Sleepy In, Sleepy Out
Today is Father's Day, and while "during a global pandemic" is not the best time to celebrate anything, I picked up some pecan pie I ordered from Mariposa at the Farmer's Market yesterday and some golden milk ice cream from Gracie's and we had that for breakfast today. Good stuff! Julie made lasagna this weekend, too, which was really delicious.
Let's see, what else... I suppose I'll just do the usual thing where I don't write often enough and just try to cram several things I haven't gotten around to writing about yet into one post.
Sleepio: Not getting enough / restful enough sleep has been a big problem for me for long enough that I'd decided it would be a good idea to do something more structured about it, so over the last few weeks I've decided to try Sleepio, a sleep improvement program that my work provides to employees. The program seems to combine four major things:
1. Sleep diary: In particular, keeping track of when you're in bed and how long you actually sleep.
2. Sleep restriction: Establishing a shorter, consistent time window for sleep and trying to only sleep in that window, expanding it gradually after the current amount of sleep is packed into a solid block. The sleep diary helps here to figure out how long this should be to start and whether it's working.
3. Operant conditioning: Maximizing the association between the sleep environment and sleep. Mostly about not being very awake (e.g. stressing out, looking at your computer or phone) while lying down in bed in the dark. The sleep diary helps figure out idiosyncratic factors that make the sleep environment particularly better or worse.
4. Reducing anxiety: Using a grab-bag of physical/mental relaxation techniques, setting aside time to relax, and cognitive behavioral therapy anti-anxiety stuff. The sleep diary helps here if one of the things you're stressed out about is sleep, if the objective situation there is less bad than it seems in the middle of a bad night.
Overall, this has been going all right for me so far. At least, I've been able to get about the same amount of sleep in a smaller window of time, and therefore get more out of my evenings and mornings. My sleep has become a bit more solid, though I wonder if that's just because I'm still consistently getting less sleep than my ideal. I wonder if I'll be able to expand the sleep window sufficiently without running into the same problems that I had before.
I also can't really take the program's advice to avoid working, reading, etc. on the bed / in the bedroom to the extent they want, since that's the only furniture in the bedroom and the bedroom is often the only quiet place in my house. Even so, just avoiding the most not-sleep activities in the most for-sleep environment (that lights-out tucked-in phone time) does seem to have a big impact.
Ghost in the Shell: I watched the first season of Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045 on Netflix a while back, and I really enjoyed it. Doesn't live up to the original Stand Alone Complex, obviously, and the season ends a bit abruptly. But I enjoyed it a lot and I'm looking forward to the second part. The aspect of the show that caught the most attention from fans early on was the decision to use a somewhat jarring CGI style for the animation. That was a bit distracting at first, but it grew on me quickly. The aesthetic reminded me quite a bit of late-00s machinima, which to me seems to resonate really well with the story's concept of an artificially-constructed system of "sustainable war". This entry was originally posted on Dreamwith.
comments are there.
Let's see, what else... I suppose I'll just do the usual thing where I don't write often enough and just try to cram several things I haven't gotten around to writing about yet into one post.
Sleepio: Not getting enough / restful enough sleep has been a big problem for me for long enough that I'd decided it would be a good idea to do something more structured about it, so over the last few weeks I've decided to try Sleepio, a sleep improvement program that my work provides to employees. The program seems to combine four major things:
1. Sleep diary: In particular, keeping track of when you're in bed and how long you actually sleep.
2. Sleep restriction: Establishing a shorter, consistent time window for sleep and trying to only sleep in that window, expanding it gradually after the current amount of sleep is packed into a solid block. The sleep diary helps here to figure out how long this should be to start and whether it's working.
3. Operant conditioning: Maximizing the association between the sleep environment and sleep. Mostly about not being very awake (e.g. stressing out, looking at your computer or phone) while lying down in bed in the dark. The sleep diary helps figure out idiosyncratic factors that make the sleep environment particularly better or worse.
4. Reducing anxiety: Using a grab-bag of physical/mental relaxation techniques, setting aside time to relax, and cognitive behavioral therapy anti-anxiety stuff. The sleep diary helps here if one of the things you're stressed out about is sleep, if the objective situation there is less bad than it seems in the middle of a bad night.
Overall, this has been going all right for me so far. At least, I've been able to get about the same amount of sleep in a smaller window of time, and therefore get more out of my evenings and mornings. My sleep has become a bit more solid, though I wonder if that's just because I'm still consistently getting less sleep than my ideal. I wonder if I'll be able to expand the sleep window sufficiently without running into the same problems that I had before.
I also can't really take the program's advice to avoid working, reading, etc. on the bed / in the bedroom to the extent they want, since that's the only furniture in the bedroom and the bedroom is often the only quiet place in my house. Even so, just avoiding the most not-sleep activities in the most for-sleep environment (that lights-out tucked-in phone time) does seem to have a big impact.
Ghost in the Shell: I watched the first season of Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045 on Netflix a while back, and I really enjoyed it. Doesn't live up to the original Stand Alone Complex, obviously, and the season ends a bit abruptly. But I enjoyed it a lot and I'm looking forward to the second part. The aspect of the show that caught the most attention from fans early on was the decision to use a somewhat jarring CGI style for the animation. That was a bit distracting at first, but it grew on me quickly. The aesthetic reminded me quite a bit of late-00s machinima, which to me seems to resonate really well with the story's concept of an artificially-constructed system of "sustainable war". This entry was originally posted on Dreamwith.
comments are there.