Solving sleep: just a toe-dipping

For those interested, Coursera currently has a course running on this topic, which goes into a lot of detail about sleep from both neurobiological and clinical perspectives. They also recommend the textbook 'Brain Control of Wakefulness and Sleep' by Steriade and McCarley.

As a narcoleptic, I am always suspicious of extreme polyphasic sleep claims. Biphasic seems to be natural, but anything like the uberman schedule seems to conflict with what I know about narcolepsy.

The primary symptom or possibly the primary cause of narcolepsy is skipping straight from light sleep to REM within minutes of falling asleep. When I was tested, I entered REM between 3 and 7 minutes of falling asleep. Sleep cycles are fractured and slow wave sleep is reduced or skipped entirely.

By contrast, a normal person enters REM after usually more than an hour, stopping along the way in three different phases of sleep. The deepest stage, slow wave sleep, is where quite a lot of brain repair occurs. Glial cells are restored, free radicals are cleared out, glucose is stored in the brain. Growth hormones repair tissue damage.

Many of the claims of ubermen proponents seem to rest on entering REM almost immediately after staring a nap. Much like a narcoleptic. Stage four is arguably more important for mental health, but this stage is not mentioned by proponents that I have seen. Furthermore, some of the symptoms of narcolepsy seem to match the experiences of polyphasic sleepers, particularly the general awakeness/non-grogginess which is occasional unexpected and uncontrollably strong daytime sleepiness.

Background: The idea of less sleep super appeals to me because I need so much. Before I was diagnosed I tried Uberman but it didn't seem to reduce my daily hours of sleep needed, and in retrospect it obviously could never have done that for me. But my natural sleep cycle is super polyphasic, 3 or 4 naps a day and reduced sleep at night. Unfortunately, my body wants is 10+ hours regardless of whether its in one chunk or spaced out throughout the day, and spacing seems irrelevant since I rarely have SWS regardless.

Better?

That was a wonderfully clear introduction! I'd definitely want to see more posts on sleep since I think it's one of the most important, if not the most important aspect of optimizing cognitive performance.

I second Mirzhan_Irkegulov's disinterest in polyphasic sleep though, at least until several lower hanging fruits have been picked. Polyphasic sleep is likely to be excessively difficult to maintain by most people, even if it were a viable alternative. Since sleep is enormously important as you stated and likely interesting as it is to many people, your posts will have a greater positive impact if you explore the less niche venues first.

Most people in society follow the same sleeping patterns so I can't see why disabling circadian control at will would be extremely useful unless you do shift work or have to socialize at nights. Could expand on that? I think it's much easier to not get sleep deprived in the first place. Problems of shift work are increasingly mitigated by the internet as work is computerized and thus can be done by people on the sunny side of the planet while you sleep.

Suggestions for subtopics based on my personal interest

• alcohol, nicotine, caffeine
• exercise and its timing, nutrition and its timing
• chronological age
• optimizing artificial lighting and the bedroom
• z-drugs and their dangers
• melatonin, mirtazapine, mianserin, quetiapine
• stress, depression, anxiety
• effects of antidepressants on sleep structure

If you need help with article paywalls PM me and I'll see what I can do.

I am curious to what extent the info in this post is common knowledge. Are these things familiar to people?

First a plug for the best Sleep text by far, "Principles and Practice of Sleep Medicine", by Kryger, Roth, and Dement. If you don't have this, you need it.

To turn off the circadian alerting, it would suffice to suppress cortisol.

I would think that there is plenty of low hanging fruit to exploit before that though. After well known sleep hygiene measures have been addressed, and pathologies excluded, the largest remaining drain on sleep quality is maladaptive emotional processing. See Barry Krakow's "Sound Sleep, Sound Mind" for lots of detail on this. This book is rather unusual in making a big deal of the link between poor emotional processing and poor sleep quality, but dude is a very highly regarded sleep specialist who had been running a top-notch sleep clinic for many, many years, and not to be pooh-poohed lightly.

This is why taking melatonin tablets before is recommended by gwern and others. I second this recommendation. Though not FDA-approved, there seem to be little in the way of negative side effects and they make it much easier to fall asleep.

(This paragraph is retracted. See jacob_cannell's post below.) Melatonin is marginally useful on occasion, but overrated. People who take melatonin for a long period of time likely don't get much benefit from it. The longest duration study I've seen on melatonin suggested the benefits did not last a year for over 90% of participants. To be fair, the study participants had delayed sleep phase disorder (DSPD), so perhaps the response is different for normal people. But I consider that unlikely given that both normals and people with DSPD take melatonin to shift their circadian rhythm and fall asleep at a more appropriate time.

My opinion is that sleep hygiene is far more useful than any drug or supplement. I'm a particular fan of the so-called "Bootzin technique", which basically makes falling asleep quickly at an appropriate time and place a habit. Also, if you suspect you might have a sleep disorder like sleep apnea or narcolepsy, it would be best to get that checked out.

Also, while we're on the topic of sleep control, there are a number of mathematical models of sleep which you might find useful. I have no idea how accurate these models are, or if they offer any hints about controlling sleep beyond what's obvious. Here's a review paper about what seems to be the most popular model. SuperMemo, the spaced repetition memory software, has a module which uses something like this model.

Regarding sleeping a lot and waking up tired: Is it possibly some degree of sleep apnea? As of a few months ago I had this problem.

Then I tried those breathing strips (despite my skepticism) that help prevent snoring. If I snore now it's at a much lower volume. The quality of sleep is vastly improved for me too. I generally wake refreshed after ~7 hours. The difference is like, ahem, night and day.

Can I get a little clarification? Are people up-voting because they like the content of this post or because they like the prospect of later posts on sleep?

I was unsure of whether to put this up, since I thought it didn't have much in the way of novel insight, just background knowledge.

Small typo:

bright screens ant night

Unless I'm misreading, I think the following two lines contradict each other. Does more adenosine correspond to higher or lower levels of sleep drive?

it seems the chemical correlate of sleep drive is the build-up of adenosine in the basal forebrain and this is used as the brain’s internal measure of how badly one needs sleep.

Adenosine levels are much higher (and sleep drive correspondingly lower) in the evening

The link in source 2 appears to be broken:

2National Sleep Foundation. (2011, March 7). Annual Sleep in America Poll Exploring Connections with Communications Technology Use and Sleep. Retrieved August 17, 2011, from http://www.sleepfoundation.org/article/press-release/annual-sleep-america-poll- exploring-connections-communications-technology-use-.

For unknown reasons, there is a dip in the circadian alerting about 8 hours after the beginning of the cycle. This is why people sometimes experience that “2:30 feeling.”

Hunh. That makes sense. I didn't realize that I was why I feel tired in the afternoon. I thought it was because of eating lunch just before.