This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4,134 for Thursday the 18th of January 2024.
Today's show is entitled Sleep Tips.
It is hosted by Operator and is about 11 minutes long.
It carries an explicit flag.
This summary is, go with Operator on his journey to Sleepy Town.
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Hello everyone, I am Olga Duna of the City of Hacker Public Radio with your host, Operator.
So today I am going to be speaking about Sleep in Sleep Optimization.
While back probably, I want to say it's been probably a 10 year saga of having issues and
difficulty sleeping and trying to bring you on that journey to where I'm at today.
So I think about probably 10 years ago, 11 years ago, I was doing consulting, traveling
a fair amount, staying up odd hours or work, doing after hours testing for security and
organizations and doing different time zones.
And I think that had some to do with it, of why I had issues sleeping.
I also think, mainly it's around drinking lots of alcohol and drinking and causing that
part and then again stress with work or work life balance type of deal.
So I started having a problem probably back, like I said, 10 years ago, I would have this
need to just wake up and my wife called it witching hours like 3 o'clock and the more you
talk to people, the more you realize that not a lot of people get the right amount of sleep
and it gets worse in different regions.
But for me, I started to realize that I was waking up around 3 or 4 o'clock and then from
then on it was more just kind of flopping around and I remember seeing commercials late
at 9 o'clock, and then I realized I actually had it almost like the sensation of threats
almost where you have the sensation of if you have to scratch your nose or something like
that, but you can't scratch it.
So you have to constantly move your legs.
It's an anxiety kind of feeling or if you've ever been antsy that same kind of thing.
It won't go away.
You can do exercises, some people say the bicycles were work, for me it was kind of holding
my legs up for a long period of time and using my muscles, the leg muscles and trying
to tire them out and it would usually give me some relief for a while.
So that ran for about, I want to say a year or two, on and off, having issues sleep being
out with sometimes draining, to help sleep, that would make things kind of worse, eventually
ended up talking to my doctor, my doctor of course just gave me pills, which was sleeping
pill.
It wasn't ambient, I'm quite yet, it was something else as I was ever, it was like
a tranquilizer essentially.
That didn't really do much.
He gave me Gavipentin, like a 500 milligram Gavipentin, that didn't do much.
He told me to up the Gavipentin, I didn't feel great with that and I tried it, didn't
help, tried Benadryl, tried every kind of over the counter thing, I tried showers,
I tried baths, I tried, you know, bar to soap, but the foot of your bed, milk exercise
before exercise.
After I tried every single possible combination of anything, the only thing that seemed
to make it worse was drinking, a fair amount, and or staying up irregular hours and not
having that normal cadence.
So fast word, I ended up taking a break from all of that because I couldn't sleep anyways
and then about a year after that, I came back and said, you know, I'm still having issues
and he put me on ambient.
That seemed to kind of work for about a year and realized it was kind of not really helping
me, it would kind of make me forgive that I had a whole night, and it would kind of
kind of knock me out.
And I would have date and you hear people about ambient and they don't want to touch it
because you essentially date trip, you'll wake up in the middle of the night and you'll
do something crazy and what I would do is if I had problem sleeping, wake up in the middle
of the night and I would down like, I'll even drink wine and I would down like a little
bottle of like mini wine or something or just wake up and, you know, take a few shots
of something or something and then go to sleep or I would wake up and have a full
long conversation with my wife or something.
So that got to be kind of, you know, I never did anything dangerous necessarily, some people
talk about driving or doing crazy things and I never did anything like that, but I realized
it's like, you know, after I woke up on morning and there was like, you know, a mini
bottle of wine next to my office because I sleep in the office because I'd flop around.
So of course you can't sleep with another prudent partner if you're flopping around
night so I'd sleep in the other room and yeah, when I woke up and there was like a, you know,
a bottle of, you know, mini wine next to my bed, I realized, okay, this is not great.
I think I took a break from ambient and I tried my routine, which is, you know, no, no sugars or
bed, nothing, no stimulants before bed, being regular about my sleep, regular exercise, not
drinking, not doing fake sugars, all that stuff seemed to kind of help.
I don't know about the fake sugar, but I know caffeine, what calls me issues.
So I quit all that and I tried anything that would, you know, induce those types of reactions
to flopping around. I would, I would kill. But for me, eventually kind of would get it
and check for a while and then it would kind of come back and it was almost season the way it would
come back. So it I realized, you know, they came back with a vengeance and I was talking
the neighbors down the street and they said, they suggested two things, some earpacks and one of
the things, one of them is a primary care, I think, and the other one was a pharmacist. So they're
just like, well, take this drug and I had been pretty steady from then. I actually before that,
there was a time where I evaped T.H.C. and that worked like a truck. It would, you know,
I would just do one little vape before I went to sleep and it would knock me out forever. As long
as I wanted to sleep, I could sleep and it wasn't a groggy seat. It was a comfortable, you know,
I slept like I was supposed to sleep. So that can work for a lot of people too. Not your
CBD oil. I did try that. I tried legit CBD oil. You know, the things like that, but nothing worked
like a regular like T.H.C. card. So that's one option, but for me later on, I started to still wake
up in the middle of the night and had the RLS symptoms. Right? And then I'd have to vape again.
And then I realized, okay, well, you know, I'm kind of self-medicating. It's working and it worked
for about a year, but then I wake up and kind of start to build tolerance to it. And like any
drug you'll sometimes most of the time end up building some kind of tolerance to it. So I switched to
the mirror packs and I'm taking the lowest dose of mirror packs and that is helping me sleep a lot
and I'm trying to stay normal with my exercise, sleeping habits are a big part of it. Not drinking
kind of at all. And if I do drink, I'll drink a little bit or I'll drink a line where I won't
drink at all because it's not really worth it to chance it for me to drink a little bit and then go to sleep
and then usually I'm fine like the first day or two and for whatever reason if I have like two or three
drinks, I'll be fine that night, but the next night it will catch up with me or the night
after that it will catch up with me. So I'll have problem sleeping, you know, a couple of days after
for whatever reason. They also talk about the skinny rhythm so I try to wake up and go outside
sit out front with the natural light and drink my tea and listen to my podcast. So having that
regular cadence of the skinny rhythm thing helps. I'm hoping, but here recently I've been
kind of still waking up a little bit at night, but more because of stress because some things
have changed at work in home so I think that's changed but some things have lifted in that space.
So I think I'm at a relatively low stress level in general, but a lot of times people can't sleep
because of stress. Reducing your stress is probably the biggest thing you can do as far as I can tell
and or, you know, get a second opinion, get a third opinion. Keep trying, don't give up
like anything any ailment that you have, get a second opinion. But anyways, I hope that didn't
put y'all to sleep and if it did and you were trying to sleep, then great. But, you know, get
second opinions, ask around, try something else, don't give up, don't live with not sleep.
If you have to, you know, vape for a year or vape for how long or if you have to, you know,
if you have to take ambient for however long just to get you some sleep for a mile until you
can figure out what works for you, right? Medication, the right balance of exercise, diet,
whatever, um, that, that, that works. It's not, it didn't all be y'all. If someone, you know,
there's a lot of pushback around, you know, taking a pill or taking a medication for something.
Um, it doesn't have to be the solution, right? You can take a medication for a short period of time
and it'll be relatively okay. I mean, honestly, everything causes cancer anyway. So, you know,
if you're going to complain that, oh, you're on ambient, oh, we all don't think that stuff.
Or that's bad. Or whatever the drug is, it's not a lifelong thing. Um, your, you might be,
you might be a, you know, left with some kind of disposition, some sort forever and have to
take some kind of medication. Um, but in general, there's usually something you can,
a tutor back and forth, try it. You can try one drug for some certain amount of time and try another drug
and switch back and forth and you build tolerances and stuff. Um, anyways,
hope that helps out, um, you know, stay vigilant, get some sleep, focus on,
good practices, good hygiene, um, get exercise. That's a big one. Um, walk out, walk, walk, walk.
At least once a day, I walk up and down the stairs. They're air conditioned here at the office
and I walk with my spouse, um, you know, around noon now, because it's not tight,
but when it gets hot, I would walk. We would walk earlier in the morning. So anyways,
I hope that helps out and, uh, a lot of it goes.
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