Posted by gmays 10/31/2025
"Insanity is hereditary. You can get it from your children."
And then as soon as they are in their 20s and reasonably self sufficient we had to get a puppy to keep me sane!
Did you have empty nest syndrome?
NGL I'm low key wondering if my messed up natural rhythm of 9pm-4am is going to be potentially handy.
As I'm typing this my 1.5yo is napping. I had maybe 6h of sleep but I'm after (part time) work and at home already, so I should probably nap as well.
Can't. My adult body won't go to sleep right now even though I'm feeling drowsy because it's too bright, too loud and chiefly I already had too much caffeine in the morning and I have like 15 minutes until I'll have to head out to collect my older child from preschool.
My SO is knocked out cold at the moment though, so I'll be relying on her this evening.
Although... I was up until 4am and got up at 6:30am and feel surprisingly great, so it still happens from time to time. :)
There's so much helpful stuff out there now it's rather a blessing.
Chronic sleep deprivation is the larger issue. And how we really don't have treatments on how to fix that, and how ultimately sleep phase issues are a social issues (being forced to follow a fixed modern schedule). Not to mention how closely that's tied to ND people. So a lot of us deal with sleep issues since we were little, but work and school dont give us the flexibility we need. For example, flex hours could be helpful here. I would rather work 10am to 6pm or 11am to 7pm most days. Or 5-6 hours during the day and 2-3 hours late at night.
Sleep deprivation is often caused by alcohol, inconsistent sleep/wake times, high color temperature lighting (>3000K) in the hours before bed, failure to spend time outdoors in natural light in the morning, temperature too warm (68F is ideal), caffeine (or other stimulants) in the afternoon, associating the bedroom with tasks other than sleep and sex, or simply spending too much time in bed.
Following doctor's advice for the last one: Start by going to bed at, say, 1am and waking up at 6am. Follow this without fail for a few weeks. You'll be exhausted but keep at it. Eventually you should find yourself falling asleep quickly. If you wake up exhausted, pull back bedtime by 10 minutes. Do this for a week. Rinse and repeat until you are waking up at 6am refreshed. That is how you determine how many hours your body needs to sleep, and how long you should be in bed. Helped me.
ND people get this pretty badly. 2023 study: The incidence of sleep problems in ASD patients ranges from 32 to 71.5%, especially insomnia, while an estimated 25–50% of people with ADHD
Insomnia is different, but tbf, insomnia for many people can't be treated well or if not at all. CBT is helpful if you look at the studies and ignore the follow up studies showing relapses between 40-70%. We can stuff people with melatonin and hypnotics but after a while that no longer works. So looking at this, it looks like things like drugs and CBT can help 70% of insomnia sufferers but the relapse rate is as high as 70%, so we're looking at people who can actually be cured as low as 15-20% of total insomnia sufferers.
Its not caffeine or screens for us, its just how the machinery of the human body works. This is like telling a depressed person to just 'cheer up.' I'm glad that worked for you, but your story is just an anecdote, and the science for this is still pretty dismal unfortunately.
The science can't work because at this point we're going against our nature. A lot of people cannot subscribe to a modern industrialized sleep schedule because its not natural for us to have extremely strict sleep and wake times.
Sure we do, however, not everyone is willing to hike 20-30 miles a day and sleep in a tent. It's not practical but it is very effective.
People have natural sleep rhythms. Society should conform to that, instead capitalism demands we conform to what it deems profit maximizing.
It usually works for the first few days of doing it but then it's like my body (probably moreso my mind) gets used to it and it doesn't help with sleep anymore.
Arguably it feels even more unhealthy because it's like my body is fully exhausted and tired but my mind won't let me sleep so no restoration can happen.
You need to take it for a while for it to build up, and for water to accumulate in cells.
It would also be disgusting in a cup of coffee!
Hard to imagine that it would be worth more than a few percent though.
Do you have a regular, intensive, exercise routine with a good mix of aerobic and resistance training?
Don’t buy the fancy high flow air filter if you’re not even doing oil changes…
Here is some literature that I've perused to support my experimentation with BHB salts:
1. β-hydroxybutyrate is a metabolic regulator of proteostasis in the aged and Alzheimer disease brain (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S245194562...)
2. Refueling the post COVID-19 brain: potential role of ketogenic medium chain triglyceride supplementation: an hypothesis (https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/nutrition/articles/10.3...)
My motivation for pursuing this was protracted sleep disturbance from long-covid.
But on rare occasions (like a couple of times a year), I get migraine auras and stuff disappears from my field of view. Can last about an hour. I feel like that's my visual cortex falling asleep.