makes it difficult to use anything that’s not in color blind mode).

This is a very important paragraph from quern's article

> There are few to no side-effects to melatonin use in adults (there is uncertainty about the risks & benefits in children & adolescents28), and it is not addictive or habit-forming like caffeine is. The usual dose for a night is 0.5-3 mg and I take 1.5mg [29]; my dose is highly likely to be too high. High doses may well be responsible for why some people try melatonin and report that it does nothing or hurts them, since in one study, the best dose for old people was 10x smaller (0.1mg or 0.3mg) and for one blind person, 0.5mg [30 31 32] . Zhdanova et al 1996 found 0.3mg & 1.0mg to affect sleep onset similarly. A study of delayed-release melatonin found with their high dose of 4mg (but not 0.4mg) elevated melatonin levels 10 hours after bedtime ( Gooneratne et al 2011) - potentially interfering with waking time.

It is difficult to find doses as small as 1mg sublingual (dissolve under the tongue) in my area. Everyone is trying to sell you 5-30mg chewables. And, I expect everyone is buying them under the assumption that more is better. But, here it explicitly is not.

The way melatonin works well for me is to wait until I'm already settled into bed and should be asleep, but I'm not. Do a couple body scans to relax for real. Try to think about something mindless. Then if I'm still awake, pop 1mg under my tongue. I'll usually wake in the morning with half of it drooled on my pillow :P

The evidence that humans would naturally be designed to sleep “multiple times a day” is quite mixed. “Multiple” does a lot of heavy lifting here, when basically most evidence points to two batches, following either of these patterns:

- a long uninterrupted night cycle and a short (20-60 mins) afternoon nap. Around 2pm. - a night cycle split into two halves. With a 1-2h break (maybe up to 3h) starting around midnight to 2am.

The former is still very common, and imho stretching the definition of multiple cycles. The latter is more historical (more common when there are long winter nights and no electricity).

Also making it a “Western” problem is kinda weird? There are other cultures where single cycle sleep has existed. Even hunter-gatherer groups with little to no contact with the west. And alternatively afternoon naps are still quite common is some western areas. I guess the main thing that prevent it would be the classic work day schedule.

The comment above just said “sleeping pills” which is ambiguous. Melatonin is an OTC supplement. True “sleeping pills” are usually controlled substances and few doctors would prescribe them as first-line options for a patient who shows up with first time complaints of sleep problems. They won’t be prescribed long-term either. The part of the post that says doctors (plural) tried to prescribe the pills makes me think it’s not traditional sleeping pills, because in this environment you would be unlikely to find one doctor willing to prescribe scheduled sleeping pills long term at all, let alone multiple doctors pushing them.

The usual suggestions from doctors for first line treatment are more mild medications that have drowsiness as a side effect, prescribed at low dose. I would actually prefer many of these low dose options over some of the high dose melatonin supplements. Melatonin is a hormone and taking it can throw off natural production

> Sleep regularity may be a simple, effective target for improving general health and survival.

But why would it NOT be? Seems stupid for us to have evolved into beings that need our sleep to be irregular.

I think I'm gonna try and find a study that had the 50 hour sleep cycles

I take melatonin to sleep on a redeye, but otherwise don't use it. I find the effect is similar to taking a weed edible to fall asleep— basically, my wearable registers a lengthy period of deep sleep but instead of waking up feeling refreshed and ready for action, I'm groggy and fog-headed for several hours, or dependent on coffee to reverse the lingering effects.

As someone who has never been a regular coffee consumer, I really didn't want to end up with the dual dependence of melatonin at night and then caffeine in the morning.

This thread is stimulating me to want to get my magnesium checked, but barring that I've found the most effective sleep interventions are the basic ones: get some exercise earlier in the day, and don't do screens for the last few hours before bed.

The problem with that take is that the evidence for melatonin is quite poor outside of jet-lag and certain more serious sleep disorders, and there can be unexpected effects elsewhere in the body when supplementing hormones, e.g. increased rates of depression for melatonin in particular.

Not sure why I would trust the opinions of this random person?

Even a simple ZMA worked wonders for me when my fitness coach recommended it. Got some of the deepest sleep of my life

The solution is clear: Offer the red car option as a trap, banning anyone who chooses it.

Magnesium Glycinate worked well for me, take it an hour before bed or so. L-Threonate is too expensive, citrate gave me diarrhea.

Much more deep sleep with Glycinate, some folks don’t like it because they feel too groggy after waking.

Let's create a Discord/Signal/WhatsApp/mailing list group to help each other figure it out... it's time to end our sleep irregularity once and for all!

Lifelong severe insomniac (sleep onset mostly) and cured myself pretty much entirely over the last year or so. My suggestions in order of what I perceived to be their cost vs effectiveness ratio:

1. The Sleep With Me podcast, especially if you struggle with racing thoughts (if you have a partner who can't stand hearing this, the Ozlo Sleepbuds are a good if imperfect solution)

2. Stellar Sleep, an app that delivers CBT-I, evidence-backed cognitive therapy for insomnia; this reset my sleep clock in about two months, which is now maintained by the other items on this list

3. Eight Sleep mattress pad to keep temperature low during sleep, especially on warmer nights

4. Manta Sleep Mask to get full light blackout

Also I've definitely just doxxed myself. But worth it to help some fellow insomniacs!

Exercise, often, not too hard, over short time you'll get your personal level better than any coach could do. It will also prolong your life easily by 10 years and add tons of quality into it, will make you happier and more connected to your own body. All people I know also corrected their eating habits aggressively, its all connected.

If you dont have enough time get to the point when you can do HIIT safely, its literally 15-20 min max. If you have time, add long walks on rest days for example, or whatever is available to you nearby (ie swimming/surf if usable water body nearby).

I find it impossible not to reflect on my personal experience whenever this comes up. I spend 8+ hours a day on a computer, looking at screens. Probably more. I am looking at a screen literally 10 minutes before falling asleep (watching stuff on my iPad).

I can easily sleep 8+ hours. Today slept 10.5.

I'm either not convinced screens are an issue, or they simply are not an issue for me personally, but if thats true -- WHY?

I find that Magnesium Glycinate works well for me. Magnesium Taurate also works.

Sure, by "other researchers" you mean other people who learned jargon terminology.

And why would someone need to have a scientific background to read about sleep regularity and how it affects mortality?

I'd rather live through my 80s without much struggling. Longevity and quality of life until the end. And I try to live in the way that lends itself towards that.

Easy to say when you're not 65-70.

Drag is a causitive input to speed though.

    nextCarSpeed(currentSpeed, wheelPower, dragForce, mass, deltaTime) =
    currentSpeed + ((wheelPower / currentSpeed - dragForce) / mass) * deltaTime

Increase "dragForce", and the resulting car speed decreases. That is a causal input, not an association.

Observational studies can have synthetic controls. The term, as such, doesn’t mean precisely what you think it means.

I drive a "Victory Red" 2005 Chevy Silverado. I always thought it was a "safer" color for a vehicle.

I have always assumed that, being in a larger vehicle that is bright red, people would be more likely to spot the vehicle from further away, notice it out of the corner of their eye, or that I would generally be MORE visible to other drivers.

I'm sure the correlation insurance companies are looking at is that the driver's of red vehicles are the cause of the higher accident rate.

Right??? The HN pissing contest...

Good point about L-threonate. It is indeed expensive. I use some of it, but mostly I rely on Magnesium Glycinate.

Mg or melatonin have 0 effects on me, Mg helps if I over-exercise but thats for muscles regeneration.

I dont have problems normally, just cant sleep in high altitude, 3000m is already showing mild effects. Guess what, I do/did quite a bit of mountaineering, its easy to get above 5000m in himalayas, highest I've been in tent attempting to sleep before summit push was 6000m on Aconcagua. Tried both Mg and melatonin up there over multiple nights, 0 improvements. I had highest O2 blood level measured in 5500m by doctor (mandatory there) from whole group.

Physical effort makes better sleep for literally everybody, thats age old knowledge and I havent met a single exception yet.

Don't watch any kind of screen in the evening. Read a book instead. You'll fall asleep sooner.

Never taking a supplement for too long is great advice. Always cycle things in and out to avoid some potential for accumulating too much in the body.

There are some horrifying case studies where people took like too much zinc, or copper, or some other thing for years and got really really messed up.

Hard to answer precisely without knowing what conventional wisdom didn't stick.

The common levers I know and that worked at least a bit for me:

- start by having a fixed waking time, and get sunlight or bright light quickly after waking up. Normally relatively fixed sleep time is supposed to follow. For me waking up is the easy part, transforming that into getting up and going outside is harder. Another option here is a strong (like, really strong) lamp on a timer, or letting the morning light in your bedroom (this one is usually not recommended I think, most people seem to be blackout curtains style, but for me it gave me a nice 6am waking time with good sleep last summer).

- melatonin. Two main ways: using it as a kind of hypnotic, so ~30 minutes before sleep, experimenting with 0.3mg to ~2mg doses ; then using it as a circadian regulator, this is a good resource https://lorienpsych.com/2020/12/20/melatonin/, search for "TO TREAT" in the page.

- app timers, for me it was mostly no twitter and no youtube, or a very low time for each.

- light, ie reduc light before sleeping. Not just blue light and not just screens, if I'm on my phone in bed I'll reduce the luminosity a lot, same with computer, same with e-reader. I also try to avoid using too much the lights in my room. More light tend to make me feel more "wired" and less ready to sleep.

- "meditation" to cut rumination, by which I mean "lay down in my bed, gently try to find sensations in the body and to stay focused on them, by gently I mean it's a very low stakes game where the goal is to find sensations in the body and give them attention, but losing focus for a while is not a big deal".

- shower in the evening, as I don't like feeling dirty when I am in my bed, but also not just before bed as sometimes I don't really want to go take a shower and this delays my bedtime

- clean bedsheets, bedroom, stuff in/on your bed

- AC in the summer, I wouldn't be able to sleep properly without it

- sleeping mask. It helps going to sleep, but it falls of my head every night so it doesn't prevent waking up with light too.

- making getting good sleep the priority of the evening. This is easy/possible for me due to my circumstances (ie low responsibilities in the evening). The way I do it is that unless something is actually important, what I'm trying to accomplish in the evening is prepare myself for sleep and get good sleep. This can look like not starting a movie at 11pm, not booting up games, not eating a super heavy meal, not drinking too much water after 6pm to avoid waking up to pee, if I have things I want to do try to do them early so they're done earlier, move some stuff I want to do every day like spaced repetition in the morning.

So where's the advert link to his favourite supplement, search those phrases and there will be 200 different brands selling this same commodity so which one is paying him commission ? All?

Hmmmmmmm

People sharing their experience doesnt immediately mean AI-generated advert

I've tried both Magnesium Glyconate and Magnesium L-Threonate and both have helped my sleep, Magnesium Citrate did very little. Which makes sense, the latter is known to not be absorbed very well.

I've not noticed any significant difference between the other two.

Conventional wisdom does work for me but it is immensely difficult. I would say take the advice seriously but don't take the timeframe or problem difficulty assesment coming from other people.

It is only natural that it takes months to years to fix a problem if you had the problem for years.

Your report matches my experience as well!

Funny how it's basically do all the things you're supposed to do - exercise, diet, stress management - then sleep is then easier.

No one knows for sure how they will be in their old age. My grandmother didn’t seem to struggle until her mid to late 90s. That’s a lot of years to leave on the table. Years that allowed her to meet and enjoy time with her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

Had she died at 65, I wouldn’t have even known her. Instead she was around for my entire childhood and well into adulthood.

Why AI-generated? Because the quality of his writing is better than that of his critics?

Eh, I was prescribed 2mg of slow-release melatonin to help with insomnia (baby-related).

Man, were these the worst nights of my life! I’d get 2-3 hours of shut-eye and then be FULLY awake. Ready to go, couldn’t sleep the rest of the night. I was dead tired by day 7 and gave up.

Tried 0.3mg. Tried 5mg. Nope. There’s some evidence that melatonin can mess you up if you’re sensitive to cortisol/have too much of it. I’m not touching it again. No side effects? Sure.

N=1, but if it’s not working for you, don’t push it. My doctor instead prescribed a bit of therapy (CBT-i) and my sleep went back to normal after a couple of sessions.

Yep, I've been taking glycine and magnesium for years. I am not as consistent as I should be but it makes a big difference when I use them.

I don’t think it’s AI-generated, but it is repeating a lot of the points that are commonly repeated in supplement ads: The claim that Mg L-threonate is special originates from the person who patented it and sues anyone else who produces it. The claims that multiple doctors tried to push “sleeping pills” and they’re all bad is a common theme in communities that accept supplement research and claims unquestionably (like patented magnesium forms being superior) but have an innate distrust of doctors and medicine.

I think this is just what happens if you read a lot of supplement forums and listen to the supplement podcasts a lot: You start developing elevated beliefs about the supplements, disdainful beliefs about doctors, and think you’re making superior choices having done your own research. That last point is some times critical for the supplements working, because if you believe you’re taking something special after having cracked the mystery by listening to 50 hours of Huberman or Rhonda Patrick (as examples) then the placebo effect will supercharge the result. Having belief that you’ve solved the problem makes the effects much stronger, especially for cases like this where the underlying problem was already pointed out as being stress related.

If you watch birds you will see they don't use alarm clocks nor go to work, but still find food each day.

Doesn't multiple mean more than one?

It was a person free-running in a cave. Here's one article about it [0] to get you started, and here's another [1] of multiple 9-day studies showing the fairly immediate shift to 24.5 - 25 hour cycles (we're actually Martians?).

[0] https://howandwhys.com/michel-siffre-time-experiment-body-sl...

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339110740_Living_Wi...

There are things that are causal and have little to no effect and things that are causal and have a large effect. I think determining whether and how much something matters, especially when the target audience is "all humans" is a worthwhile endeavor. So it may seem obvious to you, but many many important scientific findings were because somebody looked a little deeper at something that seemed obvious to everyone else.

Natrol makes a 1mg gummy and Vitafusion has a peach flavored 1.5mg gummy (sold as “3mg” but the dose is “two gummies.” My kids use these. I get them on Amazon.

It's a bit harder to find, but I've had a good experience with liquid melatonin. Each drop contains like 0.1mg, so it's easy to dial in the small dose that you need.

Because for it to be effective it must have reasonable cost compared to the benefit. The cost for such a sweeping lifestyle adjustment seems quite high, and the authors have not showed any benefit to interventions.

fyi, Whole Foods sells liquid melatonin. bottle says 30 drops contains 3mg so I only take a couple drops at night and it does the trick for me.

Go get children's melatonin gummies and cut it in half. Problem solved.

Long-term use of high dosage (5-10 mg) of melatonin gave me painful stiff neck and shoulders and muscle spasm.

> True “sleeping pills” are usually controlled substances and few doctors would prescribe them as first-line options for a patient who shows up with first time complaints of sleep problems. They won’t be prescribed long-term either.

Modern orexin antagonist sleep medications are not addictive and can be taken long-term.

it's easy to find 0.3mg melatonin online.

People love nitpicking about scientific articles, it kind of exploded with the pandemic. Especially when the conclusions of the paper don't align with the expectations of the reader.

The way I see these is "these persons invested a lot of time putting this together and all I have to counter it are personal vibes", so unless my LLM of choice can find plenty of conflicting papers, I tend to assume it's reasonably valid work.

In Austria a lot of times as second line ( after melatonin etc ) quetiapine is prescribed for its off label effects.

Magnesium Glycinate has been a game changer. My legs used to be tense to the point of cramping at night, and they’re now relaxed, enabling better sleep. I also use L-theanine as an additional supplement for a long duration deep sleep, and think it helps.

> having the strangest medical condition where it is literally impossible to sleep past ~6:30am.

It's it really? What if you go to bed at 6am? Will you really still wake up 30 mins later?

The only thing that worked for me was having a kid. He wakes up early every day, so I have no choice. Taking care of him is so taxing, being sleep deprived isn't on the table.

Did you cut out all caffeine?

Melatonin works well to help me get to sleep, but it doesn't keep me asleep. My issue is waking multiple times in the night, mostly because I'm just uncomfortable, but my brain will immediately be thinking of some work or personal task and spinning. I solve this by putting on an audiobook each time, and that focuses my attention, and I'm asleep again in 5 minutes. So, I have developed "solutions" to my sleep problems, but they don't really fix the underlying issues.

Also, I don't take melatonin often, only when I seem to need to reset my sleep cycle, and I only take about 200-300 micrograms.

Why do you take so much? 5mg is a lot, according to the studies.

Lots of people take diphenhydramine products as sleeping pills and they are advertised as such OTC in the US. Long term Diphenhydramine use is associated with many negative health outcomes and despite the warning labels many people become dependent on them.

From your description it may be acting as a placebo -- the act of putting the pill into your mouth is what tells your subconscious to activate a sleep cycle.

> They won’t be prescribed long-term either.

Tramadol is routinely prescribed long term where I live. I know someone with a massive bottle good for something like 6 to 12 months of daily use. (I don't know if that's a good thing but it is certainly a thing.)

It's worth keeping in mind that melatonin is also prescription-only in many countries e.g. UK, Canada, Japan, Australia.

Interesting, at first I though you mean the active red-light therapy things. I've seen that a lot on Instagram.

Might have to try that myself. Do you still use your phone/tablet/etc or does it also encourage you to use them less?

I've had the same problem finding low-dose melatonin in brick-and-mortar stores, but Natrol sells a 1mg dissolving tablet on Amazon. If I need a sleep aid, I break it in half for a ~0.5mg dose, chew it with my front teeth, then hold it under my tongue for a bit before swallowing what's left.

It usually takes 15-30 minutes before I get noticeably drowsy, but I feel no more groggy the next day than if I slept sober.

yeah. that’s been my experience as well. my doctor gave me the impression that melatonin helps set the cycle but magnesium glycinate is what calms the body.

This sounds like you may be taking a very high dose. What dose do you take?

This. Melatonin is a hormone. You should always be extra careful when dealing with any kind of hormone as it might affect your own body's regulations.

Bertrand Russell objected to the notion of causation in the 1900s, because merely stating the updated dynamics of a system doesn't imply causation in any grand sense. Like hume, he dismisses causation, but not because of the problem of induction or anything, but because the concept seems incoherent to him. He especially emphasized this in physics - although maybe you can argue that for everyday human language, causation is good (Alice caused BCD to happen), in physics it doesn't belong.

Not that I entirely agree with his account but just some food for thought.

Sorry but it's counterproductive to people's understanding of the causation vs correlation distinction to provide an example of the former and call it the latter.

IDK. I got a hand-me-down sporty car when I was in high school, which was initially white, then I had it painted orange as a birthday gift a year or two later. Comparing the before and after, there was a noticeable shift in how other drivers responded to me, and not universally for the better. I was less likely to go unnoticed (think people trying to merge into me, or jumping out in front of me when they have a yield), but a subset of people (mostly other young men, sometimes older men driving minivans) would act significantly more aggressively. No one ever tried to race me when my car was white. It'd happen like once a week once the car was orange. People actively speeding up to avoid me passing them also increased substantially.

Magnesium L-Threonate is actually very cheap to produce. There’s nothing special about it other than the patent.

There were some generic versions available but the Magtein people go after them. They have to in order to protect their cash cow until the patent expires.

I understand that. But saying "they had a control" in any case implies an "intervention" group of some sort, whether synthetic or natural, and this is very different from saying "they controlled for other factors", which is what they did in this study.

The study authors aren't even purporting to show a casual relationship (i.e. that improving sleep would necessarily reduce mortality), just that irregular sleep predicts mortality.

Initially I assumed it to be negligible but the numbers are actually very close!

I calculate around a 3% drop in speed (from 60mpg) for holding an average sized book out of the window. That's surprising to me.

It's not quite right to use hazard ratios to calculate life expectancy. But if we force it, it looks like being in the top 20% of "regular" sleepers compared to the bottom 20% confers 3-4.5 years of extra life (from birth, assuming everything else equal, assuming USA, etc.). That's 3.8%-5.7% more life (79 year life expectancy at birth in the USA as of 2025). So the numbers are actually close.

I made a bad analogy :)

But you get my point!

This. And maybe anecdotal, but my experience of people who have used melatonin is that they sleep very deeply, but for a shorter amount of time. But likely they will wake up after around 6/7 hours sleep, rather than the recommended 8 hours of sleep. And once woken up, it's very hard to go back to sleep.

"and don't do screens for the last few hours before bed" because that will help you fall asleep more quickly? or because that will help you sleep later in the morning 6 or 7 hours later? People never seem to mention that key aspect.

In this example you're determining the speed of the car based on the wind flow on your hand. Putting the book in front might slow down the car, and it will probably also slow down the flow on the hand. However, if you still try to determine the speed of the car from the air flow on the hand, you'll probably be off, because car speed and wind flow aren't linked like that when the book is in the picture.

All of those supplements are made with “magtein (r)” branded magnesium l-threonate. It all goes back to the same company and that company is the one that has supplied the “studies” that prove its effectiveness. And by “supplied” I mean that the literal vice president of the company’s research arm was an author on at least one of their studies but didn’t disclose his connections until a follow-up update to the study.

With this [0] I find i read 2 pages and I fall asleep consistently and really with a will to sleep. My mind wanders into far away lands and empires and says, "I take it from here".

[0] https://www.amazon.com/dp/0691134952

Isn't that "conventional wisdom"?

I wonder if that is an adaptation time problem? It takes about a month for the body to fully adjust. I live at 1500m elevation in the Denver area of Colorado, but I do recall feeling more restless during sleep at elevation before I lived here.

The only thing I did take for a long time was Fenugreek seed extract, but recently read long term us is potentially toxic, so stopped that, but I really liked how that made me feel.

Interesting about the legs. I wake up with that in the middle of the night and have trouble falling back asleep because of it. Heck, if MC just took care of that, I'd be happy. Thanks for your input!

Have you been checked for sleep apnea? If you keep waking up throughout the night, it's a good idea to get checked.

What's more, you have little difficulty falling asleep any time, any place!

Yes.

Magnesium citrate works well for constipation, IME.

I do watch screens in the morning, but reading in bed (though still a screen, Kindle) still knocks me off in max 15 minutes. I would love to know why... I only know it works.

> Mg or melatonin have 0 effects on me

> I dont have problems normally

A lot of things don't have effects on people that don't have the problems the thing is trying to solve.

I'm not taking either side but people don't need to directly link to their own store to benefit from increased awareness and "hype" in some product category - a rising tide lifts all boats.

"Health" and more specifically the supplement industry is just a revolving door of fads. There's also survivorship bias, those who are obvious get banned quickly.

"If I'm on my phone in bed" is throwing out a major, proven impactful piece of conventional wisdom.

> conventional wisdom doesn't seem to stick

I honestly didn't know you could buy less than 1mg.

I started with 5mg arbitrarily because that seemed to be the most common dosage sold at the time. I think about lowering the dosage sometimes but at the end of the day, I know 5mg works well for me. I don't notice any side effects, and it's not any cheaper.

I also started with the special "slow release" formulas but couldn't tell any difference from the normal generic stuff.

The parent post was talking about doctor prescribed medications.

The reason diphenhydramine Is associated with a slight increase in dementia risk is the anticholinergic properties. This risk increase is from correlational studies on other medications with anticholinergic medicines being taken for many years by elderly people, so the risk of taking Benadryl occasionally is low to none.

The prescription alternatives like doxepin have the same antihistamine properties without the anticholinergic properties when used at the prescribed dose.

This is an example where people can get themselves into the wrong outcome by assuming anything their doctor prescribes is a last resort quick fix, but anything they can source by themself is safer and superior.

For low dose melatonin, try liquid melatonin. Around here Sprouts carries it, but you gotta look a bit to find it. The bottle says 30 drop equal 3mg. So you can take small doses easily, and it absorbs under your tongue pretty quickly.

Yeah, I'm not sure about the efficacy of those, my understanding is that blocking blue and green light is more important than exposure to red light, but not an expert.

I do still use my phone, and more importantly for me my computer, basically right up until bedtime. I have probably decreased my usage some but it’s not a huge factor.

Don’t jinx it

most bricke and mortar should have at least 1mg tablets, and you can break those in half. or break a 3mg into 3rds. not perfect but should work.

For me most things I do on a screen are fairly mentally stimulating (like video games), and even the ones that aren't (like watching a movie) inhibit the feeling of sleepiness I get when I abstain. So, it's better for falling asleep quickly.

I believe it's much to do with blue light emitted by screens:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9424753/

I specifically take a timed release melatonin, really improved my sleep. Otherwise I did have inconsistent sleep on regular melatonin.

Tramadol is a pain medication, not a sleep medication.

It has opioid effects and can cause drowsiness but would never be prescribed for sleep.

It’s also typically a controlled substance. I don’t know where you live but I’d be surprised if anyone was handed a 12 month supply in a bottle.

Placebos are actually very effective for improving sleep

OTC in canada

Yes - I saw a very interesting video the other day that educated me a lot on Benadryl - apparently it has a lot of side effects, can cause dementia, and is probably best avoided.

>rather than the recommended 8 hours of sleep

for people getting 7 hours of sleep you're good. Improve your sleep hygiene, ok, but artificial interventions to get 8 may not be worth it for you.

I can't tell if this is germane to the analogy or not, but the air flow over your hand, even behind a book, is still a function of the car's speed. As an illustrative example, imagine the feeling when the car is at 0 compared to when the car is at 60.

It's a multivariate system, the dragforce is determined by the car geometry + book, hand, whatever.

They are both causes to speed.

In fact you don't even need flow to infer speed. You can just use pressure calculations and temperature, which is how airplanes measure their speed.

Controlling drag is a major component of the inputs to speed when flying an aircraft.

Could be related to the light spectrum. Kindles aren't really "screen" like the others; they do have background light but you can turn it off and use it with its paper-like screen (which is what I do and really like it). But traditional screens have blue light as part of the normal light they emit, which is known to disrupt sleeping patterns. When I am using my cell phone or computer right before sleeping, I usually turn on colour filtering to make my whole cell phone be tinted red. This helps wonders. I found this page that explains how this can be done: [0].

[0]: https://ios.gadgethacks.com/how-to/keep-your-night-vision-sh...

Yeah, magnesium citrate is used medically as a laxative. Because it is poorly absorbed, it draws water into the stool osmotically, making it softer. (But that also draws water out of the body and can be dehydrating.)

I meant during higher altitude adventures, as rest of my post explains in detail. Did you get to that part?

If my Instagram feed is anything to be believed, apparently we all need to be taking extra electrolytes in now.

Yeah, in an ideal world where I'm the ideal me I wouldn't use my phone in my bed, but I haven't found a way to stop doing that which I can stick with, so I try to limit the damage.

Part of what I wanted to say is, there is conventional wisdom, then there is how you actually put that wisdom in practice in a way you stick with. I've struggled a lot with the implementation, but sometimes by throwing lots of stuff at the wall I find something that brings me halfway there. It's not the "golden way" but it leaves me in a better place than before, with a bit better sleep, a bit more self knowledge, and a small victory.

My family doctor in Italy strongly recommended taking 0.3-0.5mg of melatonin maximum saying that more won't have a good effect and risks having bad effects such as drowsiness the whole day after waking up. And yes, in Italy most melatonin you'll find in pharmacies is <=1mg.

I wouldn’t say cutting out all caffeine is conventional wisdom. Every sleep specialist (sample size of 3) I have spoken to has basically said, while they don't recommend caffeine, if you only drink it early in the day it’s probably fine.

I’m asking a question to determine his view of “conventional wisdom,” which could be all kinds of things. Why would you assume that his view of “conventional wisdom” necessarily includes cutting all caffeine?

If you call it a ritual instead of a placebo it suddenly sounds much more credible.

My bad, apparently it's prescription-only for children in particular.

There are a wild amount of countries where it’s not treated like the opioid that it is, for what it’s worth. Mostly not western ones, though.

Occasional Benadryl is fine. The dementia risk is from correlations found in other medicines that share some of the same properties, when taken for many years.

It’s not a good idea to take Benadryl for many years, but occasional use or even for months while going through a difficult period isn’t going to cause dementia.

7 is enough for a lot of adults. especially 7 hours of quality sleep. After seeing a sleep doctor I realized that stressing out about not getting exactly 8 hours each night was part of my problem! I did a lot of experimentation to find my optimal hours and it was not quite 8. Trying to force extra hours doesn't really work.

That totally makes sense. Also, thanks for sharing your list! I'll see if I can try anything on it. :)

The dementia risk is from disrupting the circadian rhythm and suppressing the REM phases.

That's what my wife and I sleep for, 7 hours. 8 and we wake up with a headache.

AFAIK 7-9 hours is the commonly used range, anything less than 7 hours or anything more than 9 can have detrimental effects on how well rested you feel after waking up. Where did you get the notion that adults need exactly 8 hours on the dot?

It really is variable. My number is closer to 9, so even nights I get my "good 8 hours" I still end up with a sleep deficit by the end of the week.