I found zopiclone to be addictive. You have the most amazing sleep for the first few days when you take it. Then afterwards when you stop taking it, you get the absolute worst sleep: barely hitting REM, constantly waking up, difficulty falling asleep.

I think: diphenhydramine or melatonin might be a safer bet for some people. Never take it more than a few days in a row.

> Never take it more than a few days in a row.

Exactly.

Literally any sleep substance taken regularly can be addictive, either physically or psychologically. Even melatonin, which is what your body produces will get less and less effective.

As an aside, melatonin is often sold at dosages insanely higher than recommended. Studied have shown that less than a mg, even low as 0.1mg is the optimal dose for many people, but you can easily find 1, 3, 10mg dosages, which is insane. I was in hong kong, the lowest dosage I could find on shelves was 3mg - way too much.

What is wrong with doctors these days :( There are a thousand natural tricks to helping get back on a regular sleep schedule without prescribing an addictive drug that actually breaks your sleep in the long run. (See: Ambien)

> What is wrong with doctors these days :(

Disclaimer: I'm a doctor.

It may be different where you are from, but patients are usually the ones who want a script for something and not to be told to put away their devices, stay away from coffee and alcohol, etc.

Also, there's a difference between addiction and becoming dependent on taking a substance, which seems to be a common misunderstanding in this thread.

Agreeing here. My SO is a medical practitioner, and some of the stories I hear are just crazy. Folks who can't sleep and come in wanting meds, but after digging into their history you find they are drinking four liters of soda, two extra-large (and extra-sugary) lattes, and a pack of cigarettes every day. And on their phone until 11pm.

The more I hear about healthcare from the inside, the more I realize it's a game of "work on the worst problem, ignore the rest". There's limited time in patient visits, and patients have limited motivation, so you really have to prioritize what to fix. If you tell the patient to fix all the things, the will fix none of them.

Worse, patient education is hard work. Patients don't listen, ignore advice, stop lifestyle changes as soon as it gets hard. So you focus on one or two of the worst offenders; you convince them cigs are going to put them in an early grave and they should cut back to half a pack a day. Maybe drop the soda to two liters a day. The rest of their problems you have to ignore until later. That's often when meds come into play because they can help bridge the gap while you work on their lifestyle issues.

Oh, and all of that happens in 15 minute visits every other month.

There are certainly bad doctors out there over-prescribing all sorts of things, but from what I've seen, it's more a matter of prioritizing what to spend your precious 15 minutes on and going from there. Doctors and other medical professionals are in an impossible situation most of the time.

Edit: for clarity, this is an American healthcare perspective.

Amazingly, despite the fact that good diet and exercise are by far the best things you can do to treat type 2 diabetes, it's actually in the guidelines in Australia to commence metformin from the beginning. The reason being that studies have shown that the number of patients who actually do make long-term changes to their diet and exercise routines is excruciatingly small. So small, that it's best just to assume they won't actually do it, so just commence metformin (while still giving the advice, of course). At least this way the 95% (I dunno what the actual number is) of patients who won't change will be getting some BSL reduction in the meantime.

Also because metformin (last I heard) is considered exceedingly safe and almost universally beneficial--so much so that some recommend prescribing it to everyone over a certain age.

I don't thing the crisis we're in right now should be blamed on patients; they might want a script, but that doesn't mean its in their interest.

> I don't thing the crisis we're in right now should be blamed on patients; they might want a script, but that doesn't mean its in their interest.

I'm guessing you're American since you're assuming everywhere has the same crisis you do. From what I've read here (on Hacker News), you have plenty of systemic problems. I doubt blaming doctors is going to be the most useful course of action. But then, I don't really know. Perhaps all doctors in your country deliberately do things that are against patients' best-interests, and would continue to do so if patients actually wanted the best thing for them. Do your doctors really not suggest good diet and exercise as treatments for type 2 diabetes? I'd be very surprised if they don't.

Edit for clarification.

Not OP, but one thing I've always found absurd about our medical practice is doctors recommending things like whole wheat pasta for type 2 diabetes. Really? Plate of carbs? Many health systems here still have this kind of stuff in their official guidelines.

I've never seen that in a guideline or heard a doctor recommend that, but I agree it's strange. But it makes sense to me if it's a case of "replace your endosperm-only pasta with whole-wheat pasta". It's not practical to tell someone with T2DM they can never eat pasta ever again.

It's far more important to look at the diet overall than to agonise over the occasional pasta meal.

Some people also have luck with Magnesium L-Threonate

Yep, Magnesium works for me big time. I take a powdered form which seems a lot more effective than pills. Still wake up in the middle of the night sometimes but can get back to sleep easily without my brain switching into overdrive.

Melatonin definitely knocked me out, but I woke up groggy feeling like I hadn't slept at all

Do you take L-threonate or other versions? Have you tried stopping it - did things get worse than before you started?

Have you been taking it? What has been your experience?

If you can, get a membership at a local gym. After a few weeks visiting a gym I slept like a baby.

It has opposite effect on me - after a strenuous strength training session I usually can't sleep well, often being in a half-zombie state until 3am then having some shallow sleep until morning.

Maybe the problem is that you exercise too late. I exercise at 6am.

At around noon. And till failure.

Look up "overtraining". You are putting too much stress on your body and possibly your central nervous system.

Why do you train to failure? Very few training programs that I have seen encourage lifters to regularly train to failure. I think westside barbell's program may, but that is for people competing in powerlifting.

Also, it's my understanding that when most people talk about exercising for better sleep they are specifically talking about low intensity steady state cardio exercise.

I am one of those "lucky" ones that have to train extremely hard to see minimal gains. That means Tabata sprints till (almost) vomiting, 3xHIIT in a row, lifting long sets till failure etc. Nothing else works. Look it up, I am not alone. I am very tall, so it is compounded with much stronger lever effects, higher risks of injury if anything in the movement is misaligned, higher risk of splitting/cutting tendons etc. Also requiring Prussian discipline to see any gains and overriding feelings to push forward.

Every person I have met who said they work hard for minimal gains was either not working as hard as they thought or not eating enough. I was one of those people until I started tracking food and workouts.

I tried a lot of different things, went through paleo, high-protein, liquid vegan, standard, high-carb, carb-waves etc. You can't apply your limited experience to everyone else; it's like when I talk to a regularly-sized coach and they just don't get the issues very tall persons have to cope with and most of their advice is either misguided or outright dangerous (but would work wonderfully for their type of person).

You may have tried it/added it in, but a single point of anecdata if I may - try adding in rowing. It's basically squatting a lot if you think about the form used.

You describe almost exactly what I face in training and I've seen substantial improvements in conditioning by adding rowing to my workouts. I actually do 45 minutes at around 19 strokes per minute at a 500m split of (average) 1:45. More recently I've moved to doing 1000 strokes per workout. That's at about 275-325 watts per stroke. I use an adjustable water rower with heart rate around 150-170 average. I get around 15-16km per workout.

The action is essentially resistive aerobic training, not unlike squatting as I mentioned. I can't say it'll work for you but I can say it's helped me find a form of aerobic exercise that maintains strength and conditioning.

Your height will give you a mechanical advantage but a water rower will give a non-linear resistive load so you can adjust it to give you the desired heart rate/wattage to sustain difficult training throughout the workout period.

Rowers are considered to be the absolute top of the pyramid amongst athletes in terms of balancing power/vo2 max/aerobic capacity etc etc.

Thanks for the idea! I've tried rowing very rarely as a rowing machine wasn't a standard piece in gyms I usually went to; I'll try to find one that has it and then try it for ~3 months following your advice!

Based on the diets you listed, you missed my point completely. If you are not getting any gains, you are not eating enough and/or not lifting heavy enough. Track your food. I thought I ate a lot and when I tracked it was clear I was not. I had to set alarms through the day to tell me to snack on the jars on PB I kept at my desk. I was almost never hungry, ate 2 dinners, etc... And it worked. I'm 6'1" (not very tall) and went from a skinny fat 165 to a lean 205.

Lifting heavy is the other part. Everyones biomechanics are different, so you need to adjust to fit your own, but being tall is not something unique. There are plenty of tall athletes who put on lots of lean muscle.

Non of those things are helpful for gaining strength or building muscle. Do a basic barbell program and eat 6000 calories every single day and I guarantee you that you will see results.

I am 6’4 and thought it was impossible for me to gain muscle weight. Turns out I just wasn’t eating enough. Starting Strength + gallon of milk a day, and I have been making really good progress. Eating and sleeping are parts of the difficulty when training.

The most important thing to do is to track your calories. If you haven't done that yet try it for a month and see what happens. Worthwhile experiment.

Your problem is all the anaerobic-lactic work. Anaerobic-lactic training leads to quick gain over the short-term, but after 3-4 weeks you plateau and from then on you burn out if you keep doing that (This is why most competition preparation programs for endurance athletes only have anaerobic work in the last few weeks before the event). [0]

If you don't have a competition coming up (or if you are just training for health), then a mix between aerobic and anaerobic-alactic (strength, explosiveness) is much better.

Check my website [1] for the training methods that I usually recommend. For a non-athlete or someone in off-season I would stick to cardiac output, threshold training 1x per week and strength training.

You will see much better results and you will sleep better if you change your training approach. Hope that helps :)

[0] See Arthur Lydiard's work

[1] https://fit4bjj.com/

Sidenote: I would recommend actually reading the tabata study. You can see that they also plateau'd after a few weeks (but the study duration was not long enough to see the long-term effects).

Thanks for the pointers! I'll definitely look into what you wrote!

After working out for many years I have come to accept that squeezing out single digit percentage gains is not worth the physical and mental effort required, and that maintenance is sufficiently satisfying. My goals have shifted from bulking up to staying fit. It's one less thing to worry about.

None of this precludes incorporating a significant cardio component, which tends to help with sleep.

Maybe try taking it easy?

How late are you working out? I try to avoid exercise after 2 hours before bed time otherwise I have too my energy to fall asleep on time.

If you hit the gym too close to bedtime, that's not super surprising. It also may take time for your body to adapt to the workouts. I hope this isn't stopping you from strength training at all — from what I've read, it's almost a non-negotiable dimension of health and wellbeing.

I am in a pretty advanced stage of training, so I don't think it's an adaptation problem. I guess some people are like me, some aren't (shrug).

To be fair, that's how many babies actually sleep.

I assume any cardio exercise will do. No gym membership required.

Just to add, you can do strength training just fine without a gym membership, and exercise every muscle group. There is an endless sea of web content to teach weightless workouts.

Simple examples..

Back: pullups. Too easy? Use one arm.

Chest: pushups. Too easy? Vary your arms position, or just use one arm.

Legs: squats. Too easy? Use one leg.

Abs: sit ups. Too easy? Hold something heavy against your chest. Too easy? Hold something heavier.

It's not rocket science :) Motivation is the only ingredient you need for all the exercise you can tolerate.

Motivation and discipline. I have found adding it to a list helps the discipline part for me since I'm OCD and have to finish all the lists! :)

Thanks for the recommendation, but is it possible to do something for the back without a bar to do the pullups? I dont have a bar and I cant install one on the apartment I rent. Thanks!

There are pull-up bars that use only friction and leverage, that don't require any drilling to install. Here's an example: https://www.amazon.com/Iron-Gym-Total-Upper-Workout/dp/B001E...

They're a little low and only support <250lbs, but otherwise they are perfectly fine for the average home workout.

If your doors are sturdy, make a knot in a towel, hang it over the door and close it. Use that to do pullups. I used to do this a lot during traveling.

You can also do inverted rows under a table by holding on to an edge (not comfortable, but works).

You could invest into a dumbbell and/or resistance bands and do row variations. Or a TRX for inverted rows.

Or go to a park or anywhere else where you can hang onto to do your pullups.

Abs: sit ups. Too easy? Hold something heavy against your chest. Too easy? Hold something heavier.

Fault! This is adding weight. Better luck next time. :)

Hanging leg raises are what you're looking for. Start with bent leg, then straight leg, then toes to bar etc.

Pilates (wothout reformer) offers harder ab exercises without external weights

For me, weight lifting improves my sleep far more than cardio.

I have the same experience, provided it's early in the day. However, swimming a couple of km does it for me too, maybe even better!

Do you go to the gym at night before bed, or in the morning?

Both actually work in improving the quality of your sleep and whether you should exercise in the morning or in the evening depends on your chronotype. However if you decide to exercise in the evening you should aim to be done with it at least 2 hours before your normal bedtime.

When I work out in the morning I sleep like a rock and can fall asleep as early in the evening as I would like.

When I work out at night I usually feel energized afterwards and tend to stay up later.

I did it in the morning, at 6am. The reason why "did" is because I now go to a swimming pool instead.

so it was kind of implied, but i want to ask explicitly - those 2.5 extra hours of sleep had a noticeable impact in your days? If you had to qualify the experience beyond 'just being more alert,' how would you do so?

Thanks!

Unfortunately sleeping pills are rarely sustainable, good luck.

When I was prescribed them before, I used them purely to reset the time I go to bed to a reasonable hour. And never more than 2/3 days in a row.

I only used them for the first 2 nights when I returned and haven't since. Doctor did warn they are addictive.