This is a familiar feeling to me as a sailor; when cruising, every place is new, and at anchor I'm never fully asleep the way I am on land. Any little sound, or the cessation of any regular sound I've gotten used to, and I'm up like a shot with the flashlight trying to identify it. Even the relatively slow rotation of the boat around the anchor as the wind shifts is enough to bring me awake thinking "what changed?"
It sounds like the brain will only sleep as deeply as it's safe to. That lines up more with the results in the article than the notion that it's directly about how many times you've been in that location before. When you're in charge of a boat, you have to be alert for any danger. When you're a fireman on duty, you have to be ready to hop into your pants. When you're in a strange sleep lab and covered in biosensors, you're going to be creeped out and on-edge.
My grandfather often took the engine room night shift on 'mud barges'. He'd just sleep and any change in sound that might indicate an issue would wake him up instantly. He likes to joke that he got rich sleeping.
If anyone has a baby, I feel this is what its like having a new born at your home for the first year. I slept HARD before I have ever had kids, but for some reason, that first year, I slept very lightly and would wake up to a cry.
I sleep walked with our first baby. I don't sleep walk normally and as far as I know this was the first only time period when I did. Apparently my wife would tell me to get the baby and I would do it in my sleep with absolutely no recollection after of having done so.
You were not sleep walking. You were fully awake. At the time you were fully conscious but as soon as you went to sleep you forgot about it. It has happened to me many times. Usually when I'm not getting enough sleep.
This is a semantic quibble as much as a substantive one. “Asleep” vs. “awake” isn’t really a binary distinction. Both sleepwalking (which isn’t a single well-defined thing) and the kind of awake-but-then-suffer-amnesia states you are talking about (can be caused by extreme tiredness, too much alcohol, dementia, etc.) fall somewhere in between full alertness and deep sleep.
I think sleepwalking _is_ a defined thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleepwalking What Zaphar is describing is not true sleepwalking, it's just that he was awake such a short time that he didn't form memories about it. In much the same way that I can't remember how I walked to work this morning.
Oh totally. My wife seems immune to his stirrings on the baby monitor. Without fail, no matter the time of night, I will wake up even if he silently stands up in the crib. Yhe only time I sleep hard now is when someone else is watching him.
When I got old enough to go out places with my friends and come home later at night (past 11, for example) my dad said it took a couple years before he could fall asleep without hearing the garage door open, and he's a deep sleeper who's never had any issues sleeping anywhere.
We've joked he's going to miss his own funeral because he's slept in.
I don't have a child, but this happened after buying a house, and living alone. I went from dead to the world sleep, to hearing everything happening in the house. Even ten years later, I still sleep significantly lighter.
I struggled with sleeping when I moved to a new state years ago. I still am a little anxious when I sleep and I have my sleep regiment down to the minute in order to get a solid night's rest.
I think sleep has some innocence until you lose it and afterward it changes permanently. It has in my life so far.
I'm older than many here, I suspect. And I use modafinil and coffee. But if I'm tired enough, and I know that I have enough slack, I have no problem sleeping. Indeed, if it's quiet enough, I can still sleep for 12 hours or whatever.
It helped me. Although occasionally(such as last night), she will keep getting up, walking around my wife in bed, to check on me. Sweet but kept walking me up all night haha. Almost never happens though and my sleep is quite a bit better knowing she is around.
haha ... I have a similar story. One example, my mother-in-law was living with us at the time and she offered to take the baby for a night to give us a night's rest. Her room was downstairs, ours was upstairs. First time the baby woke up (as usual), my eyes popped open the moment her cries rang through the house, after about 20 seconds she hadn't stopped or otherwise sounded like she got picked up, I ran downstairs and had her in my arms before my mother-in-law even woke up (the bassinet was literally next to her bed).
Aside from that, before and after they've grown up, I'm a pretty heavy sleeper :)
Like many others in this thread, I sleep very well in hotels. Usually better than at home.
My best sleep comes when I'm camping though. This is definitely not a comfortable or familiar environment, but I still sleep very well and feel refreshed in the morning.
That being said, I usually sleep terribly in friends' houses or AirBnBs.
I have similar great sleep when camping. There are lot of factors that may be involved.
Exercise. When camping, I'm typically much more active during the day than my usual routine. This is especially true if I'm on a hiking trip, walking several miles each day. But even if we've setup a stationary camp, all of the little activities add up to a lot of movement.
Lack of distractions/schedule. When camping, I typically just go to bed when I get tired, which is usually soon after it gets dark, and I wake up naturally, not to an alarm clock, typically with the sun.
Cool, dark, and quiet. It's usually cool at night, very dark, and relatively quiet. That contributes to great sleep regardless of the environment.
I've also had some of my worst sleep when camping. A couple of times when it was way, way colder than expected. It's hard to sleep when you're shivering. But mostly the problem is when it's too hot. I sleep terribly when it's warm, and I think that's true for many people.
I also think it matters whether you're camping solo or in a group. When you're with a group, I think you instinctively feel safer, but I've had some bad nights camping solo. One night especially sticks out in my mind. I'd seen a black bear and a cub earlier in the day, across a stream. They were a safe distance away and probably didn't care about me at all. But all night, whenever I heard a noise, I'd spring up and question for the thousandth time if I hung my food far enough away. It's amazing how large and menacing an opossum or deer can sound walking through the underbrush. But the next night when I met up with my companions, I had the best sleep ever. :)
In 2012, I went camping in mt tremblant mid september with my brother and his friends. The night we got there it rained hard. Saturday during the day was okay, but that night got super cold, around -1 degrees celsius. Plus we could hear wolves howling across the lake. Not the best of nights sleep.
I do tend to get nervous of nature at night when I'm camping, but love my experiences during the day.
My theory is that hotels often have thick doors and very solid locks and deadbolts. Plus the added "security" of the front desk... Makes it feel more secure.
>> Plus the added "security" of the front desk... Makes it feel more secure.
For me, there's also the fact that you are one unit out of very many within the hotel. Even if someone is going to be bold enough to break into a hotel room in the more "public environment", the odds are fairly low you'd be the victim from a pool of hundreds of rooms. Your stay is also brief, so you don't have a routine schedule a would-be criminal has time to study. Plus there's typically not going to be much worth stealing out of a hotel room anyway (wide screen TV, computers, etc).
I've always felt fairly safe in large apartment/condo buildings. I've never lived on the ground floor, so it feels like the odds of someone entering the building (or climbing the outside), coming to my floor, and choosing my specific unit to break into are quite low. You're very unlikely to be targeted by outside strangers; and there is a much smaller pool of people who live in the building capable of targeting you.
Three years ago I moved into an apartment with a street-level door. Basically a neighbourhood of townhouse-like buildings. It's been almost two years since I was burglarized while at work. I still don't sleep well anymore, with the ever-present feeling of dread that a nighttime home invasion is coming any day now. I can't leave the apartment for longer than 30 minutes at a time without expecting to come home to another completed burglary. I can't afford to move yet, but I can't wait for the day I go back to doubling my current rent to live in a higher class, 100+ dwelling building.
I will probably never buy a house. As I get older and save for a down payment, I'm sure it will be for a condo. I don't care for condo associations with their politics and fees, and the fact you only own or semi-own a section of an entire building. But I would never feel safe in a house where I have only a single door sitting between myself and my things, and an entire city full of parasitic people.
Shouldn't an entire suburb full of houses identical to your own yield the same peace of mind? Do you think being separated by walls instead of air makes a difference mentally?
If you sit in a parked car in front of a multi-dwelling building, you only see people walk into and out of the building's front door. You don't get to see which internal unit each person lives in. It doesn't help you to know that I live at 123 Random Street and am not home from 8am-6pm if you don't know that I live in Unit #456. You'd have to first pick me out from the crowd, and then actually follow me into the building to find out which unit I live in.
It's much easier to case a location that is directly accessible from the street. And easier to break into a door or window for that location, rather than entering a building and then breaking down a door in a hallway with frequent foot traffic.
Have you ever been burglarized by someone unknown and uncaught? The violation is extremely personal. These people watch you for days or weeks to ensure they know your routine. They know when you leave for work, and when you come home. They know you don't work Fridays.
It could be a neighbour you've said hello to dozens of times, watching from their window. It could be a stranger who finds it worthwhile to sit in their car watching your home. You'll never know.
Either way, they've invested time in observing you, and have specifically chosen you as their target. Yes, it makes you "targeted". When you come home to your back door broken open, and find $5000 worth of shit missing, and every drawer in your home opened and sifted through? When you can't possibly even know exactly what's missing. A month after the incident, you're still finding new things that were taken from you.
It's not just about the stolen property. It's your entire personal space ripped apart. It's a form of psychological rape. Hope you get to experience that some day.
I've been there, and it sucks. I ended up sleeping with a loaded 12-gauge shotgun under my bed. Neighbor of mine nailed a burglar with a 38, kept under her pillow.
You realize I posted as someone who has been through that? "Likely not going to get robbed" doesn't apply, as it's already happened. And if it happens to have been one of my neighbours who committed the crime? Great, next time they see a large box delivered to my place, they know I'm ripe for another round.
I don't really want to compare being burglarized to sexual rape, as obviously the latter is much more damaging. But would you even dare telling a woman that was raped once that she's being irrational because she's terrified every time a man walks 5 steps behind her on the street?
Do I really want you to have to experience it? No. That was a reactionary remark for making light of a victim's mental state.
> But would you even dare telling a woman that was raped once that she's being irrational because she's terrified every time a man walks 5 steps behind her on the street?
Yes. It is irrational, because the likelihood of rape from a random stranger is actually extremely low.
I'm not disputing the pain of your experience. It likely was very traumatic.
However, just because something was very painful doesn't mean it's rational to live your life in fear of it happening (when its probability is low). I likewise recognize that being the victim of a terrorist attack is traumatic, but it would still be irrational to avoid planes for that reason.
> Yes. It is irrational, because the likelihood of rape from a random stranger is actually extremely low.
This is when averaged across the entire population. A 14 year old girl walking through a "bad neighbourhood" alone at night doesn't necessary carry the same risk of rape that a 6-foot tall, bulky body builder does.
I have not either, but every single person I know who's had their home invaded is a fair bit more nervous about that sort of thing than people who haven't.
A coworker of mine had his apartment burglarized by someone who got to the roof of his building and squeezed in through the tiny bathroom window of his top floor apartment approx 8 months ago. I don't think he's gotten over it yet.
My parents are the same way, they grew up in the city, and between them have 3 different stories of being burgled, and even when they moved to a very quiet, extremely low crime (as in basically zero, aside from DUIs and the occasional marijuana arrest) rural neighborhood, still lock their doors at night.
I'd be curious if OP has a partner or roommate at home. When sleeping next to my spouse, I would venture there is some small level of stress associated with not wanting to roll into them, impede their movement, etc. Even just having someone else in the same apartment (different room) I recall being somewhat stressful.
When you go from sharing a bed or dwelling to having a whole distinct hotel room to yourself, it can be very mentally relaxing, in my experience. (At least in short intervals; obviously I prefer having someone there with me long term. Although some couples sleep in separate rooms and report very good results!) Interesting phenomenon for sure.
I used to have some trouble sleeping in hotels for the first night, but now I don't see to have any difficulty. I think it's mostly due to having slept in a lot more hotels over the years, it now feels like a "normal" experience.
I always sleep badly the first night camping. After that I sleep really well, and it doesn't matter if the tent is in a different location or the weather changes or whatever.
On the other hand, I very much identified with the article. For the first night or so in a new place, I commonly don't sleep well even if there aren't obvious travel-related factors (jet lag, shifted sleep hours, etc.) I adjust pretty quickly for the most part, but it commonly takes a day or two.
For me, camping usually meant being somewhere over 10,000ft AMSL. My altitude sickness manifests as insomnia. So, my first night was always a -- nearly literal -- nightmare.
Related personal story: I have severe obstructive sleep apena (OSA), and I went for several years before it was diagnosed.
During this time, it was not unusual for me to get very little sleep many days in a row. As a coping mechanism, I learned somewhat to "half-sleep", where I would close one eye and relax that side while continuing to do things using the other eye.
I wouldn't consider it sleeping just on one side of the brain, but there was definitely something different going on. I found that 2-4 hours of that would help my overall wakefulness.
Fortunately I had my condition addressed, but it would have been interesting to see if over time I would have developed into a full sleep-wake state of consciousness.
I find myself doing that when very tired or under significant social stress, but you're right, the structure of the brain can't support that interpretation directly.
I imagine that your brain could easily be experiencing it as a cue for self-trained rest states, so I don't want to misunderstand your experience as identical to my own, especially if you're doing it for 2-4 hours a stretch. My own interpretation of what is going on when I do it has been that it simply reduces (a) cognitive load (maybe) and (b) unnoticed eyestrain (more likely) by eliminating any attempt at depth perception.
> As a coping mechanism, I learned somewhat to "half-sleep", where I would close one eye and relax that side while continuing to do things using the other eye.
That is intriguing. Can you share some techniques on doing this? If I try to close one eye only, my brain would be full engage just to keep the one eye closed.
I'm pretty sure I have sleep apnea as well, and I've done something similar. I will often let my right eye stay closed while I'm getting ready for work, or going places that aren't work, and that seems to satisfy part of my brain that demands sleep otherwise.
It actually takes some effort to keep my left eye closed, but for some reason its super easy to keep my right eye closed and takes pretty much no effort at all. So it might be a biological thing. I also struggled to keep my left eye open enough to put contacts in it back when I bothered using contacts.
This is amazing. My initial response to this was, "That's weird, I haven't experienced that." But, thinking back to being a teenager and getting little sleep because I was up on the internet all night, I remember taking a shower and getting ready in a state of half-consciousness.. and I remember closing one eye.
This puts my morning, one-eyed phone gazing in context. It definitely feels harder to get that right eye open for the first 1-2 minutes of being awake when I've been roused by my alarm. When I've had a more natural waking, I definitely don't rely on this crutch nearly as often.
@hotelpeople A hotel is a safe environment and probably is usually associated with positive experiences. No wonder you sleep better there ;) I am the same
Agreed. The hotels I stay in are generally very similar in terms of room-structure, amenities, etc. I suspect that my subconscious doesn't register a new hotel room as a new experience, but rather as an old, familiar, and safe one.
I bet that someone's very first experience sleeping in a hotel would yield a poorer quality than their 100th one.
An hotel room is a place where I am supposed to sleep while a decent number of people (the hotel staff + anyone caring to social engineer) has full access to the door key and I rely on an unfamiliar security system to warn me when things go awry (fire, blackout, water leak etc)
The only places I would feel less safe would be a night train or a taxi in the middle of nowhere.
>An hotel room is a place where I am supposed to sleep while a decent number of people [...] has full access to the door key //
Do you normally sleep in an especially secure room? There seems as much likelihood that a hotel staff member would "break" in to my hotel room as someone would break in to my home. It's marginally easier for staff but then they stand to lose their livelihood, are much more likely to be caught, et cetera.
Do you leave a door propped against the door handle, or a handle alarm, or anything, to mitigate your feelings of exposure?
I feel it might be different depending on where you live, but in Japan/France I always have a inside lock that prevents someone to unlock the door from the outside.
In Japan it was a door chain, in France you leave the key in the door and it blocks external keying. Also you'll have to pass the building gates before reaching an appartment.
It's not infailable, but it's significantly more protected than any standard hotel room.
More than anything I remember unintentionally screwing hotel keys by having them with other devices, and the hotel front would reprint them pretty easily without asking anything more than the room number and the registered name.
Serious question: are you really so afraid of the tiny possibility of someone breaking into your room while you're sleeping that you can't sleep well in hotels?
If that's true, I seriously wonder how you ever get in a car.
I sleep decently in most conditions (I can sleep in parks for instance), it's more that hotels feel inherently 'public'. It's a place owned by someone else, maintained and cleaned by employees, ruled about under a company's rules. If I had to put it in a bucket, it would go with shopping mall bathrooms, train compartiments or compamy shower rooms.
As a sign of that you wouldn't leave valuable stuff on an hotel room table while you're out, as you would in your house.
Those locks are trivial to defeat within seconds with the right method and inexpensive tools. They're also unlikely to hold in the event that someone tries to breach the door by force.
"An hotel room is a place where I am supposed to sleep while a decent number of people (the hotel staff + anyone caring to social engineer) has full access to the door key"
I've been in a hotel where my room had 2 large bolts on the inside of the door in addition to the normal lock. This did nothing for my quality of sleep!
Both wholly from a safety perspective to quelch this brain patrol
But also to trust your environments' behaviour
For instance, does your brain trust your phone on the night stand to leave your sleep uninterrupted? Or will it always be monitoring for familiar signals
similarly, can you trust your hotel to have consistent environment, or did you request a wake up call that your brain will be looking out for?
The Economist also reported it, and explicitly made the point that a hotel chain can use this in their marketing. Where we normally think of unique as being a good thing, this promotes consistency, so it's better to always stay in the same hotel chain instead of using Airbnb or whoever is cheapest on hotels.com.
> This work was supported by grants to T.W. and Y.S. (NIH R01MH091801, R01EY019466, and NSF BCS 1539717). This work also involved the use of instrumentation supported by the NCRR Shared Instrumentation Grant Program and High-End Instrumentation Grant Program (specifically, grant numbers S10RR014978, S10RR021110, and S10RR023401). This research was carried out in part at the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at the Massachusetts General Hospital, using resources provided by the Center for Functional Neuroimaging Technologies, NCRR P41RR14075. Part of this research was also conducted using computational resources and services at the Center for Computation and Visualization, Brown University. [0]
"This work was supported by grants to T.W. and Y.S. (NIH R01MH091801, R01EY019466, and NSF BCS 1539717). This work also involved the use of instrumentation supported by the NCRR Shared Instrumentation Grant Program and High-End Instrumentation Grant Program (specifically, grant numbers S10RR014978, S10RR021110, and S10RR023401)."
I suspect that your mind doesn't register a new hotel room as a brand new experience, but rather as a familiar one. I bet the very first time someone sleeps in a hotel, their sleep quality is inferior to the 100th time, say. Even though not all hotel rooms are identical, the ones I generally stay in are similar enough that I doubt I subconsciously experience them as a strange new place.
I can not sleep if there isn't a door that I can lock / control. Stranger around, ever worse. Probably same reason I can't fall asleep in a public place, like on the train etc.
Once I decided to turn around on my bed by sleeping by putting my head where I usually put my feet... That was one of the most awkward weake up and dreaming experience I've ever had
Given that this behavior was studied decades ago, why has it taken so long to record the brain's activity when sleeping in a new place? Is neuroscience that new of a field such that relatively obvious findings are publishable in top journals? Or am I oversimplifying the results acquired in this study?
Either we adjust or we are self selected in the first place. Maybe both.
Taking many short flights for work practically forced me to learn to sleep sitting up even during the day if I was not fully rested. Many of my colleagues and frequently flying friends can do it too. But some people seem unable to do it. I found that once I understood I could do it, there was no further practice needed. Like riding a bicycle that half your friends always fall off.
In the past year I have slept in approximately 200 different beds. About once a month I do wake up in the middle of the night with the feeling that something is very wrong. Sometimes I don't understand why there is no wall next to the bed, or why there is a window there. This feeling is acutely unpleasant, even alarming. But it goes away and I go back to sleep. It doesn't seem to drag my sleep quality down.
I spent the past month travelling, sleeping someplace new almost every night. Did not get used to it. I had maybe 4 hours of sleep per night. Still, I was awake during the day and I had more functional hours to use for exploring, so it didn't bother me. Last night sleeping in my own bed was the first time in a very long time that I've had a full 8, but I don't notice any cognitive difference.
Sasaki says that brain response is involuntary and there's nothing people can do to prevent it, even if they've just flown in for a big presentation the next morning.
Really hope she was misquoted there and especially since it's not a quote. There's is no evidence or tests in this study to support this claim.
I think there may be some subtleties here. Like many others, I've experienced great sleep in hotel rooms, or as a guest in homes that set me up very comfortably. That said, I definitely have noticed I remember my dreams much more frequently if I'm not in my own bed. Whatever my subjective evaluation of the quality of the sleep, it seems like something different is going on in my brain when I'm in unfamiliar surroundings. Maybe the effect shown in this study explains that.
As a nomad who has been living in over 30 Airbnb flats for 2 years, I had this feeling in the past but I don't feel this anymore. Any place I go to feels "normal" to me the minute I step inside.
This seems to have potentially important implications for people who fly across the country the night before a big presentation. Maybe they should be leaving 24 hours earlier.
The number of subjects doesn't really matter all that much. You can get a statistically significant result with a single subject under the right circumstances. This doesn't happen much in biology and the social sciences, but it happens all the time in physics. The best example is how the precession of Mercury (one "test subject") confirmed general relativity.
What matters is how likely it was that the result you got simply arose by chance. This can only be measured relative to some a priori probabilistic model. If the odds of the result having arisen by chance (the "null hypothesis") is low, then you can confidently "reject the null hypothesis" and conclude that something else must have happened. Of course, the statistics can't tell you what that "something else" was. That requires an explanatory theory.
The problem is that the probabilistic model is also kind of arbitrary. For example, suppose you flip a coin ten times and it comes up heads every time. That odds of that happening by chance are, naively, one in 2^10. But that is only true if you only do the experiment once. If you have, say, 2^8 people flipping coins, then the odds of someone seeing 10 heads in a row is one in four. Parapsychology experiments and stock-trading schemes often fall into this trap.
This is a general problem with "big data". The more data you have, the more likely you are to see things happen by pure chance that are intuitively unlikely.
> And I disagree that the number of subjects doesn't matter. It matters enormously, precisely because this is a biology experiment.
It's ironic that you say this so definitively when you were the one asking for help interpreting the statistics originally.
Lisper is completely correct. Given a large enough effect size, detecting significant differences in a small population is very possible.
The statistics are sound. The assumption we should be questioning is where the subjects came from and if they are actually representative of the population that we are extrapolating this result to.
What Lisper said may be correct, however he really doesn't mention the application of the null-hypothesis in this experiment. To a skeptic it would seem the null hypothesis might be susceptible to the confusion of correlation and causation.
Edit:
The correct interpretation is that the model, the foundation of the null hypothesis, didn't fail yet.
Part of this model is backed by more experiments: "The reason that we focused on SWA is that it is the only sleep characteristic that reflects the depth of sleep" [1].
The model doesn't consist of a single variable. 11 people choosing the same 7 numbers out of 49 by chance is rather unlikely. The null hypothesis would include that there are only 11 people picking, that they don't cheat, and that random chance is indeed a thing. If now 11 people would indeed all choose the same, then the experiment could be repeated, e.g. to show that they are cheating or to increase the significance.
> It matters enormously, precisely because this is a biology experiment.
No. If I advance the hypothesis that reciting the Kama Sutra backwards will make you grow a third arm, then a single subject who recites the Kama Sutra backwards and shortly thereafter grows a third arm would be a statistically significant result, because the odds of someone growing a third arm by chance are quite small.
> "I disagree that the number of subjects doesn't matter."
you're asking for people with deeper knowledge than you for their help, and then disagreeing with them?
I get it -- you're skeptical because of sample size. But recall that "sample size" isn't necessarily the number of test subjects, but the number of measurements, as the comment about Mercury demonstrates.
Moreover, a strong signal can be detected even from a small sample size; a coin flipping the same way 11 times in a row could be mere chance, but a roulette wheel hitting the same number 11 times in a row should not happen in the entire history of the universe by mere chance. It's not just the number of measurements, but the significance of each one, that matter for statistical confidence.
Sure, you could get an even stronger signal with a larger sample size. But that doesn't mean "a study of 11 people" is necessarily insignificant or too small of a sample. It might be too small, or it might be enough to have a very high degree of certainty.
Your analogy to Mercury or flipping coins isn't helpful. (Nor is Kama Sutra below.)
I was talking about this experiment, the one the article is about, the one which I linked in my comment. The one which is apparently attracting modestly widespread media coverage.
The analogies are meant to demonstrate that sample size is (1) not as straightforward as asking "how many subjects" and (2) less important in circumstances where the signal is strong.
In other words, we're trying to give you the tools to evaluate for yourself. The initial article is about "an experiment involving 11 people", and your skepticism seemed to be about whether it's even possible to get valid results with that sample size (answer: yes). Even in this study, yes, you can get a valid result from "only" 11 people.
Perhaps, then, this isn't measuring sleep in any different place (a hotel room, a friend's house), just sleep in a weird, inhospitable place like a lab with weird stuff strapped to your cranium to measure your brain activity.
I've taken part in a number of sleep studies and I can say from experience that sleeping with electrodes strapped to your head does make it very difficult to get any sleep.
The worst part was the feedback loop of feeling that I have to sleep, or else this study will be useless; then those feelings contributing to more sleeplessness.
I've done some sleep studies too, and had the opposite experience. I was suffering from sleep apnea, which makes it impossible to sleep well. The electrodes during the sleep study were weird, but for much of the night (especially after the first night of study) they were running a CPAP at various levels to determine what I needed to keep my airways open. I slept better than I had in months.
I've been using the CPAP ever since, and now I sleep very well most of the time. I fall asleep in just a few minutes (used to lie awake for hours) I sleep all night through, and I often wake up a few minutes before my alarm goes off.
An ENT may be able to help if it's a physical problem. Tongue placement at the roof of your mouth is paramount though. It will help open the nasal sinus. If you can't put your tongue up there, you may be tongue tied, and can look into a frenectomy to untie it. A myofunctional therapist will then help you learn how to properly strengthen and hold your tongue in the right place, as well as swallow properly.
It might sound crazy, but mouth breathing is linked to ADHD and all kinds of issues, likely due to lower nitric oxide levels and less stimulation of the pituitary gland. Expect the field to grow in the next decade. Lots of us are now having problems because of the reduction of breast feeding, amongst other things.
Thanks for the info - seeing an ENT is also on my todo list. I never realized this was an issue until recently, but looking back I've always been a mouth breather.
One night a few weeks ago I tried the method of taping my mouth shut before going to sleep. I woke up the next day feeling super sick and lightheaded, presumably due to lack of oxygen. There definitely seems to be an issue with my nose breathing.
Yes, taping is a great strategy but if you have bad tongue placement or just a physical nasal airway restriction, you might not be ready. ENT is your first stop, in my experience. Schedule it up!
It's not even a question of IF for those who are into this stuff. It's really a question of WHY for the researchers. But for those in the field, the solution is simple and you don't need to know the why, you just work around it (by nasal breathing!)
Here's some more that are more about the sleep apnea side of things:
Point being: before you think you (or your kid) is "ADHD", see to it that they are breathing and sleeping properly. They're just so tired they become irritably unstable and unfocused. Lack of sleep = kids are a mess
I find that changing my orientation on the bed results in a significant improvement. I suspect that it might have something to do with the location of the window.
I don't know if there's research backing this up, but sleeping in a bed that isn't aligned with a wall is incredibly nerve-racking. I was moving furniture around late at night and decided to just go to sleep with my bed askew. Terrible night sleep.
In which case you confirm research findings, as babies tend to sleep light, wake up every few hours, then cry.
In all seriousness I doubt you can self asses this. Maybe I've miss-skimmed, but nothing in the article mentions about how participants felt, but rather how easy it was to wake them up.
If this really happens, then I guess I'll need to switch to a nomadic lifestyle. It's impossible for me to wake in the morning at home (so I'm always late in the office), but I have no trouble getting up early when on delegation abroad, sleeping in a hotel...
I used to have your problem, and switched to an alarm setup that uses a very small motion sensor attached to my pillow designed to wake me during a designated 30-minute window when it "feels" that I'm in the lightest sleep (based on movement etc).
Speaking anecdotally, it works for me, and I wake up feeling more rested and less groggy.
There are plenty of smartphone apps that do this as well. I use Sleep as Android [1] and my anecdotal opinion is that it helps me wake up in a better mood and without trouble keeping awake.
I bought a Mi-band specifically as a vibration alarm clock, as it's cheaper than any other such thing on the market, it follows you around, being strapped to your wrist (so you can always feel the vibration when the time comes) and has this useful feature where it monitors your movements and tries to wake you up in your light sleep.
If you have a regular weekly wakeup schedule you only need the app once, to program the band over Bluetooth, then you can just wear it as a night accessory and charge it every few months.
I use it in combination with those yellow spongy ear plugs, to get a bit of silence (locking the door to my bedroom, so that any intruder would hopefully make enough noise to wake me up through the ear plugs) but I suppose there are many use cases.
A big reason for me buying my Pebble was the high hopes I had in the vibration alarm. But of course, it's not strong enough to wake me up at home. Even a combination of this and annoying songs set up as alarm clocks on the phone are not enough.
Ah ok if you're a super deep sleeper then I'm not sure what to suggest..
I know that Philips makes a crazy progressive light alarm clock that goes from dim to SUPER BRIGHT in the span of 10-15 minutes, designed to slowly wake you up by brightening up the room, but again I'm not sure how much light affects you, and it's actually really expensive.
Thank you! This entire thread is full of anecdotes about how 'well' everyone thinks they sleep when they travel. Unless they're doing a brain scan at the same time, these anecdotes are useless.
Additionally, all the stories about camping and hotel stay are situations in which other factors would influence sleep - strenuous hiking, sleep schedule mucked about by jet lag, etc.
It probably varies by experience. I know I used to have trouble sleeping in unfamiliar places, but then there was a period of my life where I was moving, traveling, and visiting people a lot, and sleeping in a lot of guest beds or couches. It got a lot easier for me to sleep in new places after that.
Like jdimov9 I find that new places seem to make me sleep more soundly.
I did a fair amount of backpacking when I was younger (mostly in Scotland) which, almost by definition, includes sleeping in lots of different places - both in tents, bothies and sometimes bivouacs. I wonder if the association of being physically tired (carrying a pack all day up/down mountains) and new places caused an association with good sleep?
One odd association that I have is the sound of rain on an umbrella makes me drowsy - I've spent a lot of time sleeping in tents listening to rain!
Sometimes change triggers benefits like these. But I also know that I'm way more subject to allergic reactions when not in my bed. No matter how dusty or dirty is my room, it's always worse at someone else's place.
>But I also know that I'm way more subject to allergic reactions when not in my bed. No matter how dusty or dirty is my room, it's always worse at someone else's place.
That is because of the different "dust/allergen" load in the different places -- to the one in your room you have adjusted already since ages.
It's opposite for me. I have hard time sleeping at someone else's house. I have to lay down for hours before I get to sleep. I get best sleep in my own room.
In response to both parents of this comment, my first reaction would be that "of course" it's personal: maybe your bed at home is not that great, or a neighbouring mine makes sounds that don't register consciously anymore but still keep you up. But then again, in my experience it is a personal thing beyond a person's environment. I know people of both kinds and the location does not seem to matter.
It's often the case in non-exact science studies that the results are difficult to reproduce. Besides the obvious "they're not called exact", it's interesting. What is this caused by? Would, in this example, some people lack the 'feature' of sleeping with half a brain?
I would imagine that someone trekking through Nepal has experience with backpacking and finding themselves in a new place in the outdoors. A few people in this thread that have mentioned camping say they sleep better while camping. No idea if thats because they go to the same place to camp every time though.
I sleep worse the first night. Then I sleep like a baby the rest of the trip. Because I'm worn out by the end of the day, and a bomb going off wouldn't wake me up.
