There was a room in my parents’ house where I slept as a child, and even as an adult over 40, I fell asleep there as easily as I did as a child, although I constantly struggled with sleep in other places. When my mother died, my father moved, but I accidentally found a replacement – in my country house, on the edge of civilization, I sleep as well as I did as a child.
I think sleep problems are more a matter of switching from work mode to rest mode. I work remotely, and my bedroom is also my workspace. I can wake up at 4 AM and sit at the computer, and then go to bed at 3 PM – it’s terrible. I don’t think glycine will help me, no matter the dose.
I almost never have trouble getting to sleep; the glycine seems to improve the quality of sleep or reduce my need for it, which seems more likely to have to do with ROS clearance or possibly collagen repair than the NMDA signaling mechanism studied specifically for sleep onset.
But my utility function is different. I experience flow states periodically — and I want them more often. This is not an abstract wish: if it already happens, the conditions for it exist and can be studied.
I’d agree to an experiment — taking 0.3g of glycine before bed, as a chemist and understanding the mechanism
But the metric I’ll track isn’t sleep quality or morning alertness. It is the frequency and intensity of flow states over the following weeks.
If these variables turn out to be orthogonal — that is also a result.
Your flow states won’t be nearly as productive if you’re getting bad sleep. Just noting. Sleep has a large effect on intelligence forany purposes. And the effect is underestimated subjectively.
There was a room in my parents’ house where I slept as a child, and even as an adult over 40, I fell asleep there as easily as I did as a child, although I constantly struggled with sleep in other places. When my mother died, my father moved, but I accidentally found a replacement – in my country house, on the edge of civilization, I sleep as well as I did as a child.
I think sleep problems are more a matter of switching from work mode to rest mode. I work remotely, and my bedroom is also my workspace. I can wake up at 4 AM and sit at the computer, and then go to bed at 3 PM – it’s terrible. I don’t think glycine will help me, no matter the dose.
I almost never have trouble getting to sleep; the glycine seems to improve the quality of sleep or reduce my need for it, which seems more likely to have to do with ROS clearance or possibly collagen repair than the NMDA signaling mechanism studied specifically for sleep onset.
But my utility function is different. I experience flow states periodically — and I want them more often. This is not an abstract wish: if it already happens, the conditions for it exist and can be studied.
I’d agree to an experiment — taking 0.3g of glycine before bed, as a chemist and understanding the mechanism
But the metric I’ll track isn’t sleep quality or morning alertness. It is the frequency and intensity of flow states over the following weeks.
If these variables turn out to be orthogonal — that is also a result.
Do you have any data on this use case?
I think you would want 3 g, not .3 g.
Your flow states won’t be nearly as productive if you’re getting bad sleep. Just noting. Sleep has a large effect on intelligence forany purposes. And the effect is underestimated subjectively.