Sleep has been an issue my whole life, especially because it absolutely burns my memorization abilities.
I don’t even notice it when I get bad sleep. The hours are right on my watch, but this doesn’t mean that the sleep was great. I always do stupid stuff and end up messing up my sleep.
So, I’m starting a journal too!
I’ll post every day and adjust rythm as I go
May 2->3
No dreams
Didn’t feel refreshed
Bad memory
Possible causes
no magnesium since 3 days
cortexin too late
took melatonin too early
gone to sleep too late
Ritalin too late?
NAD buildup?
Fixes
No Cortexin past 16h
No Ritalin past 21h
Order Magnesium
Continue to shift my workday to end earlier
I tried staying in my bed until I wake up again and ended up losing a good chunk of time this way, without having a good time, resting, or getting something done.
All the day, it was super hard to focus; I was 100% sleep-deprived.
Well, I have written a few beeminder posts
fixes to increase sleepiness
I need to be more sleepy in the morning to get the REM sleep.
Some fixes:
magnesium
duloxetine
better circadian rythm
better Melatonin timing
no sports before sleeping
beeminding strict Cortexin usage (before 1pm; not on weekends)
fixes to avoid wasting time in bed
using my phone for more than 3 consecutive minutes after 8 am should launch a timer of 1h; I have to go out or I’ll get a beeminder sting
What I will implement
Nothing today; I’ll look into all this this weekend.
I was pretty restless and didn’t feel super good after sleeping.
I believe this is mainly because of alcohol.
When I woke up, I didn’t have water and tons of stuff preventing me from getting out of my bed. So I stayed in my bed most a few hours. I need an alarm.
Woke up while dreaming because I tried to think too hard. So I’m like at 4 hours of sleep
Causes
late Ritalin intake (22h)
no “winding down” period
no relaxation time in the day
Fixes
Go out, grab something to eat, get back to sleep
Hard limit of no Ritalin past 18:00, deal with it!
Add mandatory relaxation / mess around
Add mandatory winding down hour before sleep
Right now
Hard to think straight so I’ll choose what I do here…
put on some clothes
go outside my room
grab something to eat if I have stuff left (no there is not anything left, that’s for sure )
okay then go outside to a store and buy something (everything is closed )
I guess I’ll just lay in my bed and slowly rot away
Edit
I choose to watch anime, but went to work and had a productive day afterward.
It didn’t feel like a super awesome day, but at least, I’ve got some stuff done
I woke up early with bad sleep, but I drank water. I put music on to cover the construction noise and tried to sleep again.
Thanks to returning to sleep, I had some dreams.
I just woke up, and I feel incredibly refreshed.
My guess is that something has happened between my first wake and the last one. My leads:
Drinking water
Just getting back to sleep
Changing position in my bed (better blood flow or nerve stuff)
Having dreams
Sleeping on my hand instead of directly on my cushion (allergy trick )
New approach
I think that I’ll dedicate 12 hours to sleep.
It’s super inefficient, yes, but I’ll improve it with time. I just feel so much better when not sleep deprived; and I’m not going to find a solution by forcing myself to wake at 8am. So I’ll mess with my calendar and get myself these hours. I’ll probably have to cut some stuff out of my life, but great sleep is worth it 100%
And also I can improve sleep efficiency with time, to get back some sweet awake hours
Having dreams is really primordial for me to feel refreshed. 100%
Candidates
Ritalin too late
Cortexin too much (I didn’t take it late, so I believe it’s only a matter of quantity)
Allergies
New rule
If there is no dreams, I have to live like a monk.
No parties. No Cortexin. Ritalin in the smallest quantities possible. Go out of work early. Watch anime. Treat it like a sick day!
i’m really curious about this: do you remember your dreams so regularly? or do you have some amazing radar for “i know i didn’t dream last night / i know i dreamt, even if i can’t remember it anymore”?
from the last time i vaguely looked into dreams i seem to remember that it’s common to only remember few dreams. of course there’s things one can do to even the odds, i think writing them down is a big one (but that might have just been from lucid dreaming tips)? anyways, i personally would never be able to tell if i dreamt on any given night, or if i didn’t—unless of course i definitely remember at least snippets of a dream, which unfortunately happens rarely recently. (probably due to suboptimal sleeping and waking-up conditions …)
i’m really curious about this: do you remember your dreams so regularly?
Yes, I do! Because I keep a journal. (I don’t have a magic radar yet). It’s weird for me to not remember any small part of any of my dreams
If you woke up and directly asked yourself: “did I dream of something?”, wouldn’t you be able to get some snippets? Or something that happens to me frequently is finding elements of dreams in the morning; like seeing a coffee machine, which makes me remember about the coffee monster I fought
this doesn’t happen too often to me, i think. today something similar (the reverse?) happend, though: i thought something had happened in real life (a text message), but looking up the chat it turned out that it hadn’t been sent in real life, so the only logical conclusion is that it must have been a dream.
my instinctive answer would be “no,” but i guess i’ve never tried it, so there’s really no way to know. mostly these days when i wake up, i’m still super tired, pissed off by the alarm, groggy from probably waking up in the wrong sleep phase or in any case earlier than my body and mind would like, and, idk. i’ve never tried to force dream memories—when i can remember dream snippets by myself, i often try to reconstruct more of the dream, but i’ve never really felt the urge to find out if i dreamt anything if i can’t remember even a snipped off the top of my head.
anyway, i envy your complete day-scheduling freedom! (although i’m not sure if i would function well within total scheduling-freedom like that, but at least in theory it’s a nice thought!) and i’m glad to hear you’ve been getting to sleep longer for the past few days (nights? :p)! i also slept longer last night, thankfully (maybe 8 hours; definitely more than 7!)! *sends a mutually congratulatory high-five over the alps*
Maybe, you are overdue for a sleep_journaling Beeminder goal…
I see what you mean; sometimes, some of the memories seem fake because they are so hard to retrieve.
IMO it’s doesn’t really matter because this is still fetching memory in the dream territory, which will reinforce recording in the next nights. It doesn’t matter either when using dreams as an indicator for sleep quality, at least for me, because I don’t have the energy to dig deep enough for this to happen.
Let me imagine a world where you have a flexible schedule… You would struggle for a few weeks, but since you are so amazing, you’d find a solution and post about it here !
Went walking with my friend until 4am…
Then did beeminder stuff…
Woke up at 12 am… With tons of Raegeeton music… But also house music… And construction noise…
I helped said friend to move to her new place… we ate sushi… We talked about nothing and everything… And I started to feel very very… Sleepy…
I returned home… I feel so…
sleeps for 3 hours
I woke up feeling not super good even though I had dreams, omg, is my theory falling short?! No, I don’t believe so.
Why, you ask? Super high sleepiness like this is a side effect I get from buildup of Duloxetine in my body over a few weeks.
pharmacology hobbyist ramblings
In turn, Duloxetine makes levels of norepinephrine super super high. Normally, high Norepinephrine makes you alert and smart, but too too much does the opposite. So it makes me dumb and sleepy xD.
It happened a lot to me, but now, I’m pretty experienced, so I know this is not natural. The solution is simply skipping a few doses over a week, adjusting intake via Beeminder to be a little lower, so it doesn’t happen so fast again.
This might also explain why it’s been hard to fall asleep in the past days, as I’ve probably been crossing the “uh this is a weird amount of norepinephrine??” line over the week.
It’s usually a good time to watch anime and be a couch potato. Not a big deal
I went to sleep late, like always. Around 3am.
I woke up around 12pm, a bit confused because I was in a weird sleeping position and couldn’t breathe normally.
However, I think I slept well. I woke up in the night, but drank water and went back to sleep.
I had a great day.
Right now, I believe that the best I could do for my sleep is to start going to bed at a consistent time.
I went to sleep too late due to beeminding, like every time
And woke up soon due to noise and light.
I could not force myself to go to sleep again this time.
I need to find a way to sleep even if there is sound and light. I wish every day was a Sunday
I used to struggle with sound and light while sleeping, but living a year in a city apartment helped because I had to find handling strategies. In particular, we got a nice sound machine with a high quality rain-sounds loop to help drown out more unpredictable outside sounds, and slept with a sleep mask more often even when it was dark to get used to wearing it. Obviously YMMV, but might be worth a shot if you haven’t already tried! Apologies if this is old news—I did some Ctrl+F for key phrases but I’m sure I could have missed stuff.
That’s interesting, thanks for the idea! I’m probably going to go the same path as you. Would you mind giving me more details about this sound machine? Is this something like this?
Woke up early with tons of sounds and generally pretty tense. Nothing like a few years ago but still bad.
On the plus side, I went to bed pretty early. And left work early too; I feel like my time was truly well spent, yesterday, and it makes me pretty happy
Potential causes
Ritalin intake
Nicotine intake (gum + smoked)
going to sleep earlier than usual (2am instead of 4am)
I was on a Ritalin break for 2 days and my sleep gradually got better. I also took less Nicotine gums, only maintenance doses to avoid withdrawal.
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!!
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(mexico = siesta)
