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Comment by zemvpferreira | Hacker News Reader

I remember reading the article a few years ago (unfortunately down right now) and being struck at both how erudite and impractical it is. These days I find it even more of the later.

My biggest pet peeve is that it ignores the role technology (in the form of artificial light and comfortable indoor space) completely subverts our natural sleep cycle. It's a lost battle.

Better to accept that we're in an artificial state our whole lives and do our best to adapt to it. What I'm trying right now is a good melatonin supplement every night to counteract the unnantural stimulus, plus a magnesium supplement, and a lot of daytime exercise. This routine has gotten me from 6 hours of anxious sleep to 8-9 hours per night plus the occasional nap. And I feel great.

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I very much disagree that it's a lost battle. It's not hard to put blue light filters on screen when it gets dark, and limit bright screen usage before bed. But I do agree that melatonin and magnesium is a great idea as part of a strategy to counteract artifical light messing with our natural melatonin production.

I think it is great you found something that works for you.

The main point of both your comment + the article (which, I also haven't been able to read yet) is that you need to find what works for you by trying things.

Personally, melotonin only gives me 6 hours of sound sleep (many times I have tried to get more, last night being one of them). But in 6 hours from sleeping almost like clockwork I will be awake- and quite wide awake. It ususally takes another hour to fall back asleep, or sometimes I just decide to be awake.

So personally, moving towards the no-supplement tact is appealing even if it is much harder in artificial environments.

I have the same problem with melatonin — it seems like artificial sleep because when I wake up 4-5 hours later, my body really doesn’t want to fall back asleep.

Have you played around with dosage?

Have you tried bi-phasic sleep patterns? You could for example get 6 hours at night and a couple hour in the day as a big nap.

My sleep got royal screwed during the summer and I'm trying to get back to at least some sort of stable baseline. Probably a few months ago I managed to get myself on a biphasic sleep schedule. It probably would have worked if I had more flexibility in my schedule.

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