I have seen many doctors, including sleep specialists, regarding insomnia. They all pointed to one source as the reason for the sleep issues: stress. And they all wanted to put me on prescription sleeping pills. I said no to that. Sleeping pills can cause dependence, and they often treat the symptom rather than the underlying cause. As a software developer, I am used to finding and fixing the underlying problem instead of relying on the quick fixes these doctors were offering me.

After much research, I figured out what I believe was the underlying problem, and the fix for it. The underlying problem was magnesium deficiency. As a software developer, I spend much of the day doing mentally demanding work. This is the kind of stress the doctors were talking about. Stress can increase the body's demand for magnesium and may contribute to low magnesium levels.

The cells in our body depend on minerals such as calcium and magnesium for normal function. In muscle and nerve cells, calcium helps switch the cell into an active state, while magnesium helps keep that activation under control and supports the return to a resting state. When you are low on magnesium, your muscles may remain tense and your nervous system may have a harder time settling down. That can contribute to muscle stiffness and difficulty sleeping.

The solution, in my case, was magnesium supplements. They fixed my muscle stiffness issues and my sleep issues. A special form of magnesium called magnesium L-threonate may be especially helpful for the brain because it appears to raise brain magnesium levels more effectively than some other forms.

They do factor in shift work as a categorical variable, and employment status as a categorical variable not taking into account occupation. But probably occupation (not a variable here) interacts with sleep status. Any job that involves a lot of flying (pilot, crew, people travelling for business) get more cosmic radiation exposure, for example, and potentially more sleep disruption. Certain operations and manufacturing jobs correlated with exposure to carcinogens also likely correlate with less regular sleep, possibly in a way that isn't corrected for by the limited shift work categories.

Regular sleeping hours as a marker for a less stressful life?

Also ran across this:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5105607/

I doubt it's the actual reading. Maybe having a calmer life where you take the time to relax with a book.

You might measure the speed of your car by putting your hand out of the window and notice that the wind force on your hand is strong when the car goes fast.

Putting your hand out of the window and then blocking the wind with a book doesn't make the car slow down.

Keyword: "associated"

EDIT: I meant to communicate that it doesn't make the car slow down as much as your hand behind and blocked by the book (feeling almost no wind), would imply.

Or irregular sleep corresponds to bad habits like drinking and using drugs and they are the cause of mortality?

Or, could it be that problems with sleep are caused by using alarm clocks, i.e. not waking up naturally but forcefully at unnatural time? Waking up at the same time every day benefits people whose inner clock has 24h period and disadvantage people with clock tuned to 23h or 25h day.

Or I am wrong?

Perhaps someone who has a consistent schedule is hypothetically more likely to make healthier choices on average?

I have struggled with on-and-off sleep issues for a while, and I'll admit I don't always follow perfect sleep hygiene. But there is something about dumping my thoughts out loud that completely shuts down the repetitive, circular thinking that usually keeps me awake.

Bryan Johnson says you should base your life around your sleep. He’s totally right

… but he won’t get young men to sleep in at 8pm

New sleep meds are creating a new lever here and serve a real empowering function in a way that culture hasn’t caught up to yet

When we think of traditional sleep meds we think of sedatives and it has an identity connotation to it. The new meds coming out, not just in sleep either, are changing a lot of things. I’m talking about designer drugs, new pathways, multiple agonists etc etc.

By total accident a month ago, I was prescribed a medication for sleep, lemborexant (not into trade names for drugs, more power to generics)

I didn’t plan on ever getting a sleep med. I don’t see myself as a sleep med guy lol. I didn’t walk into a clinic thinking I’d ever want one either. But to me this feels like a peptide or an athletic recovery supplement. And I think there’s even better and newer out there

Having this lever has personally helped me a lot. Why? Because it’s very easy to let sleep quality slip over time. Here are a few questions I wished someone had asked me a year or two ago:

-Have you been dreaming? When’s the last time you had a vivid dream? If you can’t even recall that, it’s a big red flag. If you haven’t been dreaming, your sleep quality could be junk

-Erections during sleep? Just something to take note of

-Waking up tired or ready for the day?

-How long does it take you to fall asleep? There’s a key distinction there between how long you’re in bed vs. how long you’re actually sleeping. Check your apple health data. It’s so easy to mess this up, in this modern age especially, it’s why I’m hooked. There are far too many variables that could affect a key function of your life, especially for young guys. An afterparty, a hookup, a stressful period in business, a productive all-nighter, or just overthinking instead of sleeping

People notice when you don’t sleep well

But i suspect if you hop over the second part there will be more funding in telling poor people to sleep there way to longevity.

[1] https://www.impulsearc.com/wavelength/

[2] e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41540-023-00300-w

Do you think our ancestors slept exactly 8 hours a night from 10pm to 6am? No they slept when they wanted.

Like, John Carmack said that he NEVER burned out, never went into a dark corner (verbatim from his interview), and everyone agrees that he works like a machine. And I don't think he actually spent a lot of mental training to achieve that stability, because, he has been like that from a young age. This is THE best thing you can have in the world, if you want to achieve something, anything. If you don't have the mental toughness, you won't be able to make through that 10,000 hours (cliche, I know). I guess that's also why many self-help book talk about being consistent -- to be consistent, is to have mental stability. And I think there is a whole difference, between someone who trains his mental to stay stable for 6 months, then collapse, from someone who actually doesn't need to train and just be stable somehow.

This also leads me to realize that good sleep is one of the fundamentals of a stable mind. As a parent, I actually don't remember when was the last time I had a good sleep, and my definition of a night of good sleep is perhaps just trivial for someone else. At the same time, I consider myself lucky, because at least I don't suffer from serious mental issues. I still have a job and a house, and that's better than many out there.

This then leads me to despise the human body. It is a machine so delicate that you have to be very lucky to be super productive, whatever your definition of being productive is. It seems to ignore the input in short term (e.g. you can eat garbage food for a month and nothing really happens, or, you can sleep 4-6 hours every day for the last 6 years and still function normally), but once the long term shows up it is very hard to reverse. And there are so many theories focused on it that we have no idea which one is best for the individual. You might as well spend years doing A/B test on yourself and still have no idea what the hell is going on. Or you need to be super rich to have some medical team monitor you 7/24 to figure out what the hell is going on.

He said that as long as people are mostly regular in their sleep hours, the actual timings don't matter much. However, extended periods of irregular sleep schedules are actually (his words) "classified as a type of carcinogen."

I briefly looked into the evidence at the time but did not find it very concerning. TFA does make a more compelling case by linking it to all-cause mortality.

[1] I believe it was The Sleep Solution by M. Chris Winter, though I may be wrong. I can only remember it had a blue cover, but turns out pretty much ALL books about sleep have a blue cover. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Basically my doctor's biggest concern right now is making sure I don't die in my sleep because of something the device records that I and my wife never even know happened. Its a point of debate right now how much to disrupt my life with side-effects to do that.

This has been game changing and keeps me on a regular sleep routine.

I get the study design is not causal and all, but this R^2 looks very underfit for a study that claims a stronger predictor?

Last year I did an experiment of sorts while unemployed for a time and found that if I just slept and woke when tired that my sleep time would naturally recess and eventually "flip" after about a month.

My entire life I've wondered why I feel incredibly tired and found waking up so difficult. Turns out that if you follow your bodies dominant sleep cycle it's a synch to wake up. Unfortunately, it doesn't work with modern life very well.

The cortisol spikes are what get me. I can drink or not drink, exercise or not exercise, take magnesium or not take magnesium. The brain wants to tell me at 630 or 7 all the things that can go wrong or todos, instead of letting me sleep til 8. Sometimes it's much earlier than that.

I also wake up at the slightest sound or movement. It's been like this since I was a child. I'm defective, and all the bro science Youtube videos with top 10 science -based 'hacks' don't solve the problem. Know what does? Anti anxiety medication, but doctors don't prescribe benzos anymore.

Some more discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42022151

like "garbage collection"

ie. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4651462/

ADHD, for example, is correlated with both sleep cycle issues and worse outcomes in life (including higher rates of crime and participation in risky activities).