Sleep
Pathologies and hacks
2017-04-19 — 2026-02-04
Wherein the uncertainties of sleep science are surveyed, blue light and melatonin timings are noted, and jet lag is managed by Timeshifter’s commands of sun, shade, coffee, and naps.
Things about sleep.
1 Do we sleep enough?
That photogenic researcher who keeps making pronouncements about the pathologies of modern work schedules, and whose name I can never remember: Till Roenneberg. He’s affiliated with the EUCLOCK project, and with MPG and LMU, etc. I’m not convinced, BTW, by the Munich Chronotype Questionnaire created by Roenneberg and Martha Merrow; the questions make almost no sense for my own routine, so I wonder who else the questionnaire covers poorly? Plus, there are all the usual challenges of inferring anything from a survey. Still, I’m hoping the strident lifestyle advice these folks give rests on more data than that particular survey.
AFAICT the question of sleep isn’t at all solved. Alexey Guzey argues.
If you take one thing away from this entire essay, remember this: as long as you feel good, sleeping anywhere between 5 and 8 hours a night seems basically fine for your health …, regardless of whatever Big Sleep wants you to believe.
All of the evidence we have about sleep and long-term health is in the form of those essentially meaningless correlational studies, but if you’re going to use bad science to guide your sleep habits, at least use accurate bad science.
2 Why do we sleep?
That’s suggestive. The electrochemical pump seems to clean the crap out of our brains. Maybe. (Fultz et al. 2019) “Why” in an evolutionary context is always fraught, anyway.
3 Getting better sleep
4-7-8 breathing method for falling asleep
I put the tip of my tongue where the ridge of the gum meets my upper front teeth before exhaling forcefully through my mouth to make a whooshing sound. Then, I close your mouth and inhale through my nose for a count of four. Next, I hold my breath to a count of seven, then exhale through my mouth making the same whoosh sound for a count of eight.
Hmm.
3.1 Light
We should avoid light before sleep, especially blue light. (Chang et al. 2015).
We can still get blue light in the morning, which can be a sleep intervention (Danielsson et al. 2018; Terman and Terman 2005).
If we need more light, consider a light therapy lamp. There are loads on whatever online retailer we’re using.
- The 4 Best Light Therapy Lamps of 2023 on Wirecutter
- Do read the DYNOMIGHT synthesis on blue light for sleep (tl;dr: blue light is probably important for influencing melatonin production, so be careful with it; but we can just cut down on all light and that will reduce blue light, so don’t panic)
3.2 Melatonin
The 2005 meta-analysis Brzezinski et al concluded that, over all (mostly healthy) adult participants, melatonin improved on placebo to the extent that it [statistically-]significantly reduced sleep onset latency by 4.0 min (95% CI 2.5-5.4) [The normal limits for latency to sleep are considered to be 15-20 min.]; increased sleep efficiency by 2.2% (95% CI 0.2-4.2) [The normal sleep efficiency is about 90-95%.], and increased total sleep duration by 12.8 min (95% CI 2.9-22.8). […] One might object that they do not wish to tamper with their natural sleep, even if melatonin is a normally-secreted hormone. Sad to say, I would point out to such readers that they are already profoundly tampering with their natural sleep cycle, and indeed, all of Western civilization is tampering with it; most of my readers do not even sleep multiple times during the day, as Nature intends and as humans have usually slept through history […]
So if you want to go to sleep (and wake up) earlier, you want to take melatonin early in the day. How early? Van Geijlswijk et al sums up the research as saying it is most effective “5 hours prior to both the traditionally determined [dim light melatonin onset] (circadian time 9)”. If you don’t know your own melatonin cycle, your best bet is to take it 9 hours after you wake up (which is presumably about seven hours before you go to sleep).
There’s some friction when it comes to getting melatonin in Australia; we generally need a prescription from a doctor, which costs time and money.
Previously, everyone I knew was getting melatonin from iHerb, but iHerb recently stopped shipping melatonin of any kind to Australia to minimize brand damage after a recent health incident—namely, that in 2025 nearly one Western Australian parent per day called the Poisons Information Centre because their kids ate colossal overdoses of melatonin candy. When they called the centre, the parents learned their kids would be totally fine because melatonin isn’t particularly dangerous. Has restricting melatonin reduced more anxiety than it’s created by making it harder to get? Working out the net benefit of this restriction is left as an exercise.
4 Jetlag and shift work
How can we optimally shift our circadian rhythms when travelling or working shifts?
There’s a lot of research on light exposure, melatonin, and so on. Counterintuitively, a few studies suggest that fasting helps (Fuller, Lu, and Saper 2008; Saper 2006). Fasting certainly seems to help me. I no longer eat on planes.
Also, some peers have recommended the automated jet lag planner Timeshifter.
Timeshifter uniquely combines the only elements shown to reset the circadian clock (light-dark exposure and melatonin supplements), and alleviate the symptoms (light, melatonin, caffeine, naps), and […], the sum of their effects is greater than the individual parts. There are many scientific studies attesting to the benefits of our approach[…].
I give Timeshifter money because the app seems to work for me. It gives me a baffling plan full of instructions to wear sunglasses, get sunlight, drink coffee in the dark, nap, and so on, and by the end of it, I’ve survived a long flight and my circadian rhythm has been force-synced to the new time zone with minimal jet lag. For example, I successfully flew from London to Sydney for five days for a wedding, kept jet lag minimal (I got sleepy for like 20 minutes during a lecture), and didn’t fall asleep or wake up at any stupid times.
The effectiveness of this app has massively altered my estimate of the importance of light and sleep time for my circadian rhythm and I now have much greater wariness about artificial light in general.
5 Snoring, sleep apnoea
SnoreLab is a smartphone app for quantifying snoring and identifying whether it is problematic. Apple Watch also has snore detection features now.
5.1 Anti-snoring exercise
TBC
5.2 Anti-snoring garments
Garments for “positional therapy”, a.k.a. “not letting one sleep on one’s back” (Permut et al. 2010).
- SomnoCushion® Standard anti-snoring backpack (only ships to Europe)
- rainbowstar Positional Sleep Aid Backpack
- WoodyKnows Anti Snoring Backpack (only ships to the USA)
- Rematee Anti-Snore Bumper Belt (only ships to the USA)
NB: none of these retailers ship to Australia, even the ones that clearly could, like Amazon. Presumably some quirky bit of Australia’s therapeutic goods regulations stops them selling padded shirts here because it’s too medicine-adjacent.
If we’re in a jurisdiction like Australia, the following options are available and affordable:
- Sew a tennis ball into a t-shirt
- Wear a backpack full of inflated goonbags in bed
They’re less reliable, though.
5.3 Weird machines
I Tried 6 Popular Anti-Snoring Devices. Here’s How They Did
Highlights:
When this mic-enabled system detects snoring sounds, an under-bed base station sends a burst of air up into a pillow insert, lightly shifting how your head is positioned.
I’m… uncomfortable with this.
6 Incoming
In Theses on Sleep, Alexey Guzey was sceptical about sleep:
In this essay, I question some of the consensus beliefs about sleep, such as the need for at least 7 hours of sleep for adults, harmfulness of acute sleep deprivation, and harmfulness of long-term sleep deprivation and our inability to adapt to it.
It appears that the evidence for all of these beliefs is much weaker than sleep scientists and public health experts want us to believe. In particular, I conclude that it’s plausible that at least acute sleep deprivation is not only not harmful but beneficial in some contexts and that it’s that we are able to adapt to long-term sleep deprivation.
I also discuss the bidirectional relationship of sleep and mania/depression and the costs of unnecessary sleep, noting that sleeping 1.5 hours per day less results in gaining more than a month of wakefulness per year, every year
Later, the author of that self-experiment decided that sleep might be useful.