Mouth taping (stopped snoring immediately), magnesium glycinate before bed, no screens an hour before sleep, keeping the room cold, not eating dinner so late and regular sauna sessions. Individually they helped.

Together they made a real difference, loud cars and city noise don't wake me up anymore.

I know it sounds like biohacker stuff, but it works. This tool makes it possible to actually find the root cause instead of just guessing. Love it!

[1] https://academic.oup.com/sleep/advance-article/doi/10.1093/s...

Two observations. 1. Often you wake up after a loud noise but like 5 minutes later with no memory of it. 2. even if you don't wake up from the noise your breathing changes, more likely to talk in sleep and shuffle more. So even if you not waking up your quality of sleep is disrupted.

Our case had some random construction like noise in the early morning, lasted around 10 seconds and disappeared. However, we noted even ordinary sounds we didn't think was loud was effecting our sleep.

Solution for that place was earplugs and a loud fan to generate white noise.

> Measure before you fix

In my case, I got a few IKEA CO2 sensors, and after leaving them in the bedrooms for a few days, we found that leaving an outside window slightly open + the bedroom door open, kept the CO2 levels below 600PPM at night.

We're 1000ft/300m away from a motorway, but fortunately the noise pollution isn't bad. So ventilating (even as it's getting cold) turned out to be a simple fix. I hadn't thought of collecting sleep data from our devices, but maybe I'll get an AI to do that, so I can correlate our sleep quality with the environment.

I spend time in two places. San Juan Islands WA and Santa Cruz, CA.

On island, nights are too quiet. During the day, a float plane a mile away sounds like it is next door.

In Santa Cruz, the house is on a major street. Busses, ambulances all sorts of yahoos.

I sleep better quiet. But I sleep even better when settled - mind not going, etc.

I generally don’t sleep well at all. The biggest factor is - has my brain settled. Background and noise don’t matter.

I even heard of people going to sleep with airpods pro in their ear.

Now that it's fixed tho my body decided I would need to pee every night about 2 hours after I went to bed... La vieillesse est un naufrage.

In my case, thinking too much about the causes of bad sleep actually contributed to making sleep worse, so if this guy is anything like me then this whole project could be hurting his sleep rather than helping.

As an avid reader of aircraft accident reports (ok, more reader of blog posts and watcher of YouTube videos based on those reports - yeah, people have strange hobbies), it reminds me more of flight data recorder graphs - the first FDRs actually inscribed the graphs with needles on metal foil (https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/59289/was-the-f...), which is of course no longer the case, but the presentation has been kept.

The mechanism: mast cells (the immune cells that release histamine among other things) have their own circadian clock. The CLOCK gene controls their IgE receptor expression in a time-of-day manner, and both plasma histamine and tryptase peak during the night. In healthy people this is fine. In MCAS or histamine intolerance, this nightly mediator release is excessive, and it happens right in the window where cortisol (which normally suppresses histamine release) bottoms out around 2-4am. Histamine is itself a wake-promoting neurotransmitter, so you get woken up, often by something minor like a noise, reflux, or a temperature shift that wouldn't otherwise register. Signs it might be worth looking into: 3am waking with a racing heart, sweating, flushing, itching, or reflux/throat tightness. A good in-depth resource: https://health.programmerlife.org/en/

I went to work at a BBB office once. They turned all their computers off at night and every morning they were back on. It was just "normal" for them.

I can't even remember what problem I was troubleshooting. At the time I was working on IVR systems.

Anwayz, I was working late in their office. Everyone had turned off their computers and went home. At exactly Midnight, every computer in the office turned back on.

I walked around the office looking at desks wondering what had happened. On one persons desk was an alarm clock with a very quiet alarm buzzing. I checked the clock and it was set for midnight (probably a default). About two minutes later it turned off automatically.

I turned off computers and re-set the alarm to go off a few minutes later.

When that alarm clock went off it somehow caused either draw or feedback in the wiring that caused all the computers to turn back on. At the time I wondered if it had something to do with wake on lan.

In any case, I suggested that person take their alarm clock home.

Also, iOS has background (white noise etc) sounds built-in: https://support.apple.com/en-us/109346 Android has something similar too?

We also installed triple-layered windows for sound insulation, but I believe it degraded the quality of the air, so sometimes have to open the windows for a few minutes before sleep to get fresh air.

That’s not how lightning and thunder work.

Then correlate the time you woke up in your sleep log with the camera footage.

Which makes a lot of sense. Especially non-Tier-1 services.

  Note: Having previously worked at Amazon, certain shifts can be really busy. Busy as in 30-40 pages/incidents over the course of the shift. I sometimes wake up to a "ghost" page, although I left my position earlier this year...

> *= I do not like Garmin, I think they're a fraudulent company systematically breaching consumer rights and I'm looking for alternatives. Already converted multiple people to Coros.

I love my Garmin, but it's one of the worst smart watches to track sleep with. It consistently ranks poorly in tests that stack it up against pro sleep equipment, and from my experience it struggles to even detect sleep times properly. That 3:32 event that the watch said has pulled you out of deep sleep may not have been real.

It’s funny how many things can boil down to "rich distributed traces" and events / logs.

Then there is the two sleep theory that suggests we are not supposed to sleep in single block. In more traditional environments, people got up to stoke the fire at this point. I know some folk that get up to urinate or have a drink. I used to turn the radio on for a bit.

Slightly off the main topic, but I can strongly second that recommendation for Coros gear!

No relation other than a very happy Coros user (Pace Pro). They make an excellent series of sport & health monitoring watches and bike gear, best GPS I've ever seen producing the most accurate run/bike tracks I've ever seen (using 5 GNSS systems: GPS, Galileo, QZSS, etc.), very reasonable pricing compared to the competition, continuous useful updates, and just a great overall approach to health and technology.

Anybody living in a mid to large city or urban area could have told you that. What a waste of resources.

AI is melting your real world understanding: https://www.sleepfoundation.org/how-sleep-works/biphasic-sle...

Also the AI-generated hero image looks vile.