Salon post: Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care...

[jenett]

Welcome to this week's salon post. I get us started with a couple of questions, but feel free to bring up totally different things if you'd rather.

(This is a public post, feel free to encourage other people to drop by, just note the 'if posting anonymously, include a name people can call you in responses' rule.)

Topic of the week
It feels like everything I'm reading is about sleep recently - okay, and I'm most of the way through Dr. Matthew Walker's Why We Sleep which is being recommended in a lot of those conversations.

So, my question for the week is "What works for you about sleep" and I'm sort of deeply curious about what people's preferences in bedding and making bed comfy are, if there are parts of that you're willing to share.

What I've been up to
Still on "Trial of a Timelord" in the Doctor Who rewatch (I have been dipping into other things, notably QI, which is also on BritBox, which is a weird clever British quiz show. (elisem and her husband introduced me to it last year.)


House rules:
* Consider this a conversation in my living room, only with a lot more seating. I reserve the right to redirect, screen, and otherwise moderate stuff, but would vastly prefer not to have to.

* If you don't have a DW account or want to post anonymously, please include a name we can call you in this particular post. (You can say AnonymousOne or your favourite colour or whatever. Just something to help keep conversations clear.)

* If you've got a question or concern, feel free to PM me.

Comments

[jenett]

So. Sleep. I have been attentive to it since I started getting migraines since lack of sleep is a significant trigger for them. (And migraines do encourage one to consider alternate ways of spending one's time.)

I track mine (I use Sleep Cycle as an app) and am currently averaging around 7:45, which is better but I'm trying to nudge it up a bit (since when I let myself sleep in on weekends, I'm fairly regularly sleeping 9-10 hours, which suggests there is not enough during the week.)

I am very picky about the actual bed. I have a thing where sleeping on white sheets is Weird (hotels are very hard) and have had a set up for about the past decade which involves:

- dark blue and green flannel bedding (fitted sheet, comforter cover, pillow cases)

- a wool mattress pad and the recent addition of a wool comforter (which I adore: if you have heat regulation issues when you sleep, I've found wool helps a lot: it breathes and reduces heat when there's too much in a way synthetics don't.)

- a large U shaped body pillow (the U shape is handy because I am less likely to hurl it off the bed in the middle of the night)

- a memory foam pillow

- and a buckwheat pillow on top of that. (I have very broad shoulders and am a side sleeper, so a lot of this is angling issues.)

And then I try hard to get the bedroom down to a reasonable temp. I'd love 68, but my apartment runs hot in the winter (I have not had the heat on in a month at all, and it hasn't gotten below 70)

Also one cat, usually taking up the bottom centre third of the bed or sometimes the bottom right or left corner. (Very occasionally other locations. When I need Extra Supervision, she comes and curls up near my head.)

[florianschild]

Your bed sounds very cozy!

I used sleep cycle a few years ago when I slept alone, but I don't think the motion sensor works as well when you're co-sleeping. I liked it while I was using it though!

[jenett]

They have a FAQ about that! they recommend using the microphone option.

https://support.sleepcycle.com/hc/en-us/articles/206704569-Does-Sleep-Cycle-work-with-two-people-sharing-bed-

(I use the accelerometer option, because I have a cat who delights in knocking things off tables and flat surfaces and the number of times I have fished my phone out from odd places is very high, and I do not need that to happen when I am trying to wake up.)

[florianschild]

Hmmm... do I want a microphone listening to me while I sleep? I don't know, it kind of creeps me out. Although I guess Siri is probably listening anyway.

[jenett]

That is of course, the complex question. (I seem to remember them saying that the accelerometer will also work, but may be a little less reliable - apparently depends a lot on your bed, since some beds will transmit movements on the other side more than others.)

[rmc28]

Like you, I find Getting Enough Sleep is a key migraine preventative. I have a Fitbit and pay attention to its sleep tracking (recently I switched from a non-waterproof heart-rate-monitoring fitbit to a waterproof but non-HRM fitbit, but as far as I can tell the sleep monitoring is still reasonably convincing.) For a long time I had a goal of 8 hours sleep, and missed it a lot; I recently dropped it to 7 hours, which I hit a lot more often. I seem to have a mode where either I sensibly go to bed around 10-11pm, or I stay up until past 1am and then crash at about 8pm the following night.

I get reliably woken up between 6am and 7am by my children, every day of the week. So to get 8 hours sleep I need to be reliably asleep by 10pm - dropping the target to 7 gives me that bit of leeway to be asleep by 11pm, which means I'm much more likely to avoid the 1am/8pm thrashing sequence.

I'm a side-sleeper by preference, though I *can* sleep on my back. I like two firm foam pillows and a firm mattress. My spouse and I at home have a large duvet each to avoid either of us having it pulled off, and also to accommodate different temperature preferences overnight.

[rmc28]

Oh! And I meant to add that in recent years my favourite way to fall asleep has been listening to audiobooks; something about the sound of someone reading to me is better than music or nothing or even the kind of white-noise or rain-on-car-roof things I've used before. I use the Audible app and the 15-minute sleep timer and usually I fall asleep well before the 15 minutes is up, and have to adjust the position back the next day. I've worked my way in tiny increments through the entire Ancillary trilogy twice and am currently working through All Systems Red the same way.

[florianschild]

Interesting topic! I've been having a lot of back pain in the last few months that was particularly bad when I woke up in the morning. So a month ago I tried sleeping on a futon mattress on the floor. I read that some people get great relief from it, and I was so excited to try. I managed to do it for one week and it was pretty awful; I woke up with even more intense back pain than before. But I think it might have reset my back or something, because since then my bed has felt much more comfortable and I don't wake up in pain at all!

Have you ever heard of lucid dreaming in your sleep-related reading? That's something I've dabbled in before and thought was pretty neat.

[jenett]

Just read a section on it in the last day or two - he describes a study in which is fascinating.

They took people who said they could lucid dream, and had them alternately clench their right and left hands into fists, and did scans while they were doing that to map the areas of the brain involved.

Then they let the people fall asleep in the MRI, with pre-established cues from eye movement to indicate what they were doing, since there is complete paralysis in REM sleep. (So, for example, three looks to the left when they entered lucid dreaming, two to the right when they were clenching their right hand, etc.)

And then the person in the MRI went and did things in the dream, including specific actions (moving left, moving right, repeating the hand gestures they'd mapped while awake) and the brain scans match up.

Which is definitely some interesting science. (He goes into more detail than I'm typing up here, and also has footnotes.)

I haven't done anything with lucid dreaming because I remember dreaming very irregularly unless certain med things are going on.

[florianschild]

That's fascinating, because I was very suspicious of the one or two times where I thought I might have been lucid while dreaming. There's always that wonder that maybe you're just dreaming that you're lucid and you're not really in control at all. But knowing that there has been some scientific verification makes me want to restart my practice. A good goal to work toward. :)

[rosefox]

I tried lucid dreaming once. I had a series of increasingly unpleasant dreams, all of which tried to get me to stay where I was, and I kept insisting on going down a flight of stairs (I was trying to get to a dream-space that feels safe to me, which is a basement room linked to my childhood bedroom). Finally my subconscious got tired of my attempts to stay conscious in the dream and kicked me into a non-lucid nightmare to teach me a lesson. It worked; I haven't tried lucid dreaming since.

[hobbitbabe]

Sleep. I'm not very fussy nowadays because I don't need to be; I fall asleep easily and stay asleep all night and wake up before or at the alarm, and I also nap easily.

But my preferences include: multiple-layer futon mattress or good hotel mattress, feather pillow that I can nudge into my neck so my shoulder or shoulders aren't on the pillow, duvet-with-cover on top of me and another one underneath me. Alone or non-entwined co-sleeping. A light beside the bed that I can turn off when I'm done reading without getting up and ideally without lifting my head.

I went for years being unable to calm into sleep without reading, but that switched in 2006 into "reading or listening to music" and then again around 2012 into "reading or find the book, put it beside me on the bed, take off my glasses, daydream" and has stayed that way ever since.

[jenett]

I find the shift fascinating! I have read for at least a few minutes before falling asleep almost every night of my life (and before I could read, it was someone reading to me.) The exceptions are all basically times when I was on some sort of group thing that had an absolute lights out.

I can't do noise before I fall asleep: it will wake me up very quickly. I'm no longer so sensitive to it I have to sleep with earplugs in (as I did in college, or with a husband who snored) but the idea of falling asleep while there are things to listen to is so different than how my head works.

[evandar]

Oooh, sleep. Something I definitely don’t get enough of! That said, I seem to be able to get by on very little sleep, so...

I’m with you on the fitted sheets and dark bedding. There’s something very disquieting about hotel beds and loose sheets. Getting used to non-fitted sheets on hostel beds was one of the hardest parts about backpacking for me.

I sleep on my front, with two standard pillows. I’ve been thinking about getting one of the u-shaped ones, but I’m not sure how it would work with my sleeping position.

I require medication to be able to sleep. I’ve been on it, on and off, since I was in my mid-teens. Dosed up, I get about six hours of heavy sleep a night. Unmedicated, I sleep somewhere between three and four hours of very light, restless sleep.

I have to listen to human voices to be able to get to sleep, even with medication. Not singing or music because I find it too distracting, but stories. Weirdly, I find listening to ghost stories to be the most relaxing, and I tend to listen to podcasts or YouTube videos that include those. White noise, like recordings of rain or wind, will make the nightmares worse, but recordings of trains I can just about cope with.

Nightmares! I’ve had chronic nightmares and night terrors since I was a kid. I also occasionally suffer from sleep paralysis, which white noise seems to make worse for some reason. My sleep medication also tends to bring it on, so I’ve been trying to reduce the dose as much as I can without coming off it completely. Even so, it sometimes ends up being a catch-22 situation where the mess prevent me from waking up out of a nightmare.

[jenett]

Oh, the nightmares sound so frustrating, as well as, y'know, scary.

[rosefox]

I have delayed sleep phase syndrome, so for a long time I slept very little and very badly. Then I fixed my schedule to accommodate my body clock, and now I sleep extremely well.

I like a fairly firm mattress, a side-sleeper foam pillow (a recent change from two regular firm pillows), and crisp sheets in jewel tones (though I don't mind white ones). I use two king-size pillows for body pillows, to replace the giant stuffed bear and giant stuffed lizard I used to rely on for comfort when I was in LDRs and lonely at night. It's been so long since I slept next to an actual other person that I don't think I'd be able to do it easily. I like the theory of having a cat sleep on my bed but the practice has never worked well; they always wake me up.

I sleep under two quilts and a blanket no matter the weather, and am considering getting a weighted blanket for the summer; that's not urgent, though, because I'm always cold and glad to snuggle under lots of blankets.

I used to hate white noise. Then I developed tinnitus. Now I sleep with a custom mix of brown noise and ambient sounds playing from my phone or tablet, plus my air conditioner fan on to block noise from the rest of the apartment. Since everyone else in the house—including the cats and the toddler—gets up much earlier than I do, that's very important.

[jenett]

One of my concerns with the wool blanket was whether it'd feel like enough weight (I have the absolutely lightest one they make, which is lighter than a number of other places I found) because I like the weight but do not need the heat.

(And my cat will apply the tip of one claw very precisely to exposed appendages, mostly feet, so my feet need to be tucked under something if I don't want to wake up thrashing at that in the middle of the night.)

[solitarywalker]

The thing i have that particularly works for me is a heavy wool blanket. Just one, which is all that is needed. Warmth and weight without bulk. In the past i've had layers of various things, or a thick down duvet, which provided warmth just fine but lacked the satisfaction of simple wool.

What does not work for me very well is the bed itself, which is too soft; i'd rather a firmer mattress.

Another thing that works for me is sleeping when i'm tired, as opposed to at any particular time. Getting up in the morning for work of course doesn't work for me, but if i have a good stretch without that restriction, so i can just do my own thing, i sleep better when i sleep and feel better when i'm awake.

[jenett]

I really love the stretches when I don't have to get up for work.

(I can set my work schedule within reason as long as it's consistent, but unfortunately, traffic patterns mean that if I want my 5 mile commute to be under 40 minutes, i really need to leave the house by 7:10. I am very not a morning person, and I'd be a lot happier going to sleep around midnight or 1 and waking up 8 hours later, but I cannot figure out a way to make the logistics work.)

I've taken to taking a week of vacation a couple of times a year in which I stay home, sleep on my preferred schedule, and do a lot of writing and household stuff, which is glorious.

[solitarywalker]

If it's a matter of traffic (and the weather's not too bad) maybe biking the 5 miles would be faster than driving?

[jenett]

So many chronic health issues make that a bad idea for me. (I toy with it occasionally, as a desire: they're working on a bike path that would mean almost the whole way could be bike paths, not roads.)

But lung issues mean there's a fairly narrow window in spring and fall when being active outside works at all for me, and the fatigue and stamina issues mean that trying to do that kind of thing would leave me not all able to work when I got to work. Which would be a problem.

(I might, with a lot of careful planning and making it a Big Project for an extended period of time, work up to being able to drive one way, bike the other, and alternate where the car is. But it'd involve a lot of health stuff going right for an extended period, including stuff like 'don't get a cold' which seems a tad unrealistic to plan on as a commuting option.)

[wohali]

I had bad, bad insomnia for years. I got allergy screened and found that I had bad allergies to dust mites, which explained why things were always worse for me in the winter. When that didn't fix things, I later got screened for sleep apnea (which runs in the family) and was found to be borderline. I slept with a CPAP for about a year before I gave up on it. I then got checked for nasal issues again and got both a "cryoshrink" of my nasal turbinates as well as surgery for my deviated septum. This last thing made all the difference. I no longer have trouble breathing when I get a cold. I can sleep and breathe mostly normally all night, according to my partner(s). And best of all, I wake up mostly refreshed from sleep.

So my current sleep regimen is: go to bed when I'm tired (which is usually around 2AM), and get up about 8 hours later, sometimes 8.5h. I keep the room as dark as possible (this is an issue for me, light will wake me up very quickly). I allow no screens/Internet in bed, but I do allow myself to fall asleep to music/podcasts. (I've been doing this since my first Walkman in the 80s.)

--

QI is fantastic. I am starting to love Sandi Toksvig more than I liked Stephen Fry, which is saying a lot. They've been decidedly...bluer this season, though, and I wish they wouldn't. They can do better. My favourite ep of all time is still probably Series E, Episode 4.

--

Trial of a Timelord has moments I really like, mostly towards the end where they tie it all together. Terror of the Vervoids is one of the better eps of Colin Baker's run, even if the aliens look like romaine-wrapped phalluses.

[jenett]

I also do the 'dark as possible' (most of the time, not just when I'm sleeping.) I also have dust mite allergies, which is another good reason for wool bedding, since the mites can't live in it. (Though for me, it has to be 'covered in a thing that is easily washable, because cat dander')

I really do like Sandi - I liked the episodes I've seen with Stephen, but I've only seen scattered ones. I love her dryness about a lot of things.

[jazzyjj]

Well let's see. I would prefer not to have to sleep in a sleeping bag, but if I really have no other choice I'll take it. I've never had sleep apnea or anything like that, I just don't like sleeping bags much. Maybe it's size. Often times when I'm staying over at my parents' place, the upstairs room I normally use is being occupied so I have to sleep on one of those inflatable mattresses which I must admit are kinda cool. But speaking of that upstairs bedroom, my mother's brother's old bed from his childhood is up there and it reminds me of a spaceship. It is a bit higher up off the floor, and has 2 guardrails. It's a king-size bed and is very comfortable. I was in that bedroom this weekend, when I was celebrating my birthday with the family. One thing I absolutely cannot stand is loud snoring. I know some people who do this, including some members of my family. A sister of mine, for example, does it but she was diagnosed with sleep apnea a few years ago. She has one of those CPAP machines though, and it has really helped her out.





As for my birthday, it was nice. I actually kinda celebrated all last week, some with the neighbors in my apartment complex and friends, and some with my immediate family. I got some cool presents as well. One of my neighbors got me a card that shows the Chicago skyline and has audio, and everyone here plus the 2 support staffers who work with me signed it.