Chronic Sleep Issues, Ideas and Training

Bugs and Issues
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My sleep pattern is messed up from working a midnight shift several years ago and has never gotten back to normal.

My current approach is part of CBT-I. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia. The cycling workouts are more just to keep me awake in order to phase shift my sleep patterns. Low intensity exercise combined with light therapy (10k Lumens white light) directed to the eyes to retrain my body/brain (hormones, neurotransmitters etc.) to the proper time of day. I put the kids down at 7:30 and get on the trainer from 8-9 or even till 10pm.

While it’s not the number 1 goal of doing this, it would be nice if I was getting some physiological benefit (mitochondrial biogenesis, increased capillary density, etc.) but I’m not sure the stimulus is strong enough. Correcting the sleep issue is the #1 thing I can do to improve performance right now, better than any input from training. I spent the last year following a CJ plan and while it was fun and I did make some small gains, it didn’t line up with the amount of work I put in.

So for the foreseeable future, it’s back to HR-Controlled Workouts brought to you by Trainer Day!

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HR-Controlled Workouts - They're GREAT!
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Hi,

I actually did CBT-I and I was suggested to do sleep restriction.
From what I read from you I think this could be really beneficial for you to reset your conditioning.

The idea is to rewire your brain to: bed = sleep.

Sleep restriction is mentally very hard but in literature very effective.
You should discuss it with a therapist or physician.

You will restrict your sleep window to force your body into sleep.
It start with only 5,5 hours bed time and then slowly increase every three days for 15 min earlier bed and 15 min later getting up.

Hard when you are a father and also working the same time.

Example:

Bed 11:30 pm Up: 5:00 am

after three days:

Bed 11:15 pm Up: 5:15 am

and so on…

It takes like a month to get to your target times.
Rules are: not sleep at daytime, no naps
Getting up earlier than the target is allowed but not sleeping longer, get up, no matter how hard it is.
Getting later in bed than the actual target also allowed but trust me, you won’t get this urge in the beginning.

Make sleep your number one priority.

This will reset your brain and implement a very high and strong consistency which is absolute key.

That’s just an overview, if you really consider get more into literature and once again discuss it which either a therapist or physician.

Cheers

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@Alex you may want to break this into a new thread?

Good to hear from you Abrams. I had read your post a few days ago about your struggles and thought it would be good to get some input from you.

I have worked with a functional medicine physician about this issue, but unfortunately after 2 visits she left the practice and they never replaced her. She is where I did learn about CBT-I. She suggested an APP called CBT-I Coach. When I used it and loaded up my data, it said I didn’t sleep enough (it couldn’t help me) and to work with a physician. A frustrating loop.

I’ve attempted to find other practitioners for sleep, but it seems everyone I’ve encountered has the same mindset…sleep apnea. If you don’t have sleep apnea, well, they can’t help you. I suspect this is more of a problem with the US healthcare system and insurance incentives/disincentives, but that’s a topic for another forum.

So after a review of the literature over the past several months I’ve come up with a protocol that I’ve refined and am now 2 weeks into.

Since light and exercise are both intense signals for the body to be awake, I’m combining them with sleep restriction. Sleep restriction is very mentally challenging as you said. After I put the kids down all I want to do is pass out, and this is already hours after I’ve wanted to be in bed. I get sleepy at 3-4pm.

My typical bedtime is 8pm with a goal wake time at 4-4:30 am due to work schedule. Prior to this new approach, I would go to bed at 8pm but after 4 hours I’d wake at midnight and be unable to sleep any more.

With the new approach, I’m using a set of light therapy glasses in the late afternoon (~4-5pm) to overcome the urge to fall asleep (they only work if you can keep your eyes open :sleeping:

I have found the days I am consistent with using the glasses and the timing, when I get that super strong urge to fall asleep around 4-5pm, those nights I have slept better.

Yesterday was a good example of this. At 4:30 pm I could not keep my eyes open, so I put on the blue light glasses for 45 minutes. While I did nod off a few times briefly and did not get to exercise due to circumstances, I managed to get to bed at 11pm and slept solid until 4:30 am today. A solid 5.5 hours for me is a win right now.

For the protocol, later I pair the low intensity HR+ workouts with more light therapy in the evening at what would be the normal bedtime in order to stay awake, pushing the bedtime to more around 11pm.

Until last night I’ve been consistent with the exercise, but the timing of things has been a bit off with all the extra family things related to this time of year. There have been times when I didn’t get on the trainer until after 9:30 pm. The mental struggle of starting exercise this late is intense.

I’ve started to notice some small shifts but they’ve been inconsistent. Some days I have been fortunate to make it till 4am, but most days I’m still getting just the 4 hours, it’s just shifted from 11pm to 3am. And the dreams have been wild. I had no idea Taylor Swift was a leader of the Star Wars Rebel Alliance! :crazy_face:

I have read in the literature that this type of dreaming is temporary and a sign things are starting to work perhaps.

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Good call. Maybe I should have taken more message history but this seemed like a clean break.

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Whatever we do, consistency is definitely the key to everything. Sleep and training related. Christmas is killing my entire consistency so i hope to restart with the year changing.

Meanwhile i tapered the meds i got to improve sleep since they did not improve my sleep. No change in the sleep patterns yet.

@Alex i answer your question from a different chat. I am convinced my sleep issues started and since then set deeply on my nervous system, when i started to have a lot of pain in the nights. In the first 2 years i was down to 4h of sleep, sometimes less. This was 15 years ago. Now my pain is under control with the SCS implant but i think my nervous system is still “trained” on these years, decades where it was much worse.

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I have struggled with the consistency lately too given the holidays. I have managed to stay up and mostly keep up with the sleep restriction, but the exercise fell off a cliff. I haven’t ridden in more than a week and haven’t been motivated to do so. While I have noticed my sleep has been getting consolidated with a good number of the nights being a solid 5-5.5 hours, I’ve been feeling more tired and less motivated to do much of anything.

I can’t seem to explain this but even moving my bedtime up 15 minutes from 10:30 up to 10:15 throws everything off and I wake at 2 am ish unable to get back to sleep. I go back to 10:30 and everything is fine again, then several days later try again and keep running into the same problem. Any advice?

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I think it’s not uncommon to struggle with the sleep restriction. However, it should not make things worse. The only thing i can imagine is to adept the time in a different way.

I don’t know how close you are to your target bed and wake time. But maybe you can go 30 mins earlier in bed keeping the actual wake time.

Your time asleep is the actual total hours or time in bed?

Is this an estimation or something some smartwatch is giving you?

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I am far from my target. My target would be 8-8.5 hours. From 8pm to 4:30am. I’m currently at 10:15pm to 4:30am. I cannot move my wake time later due to work schedule.

Nearly every time I try to move my bedtime earlier by the 15-minute increments, that night is a horrible night of sleep. I then revert back to the previous bedtime from the night before as that’s how I was told to do it. Once you can get at least 3 nights of consistent sleep at that same bedtime, then you advance it up 15 minutes again. If you have a bad night, then you revert back to the previous bedtime you were successful. Keep repeating the process until you reach the target bedtime.

With this sleep restriction approach, my time in bed pretty closely matches my actual sleep, about 15-30 minutes in bed more than sleep, now that I’ve been getting consolidated sleep. Before this I’d be in bed 8-9 hours but only sleep the first 4.

I had been very reluctant to try sleep restriction previously as I would get the odd “good” night of 6 hours now and then, but would never know when that might happen, so I was afraid limiting myself to 4-5 hours initially would eliminate that one good night.

Of course, it has eliminated those “good” nights and I have felt the effects. Resting HR is now in the 70s vs 50s prior and my power on HR+ workouts has plummeted. So by some metrics I’m going backwards, but the reality is I’m getting consolidated sleep on the back end of the night instead of the front end and slowly advancing my bedtime earlier.

It’s slow going but does seem to be working, though much more slowly than I’d like and with frequent setbacks.

For the data, I am now using an Oura ring. This is only a little less than a week of data and I do find that I have had to edit the data as it overestimates my sleep. The other night I woke at 1:45am and never fell back to sleep, but lying there fairly still it thought I had gone back to sleep. I realize these things aren’t perfect and went back and forth many times on whether to get one, but decided the data was worth the curiosity.

Prior, I would estimate and while a good night the estimate was probably not super accurate, a bad night was always memorable.

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I see, thanks for sharing. The last things come to my mind I can share with you are the following:

Sleep diary is quite helpful. And best way is to do it the old-fashioned way.

In my case I was writing it down, directly after getting up and later I put it to some excel sheet to calculate my bed time, time asleep and sleep efficiency.

Bedtime, sleep onset time, wake up events, total time awake and when you got up.

Its enough to estimate the times falling asleep and being awake since your feeling is something you trust and will not change a lot over time. Its also enough to estimate in 5 minutes or even 10 mintue steps no need to break it down to single minutes.

Related to time awake: Our brain will tell us only that we slept, when it was ~15 min+

So, if we are still bit restless and moving around. We fall asleep but wake up within that 15 mins time window, the brain will tell you: you did not sleep. If this happens like 5 times in a row, we think we was awake 1h but in reality, we slept like 45 mins.

Let’s talk about wearables.

I am a huge fan of data but its important to understand what data we see and why. Put it in a framework and never rely on absolute numbers but on trends.

My thought: if the tracker measure things wrong, it hopefully does this consistent so if a trend is moving this information is more reliable.

However, for getting an idea how good or bad some specific brand is I suggest this guy: https://www.youtube.com/@TheQuantifiedScientist

Also, they need to calibrate so give it time until you work with the data.

That’s said, if you do a sleep diary, fill this first before your mind get fed with the Data.

Extra:

Of course, I went to the exercise to compare my felt times to the data (Whoop in my case). In over 2 months of collected and compared data I found out an average discrepancy of only 5%. That’s amazing but I saw several nights where the discrepancy was 25%. It’s a mix of over and underestimating.

Like I said, its important to put it in the framework. The discrepancy was about total time awake so the time falling asleep + wake time. Turns out that Whoop was completely underestimating my onset in many cases but overestimating my wake time in the night.

Why is that? Well, the wearables only work with limited options. Movement + HR/HRV. So, laying still not moving triggers the sleep usually quite fast.

Sleep stage differentiation is one of the hardest exercises for wearables. Simple example REM, intense dream, you might move a lot, the wearable thinks you are awake.

Conclusion:

Sleep diary is very helpful to get an overall idea about your sleep. With all nights documented you also will not miss out the good ones. Over time you will get a much better understanding how things really are and not only have the last bad night in your mind.

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This is how I am choosing to look at the data, trends more than anything. Not even having a week’s worth of data yet it’s mostly just the novelty of having the device and playing with the new shiny toy. I’m looking forward to the month-long plus insights I can gather from it.

I have done a diary in the past as that was part of what that one decent Dr who introduced me to CBT-I had me doing. I found having it on paper rather than in digital form like the wearable is providing, made it harder to see any trends or really gather any insights. In the end I used a bunch of different LLM’s and had several deep dives to gain some insights based on feeding them my experiences.

So far from what I have been seeing from the data, sleep timing, onset, efficiency etc., I’m inclined to feel it’s pretty accurate as you said. There are obvious exceptions like when I know I’m lying there awake, but I can adjust those manually after.

I was not fully aware of what you said about the brain believing you were awake when you wake several times repeatedly, but in reality, you likely did get more sleep than observed, those 15-minute increments. This makes sense though and it’s something that when I look at the data I have so far does makes sense. I’ll have a night where I know I woke several times repeatedly (fragmented sleep) and think it was a horrible night and the data will show several wake ups, but then also shows more sleep than I thought I was getting. This gives me more confidence in the wearable as well based on what you said.

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Sounds like you are also reached the edge of options.

I stopped doing the sleep diary when i saw that the wearable is giving the right trends.

Generally i try to aviod to make myself too crazy about it.

I tried lot of supplements also sometimes they seemed supportive, sometimes no change so overall i eliminated everythign extra which does not really help. I think sleep need to work naturally without lots of extra steps, meds what so ever so i think we still need to find the right trigger.

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There was a time when it would drive me crazy to get bad sleep. Then, I just gave up on it, realized that it was just another stressor that might be making things worse. Nothing changed though. I didn’t sleep better or worse. So ignoring the problem didn’t help either. But I do agree that making oneself TOO crazy over it won’t help anything.

I’ve tried all the supplements too. Some things would help a little or for a bit, but nothing lasted. I seem to be a fast metabolizer of caffeine, meds etc., so maybe that has something to do with it. Who knows? :man_shrugging:

About the time I started my current approach, I cut all the supplements out. It wasn’t so much on purpose, just out of sheer exhaustion/lack of motivation and will power. Several days ago I added back in the 5g Glycine an hour before bed and also started taking creatine again (currently 10g/day in 2 divided doses) after coming across some research about creatine having the potential to provide the brain with more energy particularly during sleep.

The idea being the body would perceive less energy deficit during the fasting hours at night to reduce a sympathetic response and therefore prevent the middle of the night wake ups. I can’t determine if it’s working or not yet, too soon. I’ll give it time. 5g for the muscles and the extra 5g if the muscles need more and the extra for the brain.

2 nights ago was great and I had been SO tired after weeks of restriction that I did not set an alarm to stay consistent. I had the day off and the kids had no school, so no one had to be up early, I got 8 hours of sleep from being in bed nearly 10 hours. That might have been a mistake as last night was only 4 hours again, but there are a number of factors that could have affected last night. Alcohol and partying however were not among them.

Happy New Year. :partying_face:

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