Was just listening to the superhumanradio podcast last night and he was saying that he read a study where the subjects took ambien only 18 times in one year, and their chances of getting cancer dramatically increased for the next 2 years. Sedation is not sleep, unfortunately. As a nurse, I used to think the 2 worst medications you can take is stomach acid reducing medications and cholesterol lowering medications, but I think any medication that’s taken before bed to induce sedation, instead of letting your body go through the natural sleep cycles, has to be worse for overall health. Sleep will always be the #1 factor in regards to health, longevity and disease prevention. Anytime you mess with that, like in the case of taking sleep medications, you’re just asking to die early, and most likely due to an extremely preventable chronic disease.
Was just listening to the superhumanradio podcast last night and he was saying that he read a study where the subjects took ambien only 18 times in one year, and their chances of getting cancer dramatically increased for the next 2 years. Sedation is not sleep, unfortunately. As a nurse, I used to think the 2 worst medications you can take is stomach acid reducing medications and cholesterol lowering medications, but I think any medication that’s taken before bed to induce sedation, instead of letting your body go through the natural sleep cycles, has to be worse for overall health. Sleep will always be the #1 factor in regards to health, longevity and disease prevention. Anytime you mess with that, like in the case of taking sleep medications, you’re just asking to die early, and most likely due to an extremely preventable chronic disease.
I took ambien for a couple weeks. It helped a little, but I didn't feel very good on it. Had awful headaches the next day and definitely did not feel rested. It's a drug that I would only ever consider recommending if absolutely everything else didn't work.
Switched to 1mg, then 3mg melatonin and got same results as ambien without the headaches. Went to 6mg melatonin and started sleeping 7 hours. I'm now on 5mg (2.5mg instant, 2.5mg time release) and I sleep at least 7 hours a night.
I know there's a study that shows something like 0.3mg of melatonin is as effective as more, but that definitely didn't work for me. My doctor actually wants me on 10mg of melatonin for the antioxidant and anti-cancer benefits.
Everyone wants a pill
Lol yeah I have a tendency to go for the quickest, easiest solution. I wish that good sleep habits would work for me. I will say the one thing I haven’t tried yet is a sleep study which I plan to get once i can get into a sleep clinic.
I have recently had success with 5 mg melatonin. This kind of seems to be a must for me at this point. I have a pineal cyst, which essentially impedes the pineal gland from releasing melatonin effectively.
Other than that, I’ll say exercise, meditation, turning electronics off, and getting into bed to read about an hour before I go to sleep has been the most helpful thing.
Sometimes a pill is the only option after you've exhausted all others.
I would honestly prefer to not have to take a pill for the rest of my life. Unfortunately, it looks like if I want to take the other "pill" (testosterone cypionate), then I might have to take melatonin to be able to sleep.
My teenage son had a horrible time getting to sleep until 2am every day. He plays video games until 11pm and then tries to go to bed. Rolls around for 3 hours or so and finally falls asleep.
I got him a pair of amber blue blocking glasses and had him wear them at 4pm whenever he games/uses computer/watches a screen. I also got a SAD light, woke him up at 7am, made him sit in front of it for 15 minutes reading/eating.
In just 2 days he was falling asleep at 11pm and waking up at 7am feeling great. After a week he started falling asleep at 10:30pm.
I strongly recommend using blue blocking glasses to anyone that has trouble falling asleep. I also suggest trying a SAD light for anyone that is trying to shift when they fall asleep and when they wake up.
Awesome story. People don’t realize that if you don’t wear blue blocking glasses, your body thinks it’s morning time all the way up until you go to sleep. So of course it’s not going to produce the melatonin needed if it thinks it’s morning time. And people also don’t realize how important it is to get light in your eyes when you wake up. Doing that in the morning literally dictates how much melatonin you will produce before bed. The other thing that I would recommend is to take magnesium before bed. It’s the number one sleep aid that I’ve found. That and very low dose melatonin. 0.3 or 0.5mg.
Definitely. Blublox.com. I have no affiliation with them. Just listened to a few podcasts that interviewed the owner, and they’re by far the best out there. There might be others that are similar, but it would be very hard to find better ones. You need glasses that not only block blue light, but green as well. Just wait for them to have a 20% off sale. They have them pretty frequently. Or see if you can find a coupon code for around 15-20% off.
DragonBits
Well-Known Member
It seems to ,me that rather than use the SAD light, you can use your phone/tablet/computer and have the same exact effect?
Is that correct?
I think that in part, you did Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) to reprogram your son's sleep habits.
Two specific behavioral therapies, which are often included as part of CBT, are stimulus control therapy and sleep restriction therapy. Stimulus control is based on the belief that insomnia may be the result of maladaptive classical conditioning (Bootzin & Nicassio 1978). Patients are instructed to eliminate all in-bed activities other than sleep, such as reading and television watching. If they are not able to fall asleep within 20 minutes, they are instructed to get out of bed until they feel sufficiently sleepy, when they can return to bed and attempt to again fall asleep. If they are not able to fall asleep within 20 minutes, the pattern of getting out of bed until sleepy repeats itself. This therapy tries to break the association between the bed and wakefulness.
Sleep restriction therapy limits the time spent in bed to about fifteen minutes beyond the duration of time spent asleep at night (Spielman, Saskin, & Thorpy 1987). As sleep efficiency improves, the amount of time spent in bed gradually increases.
Normal and Abnormal Sleep in the Elderly
What works for your teenage son might not work as well for those of us over 65.
My problem isn't falling asleep, it's more getting up often, or waking up at 3:00 am and not being able to fall asleep again. This is pretty typical of many people over 60. Sometimes I can sleep 7-8 hours, but it's not most of the time.
I also speculate that smart watches and such devices that inform us about how much sleep light sleep/deep sleep/rem sleep we got can make us worried that we don't get enough sleep even when we would feel fine if we didn't know so much about the details of how we sleep.
Looking at a phone in the morning wouldn’t work. I’ve actually heard on a podcast that it can do the opposite. It can result in ruining your melatonin for the night by looking at it first thing in the morning. I forget why. But to receive the benefits of looking at light in the morning it has to be certain wavelengths, and it has to be a certain amount of lux. So basically the sun would be the best options obviously, but I’m pretty sure the SAD lights are setup with similar wavelengths, and enough lux mimic the sun.
I don’t know if I participated here but my issue with sleeping was because of low ferritin I did many blood test only donated once ferritin went way down, couldn’t sleep at night, after supplementing with iron (still do) I am 90% back to normal (keeping the 10% to see how do I feel when I reach ferritin normal range )
I got the $35 spectra479 brand ones on Amazon for my son and they worked great. Just make sure they block 100% of the blue light and not some partial percentage.
Oh I totally agree this won't work for everyone. I was only suggesting the blue blocking glasses and SAD light for people that have trouble getting to sleep or that can't get to sleep until really late, but once asleep they sleep great.
When I started TRT I had bad insomnia and I never had insomnia before in my life. My problem was I couldn't get to sleep and I couldn't stay asleep. There are lots of potential causes for this type of insomnia. M.J. mentioned low ferritin as one of them.
The blue blocking glasses and SAD light did not solve my insomnia. I ran lots of labs and tried lots of other things to solve my insomnia (diet change, magnesium glycinate, tryptophan, GABA, L-Theanine, melatonin, daily multivitamin). At the end of the day, the diet change along with 6mg melatonin (now 5mg melatonin) worked for me.
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DragonBits
Well-Known Member
Windows 10 has an automatic filter for blue light that does on when you schedule it, so do many smartphones. Does anyone think that is enough?
The first couple of weeks after an Nebido injection, my sleep really goes to hell. I assume it's the much higher e2 than normal.
I have tried all those things as well. tryptophan seens to have a positive effect, but not a big effect, GABA is short term, magnesium I take for muscle cramps, doesn't seem help, melatonin works to get me to sleep but does nothing for staying asleep, and if I am agitated waking up more melatonin is like candy, no effect at all. ER melatonin isn't effective at staying asleep.
Often eating when waking up works, but that plays hell with blood glucose and weight gain.
Diet and progesterone seems the most effective, though I am still not sure if progesterone messes with daytime wakefulness or other hormones like E2.
I don't know how much of the blue light you can filter using the night light settings. The amber glasses I bought my son filter 98%. I use the night light setting on my PC along with blue blocking warby parker glasses (only block like 50%). But as I said in my last post, this wasn't really my problem with my insomnia.
I talked to 4 different TRT docs after I experienced insomnia from TRT. One of them said that 30% of their patients experienced insomnia, heart racing, anxiety from once weekly 200mg cypionate injections. They give all their patients an AI along with their injections and now none of their patients have these symptoms. So it could be the E2, but from my reading on the forums it seems like it's more complex than that as there are lots of people with these symptoms that are on an AI.
Are you eating enough? For me I was not eating enough and eating a big breakfast with at least 30g protein really helped stabilize my blood sugar. That along with eating every 4-5 hours and ditching most carbs.
For my insomnia I am pretty sure it was adrenaline that was waking me up. When you don't eat enough your body prioritizes food over sleep and pumps adrenaline to wake you up to find some food. Another sign of this is that you have to get up to pee during the night. Often multiple times.
I don't know if the blue blocking glasses and SAD light will help you as all they do is restore your body's own melatonin production schedule. If you've tried taking 5mg-10mg of melatonin and still can't sleep then your body's natural melatonin probably won't work either. It might though as you would have higher melatonin throughout the night. External melatonin leaves the body pretty quickly. You might wanna try the half instant, half time release melatonin. Works great for me.
Filters are good, but if you’re exposed to any other form of artificial light it defeats the purpose. So if you can avoid turning on any lights in your house 2-4 hours before bed, it is better than nothing, but that’s very hard to do. Plus, a lot of the filters don’t block any of the green spectrum, which is just as suppressive to your melatonin production as blue light. So, imo, just getting a quality pair of blue/ green blocking glasses is the easiest and most effective solution.
I know this is an older thread, but I rotated between keto and carnivore while doing IF and work full-time nights and my protocol for difficult nights is: 75mg Benadryl, 9mg melatonin, 2 Valerian root and that usually does the trick quite successfully. I occasionally throw in 50mg of trazadone as needed and cycle ZMA as well. I know the anticholinergics, like Benadryl are allegedly linked to dementia long- term so I usually only use Benadryl sparingly. Just my .02
That’s what I was thinking! Lol
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