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.

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.

I had lunch with Lisa Goldberg, an adjunct professor in the Statistics Department at Berkeley. Her application area is finance. She said that people in finance have at least as much contempt for academics as academics do for people in finance. Thorstein Veblen, of course, wrote about the latter — people looking down on useful work — but not the former. Perhaps his views were skewed by being an academic himself. I blogged earlier about how students in each major at a San Francisco art school look down on the students in some other major.

Lisa also said she sleeps well. I was surprised — hardly anyone says that. It turns out she exercises heavily. She swims or runs seven days a week and when she swims, she swims 2000 meters. As a former swimmer, I know that’s a lot. When I exercised, there was no clear effect on my sleep, apart from falling asleep faster. I still woke up too early in the morning. Maybe I wasn’t exercising enough. Anyway, it’s one little data point supporting my conclusions from standing on one leg.

Two more people have gotten results similar to mine. From a comment on an earlier post:

I’ve been doing these exercises - standing on one leg - and it’s helped my sleep immensely. About a year ago, I went through a pretty traumatic experience that disrupted my sleep patterns. The end result was that I couldn’t sleep for longer than 3 or 4 hours at night without waking up. For several months, the lack of sleep was like living in a nightmare, and prescription drugs just made the problem worse. I finally decided to go off medication all together and change my attitude, which worked wonders - I could get back to sleep after I woke up - but I’d still only sleep in 4 hour chunks.

About a month ago, I began doing these exercises, and now I’m sleeping 6 to 7 hours at a time. It’s amazing; and on the days I don’t do them, I don’t sleep well at all.

It’s amazing how easy they are to do - if I find myself standing in line, meeting friends for a happy hour, or even watching tv, I’ll do them.

Last night I told a friend to do them while he was at a happy hour, and this morning, he said he slept “like a log.”

As Pale Fire says:

If on some nameless island Captain Schmidt
Sees a new animal and captures it,
And if, a little later, Captain Smith
Brings back a skin, that island is no myth.

I have started to measure my sleep with a SleepTracker so I will have another way to measure the effects, in addition to (a) how rested I feel when I awake and (b) how long I sleep.

More The SleepTracker — my second, the first didn’t work — worked correctly for the first three nights but failed on the fourth.

As far as I know, I was the first person to have a treadmill desk. I wanted to be able to stand more easily. I had found that if I stand a lot I sleep better. I reasoned it might be easier to stand a long time if you are walking than if you are standing still.

Treadmill desks are now becoming mildly popular, the New York Times reports. I had nothing to do with this. They were popularized by James Levine, a Mayo Clinic endocrinologist, who believes that calorie burning is a good way to lose weight. I used my treadmill desk for a few years. There were two big problems: 1. The noise bothered my neighbors. The Times article says these desks tend to be placed in common areas, where that would be less of a problem. 2. It was tiring. After one or two years I mainly stood on it and rarely walked on it. Finally I replaced it with a standing-height desk.

The article describes non-weight-loss benefits: Walking makes it easier to concentrate.

“I thought it was ridiculous until I tried it,” said Ms. Krivosha, 49, a partner in the law firm of Maslon Edelman Borman & Brand.

Ms. Krivosha said it is tempting to become distracted during conference calls, but when she is exercising, she listens more intently.

“Walking just takes care of the A.D.D. part,” she said.

Allen Neuringer, a professor of mine at Reed College, found that movement helped him learn. I think an urge to be active builds up during inactivity just as thirst builds up when we don’t drink. Being able to be active while you work gets rid of that distraction — and no doubt is healthier in other ways than sitting all day. I would like to be able to use a computer while I am free to move around the room (or larger spaces) and move my arms, not just walk forward with my hands on the keyboard. I’d like to be able to write this blog post while strolling through my neighborhood, for example.

Thanks to Marian Lizzi.