Heeding Circadian Rhythms

Count myself among the many who wish their sleep patterns were better.  Short of a formal sleep study, a form of excessive medical care for me, I've engaged in a lot of interventions.  I am aware of sleep hygiene principles, which I commit myself to periodically.  My bottle of melatonin from the shelf at Walmart gets judicious use.  My card of diphenhydramine gel caps, obtained from the Dollar Store, allows me to get drowsy but at an unacceptable cost the next morning.  Unlikely that I will finish the remaining aqua capsules.  I've used Ambien samples, four of them conserved over several months.  That stuff works, and offered to me by my doctor, but not the direction I should be taking in my senior retirement years.  Sleep Hygiene is the way to go.

The principles are very easy.  Lights out at a predictable time.  Avoid zonking out early.  Put away the blue lights from the smartphones and tablets a couple hours in advance. Big Screen TV causes fewer disturbances.  Arise on time.  Avoid snooze button.  I've also had sleep trackers.  I found the free apps on my cell phone intrusive.  The Apps themselves periodically failed.  My smartwatch has a basic program that works consistently, if not all that accurately.  Often I have two half-nights sleep when trying to adhere to fixed sleep and wake times.  The most difficult advice for me has been how to deal with the middle of the night wakening that creates those two half-nights.  Professional sleep organization advice recommends getting up if not back to sleep by a certain interval.  My smartwatch has a timer that allows me to create that interval.  I am rarely back asleep.  However, the sleep app of the watch shows the wake time to be not that much longer than the recommended allowable in-bed wake time.  If I feel groggy I stay in bed.  If I feel wired, I head to My Space where I turn on the big screen TV to Modern Marvels or How the Earth was Made to maybe learn something.  By the end of the show, if not dozed in my recliner, I usually find myself loopy enough to return to bed for a successful second half of the night.

Wake times occasionally challenge me.  My smartwatch has an alarm set to my wake time with a snooze feature for ten minutes.  I am rarely jolted awake by the buzz.  My internal timer has me either awake or dozing lightly when it signals my left wrist.  By then I have already read the red numerals on the should be obsolete clock radio behind my bed.  I rarely arise with the buzz but nearly always am able to head to the bathroom for dental hygiene before the reminder buzzes ten minutes later.  Then to the kitchen to begin the day.  Make k-cup coffee, retrieve the newspaper from the end of the driveway for my wife, then bring that brew back to the laptop in My Space.

Recent weeks have changed my internal pattern.  The middle of night awakening still occurs at a predictable time, but my smartwatch indicates that light sleep resumes within a few minutes.  And if I am awake within a half hour of the alarm set, I just get up early to begin my day.  My internal rhythms seem a reasonable guide.  My energy has improved, as has my ability to stay awake past the designated lights out time most nights.  I rarely doze off before that, something I used to do most nights.  Time to falling asleep does not seem unduly long.

So the sleep hygiene protocols seem on target.  While they can sometimes be disruptive to follow, consistency seems to pay off.  While these recommendations make people subservient to the clock with its timers, biological signals remain recognizable.  It pays to follow them if not predictably destructive.  So now my wake times have become longer, my activities within those daylight times more productive.  That was the intent.  Sleep study not needed yet.

Wrist Jolt

Behind my bed sits a vintage clock radio.  Modern in its day.  Red numerals.  Wake to an audio blare or to whatever AM or FM station had been preset.  I never liked it, but those red numbers behind me remain my official command to arise each morning.  Though that now happens silently.  The NFL offers a two-minute warning.  My current smartwatch signals a ten-minute warning in the form of a fifteen firm buzzes across my left wrist.  

Being smart, and a good buy at $40, it multitasks.  That includes a passive but ongoing assessment of the sleep it is programmed to terminate.  Home Sleep Trackers have been a great disappointment, at least the two Apps I've downloaded to my smartphone.  Highly inaccurate.  Prone to failure. Annoying to have the device next to me.  This watch may not be any more accurate, but it doesn't intrude.  It records a sleep time, has a mechanism for deciding when I am in REM without access to my eyeballs, and thinks it can decide when my nightly nap is light or deep.  Then it gives a time summary at the end.  Unlike the phone Apps, it does not offer a running timeline so I can match which stage at which hour.  Mostly, the morning wrist buzz occurs during light sleep, confirmed by the electronic bar graph of sleep stages.  However, apparently nearly every morning I have a deep sleep interval preceding that.  One electronic jolt occurred during that interval.  I could tell the difference.  The intensity of that buzz could terminate deep sleep.  The bar graph that morning had the blue deep sleep color as my final interval on awakening, a rarity.  

With considerable focus on professional sleep hygiene recommendations the past year or two, I might not need the dawn reminder, as my intrinsic sleep cycle ends my nightly session on its own at about the same time each morning.  Still, I like to see what happened before that.  My smartwatch records a doze-off time, probably accurate.  I try to keep that constant, though less effectively than I manage the arise time.  It will record nocturia X 1 as wake time.  It does not really capture middle of the night insomnia, which that clock radio's red numerals usually capture at about 3AM.

Yet it is reassuring that a simple electronic device can keep me reasonably on track for what has been a chronic vexing challenge.

Up on Time

Eventually, I prefer the late sunsets of Daylight Savings Time.  This third morning of the new clock settings I resolved to depart my bed at the specified time that I plan to keep permanent until either the next clock adjustment or time zone travel.  It was a struggle, but I am up, dental routine completed, newspaper moved from driveway to the front door, first k-cup of coffee brewed, and morning pills swallowed.  I need that coffee to serve its intended purpose, though that typically happens after the second cup.

I have two sleep trackers, one a smartphone app, the other a feature of my smartwatch.  They agree with cumulative sleep times, differing only by 8 minutes.  The phone breaks down the components.  About half it called REM or deep sleep, the other half light sleep or awake.  I know I was awake far in excess of the 49 minutes its highly fallible method calculated, as I could check the red numerals on the clock radio with some regularity for about 2 hours at about the mid-point of my nightly sleep session.

However, the first step of sleep regulation, with few exceptions, is a commitment to Up on Time.  For the first morning of DST, I did that.

Not Tired

Don't know if I'm on a productivity roll or the illusion of one.  Yesterday I spent mostly engaged with mental activities.  I did some laundry and prepared my newly scoured and disinfected aerogarden for planting.  Did a scheduled treadmill session. Other than a short drive with an aborted attempt to get discounted lunch on the WaWa ballyhooed app, I went nowhere.  Instead, I wrote, provoked some folks on Reddit, but mostly read.  And read quite a lot.  Several chapters of my current e-book.  A very long article on the inappropriate response of the political left and supportive university denizens to rationalize recent atrocities against Israelis by Hamas.  Made more than my usual Tweets, less than my usual FB comments.  Did well on crosswords.  Listened to a wonderful seminar from the Hartman Institute.  Made a video for my YouTube Channel.  Looked up two people, one of recent acquaintance, one from the very distant past who had done interesting things since our HS days.  A mental day.  A very satisfying mental day.

At the end of the day, I dozed while watching a documentary on the Smithsonian Channel, but likely only napped to the early stages of sleep.  In bed, I stayed awake, got up, read some more e-book and the long essay.  Still not able to sleep when returning to bed, but lights out.  Eventually sleep cycles took over.  My smartwatch tracker records six hours, but my recollection of the last glance at the red numerals on the clock radio and the numerals at wake time is closer to four.  Got out of bed and on to dental hygiene twenty minutes before the smartwatch alarm buzzed, then coffee, and now laptop.  No messages overnight.

Despite what seems like sleep deprivation, I do not feel the least bit drowsy.  It is a treadmill day and a morning OLLI class.  While the mental activities left me satisfied, today may be better diverted to more of a mixture of chores and recreation.  I also do not feel irritable, not annoyed with anyone or anything.  By the end of the daylight hours, the sleep deficit should express itself as fatigue with a return to my more customary surly self.  But for now, at least until treadmill time, some more reading and thinking.

Continuous Sleep

For the first time in recent memory, perhaps a few years memory, middle of the night insomnia did not present itself circa 3AM.  I remember not falling asleep easily, estimated by Sleep Tracker at just over an hour. Usually my sleep latency, the time from lights out to being asleep is relatively short.  But my next awareness came with a wrist buzz.  The smartwatch sent its alert at the programmed 6:30 AM, prominent enough for me to notice it.  I still thought I needed more sleep, but got up momentarily for the bathroom.  Not long after, at 6:45, the music from Sleep Tracker, which could begin anywhere from then until a half hour later depending on other signals built into the program that I don't understand, turned on.  I felt almost awake, not yet 100% but not deprived enough to challenge modern electronics, so I completed the night's sleep interval.  It estimated I had been asleep about 6.5 hours, but its rare continuous nature caught my attention.  Since the purpose of sleep is to enable activity the following day. Whether this made a difference should play out later.  For now I feel adequately rested, maybe a notch or too shy of optimally renewed, but fully functional.

Two Half-Nights

It doesn't take very long to adapt to Daylight Savings Time, now in its second day.  Much like traveling to a different time zone.  Sleep times are affected first, though not for many nights.

My Sleep Tracker has helped improve my rest, for all its inaccuracies.  Some things it just doesn't seem designed to do, particularly measuring my middle of the night insomnia, those wakeful times, and it doesn't always measure sleep latency, or time from entering bed to falling asleep in the best way either.

Trying to adapt to DST, I followed the clock, which had not yet become my biological reset, entering bed at the desired time, probably falling asleep in a reasonable time, though not the seven minutes on the tracker.  I awoke five hours later, fully awake, engaging in some timed maneuvers with my smartwatch to return to real sleep.  I must have about an hour later, then awakening spontaneously, though not entirely refreshed at a reasonably desirable clock time, which by then was probably also my biological time.  I thought I would stay in semi-sleep until the tracker which has an algorithm for sounding within a band of preset time, signaled me to get up.  WRTI radio set by my wife got there first.  My first inclination, wait another fifteen minutes for their Souzalarm, which is a rousing march of some type aired at 7:15, which is also the end point of my tracker algorithm, but I just told the tracker to end the night's recording, look at its overnight statistics, and go on to dental hygiene followed by weekly weigh-in and coffee.

While the tracker offered its measurements, my internal assessment is that I really had two half-nights of sleep, each pretty decent.  First portion, falling asleep to awakening five hours later, second portion resuming true sleep probably an hour or so later and waking spontaneously close to a customary wake time.  Each seemed adequate when combined, neither adequate by itself.  And I don't really have a good sense of what transpired in each session except for maybe a fragment of a dream in the second half.

The purpose of sleep is to enable the next day.  Off to an OK start.