I Tried to Hack My Insomnia With Technology. Here’s What Worked.
upstart writes:
Submitted via IRC for Bytram
I tried to hack my insomnia with technology. Here's what worked.
I stopped sleeping when I was 18.
I'd just arrived at college, having moved from a tiny village to a big city for the first time in my life. London was loud and busy. I was staying in a dorm with a load of people I didn't know. There was a hospital nearby with sirens going off at all hours. I was stressed.
I developed insomnia. I tossed and turned, night after night. The more I chased sleep, the more it seemed to elude me. At its worst, I felt I'd had virtually no sleep for almost two weeks. In the end I had to take sleeping medication for almost a month to knock me back into the semblance of a proper routine. Fast-forward to today, and although I generally sleep well, insomnia still sometimes comes back to haunt me.
I'm far from alone: about a quarter of Americans experience acute insomnia every year, a statistic that's replicated elsewhere around the world. In the US alone, that's 82 million people who struggle with sleep.
Given those figures, it's no wonder there are so many tech startups hoping to cash in by "fixing" sleep for sufferers. After a period of particularly bad sleeplessness, I decided to give some of them a go. Maybe one of the sleep tech products on the market could prove a better option than just popping pills.
Even if you don't have insomnia, there's still a decent chance you aren't getting enough sleep. The amount we need varies from person to person, but a 2016 review study concluded that most adults need more than seven hours sleep a night. Anything less than that is associated with an increased risk of obesity, dementia, diabetes and heart disease, among other issues. The number of Americans who get six hours of sleep or less each night is rising, however.
"When you disrupt your sleep over the long term, it starts to erode your health in many, many ways," says Michael Twery, director of the US National Center on Sleep Disorders Research.
Read on to see what the author tried, what worked and what didn't.
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