HN

Comments (289)

• Menu

  petilon
  Magnesium supplementation solved my sleep issues.I have seen many doctors, including sleep specialists, regarding insomnia. They all pointed to one source as the reason for the sleep issues: stress. 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.After much research, I figured out what I believe was the underlying problem, and the fix for it. The underlying problem was magnesium deficiency. As a software developer, I spend much of the day doing mentally demanding work. This is the kind of stress the doctors were talking about. Stress can increase the body's demand for magnesium and may contribute to low magnesium levels.The cells in our body depend on minerals such as calcium and magnesium for normal function. In muscle and nerve cells, calcium helps switch the cell into an active state, while magnesium helps keep that activation under control and supports the return to a resting state. When you are low on magnesium, your muscles may remain tense and your nervous system may have a harder time settling down. That can contribute to muscle stiffness and difficulty sleeping.The solution, in my case, was magnesium supplements. They fixed my muscle stiffness issues and my sleep issues. 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.
• Menu

  A1kmm
  I wonder how much of this is driven by confounding variables they haven't accounted for.They do factor in shift work as a categorical variable, and employment status as a categorical variable not taking into account occupation. But probably occupation (not a variable here) interacts with sleep status. Any job that involves a lot of flying (pilot, crew, people travelling for business) get more cosmic radiation exposure, for example, and potentially more sleep disruption. Certain operations and manufacturing jobs correlated with exposure to carcinogens also likely correlate with less regular sleep, possibly in a way that isn't corrected for by the limited shift work categories.
• nottorp
  I wonder how many of these "surprising" results are markers of other life style decisions.Regular sleeping hours as a marker for a less stressful life?Also ran across this:https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5105607/I doubt it's the actual reading. Maybe having a calmer life where you take the time to relax with a book.
• codedokode
  Could it be that irregular sleeping is caused by inner clock being off due to genetic errors, and genetic errors are the main cause of mortality? I.e. irregular sleep is not the cause but the indicator?Or irregular sleep corresponds to bad habits like drinking and using drugs and they are the cause of mortality?Or, could it be that problems with sleep are caused by using alarm clocks, i.e. not waking up naturally but forcefully at unnatural time? Waking up at the same time every day benefits people whose inner clock has 24h period and disadvantage people with clock tuned to 23h or 25h day.Or I am wrong?
• Menu

  djoldman
  As always with a lot of these: it's not saying causation.You might measure the speed of your car by putting your hand out of the window and notice that the wind force on your hand is strong when the car goes fast.Putting your hand out of the window and then blocking the wind with a book doesn't make the car slow down.Keyword: "associated"EDIT: I meant to communicate that it doesn't make the car slow down as much as your hand behind and blocked by the book (feeling almost no wind), would imply.
• Menu

  ssgodderidge
  Couldn’t this effect be classic cause vs correlation?Perhaps someone who has a consistent schedule is hypothetically more likely to make healthier choices on average?
• Menu

  timbaboon
  Largest medical insurance company (Discovery Health) in South Africa has just launched a sleep rewards program as part of their wellness program (Vitality). The idea is that you get rewarded for getting good sleeping scores... which is not entirely in your control, but anyway. Their model is built by looking at years of sleep data combined with health insurance claims. They place a large emphasis on sleep regularity. Anyway, just interesting to see this study come up and it seems to match up sort of with the Vitality stuff. There will ofc be many confounding variables though...
• Menu

  redanddead
  Just my 2cBryan Johnson says you should base your life around your sleep. He’s totally right… but he won’t get young men to sleep in at 8pmNew sleep meds are creating a new lever here and serve a real empowering function in a way that culture hasn’t caught up to yetWhen we think of traditional sleep meds we think of sedatives and it has an identity connotation to it. The new meds coming out, not just in sleep either, are changing a lot of things. I’m talking about designer drugs, new pathways, multiple agonists etc etc.By total accident a month ago, I was prescribed a medication for sleep, lemborexant (not into trade names for drugs, more power to generics)I didn’t plan on ever getting a sleep med. I don’t see myself as a sleep med guy lol. I didn’t walk into a clinic thinking I’d ever want one either. But to me this feels like a peptide or an athletic recovery supplement. And I think there’s even better and newer out thereHaving this lever has personally helped me a lot. Why? Because it’s very easy to let sleep quality slip over time. Here are a few questions I wished someone had asked me a year or two ago:-Have you been dreaming? When’s the last time you had a vivid dream? If you can’t even recall that, it’s a big red flag. If you haven’t been dreaming, your sleep quality could be junk-Erections during sleep? Just something to take note of-Waking up tired or ready for the day?-How long does it take you to fall asleep? There’s a key distinction there between how long you’re in bed vs. how long you’re actually sleeping. Check your apple health data. It’s so easy to mess this up, in this modern age especially, it’s why I’m hooked. There are far too many variables that could affect a key function of your life, especially for young guys. An afterparty, a hookup, a stressful period in business, a productive all-nighter, or just overthinking instead of sleepingPeople notice when you don’t sleep well
• Menu

  adamsmark
  Something that has worked surprisingly well for me is journaling via voice recording on my phone. It's been so effective that I've mapped it to my phone's physical shortcut button.I have struggled with on-and-off sleep issues for a while, and I'll admit I don't always follow perfect sleep hygiene. But there is something about dumping my thoughts out loud that completely shuts down the repetitive, circular thinking that usually keeps me awake.
• Menu

  sajithdilshan
  My problem is that I'm always sleepy throughout the day and when I have to go to bed at nigh, then I feel so active and energetic, as if my body tries its best to avoid sleeping.
• cortic
  Sleep is a predictor of poverty and poverty is a predictor of mortality.But i suspect if you hop over the second part there will be more funding in telling poor people to sleep there way to longevity.
• Menu

  bkazez
  Having just spent a few months reading circadian entrainment papers for a circadian rhythm app I just finished,[1] I wonder if this effect might be about circadian amplitude[2] (rather than phase, which has gotten more attention).[1] https://www.impulsearc.com/wavelength/[2] e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41540-023-00300-w
• Menu

  small_model
  I do bi/tri phase sleep, 6 hours at night, and 1-2 naps a day (I work remotely so allows me to nap when I want) This is the best, sleep when you need to you body knows best.Do you think our ancestors slept exactly 8 hours a night from 10pm to 6am? No they slept when they wanted.
• keeda
  Somewhat related, I once met the author of a book about sleep [1] and asked about my specific case. At that time I was splitting half my time across two continents 10 time zones apart but working largely in the same timezone, about 2 - 3 months at a time. That is, every 2 - 3 months I switched from a 1st shift sleep schedule to a "2.5th shift" one. So I asked him how bad that was for my health.He said that as long as people are mostly regular in their sleep hours, the actual timings don't matter much. However, extended periods of irregular sleep schedules are actually (his words) "classified as a type of carcinogen."I briefly looked into the evidence at the time but did not find it very concerning. TFA does make a more compelling case by linking it to all-cause mortality.[1] I believe it was The Sleep Solution by M. Chris Winter, though I may be wrong. I can only remember it had a blue cover, but turns out pretty much ALL books about sleep have a blue cover. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
• Menu

  todotask2
  A good night's sleep is no longer an option for me. My area is experiencing widespread, constant ground vibrations throughout the day and night. It feels as if your whole body is vibrating. No supplement can help with that, and there's nothing the local authorities can do until the major construction projects are completed over the next few years.
• Menu

  markus_zhang
  I kinda realize that the most important factor for personal success (whatever kind of success you want) is mental stability.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. And I don't think he actually spent a lot of mental training to achieve that stability, because, he has been like that from a young age. This is THE best thing you can have in the world, if you want to achieve something, anything. If you don't have the mental toughness, you won't be able to make through that 10,000 hours (cliche, I know). I guess that's also why many self-help book talk about being consistent -- to be consistent, is to have mental stability. And I think there is a whole difference, between someone who trains his mental to stay stable for 6 months, then collapse, from someone who actually doesn't need to train and just be stable somehow.This also leads me to realize that good sleep is one of the fundamentals of a stable mind. As a parent, I actually don't remember when was the last time I had a good sleep, and my definition of a night of good sleep is perhaps just trivial for someone else. At the same time, I consider myself lucky, because at least I don't suffer from serious mental issues. I still have a job and a house, and that's better than many out there.This then leads me to despise the human body. It is a machine so delicate that you have to be very lucky to be super productive, whatever your definition of being productive is. It seems to ignore the input in short term (e.g. you can eat garbage food for a month and nothing really happens, or, you can sleep 4-6 hours every day for the last 6 years and still function normally), but once the long term shows up it is very hard to reverse. And there are so many theories focused on it that we have no idea which one is best for the individual. You might as well spend years doing A/B test on yourself and still have no idea what the hell is going on. Or you need to be super rich to have some medical team monitor you 7/24 to figure out what the hell is going on.
• AbstractH24
  I have epilpsy, with an implanted device that both acts like a pacemaker and records my brainwaves.Basically my doctor's biggest concern right now is making sure I don't die in my sleep because of something the device records that I and my wife never even know happened. Its a point of debate right now how much to disrupt my life with side-effects to do that.
• Menu

  shykes
  Well, I'm screwed...
• Menu

  kilroy123
  The only thing that has worked for me to keep my sleep regular is to go outside first thing in the morning and sit for 15-20 minutes. Rain or shine. Even if it's cold or cloudy.This has been game changing and keeps me on a regular sleep routine.
• plutomeetsyou
  > Adjusted R2 values for each model were 0.085 (linear), 0.118 (quadratic), and 0.125 (cubic)I get the study design is not causal and all, but this R^2 looks very underfit for a study that claims a stronger predictor?
• Menu

  mhitza
  I'm really pissed that I went through 6 cloudflare captcha loops with no result. I swear they're guarding this website from VPN users as if it's the fort knox.
• Menu

  irenaeus
  I read the abstract, pretty interesting. I did a word search for "wake" looking for if they talked at all about early waking times being correlated with overall regularity, as that has been my personal experience. Unfortunately they didn't talk about it, or if they did I couldn't find it.
• Menu

  elcritch
  Well that sucks, given I have a gene variant related to delayed sleep according to 23andme.Last year I did an experiment of sorts while unemployed for a time and found that if I just slept and woke when tired that my sleep time would naturally recess and eventually "flip" after about a month.My entire life I've wondered why I feel incredibly tired and found waking up so difficult. Turns out that if you follow your bodies dominant sleep cycle it's a synch to wake up. Unfortunately, it doesn't work with modern life very well.
• bdcravens
  As my diabetes has progressed, I find myself sleeping more odd hours (it can be hard to fight off the tiredness that comes after a meal), and I can be frequently woken up my extreme lows where my body is screaming for carbs.
• mancerayder
  What's missing is how much ability you have to sleep, rather than some sort of sometimes controllable factor like schedule. In my case, my brain wakes me up with anxiety one hour or more before the alarm rings (I never check time, I'm guessing). My room is always cold and relatively dark - not photo development dark, but not far.The cortisol spikes are what get me. I can drink or not drink, exercise or not exercise, take magnesium or not take magnesium. The brain wants to tell me at 630 or 7 all the things that can go wrong or todos, instead of letting me sleep til 8. Sometimes it's much earlier than that.I also wake up at the slightest sound or movement. It's been like this since I was a child. I'm defective, and all the bro science Youtube videos with top 10 science -based 'hacks' don't solve the problem. Know what does? Anti anxiety medication, but doctors don't prescribe benzos anymore.
• mannanj
  Without blue light or loud noises there are no sleep issues. You just fall into rhythm with the sun and rise and sleep more or less by the seasons. No industry coaching, science or reliance on an expert needed - *except the sun.
• ChrisArchitect
  (2023)Some more discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42022151
• ck2
  because of how we evolved biologically, there are some processes, particularly in the brain and not just the body, that can only happen during sleeplike "garbage collection"ie. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4651462/
• pullrun
  [flagged]
• anon
  undefined
• tyiz
  [dead]
• Jamesmygov146
  [flagged]
• Menu

  el1s7
  Interesting, though it seems quite annoying to read research papers with all that jargon without using an LLM
• SkyPuncher
  This makes sense to me as a correlation. Mental health disorders alone seem like they’d contribute significantly.ADHD, for example, is correlated with both sleep cycle issues and worse outcomes in life (including higher rates of crime and participation in risky activities).