
Sleep hacks - RiderOfGiraffes
http://download.cnet.com/40-Sleep-Hacks-Geek-s-Guide-to-Optimizing-Sleep/3000-2129_4-10864038.html
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RiderOfGiraffes
Direct link to a PDF:

[http://dl.dropbox.com/u/578454/3932344-40-Sleep-Hacks-The-
Ge...](http://dl.dropbox.com/u/578454/3932344-40-Sleep-Hacks-The-Geeks-Guide-
to-Optimizing-Sleep.pdf)

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
I see the title has now been re-written. It used to be more descriptive, and
point out that this was a non-scribd link. Now it's been trimmed simply to say
it's about sleep hack, and not mentioning the non-scribd aspect.

I find that leaves a slightly bad taste in my mouth. I wish it hadn't been
done, but I guess I can understand why.

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cturner
Hurrah! Thank you fellow scribd-loather. I flagged the other article out of
disgust but was annoyed as the topic interests me.

~~~
mambodog
I wouldn't mind just going to the Scribd page and clicking the green
'download' button if they would just let me have the file without extracting
my personal details (facebook connect).

~~~
seancron
That's why I use Bugmenot: <http://www.bugmenot.com/view/scribd.com>

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RiderOfGiraffes
This submission - <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1953615> \- is of a
document about getting better sleep, and taking control of your sleeping
patterns. It's also hosted by scribd.

In the discussion a link was provided to a non-scribd version, so here it is.
It's a 1.8MB ZIP of a PDF.

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david_shaw
Not trying to give a personal plug (well, maybe a little bit), but I wrote a
bed time calculator that might count as a pretty cool 'sleep hack'.

The idea is that it counts backwards in sleep cycles from the time your alarm
has to go off so that you wake up during a light phase of sleep. Waking up in
light sleep (vs deep sleep) will let you wake up feeling more awake, alert and
refreshed.

If you're interested, the URL is <http://sleepyti.me>

I'd love to hear any comments or suggestions about the page, so if you have
any feel free to let me know!

~~~
jonhendry
The flaw there is that it's often hard to control when you fall asleep.

There's a watch on the market that monitors your movements in order to spot
when you're lightly sleeping. You can set an alarm, and a window of time
before that alarm. If, during that window of time, the watch detects you
moving, it'll go off then. Otherwise, it'll go off at the specified time even
if you're deep asleep.

~~~
david_shaw
I believe that there's also an iPhone application that will use the
accelerometer to figure out when you're moving the most during the time frame
in which you're supposed to wake up. The increased movement implies lighter
sleep, and that will trigger the alarm to wake up.

The idea with <http://sleepyti.me> is basically to emulate this without the
need for external hardware. I'm in the same boat as you--that is, I have
trouble actually falling asleep sometimes.

I originally had 'time to fall asleep' option that would allow the user to
specify how long it usually took to fall asleep. Unfortunately, no one really
ever used it. It's a lot easier to say "the average human takes fourteen
minutes to fall asleep," than to try to calculate that in beforehand.

My advice is to give yourself a half hour or so to fall asleep. If it's been
longer than that and you're still awake, get up, walk around, go back to bed
in 15 minutes (and recalculate from sleepyti.me!). Research says that laying
in bed longer than a half hour while awake will actually make insomnia worse.
If you're sitting in bed for over a half an hour every night, you might
consider talking to a doctor about sleep aids. It helps me sleep better just
_to know_ that I could take an Ambien if I need to.

------
fragmede
Surely I'm not the only person who thinks a PDF inside a ZIP is _worse_ than
Scribd.

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
I'm sorry, clearly I should've done even more work for you so you wouldn't
have to do anything. Now I have, or at least, I spent two minutes looking
thorugh the existing thread to find the link already there. So here, just for
you, a direct link to a PDF that you can view online and without any extra
work:

[http://dl.dropbox.com/u/578454/3932344-40-Sleep-Hacks-The-
Ge...](http://dl.dropbox.com/u/578454/3932344-40-Sleep-Hacks-The-Geeks-Guide-
to-Optimizing-Sleep.pdf)

~~~
duck
I have to ask though... why submit this again to HN when all of these other
download methods were linked on the other thread already?

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1953637>

These two threads basically show what I have always said... PDFs are wrong for
the web (and any 'tool' that displays them).

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
In short, because the other submission has a link to the scribd site, and the
direct links were buried. But submitting this separately I gave people a
chance to decide whether they want to access the direct version(s), or the
scribd one.

Ideally a site that eventually replaces HN, or an update to HN, will have a
single location where similar submissions can congregate, and then we get a
single discussion thread. In this case we could then have put the direct links
as alternative sources, and retained a single discussion location.

But we don't have that, so I provided an alternative source that was close to
the surface, instead of buried in a thread.

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mise
I feel sorry for <http://www.sleepwarrior.com/> that their site is in
"maintenance mode".

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ashconnor
Am I the only one who thinks you shouldn't "hack" your sleep. The human body
isn't a computer or a program and shouldn't be treated as such.

~~~
TallGuyShort
I disagree - the more we understand the underlying mechanisms of our body, the
better we can get it to perform. It's a bit like saying changing your diet
because you know what's bad for you is messing with nature.

~~~
ashconnor
That's why I'll be taking advice from my doctor and not an ebook.

~~~
tree_of_item
Suppose the author aggregated information from many doctors and wrote it down
an ebook?

And what makes your doctor the authority on sleep? They inevitably get their
information from scientific studies not conducted by themselves, and the
author of an ebook can do the exact same thing.

There's no reason to disparage the ebook just because it doesn't look like the
conventional form of authority.

~~~
ashconnor
>Suppose the author aggregated information from many doctors and wrote it down
an ebook?

Then it should cite the sources.

~~~
jexe
It does, actually. Most - not all - of the "hacks" are cited and linked to
doctors, studies, the American Nutritional Association, etc.

A few don't lead anywhere, guess that's a symptom of linking out of a two year
old ebook?

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astroguy
Thank you. I have a feeling that my brain works best during nights, but I have
to start tuning to overcome that feeling.

~~~
troutwine
It's worth noting that some humans are shifted into the evening. Morning-
persons and night-owls seem to have held different advantages to our species
once we domesticated dogs. Morning folks catch the first rays of light for the
day's labor, night folks tend the watch fires and keep intruders away while
the bulk of the humans sleep.

~~~
brass_cannon
That's an interesting idea. Is there any additional reading related to this?

~~~
troutwine
Of course. The following Wikipedia article has several references:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronotype> It is also worthwhile to do a Google
Scholar search with the query "evolution eveningness".

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stefanve
Thank you :)

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goldenthunder
modafinil = sleep hax.

