Just to confirm, because this is a surprising result: disabling the blue light filter on your screens improves your sleep?

That is a tough question. Activity, it seems, has a habit of begetting activity. Such that the answer may not be, "you need better sleeping habits," but it could be more that, "you need better activity habits."

Noticing things is also a dangerous place to be in. A lot of what your body does while asleep is based on expectations as much as it is anything else. Learned expectations, to be specific. Most people know the "you wake up before the alarm goes off" idea. That is strong enough that it will work for changes in the alarm time.

What does that mean? It may be that your body learned a cue to start something for your sleep. So, for you, you now need to turn on your blue light filter; even if that may, in fact, not be actively doing anything.

Probably a lot of us, especially parents of small children.

I've also been struggling with sleep for the past five or six years, waking up in the middle of the night feeling strangely wired up. With a lot of trial and error I've been improving the quality of my sleep.

Three years ago I went to a sleep clinic because I noticed symptoms of sleep apnea and they were able to confirm it and prescribe a CPAP machine, for which I am grateful, but the overall experience was disappointing. When I explained during the follow up that I still was waking up at night feeling stressed they brushed me off and suggested some herbal remedy. It turns out that the pressure they had prescribed me was laughably off, which I only learned through trial and error for a period of two years until I found what works for me -- almost twice what they prescribed.

You mention some factors that I've also noticed having a big impact, like stress/work, walking outdoors (1hr minimum for me), stretching, foam rolling, early dinners, and only drinking one cup of coffee first thing in the morning. Another one that seems to have a weirdly strong impact is what I eat for dinner, with legumes/beans being by far the most beneficial -- maybe something to do with blood glucose during the night?

Doctors will often recommend exercise, but I find that these days even moderately strenuous exercise like riding a bicycle destroys my sleep quality for several days. There's something about it that appears to be too physiologically stressing, even though ten years ago I was a happy as a regular gymgoer.

this is surprising! Not that this would be easy to just do, but have you ever leaned into it for a while (like a month) and seen if that persists? I'm obviously not a doctor or anything -- I just wondered in reading that whether it may possibly be a change shock that would subside after a brief period at a higher activity level, resulting in the best of both worlds.

I had something similar like this. I think I was able to fix it. The theory is that your sleep is still poor, even though you sleep through the night. This is causing high cortisol levels during day time and higher resting heart rate. This is elevated further after doing moderate exrercise and takes a long time to get back to normal as your sleep isnt adequate. If your heart rate doesnt go down enough, then your sleep quality gets destroyed.

The solution, for me and I am guessing for you, is this: Stop the cycleing. First fix sleep. Track it using Wellue O2 Ring. If the scores are not good, the reconfigure CPAP - use sleepapnea reddit for inputs. Once sleep is sorted as per O2 Ring, then it might take a few months for you to recover. After that you can restart moderate exercise and things should be fine.

It did get better when I stopped cycling, as much as I loved it. I'm now walking instead and feeling much better. I intend to increase volume over time and once my VO2Max is back to my baseline then I may introduce cycling with an eye on going easy and eating enough before/during/after exercise.

Thanks for the advice, it is good to hear that it worked on other people.

I have thought that the blue light filter doesn't do so much, with a caveat. The laptop screen is much less bright, so it doesn't bother me. It seems like the blue light of a desk screen has a bigger effect. But I also think it is the brain activity of stimulus seeking on the screen itself that has a big effect on sleep. It's better to turn of screens entirely to wind down, or do something that actually helps you wind down for sleep.

How do you do that? The smartwatch may give some info, but what do you do with it that allows falling and staying asleep, while all kinds of random variables may affect the metrics?

Everyone's obviously different and your mileage may vary but at the end of the day you can drastically feel different by heavily modifying your diet and pushing past hunger 1 time/day.

I was routinely waking up in the middle of the night and unable to fall back asleep even on days I did not drink. Now I fall back asleep instantly.

I tried eliminating caffeine and practicing mindfulness before cutting out alcohol. I only stopped to be healthier, was pleasantly surprised when all my sleep issues went away. Have resumed my caffeine intake without any problems.

Alertness is also partly a function of resting metabolic rate, which is higher for those who exercise and/or have more muscle tissue.

Thanks to the tracker, I was able to determine that on nights I have just awful sleep, it correlated with my exercise days. Turns out that taking a pre-workout loaded with caffeine at 4PM is a terrible idea because caffeine can have a nearly 12 hour half-life. Oops. Ditched the pre-workout and my sleep improved significantly. No more insomnia and less time waking up in the middle of the night. I still have issues with REM at least half of the week unfortunately.

I finally got referred to a sleep study a few months ago and although it was for existing sleep apnea - which I've already been treating successfully with cpap/autopap for decades - it confirmed that I am indeed not going into REM. So it's not dementia (at least not yet), it's lack of REM sleep. It also revealed that my body is moving a lot during sleep, not good. And for the cherry on top, I recently started exhibiting behavior of REM sleep disorder where I am smacking/punching myself and my partner and yelling out in the middle of the night. Definitely not a good sign, but at least now we know sleep issues are at the heart of it. That Fitbit sleep tracking turned out to be very valuable after all.

N3, also known as deep sleep is when the glymphatic system flushes toxins from the brain, consolidates memories, increases HGH secretion, along with other hormonal changes, primes the immune system, drives parasympathetic response, etc etc.

REM sleep is related to emotional processing, and some memory, but I also recently heard a theory that REM may also be necessary to prevent the elasticity of the brain from over-writing the visual system with other inputs, which was an interesting theory, as sight is the only sense which is turned off during sleep.

I'm in the midst of a reflux episode so this is definitely something, but 4-5 hours between final meal and bed is a lot of time. Regardless, glad you found something that works and thanks for sharing.