I posted earlier about my experimentation with blue-blocking glasses to help improve my sleep.  I ended up not enjoying the experience of wearing the glasses, but I realized that I could achieve similar results by setting up red and orange colored night lights in my house.  This was especially nice to add to my bathroom, as it now allows me to use ( Read more... )

After hearing about blue-blocking glasses at the Life Extension Conference, I decided to give them a try.  The basic principle behind them is that your body keys its circadian rhythm off of the presence of sunlight, specifically light in the blue wavelengths.  A lot of insomnia (the hypothesis goes) is caused by exposure to blue light well after ( Read more... )

I'd like to talk about a serious shortcoming of the medical system in treating a category of illnesses, and a simple, self-experimental approach that allows you to potentially treat these illnesses cheaply and easily.

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Introduction:

"Diffuse Conditions" is a term I made up to describe health conditions that have numerous potential causes and ( Read more... )

I already self-track numerous metrics, such as weight, body fat %, cholesterol, sleep, stress, and happiness.  However, the Life Extension Conference helped me realize that there are far more things that I should track.  Here's why:

- You might discover that you are abnormally low or high in a particular metric, and this knowledge will allow you to ( Read more... )

For years I've been convinced that sleeping pills that have Diphenhydramine HCl as the active ingredient (this includes most over the counter sleeping pills: Tylenol PM, Nytol, Sominex, Benadryl etc) make you dumber.

This study was only done on older African-Americans who were regular users of such pills, but it did establish just such a connection ( Read more... )

My talk on Sleep Hacking from the May Quantified Self is now online. Thanks, Alexandra!

You can watch this video on www.livejournal.com

Matt Bell - Hacking the Sleep/Wake Cycle from Loren Risker on Vimeo.

Come check it out... it's in downtown SF at Langton Labs

http://www.meetup.com/quantifiedself/calendar/13129652/

I bought a Zeo Personal Sleep Coach in my continuing effort to improve my quality of sleep so that I have more energy during the day,  Getting even one additional productive hour out of each day is like getting an extra four years of life.  It's a huge difference.

Zeo uses an EEG headband to read your brainwave state and determine whether you are ( Read more... )

I'm often slow to wake up in the morning -- I usually spend half an hour or so in a grumpy, groggy, and not-so-intelligent state.  I also find myself in traps of laziness when I'm tired.  This occurs for example when I'm feeling too tired to do the things I need to do to get to bed (eg brush my teeth) so I end up sitting on the couch relaxing and ( Read more... )

Some material from my Quantified Self presentation on sleep self-experimentation is on Wired's blog today.

Click to view

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Some Q&A:

> Why are you doing these sleep experiments?
I'm hoping to improve my amount of wakeful, pleasurable, and productive time during the day by improving my sleep. I've been specifically trying to shorten sleep latency and ( Read more... )