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Wellness Wednesday for November 20, 2024

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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Hey guys, what's your experience with chronic sleep deprivation?

I think I never slept normally. So my whole life? I seem to have a circadian rhythm that just pushes me an hour later every night no matter what. If I wake up consistently at the same time every day I will just feel permanently deprived of one hour of sleep, and I will consistently stay up an hour later than I should.

If my sleep schedule is totally unmoored from a specific wake up time it will just drift forward again and again. It will do this until I'm napping through the day and staying awake all night (like I am right now).

I need about 5-6 hours of sleep sober and about 8-10 if I'm drinking. Good sleep is something I highly value. I've occasionally taken medicine to fall asleep (nyquil, melatonin?/melanin?), but it seems to lose effectiveness, and I've avoided the addictive habit forming stuff.

I get the same non-24-hour cycle thing, for a long time it seemed like my body wanted to live on a 25-ish hour cycle. This mostly manifested in being unable to fall asleep when I wanted to, despite being woken up by an alarm at a consistent time. It seems to be mostly cured since I started taking Melatonin about 2-3 hours before the time I wanted to go to sleep. Now I mostly sleep pretty well at around 6-7 hours a night. I don't believe the Walker take that everyone must have 8 hours a night no matter what and you're doing something bad if you don't.

Alcohol has weird and complex effects on my sleep cycle depending on exactly when and how much I drink.

I have been doing mostly-Keto for weight reasons, which I started a number of years after I started using Melatonin. I hadn't heard of the sibling's claim that it also affects the non-24-hour sleep cycle thing, but it seems plausible.

This guy says his non-24 sleep disorder goes away when he's on keto (although having lost a bunch of weight on a low-PUFA, low-protein version of keto, it may have gone away forever as of his last post).

That is interesting, I didn't know there was a term for what I had. I've done Keto diets before, but didn't have much effect. I think I just have a slightly longer circadian rythym. I've managed to not let it effect work, but it definitely got worse over covid when I was at home and able to easily nap.