Some people with insomnia think they're awake when they're asleep

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/some-people-with-insomnia-think-theyre-awake-when-theyre-asleep/

by sabrina_ramonov • 2 years ago

291 181 2 years ago

scientificamerican.com

cut32• 2 years ago

The article is blocked unless I pay so I can't read it.

JohnMakin• 2 years ago

https://archive.is/cs1fW

Luc• 2 years ago

Prepend the URL with archive.is/

Curiously, it's free for me in France, even in an private window.

cut32• 2 years ago

awesome thanks Ill do this in the future :)

sabrina_ramonov• 2 years ago

my bad, I was able to access it for free without paying so didn't realize

MarkusWandel2• 2 years ago

Great, just great. I went relatively low-tech and outfitted the mattress I sleep on with an Angel Care sensor pad, connected to some custom homemade datalogging stuff. This is to convince me that what felt like a restless night actually did have significant sleep spells. So I'm just imagining feeling tired and having been awake most of the night, right? Have some coffee and get on with things. And now they're saying that sleep was, in fact, no good?

"Significant sleep spells" - sometimes the data, sampled in 1-minute binning intervals, is a flat line - no difference, minute-to-minute, in motion (however significantly above baseline of an unoccupied mattress - I guess that's what the angel care sensors monitor - just the motion energy of breathing. Other times the data is really, really noisy. Is that different sleep or just different body position? Never figured it out. But "awake" is clearly visible - that's noise that never goes down to the "just breathing" baseline at all.

throwway120385• 2 years ago

If its based on heart rate and breath rate you could probably do that sonically or ultrasonically. If it's using ultrasound, it's probable that it's just because of your sleeping position. The maternal/infant monitors that the hospital my wife gave birth in used were very sensitive to positioning to the degree that they would stop measuring my son's heartbeat whenever she changed positions whereupon the nurse would come in and reposition the sensor.

MarkusWandel2• 2 years ago

Angel care sensor pad is just a piezoelectric disk and a couple of plastic plates. The real Angel Care box probably does DSP to pick out heartbeat or at least breaths, so it can raise the (frequently false) alarm if something goes wrong, presumably to trigger parent action that's fast enough to prevent a SIDS death. That's the theory anyway. In practice the false alarm rate is too high.

The algorithm I do use: Over a configurable number of samples, find maximum and minimum reading. Add the difference to an accumulator. Repeat. Once a minute, retrieve the accumulator and reset to zero. With 1-minute binning, it would be too slow to raise a "not breathing" alarm - but it's perfectly fine for post-analysis. I've used it for years, and can tell with a glance at the graph how bad the night was.

l33tman• 2 years ago

"The researchers exposed people to a distressing emotional experience for three days in a row: they had to listen to a recording of themselves singing—often out of tune—to karaoke, which aroused shame." Heh.. The researchers have been pretty creative :)

But yeah, I've experienced the same thing, you think you haven't slept a second during the night but you probably have

kunalgupta• 2 years ago

yeah i have this. didnt officially verify but i noticed that theres a direct correlation between hours i am in bed and how rested i feel, even if i feel like i spent the time awake. So i stopped specifically worrying about whether i’m asleep or awake and instead focus on enjoying the break

xkcd-sucks• 2 years ago

In consideration of the placebo effect and sleep architecture, I have started trying to think of deep half-awake time as "stage zero sleep"

EPWN3D• 2 years ago

I've definitely experienced this. It used to happen weekly. My wife would often "wake me up" and say I was snoring, but to me, I was still lying awake trying to fall asleep. It was incredibly confusing, but I just trusted that she wasn't making things up.

I've begun taking a small amount of CBD in the form of an edible a few hours before going to bed (a quarter of a 5 mg gummy), and I have minimal sleep issues now.

xcskier56• 2 years ago

I have this EXACT same experience with my GF but on the other side of things. She'll be snoring so I'll poke her and she'll say she was awake... but was definitely snoring asleep

wil4212• 2 years ago

Don’t try to prove she’s snoring by showing her evidence of the snoring. Let me make that mistake for you.

ramesh31• 2 years ago

I've begun taking a small amount of CBD in the form of an edible a few hours before going to bed (a quarter of a 5 mg gummy), and I have minimal sleep issues now.

A 1.25mg dose of CBD is essentially homeopathic levels. Either you're confused on the dosage or experiencing a placebo effect.

wafflemaker2• 2 years ago

Active doses vary wildly between people. And spectrum folks (which 30% of hners are) tend to need less of most drugs.

itishappy2• 2 years ago

Edit: This was a garbage-tier comment. Leaving it up with edits because I think the links are interesting.

1/4 "serving size" (if you will) isn't homeopathic, ~~and aligns pretty closely with the recommended dose of the only FDA approved CBD medication~~ (see edit below):

Increase in weekly increments of 5 mg/kg/day (2.5 mg/kg twice daily).

Edit: I'm dumb and mixing mg and mg/kg. This would be 400mg/day for an average adult. Still not homeopathic.

https://www.epidiolexhcp.com/dosing/dosing-and-administratio...

Though the ~~recommended dose~~ (again, see edit below) for various activities does vary wildly:

post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD): 1.5 mg
difficulty sleeping: 300 mg

Edit: Turns out that's just the dosage that was administered during one of the studies, not necessarily the recommended treatment dosage.

Despite these early findings and data from two case reports in which CBD improved sleep quality in a single pediatric patient with PTSD and four patients with Parkinson’s disease, we identified only one randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, study with sleep as the primary outcome measure. In this trial, 27 healthy volunteers received either oral CBD (300 mg dissolved in corn oil) or placebo. CBD did not alter any sleep measures (e.g., self-rated sleep quality or polysomnography examinations) relative to placebo.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7880228/

We really need better studies of this stuff...

dragonwriter2• 2 years ago

A 1.25mg dose of CBD is essentially homeopathic levels.

Homeopathic levels are a vanishingly small chance of their being a single molecule of the notional ingredient in a dose. 1.25mg is not even remotely “essentially homeopathic”.

swatcoder• 2 years ago

experiencing a placebo effect

And if that effect were satisfactory, as it sounds, why would that matter?

Would you even know if it was a psychogenic remedy to what was probably a psychogenic malady in the first place, rather than a peculiar, individual sensitivity that just hasn't been identified in the sparse research on CBD? (You would not)

digging• 2 years ago

This happens to both me and my partner, more often with me though. I've literally been (from my perspective) lying there awake when they say "you're snoring" and been able to immediately respond "no I'm not" - which obviously makes no sense.

I don't think either of us have insomnia. Both of us do have other mostly-managed health issues that occasionally cause us to stay up with racing thoughts, but the two phenomena aren't really associated with each other. (Also, I think it happens to my partner more because they use unfiltered screens late at night. If I accidentally use a device without blue light filtering it's much more likely for me to be unable to fall asleep. So not "real" insomnia.)

werheisng• 2 years ago

have you gotten checked for sleep apnea? Your situation sounds similar to mine (except I never tried CBD). Getting treated for sleep apnea was a game changer for me

WarOnPrivacy4• 2 years ago

Getting treated for sleep apnea was a game changer for me

I'd like to but that much money doesn't live in my pocket. It's on the list of stuff I hope for >62.

newzisforsukas3• 2 years ago

Is there melatonin in the CBD gummy? That sounds like a very low dose. It is common for cannabinoids to be marketed for sleep with melatonin in them.

BossingAround• 2 years ago

Melatonin won't improve the quality of your sleep. It might induce sleep if your body doesn't naturally produce melatonin, e.g. due to going to bed at very different times throughout prolonged periods. But, outside of that, melatonin isn't very useful as a sleep quality enhancer.

Similar to CBD, IIRC, one would have to take very large amounts of CBD to produce any statistically significant effect on one's sleep, and CBD gummies are not the most bioavailable CBD there is.

My guess is it's placebo rather than anything else.

NoboruWataya• 2 years ago

The snoring thing has definitely happened to me, though I wouldn't say I have insomnia (I can find it difficult to get to sleep but that's probably just too much coffee and screen time). It's so weird because I can't hear the snoring at all.

samatman2• 2 years ago

In terms of cheap things to try, I'd like to recommend trying a nasal stent. I don't snore because I side sleep, but do if I'm on my back, and I suspected some minor apnea was taking place regardless of position. The stent has noticeably improved my sleep quality.

If it doesn't help, you're out twenty bucks, if it does it could literally add years to your life.

throwanem• 2 years ago

Can you recommend an example product? Everything I find in a search for "nasal stent" appears to require surgical placement.

QuercusMax• 2 years ago

I've had good results with a nasal strip (like BreatheRight) plus an anti-snoring appliance (like zQuiet). I had a dentist-provided appliance that cost me $1000 out of pocket and broke in less than a year (when I had moved out of state); the zQuiet + nasal strip helps just as much and is an order of magnitude cheaper.

lazyeye2• 2 years ago

Also worth getting a good quality air purifier for your bedroom. This definitely improved my breathing and sleep.

op00to2• 2 years ago

This literally happened to me the other night. I was sitting in my lay-z-boy and my wife was resting in the bed nearby. I realized about an hour later that I had been asleep. I was 100% sure I was awake and watching the show, and vividly remember watching the show, but nope, I was asleep. Weeeeeird.

pillefitz• 2 years ago

Do you remember any of the show's content?

gwbas1c• 2 years ago

My wife would often "wake me up" and say I was snoring, but to me, I was still lying awake trying to fall asleep.

Have you ever been evaluated for sleep apnea? That's how it used to feel to me: I would feel like it took me 45-minutes to an hour to fall asleep.

Once I started using a CPAP, I fell asleep almost instantly.

j0hnyl• 2 years ago

I'm very skeptical that 1.25mg of CBD alone could have any impact on sleep outside of placebo.

RamRodification• 2 years ago

Don't ruin their placebo by telling them!

flippyhead• 2 years ago

I'm not; this also works for me better than anything else I've tried.

Workaccount2• 2 years ago

At least for me and for some others I have met, we have an immense sensitivity to cannabinoids. I will actually get a decent buzz from CBD gummies that most people feel absolutely nothing from, even if they eat the whole bag. I cannot smoke any THC flower because it's all way to strong, and the only way I can consume THC is cutting up gummies into small pieces.

Llamamoe• 2 years ago

You have sleep disordered breathing. Get a good, UARS-aware sleep study - not everyone's airway collapses to the point of having sleep apnea, plenty of people experience horrifying sleep fragmentation instead. If your sleep is messed up AND you snore, you 100% certainly have it.

gmiller123456• 2 years ago

I actually often have dreams that I'm lying awake in bed. Sometimes I wake up and am in a different position, which is the only way I know it was a dream. I imagine there's a lot of times I think I really was lying awake when I was really sleeping.

VyseofArcadia• 2 years ago

Anecdata: I have observed that my migraines come in cycles with the subjective experience of not having slept. I know I've slept, because I have long stretches of unconsciousness as confirmed by the clock on my nightstand. But I don't feel like I've slept. Then I'll have a migraine and a few nights of really great (subjectively) sleep before the cycle starts over again.

It's like there's something building up in my brain that's blocking real REM sleep, and cleaning it out results in the subjective experience of a migraine.

greentxt• 2 years ago

If they are able to think, that means they are conscious no? My favorite type of sleep is the sort that precludes conscious mental activity, since I tend to think of work or other mentally fatiguing subject matter and physical sensations like pain and tension. I'd like my sleep to exclude that sort of suffering. Maybe there should be more than one word for sleep. We could distinguish certain aspects, maybe name them or something? Course I'm probably asleep right now and dreaming I typed this.

appletrotter• 2 years ago

Have you ever heard of lucid dreams?

lxgr3• 2 years ago

Dream states are definitely not equivalent to normal/awake consciousness. Try doing math in a dream!

renewiltord• 2 years ago

I have definitely experienced this sometimes. Usually it's when I've had too much to drink. Very restless sleep and sometimes I'll tell my wife how I was awake all night counting the hours and she'll tell me I was sleeping haha

seiferteric• 2 years ago

Every now and then I will have a night where my brain feels "wired" and I can't sleep and just have thoughts racing through my head. It feels like a don't sleep or barely sleep and yet hours go by pretty fast so I assume I must be sleeping more than I think, but it is a different kind of sleep for sure.

coffeebeqn• 2 years ago

I get this too. My mind is racing and I feel like I can’t fall asleep but then when I eventually get up to check the time, multiple hours have passed

msarrel• 2 years ago

This makes sense to me because for years I have felt like I'm laying in bed awake yet I also feel like I got some sleep. I described this as " I didn't sleep at all last night, but maybe I did because I feel slightly rested even though I was awake." Knowing my background, hyper vigilance and PTSD are probably at play.

sandworm1012• 2 years ago

Mind awake and body asleep is nothing new.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_paralysis

prophesi• 2 years ago

Sleep paralysis is a frightening experience, and the one suffering from it is both aware, and correct in their awareness, that they're awake. Article is describing something very different.

sandworm1012• 2 years ago

It isn't always frightening. It only get scary when you try to move and cannot. Many people suffer "paralysis" that ends as soon as they try to move. Such people are awake but their body is in sleep mode, often snoring. I've experienced it myself when lying in bed wondering who is snoring beside me, only to discover I am alone in bed listening to myself snore.

namanyayg• 2 years ago

Interesting to see this article and the comments here on how everyone's experience varies.

This happens to me when I go to bed while thinking hard on a specific problem, usually related to my startup.

It starts off awake with regular thinking, but then at some point it becomes surreal and events that have no cause and effect or basis in reality start occuring.

When I feel an "aha" moment where I become of the surreal nature of my recent thoughts, my memories cease and I assume I transition to real sleep.

In some cases, I wake up and when I check the time my 30 minutes of "thinking" actually occured over ~3 hours.

I find it fun, and as part of my self sleep experiments I try to even recreate it.

huevosabio• 2 years ago

This happens to me fairly often, and find it amusing as well.

Its become my way of detecting that I'm falling asleep: "oh, that is such a weird, ridiculous thought, I must be falling asleep".

hadlock• 2 years ago

This is at least a once a month occurrence, usually weekly+ when I'm working on a big new project. I'll feel like I spent the whole night thinking about how to fix X and only got 3 hours of sleep, but in reality I got more than 6

elzbardico• 2 years ago

Don't know if this is related, but I really enjoy the dreams when I go back to sleep after my wife wakes up. They are really vivid and imaginative, but at the same I am mostly aware I am dreaming, as if I was partially awake.

Of course, this is me, I am a thoroughly weird person. I understand that some other people may find it unsettling.

WalterSear• 2 years ago

This was the standard practice for inducing lucid dreaming in the class I took on it at Stanford.

mtalantikite• 2 years ago

Yeah, I've done some dream yoga [1] practice and this is a common instruction in those texts for inducing lucid dreaming as well.

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

sandoze• 2 years ago

I experienced this chronically. It was so pervasive that I would convince myself the next day that I was exhausted with only six hours of sleep. I started tracking my sleep with an Apple Watch and soon realized that, I may wake up, it’s usually for minutes and not nearly as often as I thought!

lxgr3• 2 years ago

I've experienced this a couple of times: Feeling like I've been lying awake for at least half of the night, twisting and turning, when my sleep tracker really only shows movement for maybe 2-3 stretches of 5 minutes each.

That realization has helped me stress out a lot less about "not getting enough sleep" when there's an important even the next day (which makes it easier to find sleep in turn).

josefresco• 2 years ago

FWIW I had some insomnia a while back and thought "maybe if I just lay here long enough" and so I did that for hours and my smartwatch thought I was asleep. I'm 99% sure I was not sleeping. Maybe my smartwatch sucks, but I don't think most can handle "laying down and not moving but not sleeping".

withinboredom2• 2 years ago

I'd recommend getting a super cheap camera that can record yourself sleeping. You might have actually been asleep (according to this article).

drdeca• 2 years ago

Not all that infrequently (though not in the last week iirc) I find myself in a state which I think of as being, “half asleep” (or (3/4) asleep, or whatever. Various degrees of “asleep”) and I’m still able to kind-of think about things, but such that it is easier to accidentally forget what I was thinking about, such that I’m not able to keep as much in working memory, more distract-able by random thoughts, etc. . (On rare occasion I find my breathing while in this state to be concerning to I get scared and wake myself up. I’m pretty sure it’s been over a year since that last happened. I think it was mostly when sleeping face down or something?)

I suspect the type of state I just described (not the breathing part) is something most people sometimes experience. I don’t think it is unusual. Though I don’t think I’ve often heard people describe it in detail.

Does it seem plausible to you that you were perhaps, “20% asleep, but 80% awake” during that time?

Edit: also, my understanding is that lying still and resting can work as a partial imperfect substitute for some amount of sleep (though not like, in a way that can be sufficient long-term)

grugagag• 2 years ago

I had the same experince in the past thinking I didn’t sleep at all while having some sleep amongs the twists and turns but of low quality, shallow and REMless sleep which I found unsatisfying. Luckily I get that much less these days though I do sleep in chunks of a couple of hours and do wake up in between. It’s really a bad habit and probably having to do with sleep apneea.

INTPenis• 2 years ago

I sleep pretty well in general, but when I do sleep poorly I also experience the same thing. I am so convinced that a dream is reality that I wake up confused and have to take a minute to orient myself mentally.

But this rarely happens because sleep is very important to me and I worked hard on my habits to get good sleep. Good sleep for me equals no memory of dreams.

boogieknite2• 2 years ago

I have the opposite where my entire life my parents or partners would say they came to wake me up, i sit up, looked at them and clearly say "ok im getting up" and then the return 10 minutes later and im still asleep. When i actually wake up i have no memory of anything.

Used to be a big problem when my dad would wake me up at 4am to hunt as a kid. Sometimes people tell me we had conversations and i was making eye contact. I have no option but to believe it bc ive heard it so many times now

jwalton• 2 years ago

In my late teens I would frequently be late for university because I’d turn off my alarm or my gf would come wake me up and I’d go straight back to sleep. One day I decided to move my alarm clock to the other side of the room so I’d have to physically get up to turn it off. The next morning I got up, walked over to the alarm clock and turned it off, then I was startled awake as I started to fall over standing in front of the alarm clock.

I’d like to be able to blame this on some kind of medical problem, but I think mostly I just stayed up late playing Counterstrike too much. :P

TeMPOraL4• 2 years ago

In the apartment I live in, I don't have a distance large enough I could put my alarm clock that I wouldn't be able to cross to turn off the alarm, then cross it again to get back to bed, and not even remember it later. Adding a lock or some puzzles to solve only results in me either solving them and not remembering, or continuing to sleep while the alarm wakes up half the apartment building. Fun fact: turns out I'm really good at mentally adding and multiplying 2 and 3-digit numbers while unconscious.

lotsofpulp• 2 years ago

I have picked up my toddler who fell off the bed twice in the same night and woke up and had no memory of it, until I was reminded by my wife.

entangledqubit• 2 years ago

I had a similar experience and was left wondering whether I could add progressively larger units of work to the alarm clock task to get things done while still "asleep". :)

boogieknite2• 2 years ago

Same way i solved it as an adult who needs to wake himself up for work.

Similar experiences where i wake up on the floor bc i must have rolled out of bed over to my phone in my sleep.

Izkata• 2 years ago

I also had the turn-off-the-alarm problem, what seems to have solved it for me is building "snooze" into my schedule. My alarm is always set 10-15 minutes before I actually needed to get up, with a 5-minute snooze, and ever since I haven't had issues getting up at the intended time.

Best guess is it helps with waking up slowly over 15 minutes instead of being jolted awake when the alarm first goes off.

jcul• 2 years ago

I remember stuff like this when I was in university.

I remember getting apps that made you solve maths problems before the alarm would go off.

Crazy to think.

Now I've got kids and it's the opposite, even if I'm away from them I'll wake early. And I never have deep sleep like that, I think I've been trained to come to attention quickly from night time wake ups.

j_bum• 2 years ago

I’d like to be able to blame this on some kind of medical problem, but I think mostly I just stayed up late playing Counterstrike too much.

I love this quote! I wish I could blame my poor sleep hygiene on anything but myself lol

lanstin2• 2 years ago

My youngest child is like this. OMG, it was so stressful till he graduated high school and I was like I'm never waking you again. Wake yourself up or miss class or work, whatever.

genocidicbunny• 2 years ago

Just to cover all the bases, have your child do a sleep study. Especially if they're still on your insurance and it covers such things, as it can be somewhat expensive otherwise (in the US.)

Sleep disorders really compound other problems, and they'll be pretty thankful later in life to have caught any disorders early before they've done a lot of damage.

jvm___• 2 years ago

I was doing a community service project and stayed up all night the final night. I fell asleep on a couch and woke up without the keys to the building in my pocket. Apparently someone had found me, I'd gotten up took the keys out of my pocket and given them to them and fallen back asleep - I had no recollection of doing so.

hnlmorg• 2 years ago

I used to have conversations while asleep all the time. On one occasion I even answered the phone and sleep chatted on there.

I’ve also had dreams where I’ve known it was a dream. Eg something would happen in the dream I didn’t like and I’d say “it’s my dream, so I’m changing it”

Karellen• 2 years ago

I’ve also had dreams where I’ve known it was a dream.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucid_dream

ownagefool• 2 years ago

I've heard this too, though not nearly as often anymore. ( I suspect as I've aged, nobody is waking me up before I'd normally rise )

extr• 2 years ago

I do this too, it happens mostly if I went to bed extremely tired or had a drink or two the night before. What works for me is an alarm clock app that forces me to do some moderate math problems before it turns off. I set it to 5 problems of the type "32*5+84".

I can't claim it's 100% successful, I've been known to do the math and go back to sleep. But when that happens I always remember it, so at that point it's more of a laziness problem :D

tomcam2• 2 years ago

Similar experiences with one of my kids. Quite disconcerting. A parent can be forgiven for suspecting a drug involvement even in the absence of one.

empath75• 2 years ago

if you are woken up and go right back to sleep it's completely normal not to remember it.

_0ffh• 2 years ago

That kind of thing happened to me once when my mom came into my room to call me to dinner while I has busy programming, and I told her I'd be there in five minutes. I went to dinner an hour late and asked why nobody had bothered to tell me.

interstice• 2 years ago

I had this as a kid when my mum used to tell be a bunch of stuff to remember at 7am before she left. Needless to say I rarely remembered having the conversation in the first place

bradlys• 2 years ago

I’ve had similar experiences. My most alarming ones though were getting up in the morning, my partner beaming at me, and she sees my face and goes, “ah, you don’t remember last night do you? I figured you might still be asleep!”

We’d have sex and I’d have no recollection of it. Fortunately, my “sleeping” self is still a good lay. Other times, I’ve “woken up” mid intercourse or kissing.

I’ve since had to tell every woman I’ve been in bed with that it might happen on an off chance. Interestingly - none have shown any concern! Maybe it’s more common than I think it is.

aidog• 2 years ago

I have the same, it's hard for other people to understand.

csomar• 2 years ago

I don’t think this is rare. We had a friend with the same issue but obviously where I am coming from he was not properly diagnosed, so we just called him sleepy X.

reportgunner• 2 years ago

I have this and what helps me to wake up is to have a conversation with someone. Have them ask you if you dreamt, if you want to eat something or about plans for the upcoming day.

bradknowles2• 2 years ago

Yeah, my wife does that sometimes. Apparently, she’s done it for most of her life, because her family have told me about times when she did it when she was much younger.

I think that may just be normal for some people.

neonate• 2 years ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20240611151714/https://www.scien...

https://archive.ph/9yqQY

drewcon• 2 years ago

Sample size of 1.

A disc herniation caused me pain all night until it eventually destroyed my circadian rhythm. Even after it healed and the pain went away I had terrible sleep disruption. Up every 90 minutes, couldn't fall asleep until 4 am, waking up at 4 am. The works. Going on a few months.

Then I found sleep restriction.

First two weeks were brutal, but then biology takes over. And just like that, in a couple weeks, you rebuild you ability to fall asleep naturally and you're back to normal.

And in retrospect, this is exactly the approach we took to sleep training our young children. I swear by it.

e12e• 2 years ago

Then I found sleep restriction.

Get up when the alarm rings, no naps?

Ed: Ah, I see - mechanism is basically that - but the addition of not going to bed "too early" (compared to when you plan to get up):

Some sleep-restriction methods involve shortening a person’s time in bed to the average amount that they actually sleep per night. Other methods delay a person’s bedtime.” For example, If a person objectively sleeps for 5.5 hours, the experts allow the person to be in bed only for six hours. A preliminary lab study in which participants delayed their regular bedtime by two hours showed that such sleep restriction can reduce the number of arousals during REM.

darajava2• 2 years ago

What’s sleep restriction?

lazyeye2• 2 years ago

Its basically forcing you to stay awake on a very specific schedule in order to reset your circadian clock.

If you can find a way to watch this doco it goes into the topic in detail. (RIP Michael Mosley)

https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/tv-series/australias-sleep-r...

sqeaky• 2 years ago

From the end of the article:

For example, If a person objectively sleeps for 5.5 hours, the experts allow the person to be in bed only for six hours. A preliminary lab study in which participants delayed their regular bedtime by two hours showed that such sleep restriction can reduce the number of arousals during REM.

I Like how science and medicine are more frequently taking account individual differences into account in a measured and sensible way. That is as opposed to ignoring it or making everything statistics.

WesolyKubeczek• 2 years ago

I know for a fact that during some of my insomnia episodes, I would fall asleep and dream of struggling to fall asleep. I would know it because of false awakenings and sometimes getting the dream to be lucid and noticing something wrong with the environment.

This kind of sleep never felt restful by any means, though.

jerf• 2 years ago

My favorite is when I roll out of bed in the morning absolutely convinced I got no sleep. But then I review my night, yup, tossed, turned, used the bathroom, tossed, turned, opened the window, tossed, turned, rode a unicorn to work in the Thousandth Broken Dimension, tossed, turned, fluffed my pillow... record scratching noise wait, what was that about the unicorn?

Guess I got some sleep after all.

vrc• 2 years ago

I was in the ICU for an extended period of time, and as you can imagine, with the pain, discomfort, noise, and constant monitoring, I really "wasn't sleeping at all". I remember getting frantic and trying to discharge AMA, and the attending came to talk to me and listened to my principal complaint of not sleeping. He looked me dead in the eyes and said, "I'm a sleep doctor who's been watching sleep studies for 30+ years now, and I can assure you, outside of a very small number of patients with serious, often hereditary sleep issues, everyone sleeps. You may not feel like you slept, and can be convinced you were awake, but the body forces you to sleep throughout. And sometimes, when you think you fell asleep immediately, you actually didn't sleep for a while but you stopped forming memories as you were drifting off to sleep". It absolutely did nothing for me in that moment, but it's given me a lot of peace of mind since around sleep. You might still feel like crap, but you won't have anxiety on top of it!

tomcam2• 2 years ago

I am coming around to that idea myself, and I too was given a similar come-to-Jesus lecture by a sleep specialist.

This is separate from the fact that ICUs are unforgivably noisy and chaotic. We will look at this part of medical history with horror. Yes, I do understand that making things appreciably better for patients in ICU is a massive and complex undertaking. I am not at all blaming the staff and docs.

groestl• 2 years ago

I did a 24 hours blood pressure monitoring once. Every 30min it would go off. I was worried I'd never fall asleep and blood pressure would not show the normal rhythm, and it absolutely felt that way, but the reading definitely showed I was asleep at night.

konschubert• 2 years ago

outside of a very small number of patients with serious, often hereditary sleep issues

He is likely referring to FFI. This is a genetic disorder. You cannot "catch" it. Your anxiety won't cause this.

If you are the kind of person who "can't sleep because you stress about not sleeping", then you can ignore this, your sleep issues are due to anxiety.

And the good news for people who have sleep issues due to anxiety: At some point, your body will win and force you to sleep.

cj• 2 years ago

I’ve long suspected marijuana has a similar effect, in that it “helps” you fall asleep by making it harder to remember the process of falling asleep. It’s widely known that marijuana inhibits short term memory formation. (I could be wildly off base)

lobsterthief• 2 years ago

Marijuana keeps me up unfortunately, since my brain becomes more stimulated and I just want to get up and do things. But I‘ve had massive ADHD my entire life so that’s not a neurotypical response I suppose. I wish I could just smoke weed and feel chill and calm or sleepy.

shepardrtc2• 2 years ago

A few years ago I used marijuana every night to go to sleep. It really, really screwed my sleep up. I started taking sleeping pills and got hooked on those. Very bad experience. Don't use any of that stuff, period. Even if the marijuana feels like it's working, it interferes with your REM sleep or something like that.

In the end my sleep issues were caused by anxiety disorder. Once I got on medication for that, I didn't have any further issues. Marijuana, sleeping pills, whatever, they're all just masking the symptoms of some other problem.

tootie• 2 years ago

If you read tales of the taking MSLT on /r/narcolepsy, you'll see it's a very common phenomenon. Obviously, a sample bias of people with heavily disordered sleep, but man it was so confusing. They turn off the lights, then turn them on and ask if you think you slept and I just had no idea. I took 5 naps in 5 tries but didn't know until I saw the results.

swayvil2• 2 years ago

Have you ever entered a room and forgot why you entered the room? I think a similar thing happens in sleep. What happened in dream doesn't carry over into waking memory. And maybe vice-versa.

It seems that memory splits when environment splits.

immibis3• 2 years ago

Sleep has something to do with batch-processing long-term memories. We don't know exactly what.

But that means (speculation warning) long-term memory circuits are switched into a different mode than during the day, and from an outside perspective they recall all sorts of random nonsense. That's probably what causes dreams. If the short term memory is unaffected and works normally, this explains why you can sometimes remember the nonsense when you wake up.

Sleep has been used as a form of regularization in neural networks before, although it's not in the transformer LLMs we're all using this year. This form of regularization makes the network generate outputs from no inputs, and then gradient-ascends (opposite direction from normal) away from those samples. Hey, that sounds a bit like human sleep, doesn't it?

swayvil2• 2 years ago

In sleep my fundamental thingy, "that which observes", is catapulted out of the matrix. To the shores of the outer world probably, further maybe. The stuff is real but hallucinating happens too. And I carry my universal translator with me too. Converting the strange experiencestuff into common time-space-meat format.

But yes, it is deeply strange. A profound loss of familiar context. And with it the associated anchors of memory.

So yeah

taeric• 2 years ago

I actually thought this was well established? Largely, it isn't just a complete lack of sleep that is the problem, it is lack of functional rest. Usually leading to lack of functional waking time, as well?

Specifically, my understanding was that a complete lack of sleeping is rather fatal.

pedalpete• 2 years ago

This is quite common for me. I am a chronic insomniac, but there are also nights when I "feel" I'm awake, but somewhat know that I'm not.

It's not quite lucid dreaming, though I think it isn't completely different (I've experimented with that a bit, and I work in neurotech/sleeptech).

shepardrtc2• 2 years ago

A few years ago I had severe sleep issues caused by anxiety disorder. Instead of getting proper medication, I used marijuana, phenibut, and eventually benzos (prescribed by a doctor) to sleep every night. I was only on the benzos for a couple weeks but that was enough. Combined with everything else, I was in a bad place. I stopped the marijuana immediately, and over the next 3 months I weaned myself off the phenibut. Phenibut, if you've never heard of it, is one of the most addictive drugs out there. During that time I would maybe sleep an hour at night, if that. Some nights I never went to sleep at all. And occasionally I would dream while I was half-awake. It was such an odd experience - one that is very hard to describe. I was aware that I was still somewhat awake, but my mind would start to dream. Maybe it was just hallucination. Or maybe I really was sleeping, but I just thought I was still awake. Overall it was a terrible experience that felt very much like torture. In the end I get on the proper meds and I sleep fine now with no more issues.

PSA: Remember kids, just say no to drugs.

rbongers• 2 years ago

When I went for a sleep study, I was wired awake for half the night, up in bed reading waiting for the study to be over. According to the study though, I was in sleep stage 2 the entire time I was sat up in bed reading.

HocusLocus• 2 years ago

Until age ~40 my sleep cycles were chaotic and stressful around the clock, and the morning was very stressful and sometimes (racing to work in morning traffic barely 30 minutes awake) probably dangerous. I would abuse snooze alarms. I would misplace things (keys, etc) by putting them down at night and confidently making a mental note to remember. Then on the other side after sleep a complete blank and a bomb-level search under stress to find them.

It didn't change until I developed a serious yearning for quality time in the morning. 'Quality' is any span where you do not have to be conscious of the passage of time (yet). First 5am and now 4:30am, the span from awakening 4:30 until 7:00 when work begins for example, was enough to impose a clean 24 hour cycle of habit.

The next hurdle was that I sleep with a loud fan which helps mask environmental noise and helps me to sleep. But at 4:30am it means that the cell phone alarm would have to be very loud and I'd typically awaken apartment neighbors through thin walls who sleep in silence. I'd hear them moving around and know that I had probably awakened them.

My solution was a programmable digital clock relay. At 4:30am it turns off the fan, and my mind is conditioned to awaken instantly while the fan is spinning down. Sometimes I even hear the 'click' of the relay. Then I get up quickly, because the cell phone is just out of reach and set 4:32am and I know it will be penetrating and shrill in the silence. Getting up to turn it off breaks my first level of snooze-abuse syndrome. I now (correctly) associate snooze abuse with stress and unpleasant outcomes, call it 'maturity' if you like.

So now I can awaken with time to spare in 'silence' and my neighbors can stay asleep.

Some people with insomnia think they're awake when they're asleep

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