Seth’s blog

A few days ago I spoke on the phone to someone who’d written me that one-legged standing improved his sleep. I mentioned this replication earlier but the new details are interesting.

He is a 35-year-old man with an office job. He now works in the Washington, D.C. area. Until about a year ago, his sleep was fine. He would sleep 7-7.5 hours no matter when he went to bed.

About a year ago he went through a tough time with a lot of stress and anxiety. After that he started waking up after only 6 hours of sleep. He’d wake up early in the morning, 3 or 4 am, still tired but unable to fall back asleep. This is exactly the problem I had when I started to self-experiment to try to sleep better.

He went to a doctor for help. (I considered seeing a doctor.)  The doctor prescribed:

1. Ambien. It worked for 1 or 2 nights.

2. Lunesta. Like Ambien, it worked for only the first few nights.

After using these two drugs, the problem got worse. Now he awoke after only 4 hours of sleep. He tried non-prescription drugs:

3. Melatonin. It made him foggy during the day.

4. Tylenol PM. It worked okay, but he would still wake up after 6 hours.

Then he decided he didn’t want to take pills of any sort — even if they worked, he’d have to take them for the rest of his life. (This is why I didn’t go to a doctor and never tried pills.) He tried conventional alternative treatments:

5. Changed his attitude about the problem. Although he was waking up very early, he wasn’t tired during the day. He had four extra hours. After this change in attitude, he began to fall back asleep a few hours after waking up. Gradually the amount of time he was awake in the middle of the night got shorter.

6. He has cold feet. He can’t fall asleep when his feet are cold. He read somewhere that if you imagine your feet are warm, they will warm up. This gave him an idea. What if he imagined going into an MRI-like machine that induces sleep? He started doing this. When he’d wake up at 2 a.m., he’d imagine himself going into this machine. This enabled him to fall back asleep with a short latency.

In August he read my posts about this and started one-legged standing, often while watching TV. He does it without stretching the other foot: puts one foot on top of the other or behind the other. He might or might not balance. Usually stands on a pillow. He does it until it hurts, twice for each leg. In the beginning it took only 5-10 minutes but now it has gotten much longer and he has started doing other things, such as wearing a backpack with books, to shorten the time.

From my point of view the main points are these: 1. He had tried several other treatments. Some were awful, some were okay, but none sustainably solved the problem. Not only did one-legged standing help, it apparently helped more than six other plausible treatments, including two powerful and expensive drugs. 2. What he did differed from what I did — verbal descriptions are always inexact and omit a lot — but still worked well right away.

Directory.

According to a new study,

Fewer than 20% of cancer trial results are published in peer-review journals. . . Industry-sponsored trials only achieve publication one time in 20.

A new website hopes to increase visibility of clinical trials. Publication bias is one reason a method that allows you to see for yourself — self-experimentation — has value.

The study.

My friend Carl Willat has the following suggestion:

To make it easier to consume flaxseed oil, put it on toast. About one tablespoon of flaxseed oil per slice of bread. Eat nose-clipped.

I tried it. Flaxseed on toast, noseclipped, is delicious. It tastes just like toast with butter.

You probably know that plastics were first used for toys. You probably don’t know that the first metals were used by artists, as far as archeologists can determine. That’s material science, what about non-material science? Here’s Tyler Cowen:

I’ve been thinking of all those old puzzles where a bunch of guys enter the room and only so many of them have smudges on their foreheads and you have to find the algorithm to reveal that information.

The problem is to separate good banks from bad banks, so that good banks can continue business. A big reason I started self-experimentation was Martin Gardner’s Mathematical Games column in Scientific American. I could sometimes solve Gardner’s made-up puzzles, which gave me confidence when a non-made-up puzzle — waking up too early — came along.

More When I pointed this post out to Tyler, he replied, “Exactly what I was thinking in fact, when I wrote that…I even almost mentioned Martin Gardner.”

Yesterday I went to San Francisco early in the morning.  Because of my discovery about standing and sleep, I had slept very well. In Berkeley, it looked like morning: empty streets, angle of light. I felt jet-lagged: I should have been tired but I wasn’t. On BART, the same mismatch: Everyone looked tired but I was wide awake.

It is taking longer and longer to get enough one-legged standing to generate  great sleep. Here’s a graph of how long I’ve been standing: Each point is a different bout of one-legged standing. Most of the points are from bouts where the standing leg was straight or bent (usually straight) but a few of them (”bent leg”) are from bouts where the standing leg was bent the whole time. Most days have two bouts: 1. On the left leg until I get tired. 2. On the right leg until i get tired. I’m pretty sure there’s no effect until it becomes difficult — until the muscles are so stressed that they send out a grow signal. The whole thing is pleasant because I watch TV or a movie at the same time but, as the graph shows, it has become seriously time-consuming.

So I have tested keeping the standing leg always bent. I get tired much sooner (2 minutes versus 20 minutes) but the effect is not quite as strong. Probably because fewer muscles are involved — you use more muscles when you stand on one leg in any possible way than if you stand on one leg in only one way.

I assume there’s a steady-state solution. The more muscle you have the more you lose each day. (Just as the theory behind the Shangri-La Diet assumes that the higher your set point, the fast it falls.) Eventually I should have enough muscle and will lose enough in one day so the exercise needed to merely replenish it will be enough to produce great sleep.