> Most people’s natural cycle is somewhat longer than the 24-hour solar day, which means that, left to our own devices, we would get quickly get out of sync with the external world.
I've always had very bad issues sleeping and waking "on time." In school this led to me regularly missing class and eventually dropping school entirely, and with regular work schedules I hardly ever got good sleep.
A little while ago, I made a commitment to myself to sleep when I was tired and to get up when I was rested. I eased into a schedule where every day I got up and went to bed about an hour later every day.
This has been my schedule for the past 9 months or so. I sleep 8 to 10 hours per night. Every night I go to bed about an hour later than the night before. My schedule rotates about 6-8 hours per week, and about 12-14 hours every two weeks, meaning I do a complete rotation about once a month.
During this time I've been vastly more productive and happy, I've had many fewer emotional swings toward anger or sadness, and I'm much more calm and less anxious in general.
My sleep schedule is easy to adhere to and self-corrects if I ever need to be up early/late or at a certain time. I even have an easier time making scheduled meeting times because I'm rested enough to be able to get up early when I need to.
Interestingly, I'm consistently well-rested and alert with my schedule despite having zero dependence on the natural sunlight cycle. I think this is because sunlight has a much smaller effect on me in the morning than computer light does in the evening.
With your sleep schedule constantly shifting, how do you manage day-to-day activities? You must have a job with very flexible hours for that to work. But even things like going to the store and seeing a doctor must be slightly more difficult if you might be asleep from morning to afternoon.
With 9 months of data, how consistently do you shift your schedule by 1 hour each day? I'd imagine there are fluctuations, but I guess if it's reliable you could schedule things on certain days.
How much natural sunlight are you getting vs. artificial lighting? Maybe you have some problem with the mechanism that resets us to the solar day or maybe you are disrupting it in some way. Like you suggest it's possible that the light from your monitor is also messing with your body.
My sleep pattern when I'm in nature with no artificial light is very different than at home with lights + screens. In nature I wake up much earlier and my sleep patterns tend to align themselves with the solar day. At home it's a lot less aligned with the solar day and more impacted by having lights and screens on.
For me getting proper sleep is also very important. I don't get it how some people seem to be able to function well with a lot less sleep and alarm clocks ;) I think they are just in some sort of perpetual sleep deprivation mode.
Hah that's interesting almost the exact same thing happens to me if I allow myself desired rather than scheduled sleep.
In a way though I wish my natural cycle was closer to the typical 9-5. I found it easy to be isolated or depressed on the days when your waking life is so different than everyone elses.
Registered an account just to say "Me too". I've been on this rotating cycle for several years at this point (so can't really tell how it might affect depression). It's remarkable how similar the timing is too... I go around the clock about every month or so. Though I don't think I could stay on normal time even if I wanted to. Eventually I'll have a night of insomnia, where I overshoot my usual pattern by probably 6 hours. I've seen it mentioned before as the sleep disorder "non-24". It's normal to me, but it does feel like a disability by times.
Same here, my schedule rotates and it's the only way I stay sane. For example, today I sleep at 6pm and wakeup at 2am. Jobs and relationships are hard tho, how do you deal with relationships especially?
Interesting, I thought I heard of a 25 hour sleep cycle before so I looked it up.
>>
Over the first two years, 25 subjects stayed in the bunker and were monitored. The researchers noted that the majority of them woke up slightly later every day.
Their average days were no longer 24 hours, but soon lengthened to between 24.7 and 25.2 hours.
However, this length then remained constant, and their bodily functions basically followed this new rhythm.
As this rhythm does not correspond to conventional
day and night, it is called the circadian rhythm (lat. circa = approximate,
dies = day).
<<
courtesy of the Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Physiology
Thanks for posting this. My diurnal cycle is also ~25 hours. But my schedule is more chaotic, in that working and sleeping times depend on work, personal and social commitments. And of course, I freelance.
I do something like this once in a while. When I get sick of staying up late and sleeping in too many days in a row, I start going to bed about four hours later each night, and reset my schedule to normal within a week. This weekend has been a good time for it, with one less hour to get past.
I don't know about sleep and depression. My Mom was bipolar and the topic never came up, other than her being up to all hours when she was manic.
But I recently read an interesting article about vitamin D and that lead me to supplement magnesium and vitamins D, A and K. I only do it once every three days to be conservative.
http://www.precisionnutrition.com/stop-vitamin-d
And I've found I'm much more decisive and likely to take action. In fact, last December I became a morning person using early morning light and exercise. Instead of getting to the office after 10, I now get in by 8 most days. I keep to it on weekends too and go to a coffee shop.
I also recently changed my evening routine during the week, cutting out TV and stopped eating chips after dinner.
For the morning and the evening changes, I devised a routine of things I do that make doing the hard parts easier. In the morning, I turn the light on, use the restroom, drink some water, set a timer for ten minutes, relax until it goes off, exercise, shower, dress and get out the door. I try to stick to this every day.
I also did some reading about vitamins last year and ended up taking vitamin d for a while, then magnesium for a while. My method wasn't any more scientific than that, but the vitamin D had no noticeable effect, while the effect of magnesium was dramatic. I was suffering from mood swings, poor concentration and low energy serious enough that I was considering seeing a psychologist about depression. Magnesium seems to eliminate the problem completely.
I just wish there was a better way to figure out your deficiency than just popping some pills and wait to see what happens. A weekly blood test for vitamin levels combined with mood and health journaling would probably give me the kind of data I'm looking for, but that only seems to be available in science fiction so far.
> Tübingen who was hospitalized for depression and claimed that she normally kept her symptoms in check by taking all-night bike rides. He subsequently demonstrated in a group of depressed patients that a night of complete sleep deprivation produced an immediate, significant improvement in mood in about 60 percent of the group.
I thought this bit was neat. I'd heard that sleep deprivation can bring on a feeling of euphoria, and anecdotally, it has worked for me
I noticed that stupid jokes and stuff seem much funnier to me when I am sleep deprived. One time I pulled an all nighter and then looked at some meme subreddits. I was laughing incredibly hard to stuff I wouldn't even normally find amusing.
I've noticed this too, I don't think this is specific for people with a depression though. If I have about 4/5 hours of sleep I will be less smart the next day, but engaging with others or completing tasks despite the tiredness results in a huge boost to mood and a feeling of exhilaration and happiness. That is not to say you don't feel tired, especially when the work has not yet been completed, and the day is just starting. YMMV, N=1 and all that...
Your anecdotal experience is far from uncommon. For the article to even imply this as any sort of cure for depression, though, massively misinterprets the small amount of research on this.
edit: And as a sibling comment mentioned, we do know that cognition suffers immensely when sleep-deprived.
Mood yes. Ask the kids who rave all night. But cognition? Im not convinced. I find my memory and problem solving abilities really drop after 30+ hours without sleep. Maybe it is a good tool for the depressed, but i would not suggest it to those looking to boost otherwise healthy/normal minds.
Totally anecdotal, but I wonder if it's related. Two nights ago, I was out with friends drinking and playing pool. We normally go home at 3AM, but this time we went to another bar after and stayed there until 10AM. At some point, maybe around 8AM, I became incredibly happy. Euphoric is actually the word I used to describe it at the time. I wondered if I'd been slipped ecstacy or something, since I was so happy beyond anything alcohol usually does.
I'm hoping that society will adjust to recognize this because it feels like in certain circles, saying that you need to sleep seems to be seen a weakness.
I think that's part of a near-universal fallacy that conflates good health with strength of character. In the situation you described, having the ability to shrug off lack of sleep is a source of pride, as if it was entirely about willpower; in fact it is more likely related to health.
I wonder what damage our twice yearly clock changes do. An hour doesn't seem like much but, giving an entire population a little bit of jet lag simultaneously has to be bad for us, right?
There are definitely measurable population-level effects, like increased traffic accidents [1] and heart attacks [2]. And given that its purported benefits are completely unsubstantiated, it's amazing that DST still exists.
Thinking of the recent reproducibility crisis in psychology, I'm wondering how you can prove this without the placebo effect. How does someone try not sleeping without knowing if they are not sleeping? Or do you compare with people doing something else that is known to be useless? like a sugar pill. Thinking about how different colors of placebo in antidepressants have more or less intense effects, I wonder if the fact that using a placebo so different from the actual thing makes it pointless.
Obviously the proper starting point isn't comparing to placebo; it's gathering enough data to develop baseline expected rates of change before altering the variable you're testing.
I think it is quite impossible for folks to sleep-but-not sleeping. It is kind of like testing LSD against a placebo - it is rather obvious after some time has passed which has the real thing and which doesn't. It is still quite obvious that it works.
In this case, it'll be somewhat obvious who slept and who did not. There simply isn't a way to fake that. But we can compare the results of different types of sleep.
I wonder how much coffee plays into this. I've yet to meet someone who sleeps consistently more than 8 hours per night who feels the need to drink coffee.
edit: 8 quality hours of sleep, e.g. you wake up and you're not tired.
My experience is that sleep deprivation leads me into a manic episode, but any benefits are outweighed by the inevitable crash. My depression is generally treated effectively by a rigid sleep schedule and lots of sunlight.
My father, brother and I all only need about 5 or 6 hours of sleep. We all just wake up, no matter when we go to bed or how light or dark the room is at night or in the morning. I strongly suspect we have that gene that lets you sleep less, but NYT is indicating that they think I'm depressed based on the embedded interactive.
I don't feel depressed.
Short of a genomic test, how can one differentiate?
If you go to bed always at the same time and always wake up at the same time ( = having a proper sleeping schedule) and do not feel tired, irritated, etc., then you are fine.
A lot of people do not realize how important a good sleeping schedule is for both physical and mental health.
I go to bed roughly at the same time every day and get up at the same time every day as well and it really helps me with a lot of things.
My anxiety and depression kicked in in 2006, after several triggers coincided. Some that I remember now are: dissapointment in my "friends", my inability to digest some college courses that had been way above my level of comprehension, falling in love with person A, while person B had fallen in love with me, alcohol overdose habit, stopping going to Sunday sermons after being dissapointed with local priest, pressure from my enviornment and myself to be best at everything I do, and so on. After that day X, I spent a whole week in bed, and started to behave strange.
So that left my parents no other option, but to eventually take me to psychiatrist.
When she put me on antidepressants, I started to act even worse.
I wrote and drew on blackboards at college breaks, once asked a profssor in the middle of his lecture " what is time?", I wrote in my sister's chat while she was afk and talked nonsence to she's friends, I started to have all sorts of crazy ideas and I wrote on all walls and furniture in my room.
I can't really know exacly what happened, but my brain started a roller coaster ride between being uterlly depressed to extreme overthinking and I had a thought that I somehow controlled the reality by changing the mood I was in. At the same time all inhibitors were gone.
A part of the feeling I had I can relate to a movie "A beautiful mind". That part of it that scares the uninformed viewer.
So after regulating my treatment, my state become good enough for my parents to send me to the psychologist. Too bad she passed a few years latter. RIP. I mean she was top class. I had about 7-8 90-minutes sessions until my state became a-well-functioning-member-of-society again. My family's support was unprecendented. After a few more months I satrted team gaming heavily. After a year more my psychiatrist removed my therapy alltogether. After 1 more year I returned to church (other one) to youth choir and never had this thing again.
The main thing that kept me alive and sane through my darkest hours was thought that I was once happy, and if God existed, he would not let me perish. This was just a hell one has to go through to get to heaven.
Sorry for being a little off topic, I just wanted to share what had helped me. Oh, one thing, if you are diagnosed with anxiety and depression, hang in there and talk to somebody. It's not permanent. It passes. I wish you the best.
ih
Sleep deprivation would be a bad idea for me because sleep helps the immune system, and my immune system needs all the help it can get (because of my chronic infectious disease).
I have found however that _listening to music_ during sleep will prevent my sleeping a lot from having a depressant effect on my mood. I recommend avoiding music contain exciting or bracing passages; you don't want your sympathetic nervous system to become active during sleep.
If I learn something that I want to retain, then I don't listen to music that night, because the same process (REM sleep?) that tends to depress the mood also helps with the consolidation of new learnings and new skills.
Que: people who deprive themselves of sleep and then fall into depression because that's what happens when you don't get enough sleep over a long enough period
Jet lag was a major contributing factor to a bipolar episode I had in Brazil late last year (1), but I will admit to being skeptical of the advice to avoid sleep.
As much as I love to travel, at this point I have to cognizant of how it affects my mental health
This is very interesting. I hope to see treatments that not only uses melatonin and environmental light, but one that also modifies artificial light (indoor/computer/phone/TV/etc...) to optimize wellness. Kind of a F.lux of Things.
The New York to Italy example in the article is a bit confusing to me. Seems that there's about 6 hours difference between Milan and New York, and the flight itself is 8~9 hours. Leaving New York at 6PM, arrives Milan at 3AM EST, 9AM Milan time.
"Instead of shifting you earlier to Italian time, it makes you feel it’s even later — that the night is over and it’s already morning." Does the body choose to this because shifting to "already morning" is smaller difference(6 hours) than "still not night time" (18 hours)?
About jet lag and so forth, why not try forget about DST and time zones and use UTC?
There are already people working night shifts and feeding babies :), everywhere, so we can assume, the number on our watch doesn't correlate to a certain mood-I-must-be-in-at-this-hour.
After all, if we ever leave for another planet, having single clock for single planet sure shall make communication easier than having time zones. Somebody always has eye bags.
[+] [-] JasonSage|9 years ago|reply
I've always had very bad issues sleeping and waking "on time." In school this led to me regularly missing class and eventually dropping school entirely, and with regular work schedules I hardly ever got good sleep.
A little while ago, I made a commitment to myself to sleep when I was tired and to get up when I was rested. I eased into a schedule where every day I got up and went to bed about an hour later every day.
This has been my schedule for the past 9 months or so. I sleep 8 to 10 hours per night. Every night I go to bed about an hour later than the night before. My schedule rotates about 6-8 hours per week, and about 12-14 hours every two weeks, meaning I do a complete rotation about once a month.
During this time I've been vastly more productive and happy, I've had many fewer emotional swings toward anger or sadness, and I'm much more calm and less anxious in general.
My sleep schedule is easy to adhere to and self-corrects if I ever need to be up early/late or at a certain time. I even have an easier time making scheduled meeting times because I'm rested enough to be able to get up early when I need to.
Interestingly, I'm consistently well-rested and alert with my schedule despite having zero dependence on the natural sunlight cycle. I think this is because sunlight has a much smaller effect on me in the morning than computer light does in the evening.
[+] [-] Judgmentality|9 years ago|reply
With 9 months of data, how consistently do you shift your schedule by 1 hour each day? I'd imagine there are fluctuations, but I guess if it's reliable you could schedule things on certain days.
[+] [-] YZF|9 years ago|reply
My sleep pattern when I'm in nature with no artificial light is very different than at home with lights + screens. In nature I wake up much earlier and my sleep patterns tend to align themselves with the solar day. At home it's a lot less aligned with the solar day and more impacted by having lights and screens on.
For me getting proper sleep is also very important. I don't get it how some people seem to be able to function well with a lot less sleep and alarm clocks ;) I think they are just in some sort of perpetual sleep deprivation mode.
Do you get jetlag?
[+] [-] verylittlemeat|9 years ago|reply
In a way though I wish my natural cycle was closer to the typical 9-5. I found it easy to be isolated or depressed on the days when your waking life is so different than everyone elses.
[+] [-] BallCramp|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] homero|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andai|9 years ago|reply
>>
Over the first two years, 25 subjects stayed in the bunker and were monitored. The researchers noted that the majority of them woke up slightly later every day.
Their average days were no longer 24 hours, but soon lengthened to between 24.7 and 25.2 hours.
However, this length then remained constant, and their bodily functions basically followed this new rhythm.
As this rhythm does not correspond to conventional day and night, it is called the circadian rhythm (lat. circa = approximate, dies = day).
<<
courtesy of the Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Physiology
https://www.mpg.de/943613/S003_Flashback_060_061.pdf
[+] [-] mirimir|9 years ago|reply
Edit: I've been doing this for decades.
[+] [-] anon_d|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ramshorns|9 years ago|reply
28-Hour Day: https://xkcd.com/320/
What kind of latitude do you live at? I wonder if the schedule you're describing would be worse in the summer or in the winter.
[+] [-] stretchwithme|9 years ago|reply
But I recently read an interesting article about vitamin D and that lead me to supplement magnesium and vitamins D, A and K. I only do it once every three days to be conservative.
And I've found I'm much more decisive and likely to take action. In fact, last December I became a morning person using early morning light and exercise. Instead of getting to the office after 10, I now get in by 8 most days. I keep to it on weekends too and go to a coffee shop.I also recently changed my evening routine during the week, cutting out TV and stopped eating chips after dinner.
For the morning and the evening changes, I devised a routine of things I do that make doing the hard parts easier. In the morning, I turn the light on, use the restroom, drink some water, set a timer for ten minutes, relax until it goes off, exercise, shower, dress and get out the door. I try to stick to this every day.
[+] [-] Kluny|9 years ago|reply
I just wish there was a better way to figure out your deficiency than just popping some pills and wait to see what happens. A weekly blood test for vitamin levels combined with mood and health journaling would probably give me the kind of data I'm looking for, but that only seems to be available in science fiction so far.
[+] [-] miketery|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pbhjpbhj|9 years ago|reply
>last December I became a morning person using early morning light and exercise //
Where do you live that gets light on December mornings?
[+] [-] hiram112|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] update|9 years ago|reply
I thought this bit was neat. I'd heard that sleep deprivation can bring on a feeling of euphoria, and anecdotally, it has worked for me
[+] [-] Houshalter|9 years ago|reply
This seems to be a well known phenomenon. There's a whole subreddit called 3am jokes (https://www.reddit.com/r/3amjokes/) for this.
[+] [-] SCHiM|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pharrington|9 years ago|reply
edit: And as a sibling comment mentioned, we do know that cognition suffers immensely when sleep-deprived.
[+] [-] sandworm101|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] digi_owl|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] barrkel|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ClassyJacket|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|9 years ago|reply
Personal experience, caused an accident when I was 23 this way and learned an important lesson: don't drive without having rested.
[+] [-] rangibaby|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adamnemecek|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mtdewcmu|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] roywiggins|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] transcranial|9 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/app.20140100
[2] http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc0807104
[+] [-] stretchwithme|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] busyant|9 years ago|reply
It's anecdata and small sample size and other possible confounding variables, but I think there is a kernel of truth in there.
[+] [-] make3|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pharrington|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Broken_Hippo|9 years ago|reply
In this case, it'll be somewhat obvious who slept and who did not. There simply isn't a way to fake that. But we can compare the results of different types of sleep.
[+] [-] valuearb|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _m8fo|9 years ago|reply
edit: 8 quality hours of sleep, e.g. you wake up and you're not tired.
[+] [-] failrate|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 3pt14159|9 years ago|reply
I don't feel depressed.
Short of a genomic test, how can one differentiate?
[+] [-] chrisper|9 years ago|reply
A lot of people do not realize how important a good sleeping schedule is for both physical and mental health.
I go to bed roughly at the same time every day and get up at the same time every day as well and it really helps me with a lot of things.
[+] [-] iharhajster|9 years ago|reply
So that left my parents no other option, but to eventually take me to psychiatrist.
When she put me on antidepressants, I started to act even worse. I wrote and drew on blackboards at college breaks, once asked a profssor in the middle of his lecture " what is time?", I wrote in my sister's chat while she was afk and talked nonsence to she's friends, I started to have all sorts of crazy ideas and I wrote on all walls and furniture in my room.
I can't really know exacly what happened, but my brain started a roller coaster ride between being uterlly depressed to extreme overthinking and I had a thought that I somehow controlled the reality by changing the mood I was in. At the same time all inhibitors were gone. A part of the feeling I had I can relate to a movie "A beautiful mind". That part of it that scares the uninformed viewer. So after regulating my treatment, my state become good enough for my parents to send me to the psychologist. Too bad she passed a few years latter. RIP. I mean she was top class. I had about 7-8 90-minutes sessions until my state became a-well-functioning-member-of-society again. My family's support was unprecendented. After a few more months I satrted team gaming heavily. After a year more my psychiatrist removed my therapy alltogether. After 1 more year I returned to church (other one) to youth choir and never had this thing again. The main thing that kept me alive and sane through my darkest hours was thought that I was once happy, and if God existed, he would not let me perish. This was just a hell one has to go through to get to heaven. Sorry for being a little off topic, I just wanted to share what had helped me. Oh, one thing, if you are diagnosed with anxiety and depression, hang in there and talk to somebody. It's not permanent. It passes. I wish you the best. ih
[+] [-] 392c91e8165b|9 years ago|reply
I have found however that _listening to music_ during sleep will prevent my sleeping a lot from having a depressant effect on my mood. I recommend avoiding music contain exciting or bracing passages; you don't want your sympathetic nervous system to become active during sleep.
If I learn something that I want to retain, then I don't listen to music that night, because the same process (REM sleep?) that tends to depress the mood also helps with the consolidation of new learnings and new skills.
[+] [-] ryanmarsh|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mwpmaybe|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baus|9 years ago|reply
As much as I love to travel, at this point I have to cognizant of how it affects my mental health
https://crisisofthemind.com/fallout-from-an-international-bi...
[+] [-] emersonrsantos|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] psyc|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peterburkimsher|9 years ago|reply
Prayer and music helps to cope with the lows. Like a diode.
Sleeping less to wake up early and pray before work has had a huge emotional benefit. It's like an half-wave rectifier.
[+] [-] safeandsound|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iharhajster|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nabla9|9 years ago|reply