What information are you hoping to get out of this? “I just slept for 7 hours, I can expect to be awake for X hours with probability pX”? Or “my sleep patterns repeat this 125 hour cycle”?
If you have the data in a convenient format, I could take a look at it more easily than I could explain how to take a look at it.
More like, “here’s the times I went to sleep and woke up in the previous month. What can I expect today?” Hopefully including the effects of caffeine, delayed sleep, early awakening, etc. My sleep may sort of follow a cycle, but it’s not regular enough that knowing the cycle would be that useful.
Here’s the raw data for 6 months or so last year: Data.
EDIT: I was unemployed during this period, and not using an alarm regularly, so I was sleeping exactly when I felt like it. If I was working it would look much different.
Now we’re getting somewhere! One thing really jumps out at me in that log:
3-22 back was hurting. need new mattress 4-01 Woke up with horribly aching back. (I blame my bed). 4-02 I hate my mattress. 4-05 got up with aching back. god damn bed.
I see no mention in the log of it having been replaced. That is a big deal. It may not be the entire cause of your sleep problem, but it is at least a very major contributing factor. You need to replace that mattress immediately, or find somewhere else to sleep.
It was replaced shortly after, and my back problems promptly dissipated. I had only been sleeping on that mattress for a few weeks at the time, having just thrown away another.
Side note: I thought my mattress was giving me lots of back problems (and incidentally sleep problems), and replaced it, and everything was fixed. Some months later I resumed sleeping with a certain very comfortable, too-small blanket. I hadn’t realized I had stopped when I switched mattresses. The back problems returned. I got rid of the blanket, they went away. The too-small blanket had caused me to curl up into too tight a ball while sleeping.
Ok, here’s what I just did. I looked through that log, collected all the names of pharmaceuticals in there (Klonopin, Vyvanse, Lunesta, Melatonin), and searched each one’s wikipedia page for sleep-related effects and side-effects. And I found this:
While benzodiazepines induce sleep, they tend to produce a poorer quality sleep than natural sleep. Benzodiazepines such as clonazepam [Klonopin] suppress REM sleep.
So that’s probably a net negative, sleep-wise, although there might still be non-sleep-related reasons to take it.
Wikipedia has this to say about Lunesta:
In the longest, largest phase 3 trial, patients in the Lunesta group reported falling asleep an average of 15 minutes faster and sleeping an average of 37 minutes longer than those in the placebo group. However, on average, Lunesta patients still met criteria for insomnia and reported no clinically meaningful improvement in next-day alertness or functioning.
Vyvanse has insomnia listed as a side effect. It’s not clear from the log whether you just used it once, in which case that’s unimportant, or for a long time in which case it is. Melatonin is sometimes used as a sleeping aid, but in my experience it’s pretty weak. It may be effective against a particular cause of insomnia, but it didn’t do much for me and if it didn’t do much for you, well, that’s not that surprising.
So, the good news is that the reason using drugs to help you sleep hasn’t worked is that they’re lousy drugs. The next step is to go through the wikipedia page for insomnia, and collect a list of candidate substances. Then read the page for each one, cross off the ones that sound bad (mainly based on side effect risk), and get a list of candidates to try. Bring this list to your physician, let him veto any subset, get prescriptions for any remaining ones that require prescriptions, and then try each one in turn.
Well, Vyvanse is modified amphetamine, so yeah. I also have serious focus problems. I was only on it for a month or so, and found it ineffective for the same reasons as other stimulants. I think in the sleep log I had just taken an isolated pill I had left.
But your advice is good. Going through the options very thoroughly might turn up something.
What information are you hoping to get out of this? “I just slept for 7 hours, I can expect to be awake for X hours with probability pX”? Or “my sleep patterns repeat this 125 hour cycle”?
If you have the data in a convenient format, I could take a look at it more easily than I could explain how to take a look at it.
More like, “here’s the times I went to sleep and woke up in the previous month. What can I expect today?” Hopefully including the effects of caffeine, delayed sleep, early awakening, etc. My sleep may sort of follow a cycle, but it’s not regular enough that knowing the cycle would be that useful.
Here’s the raw data for 6 months or so last year: Data.
EDIT: I was unemployed during this period, and not using an alarm regularly, so I was sleeping exactly when I felt like it. If I was working it would look much different.
Now we’re getting somewhere! One thing really jumps out at me in that log:
I see no mention in the log of it having been replaced. That is a big deal. It may not be the entire cause of your sleep problem, but it is at least a very major contributing factor. You need to replace that mattress immediately, or find somewhere else to sleep.
It was replaced shortly after, and my back problems promptly dissipated. I had only been sleeping on that mattress for a few weeks at the time, having just thrown away another.
Side note: I thought my mattress was giving me lots of back problems (and incidentally sleep problems), and replaced it, and everything was fixed. Some months later I resumed sleeping with a certain very comfortable, too-small blanket. I hadn’t realized I had stopped when I switched mattresses. The back problems returned. I got rid of the blanket, they went away. The too-small blanket had caused me to curl up into too tight a ball while sleeping.
Upvoted for meticulous data collection.
Ok, here’s what I just did. I looked through that log, collected all the names of pharmaceuticals in there (Klonopin, Vyvanse, Lunesta, Melatonin), and searched each one’s wikipedia page for sleep-related effects and side-effects. And I found this:
So that’s probably a net negative, sleep-wise, although there might still be non-sleep-related reasons to take it.
Wikipedia has this to say about Lunesta:
Vyvanse has insomnia listed as a side effect. It’s not clear from the log whether you just used it once, in which case that’s unimportant, or for a long time in which case it is. Melatonin is sometimes used as a sleeping aid, but in my experience it’s pretty weak. It may be effective against a particular cause of insomnia, but it didn’t do much for me and if it didn’t do much for you, well, that’s not that surprising.
So, the good news is that the reason using drugs to help you sleep hasn’t worked is that they’re lousy drugs. The next step is to go through the wikipedia page for insomnia, and collect a list of candidate substances. Then read the page for each one, cross off the ones that sound bad (mainly based on side effect risk), and get a list of candidates to try. Bring this list to your physician, let him veto any subset, get prescriptions for any remaining ones that require prescriptions, and then try each one in turn.
Well, Vyvanse is modified amphetamine, so yeah. I also have serious focus problems. I was only on it for a month or so, and found it ineffective for the same reasons as other stimulants. I think in the sleep log I had just taken an isolated pill I had left.
But your advice is good. Going through the options very thoroughly might turn up something.