Helpful, thanks.
pdf23ds
Karma: 762
What I’m wondering with a markov process is whether it could be embellished to include other potentially relevant variables. From 5 minutes reading wikipedia, it seems like I’d have a combinatorial explosion of states, and the more states, the more data needed to train the model.
So I’d have like 48 states, for each half-hour of the day, times 3-4 for 8-11 hours long sleep? Would it work to have ordered pairs where the first item is measured in time since my last awakening?
I have karma display turned off (greasemonkey script). It stresses me out. I think your comment could certainly expand on point 3⁄4. Really what I was looking for as a response to the post is a good pointer on what sort of algorithms or tools could potentially give me good results on this problem to direct my studying, and perhaps what textbooks or introductions I should be reading.
But point 1 is good. I hadn’t thought to do that. I was just going to go on common sense, and a kitchen sink approach.
Vyvanse has insomnia listed as a side effect.
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.
I have six months of past sleep data, though nothing current, with sleep and wake times. I could easily augment that with other potentially relevant variables, like daily caffeine intake or whatnot.
I use Supermemo daily, and have read everything Wozniak has written about sleep. I’ve talked to him a couple times about other things (1-2 month response time). I may ask him about this.
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.
I have tried sedatives, melatonin, melatonin-inducing sleeping aids, traditional sleeping aids, and Ambien (whatever that is). Some have no effect, some put me to sleep but leave me unrested, and some put me to sleep and leave me unrested and incredibly groggy for the rest of the day. Generally speaking, trying to shift your sleep schedule by more than 1-2 hours using sleep aids doesn’t work. If your circadian rhythm keeps advancing anyway, the results are just like a normal person trying to go to bed at noon using sleep aids.
a lot of different ways to use them
Can you expand on this?
I suppose I could shop around for a doctor willing to prescribe modafinil for my sort of sleep problems. I have thought of trying it in the past, but that’s pretty far off-label.
“Everything” includes having read all current medical literature, which all says that severe circadian rhythm disorders are basically untreatable, and having one sleep doctor basically give up. I could also try more sleep doctors, I suppose.
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.
I wouldn’t exactly call it a median. It trends forward every day, eventually wraps around, but it doesn’t spend much time at all around 2-8 AM, due to sunlight keeping me awake when I’d otherwise go to sleep in late morning or afternoon.
Besides, having a tool that could forecast my sleep patterns given different variables would allow me to understand the interactions of those variables and ultimately would allow me to take control of my sleep patterns.
These don’t work for me. The details are boring.
“I find it impossible to wake up at a consistent time every day (+/- 8 hours), despite years of trying”
In other words, I’ve tried everything else.
Modeling sleep patterns
What about the PocketPro II? It draws 240 mA, so a 1 Ah external battery gets you 4 extra hours.
I’ve been doing audio-only with a $40 dictator from Wal-mart that fits in my pocket. It averages 150-200 MB a day. I generate hashes of each file and timestamp them so they’re more likely to be useful if I ever need them for proof of something.
The thing that prompted me to start doing this was frequent arguments with close ones that often got down to “you said this”, “no I didn’t” type of stuff. It’s oddly very assuring to have this recording. (FTR, I used it for that purpose more or less once. Although I find it useful for recording therapy sessions too.)
I remember, when first reading this article, that it was really convincing and compelling. I looked it up again because I wanted to be able to make the argument myself, and now I find that I don’t understand how you can get from “if the staid conventional normal boring understanding of physics and the brain is correct” to “there’s no way in principle that a human being can concretely envision, and derive testable experimental predictions about, an alternate universe in which things are irreducibly mental.” That seems like too large a jump for me. Any help?
I thought a lot about creating such a system and how it would look a number of years ago, but never did make any good progress on it. The point where I got stuck was to take a particular blog post with lots of debate in the comments and try to dissect it in different ways and see what ended up being the most useful. I found I didn’t have the focus to do so.
Anyway, there’s Truth Mapping, which I think sucks for quite a number of reasons.
For a while I thought I had delayed sleep phase syndrome (which is more easily treated with light therapy), and that it’s just so severe that the morning sunlight late in my day tends to make it go crazy. It’s not quite regular enough for non-24. Or it could be completely irregular.
In any case, light therapy doesn’t seems to help at all. I tried it for about a month or two with this and saw no effects. Also, it’s a /huge/ inconvenience.