Older developers - have you noticed a change in your sleep habits?
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I've been on this site for nigh 2 decades. The honesty has always been concerning, refreshing and challenging. Many of us have been here so long, we are either reaching or have reached the end of our "careers" - whatever the hell that means. For me, my career has been running out of mouths to feed before running out of money. Setting humor aside... I'm 64. Here comes the question... How are you sleeping? I tend to crash around 10 or 11. But if I've been thinking about something, within a few hours I am wide awake. It's a little after 3am EST. Is this an age thing? Don't go medical on me - I'm just looking for general thoughts. I have a bottle of melatonin - meh. I tried a bottle of sleep aid from Costco (never again). This is border line (to be honest, probably well past) sleep disorder which is weird for me. Meanwhile, I hate my wife ;) She's snoring within 5 minutes and has an internal alarm clock for 5am...
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
I'm 61 and like a lot of you I used to work into the wee small hours and get up mid-morning. During lockdown I needed to impose some discipline on my life and started going to bed at 09:00 and getting up at 05:30 - every day of the week. Occasional nocturnal cat issues aside (who knew?) I now sleep better than I have ever done in my life. I wish I had done this years ago.
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Difficult yes. But the only reason is I wanted to ask specific dietary questions - any maybe life things. And to keep it completely private. I'll search and see what I can find. I despise google - it's all ad's and lies. I was just shooting for some raw data from people like me. For example, I have often woken up in the dead of night knowing where the bug is. etc
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
I am too young to be in target panel, so not of a great help - but I wish you all the best and to stay forever healthy :thumbsup:
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I've been on this site for nigh 2 decades. The honesty has always been concerning, refreshing and challenging. Many of us have been here so long, we are either reaching or have reached the end of our "careers" - whatever the hell that means. For me, my career has been running out of mouths to feed before running out of money. Setting humor aside... I'm 64. Here comes the question... How are you sleeping? I tend to crash around 10 or 11. But if I've been thinking about something, within a few hours I am wide awake. It's a little after 3am EST. Is this an age thing? Don't go medical on me - I'm just looking for general thoughts. I have a bottle of melatonin - meh. I tried a bottle of sleep aid from Costco (never again). This is border line (to be honest, probably well past) sleep disorder which is weird for me. Meanwhile, I hate my wife ;) She's snoring within 5 minutes and has an internal alarm clock for 5am...
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
My sleeping in getting less and less. I'll go to bed around 01:00 (earlier makes no sense for me) and I am awake at 07:00. :zzz: During the day I am tired but that is easily cured by black coffee :java: and Red Bull. (I have to support Max. He is my countryman ;) ) But I tend to 'wake up' around 19:00 and when bed-time comes I am not sleepy at all. I noticed that it get worse with age. (when I was born, I could sleep 20 hours a day :laugh: )
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I've been on this site for nigh 2 decades. The honesty has always been concerning, refreshing and challenging. Many of us have been here so long, we are either reaching or have reached the end of our "careers" - whatever the hell that means. For me, my career has been running out of mouths to feed before running out of money. Setting humor aside... I'm 64. Here comes the question... How are you sleeping? I tend to crash around 10 or 11. But if I've been thinking about something, within a few hours I am wide awake. It's a little after 3am EST. Is this an age thing? Don't go medical on me - I'm just looking for general thoughts. I have a bottle of melatonin - meh. I tried a bottle of sleep aid from Costco (never again). This is border line (to be honest, probably well past) sleep disorder which is weird for me. Meanwhile, I hate my wife ;) She's snoring within 5 minutes and has an internal alarm clock for 5am...
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
As George Carlin would say, I'm pushing 70 :) and running (as well as working on) a laundry list of projects. The short answer to your question is sort of, lol. I still drink a glass of water shortly before bed, so there's a wakeup call around 2am. If nature calls again before 5am, it can take an effort to go back to sleep. If I know my day will be hell, or I have an unfinished concept that is nagging, I'll work hard to set my mind on something unrelated to fall back to sleep for an hour or so. I won't physically get out of bed before 5am but it's a rare day that I get up after 6. My own observations are: - I drink a few cups of coffee in the morning; sometimes a small glass of coke at lunch and zero caffeine the rest of the day. As it wears off by early evening, I'm losing my edge on getting work done on most days. - I do tend to nod off between 9pm and 10pm unless the TV really has my interest. Last night I fell asleep at 9:05 during the Sunday night game, woke up around 10 and stayed awake until the end of the game around midnight. - I'm fine at 6 or more hours of sleep generally. The problem is I can generally function for about half a day on only a few hours of sleep. If I manage to stay awake later, getting up at 6-6:30 isn't difficult. - I find standard time to be much tougher on sleep than savings time, along with the shorter days as well. The need to pee, probably prostate related, doesn't in itself torch my sleep. My Samsung health app says most of the time, those breaks are less than 10 minutes. I try to keep that as a mechanical function, get up, go, and go back to bed without thinking about anything else. The four to five am time can be tough, but I try not to give in. The app isn't totally accurate, but it gives me a decent picture of sleep/heart rate/stress/O2. Having lived in Colorado for more than 30 years and way down south at the moment, my sleep is generally better. I'd put two factors that are affected by that. First, the weather lets me get more exercise during the day and second, being closer to equator allows time to be a bit more balanced.
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Going a bit medical (sorry)... Have yourself checked for sleep apnea, it can come on later in life due to slack(en)ing of various throat muscles. It can wake you up and often causes excess urination. Give the melatonin a chance, the wife and I use it but it needs about a week to really kick in. Get your prostate checked, mine was 4 times the normal size, a simple op cleared it and got rid of one of my main reasons for waking up in the night. However, I still wake up at 3 am if I have been doing anything more than social media on the computer before going to bed. Usually I have to get up, have a cup of tea and google whatever was bothering me (last night it was asynchronous Python) and then I can get back off to sleep. So the best advice I can give you is to watch a couple of episodes of M.A.S.H. (or anything similar that you know off by heart) before going to bed.
So old that I did my first coding in octal via switches on a DEC PDP 8
"give the melatonin a chance" - interesting, I had not known that. I'll keep working at it. Prostate - yeah, I see the P man in December.
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
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I've been on this site for nigh 2 decades. The honesty has always been concerning, refreshing and challenging. Many of us have been here so long, we are either reaching or have reached the end of our "careers" - whatever the hell that means. For me, my career has been running out of mouths to feed before running out of money. Setting humor aside... I'm 64. Here comes the question... How are you sleeping? I tend to crash around 10 or 11. But if I've been thinking about something, within a few hours I am wide awake. It's a little after 3am EST. Is this an age thing? Don't go medical on me - I'm just looking for general thoughts. I have a bottle of melatonin - meh. I tried a bottle of sleep aid from Costco (never again). This is border line (to be honest, probably well past) sleep disorder which is weird for me. Meanwhile, I hate my wife ;) She's snoring within 5 minutes and has an internal alarm clock for 5am...
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
Well, I've always been a morning person. So, now being past retirement age (but not retired!), here is my work day schedule (weekends are different). Bedtime routine starts at 9pm. Shower and associated activities, in bed, read for a few minutes, lights out at or near 10pm. Wake up (according to the Fitbit) a couple of times during the night that I usually don't remember, then when the alarm clock goes off at 5:15am, start the day. If I had a technical problem from the day before, I may wake up around 3am with the epiphany of how to fix it and then fall back asleep. I just need to remember it after the alarm clock goes off a couple of hours later. Usually, I can and if not, a few minutes of looking at the problem will help recall the miracle solution later in the day. I work from home, so work starts at 6:30am until 11:30am...then lunch and TV (usually I watch General Hospital from the day before...Monday I watch Friday's episode, and so on) and skip the commercials. I can usually watch another show from the DVR, too. Back to work at 2pm for 2.5-3 more hours for a time-clock measured total of 10-10.5 hours/day. Boss knows and he's okay with that, as he's a programmer/developer too and knows the inspiration strikes when it wants, not on a company-driven timeframe. I do not eat supper (trying intermittent fasting to lose some weight). Which translates to, "hubby makes his dinner, cuts up cherry tomatoes, gives them to me to eat with two fiber pills and a glass of water". I was happy with just the water, but he doesn't understand what fasting means, I guess. Now, I will admit...sometimes, if the second program off the DVR is a game show, I might take a 20 minute nap :zzz: at lunch. If I can sneak in an episode of Babylon 5, I'm wide awake for all of lunch.
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I fall asleep (too) easily in the evening, but I wake up at 4h or 4h30 in the morning and cannot go back to sleep. I don't remember the last time I've setup an alarm. There was some changes due to health issues.
CI/CD = Continuous Impediment/Continuous Despair
I would encourage all with sleep problems to get a sleep study done. My wife nagged me until I did about 5 years ago, and wound up with a CPAP (a BPAP technically). Greatly improved my sleeping habits to the point I almost cannot even take a simple nap without it, but well worth the 6 - 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep w/o sleep medicine or supplements.
Pound to fit, paint to match
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Separate the urine into water and urea. Use the water for the beer, and the urea as fertilizer for the grain. :)
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. -- 6079 Smith W.
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I've been on this site for nigh 2 decades. The honesty has always been concerning, refreshing and challenging. Many of us have been here so long, we are either reaching or have reached the end of our "careers" - whatever the hell that means. For me, my career has been running out of mouths to feed before running out of money. Setting humor aside... I'm 64. Here comes the question... How are you sleeping? I tend to crash around 10 or 11. But if I've been thinking about something, within a few hours I am wide awake. It's a little after 3am EST. Is this an age thing? Don't go medical on me - I'm just looking for general thoughts. I have a bottle of melatonin - meh. I tried a bottle of sleep aid from Costco (never again). This is border line (to be honest, probably well past) sleep disorder which is weird for me. Meanwhile, I hate my wife ;) She's snoring within 5 minutes and has an internal alarm clock for 5am...
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
If I have a "hard" problem then I tend to stew over it even after work. I have learned if I can get the problem completely "in my head" sometimes I will have an answer or a line of attack in the morning when I get up. If not working on a hard problem then I do absolutely push everything work related out of my head in the parking lot on the way to the car. Push it out and leave it there in the parking lot. That being said I am a night-owl type anyway and function on about five hour sleep a night, can do three hours a night for a week or so. Anything more than about six hours and I feel logging and sort of disconnected the next day. During vacations or between contracts my bed time gets later and later till it hits 4am or so and I am up and running by 10am (night-owl mode). While working I get up at 6am EVERY morning just to be consist. In bed by 11pm or midnight EVERY night.
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I would encourage all with sleep problems to get a sleep study done. My wife nagged me until I did about 5 years ago, and wound up with a CPAP (a BPAP technically). Greatly improved my sleeping habits to the point I almost cannot even take a simple nap without it, but well worth the 6 - 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep w/o sleep medicine or supplements.
Pound to fit, paint to match
I've had a CPAP for about 5 years. I'm addicted to it. My wife likes it because I no longer snore. I feel crappy if I sleep horizontal without it. I can sleep in a chair okay. It's a pain to fly with these days as it becones an expense to carry. I still tend to wake up at 3:00 AM to releave myself and it's a coin flip if I can get back to sleep.
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I've been on this site for nigh 2 decades. The honesty has always been concerning, refreshing and challenging. Many of us have been here so long, we are either reaching or have reached the end of our "careers" - whatever the hell that means. For me, my career has been running out of mouths to feed before running out of money. Setting humor aside... I'm 64. Here comes the question... How are you sleeping? I tend to crash around 10 or 11. But if I've been thinking about something, within a few hours I am wide awake. It's a little after 3am EST. Is this an age thing? Don't go medical on me - I'm just looking for general thoughts. I have a bottle of melatonin - meh. I tried a bottle of sleep aid from Costco (never again). This is border line (to be honest, probably well past) sleep disorder which is weird for me. Meanwhile, I hate my wife ;) She's snoring within 5 minutes and has an internal alarm clock for 5am...
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
Exactly to the T with me as well, including the wife... I have also tried the medical way, no luck. Then a TV in the room where it took the wife awhile to get used to the sounds, eventually worked a charm, mind you only on non violent heavy noises. Must have seen a billion movies with no recollection afterwards. Started exercising lately after work for around half to full hour, works like a charm for me... :zzz:
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I"m only 45, but have been on here nearly 2 decades as well. Sleep is still great for me. Out by 11 most nights and mostly wake up refreshed. Except for the silly Sleep Number bed. Please never buy one, I look forward to any hotel bed now to get away from it. I did also get a Mandibular advancement splint to help with my snoring. Sleep doc tried to force a CPAP machine on me and I wasn't having it. I hate to admit it, but my Garmin watch shows I sleep better when its in my mouth.
Hogan
My Sleep Number bed was the worst purchase I ever made. They have a huge revenue stream of chargeable replacement parts for something under warranty. Got rid of the mattress when the replacement pump was on indefinite back order. For my wife's anniversary present this year we got rid of the base and bought a made of real wood bed. We both sleep great, even if I still wake up at 3:00 to go. CPAP has probably been the second-best health technology improvement I've had. My family doctor said he resisted one for years but now he has it and wishes he would have used it sooner.
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I've been on this site for nigh 2 decades. The honesty has always been concerning, refreshing and challenging. Many of us have been here so long, we are either reaching or have reached the end of our "careers" - whatever the hell that means. For me, my career has been running out of mouths to feed before running out of money. Setting humor aside... I'm 64. Here comes the question... How are you sleeping? I tend to crash around 10 or 11. But if I've been thinking about something, within a few hours I am wide awake. It's a little after 3am EST. Is this an age thing? Don't go medical on me - I'm just looking for general thoughts. I have a bottle of melatonin - meh. I tried a bottle of sleep aid from Costco (never again). This is border line (to be honest, probably well past) sleep disorder which is weird for me. Meanwhile, I hate my wife ;) She's snoring within 5 minutes and has an internal alarm clock for 5am...
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
The natural state of sleeping for humans is to go sleep when it's dark and wake up at sunrise. However, this is usually more than the 8 or so hours we need. Therefore, waking up in the middle of the night is normal. The Romans did this. Our modern lives just break up this pattern with artificial lighting. Also, older people tend to sleep lighter, so random noises are more likely to disturb your sleep. Somewhere around very early morning (4 am?) our hearing is at it's best, so that only compounds the problem. I suggest using that mid-night wakefulness to meditate, think on problems (work or personal), and generally be mentally productive while physically relaxed. Must most importantly, don't stress over it. Stress will only aggravate it, making it harder to go back to sleep. On a side note, I have a personal theory about how early humans that were little more than animals kept watch during the night. Teenagers stayed up late, old people woke up in the middle of the night, and little kids got up very early, waking up their parents. So the whole night was more or less covered by someone keeping an eye out for predators.
Bond Keep all things as simple as possible, but no simpler. -said someone, somewhere
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Maximilien wrote:
I fall asleep (too) easily in the evening, but I wake up at 4h or 4h30 in the morning and cannot go back to sleep.
I also doze off too often watching TV early evening. Not any sort of deep sleep, I wake up easily from that, but I try fight it. There was a point where I figured, why fight it, if I'm that tired, it's because I need the sleep, and made no effort to fight it off. But I've come to realize, invariably, if I'm asleep early evening, I'll be wide awake at 11pm, and will toss and turn until maybe 4am. Which guarantees I'll be groggy for the entire upcoming day. So going to bed early always makes things worse for me.
Maximilien wrote:
I don't remember the last time I've setup an alarm.
Same. More often than not, I'm awake at 6am (7 at the latest), but don't need to get out of bed at that time so I just stay there - otherwise getting out of bed is a struggle, and I'll definitely notice being tired earlier come late afternoon.
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I would encourage all with sleep problems to get a sleep study done. My wife nagged me until I did about 5 years ago, and wound up with a CPAP (a BPAP technically). Greatly improved my sleeping habits to the point I almost cannot even take a simple nap without it, but well worth the 6 - 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep w/o sleep medicine or supplements.
Pound to fit, paint to match
I know; I used to have regular sleep apnea crisis at night (stopped breathing and wake up struggling for air, it freaked the bejesus of my GF) I lost some weight and it helped a lot (I'm struggling with that) due to some health issues. I don't remember that last time it happened.
CI/CD = Continuous Impediment/Continuous Despair
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dandy72 wrote:
There was a point where I figured,
You didn't mention it but I have seen suggestions that insuring that you have a regular schedule can help. So for example no staying up late on the weekends. Nor sleeping in.
jschell wrote:
insuring that you have a regular schedule can help.
Interesting thought. I follow a schedule pretty regularly every workday...but do indulge on the weekends. 11. Midnight. 1, maybe, is still not a rare occurrence. But one thing I can't do is sleep in. No matter how much (or little) I sleep, I'm almost always awake at around the same time. I've also come to the realization a long time ago that there's no such thing as "making up for lost time"--if I sleep poorly one night, I can NOT sleep in the next day to make up for it. It just keeps accumulating until (say) I take a nap on a weekend afternoon. After writing this, I'm starting to think it might not be enough to stick to a regular schedule during the week if I'm all over the place during weekends. That'll be hard for me to stick to.
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I've been on this site for nigh 2 decades. The honesty has always been concerning, refreshing and challenging. Many of us have been here so long, we are either reaching or have reached the end of our "careers" - whatever the hell that means. For me, my career has been running out of mouths to feed before running out of money. Setting humor aside... I'm 64. Here comes the question... How are you sleeping? I tend to crash around 10 or 11. But if I've been thinking about something, within a few hours I am wide awake. It's a little after 3am EST. Is this an age thing? Don't go medical on me - I'm just looking for general thoughts. I have a bottle of melatonin - meh. I tried a bottle of sleep aid from Costco (never again). This is border line (to be honest, probably well past) sleep disorder which is weird for me. Meanwhile, I hate my wife ;) She's snoring within 5 minutes and has an internal alarm clock for 5am...
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
I noticed similar stuff (me 42yro). If I go to sleep earlier (say 21 or 22), I tend to wake up at 3-4am and cant sleep more. They say: 1 hour of sleep before 00 is 2 hours of rest, 1h of sleep at 00 is 1h of rest, 1 hour of sleep after 00 is 0.5h of rest
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I've been on this site for nigh 2 decades. The honesty has always been concerning, refreshing and challenging. Many of us have been here so long, we are either reaching or have reached the end of our "careers" - whatever the hell that means. For me, my career has been running out of mouths to feed before running out of money. Setting humor aside... I'm 64. Here comes the question... How are you sleeping? I tend to crash around 10 or 11. But if I've been thinking about something, within a few hours I am wide awake. It's a little after 3am EST. Is this an age thing? Don't go medical on me - I'm just looking for general thoughts. I have a bottle of melatonin - meh. I tried a bottle of sleep aid from Costco (never again). This is border line (to be honest, probably well past) sleep disorder which is weird for me. Meanwhile, I hate my wife ;) She's snoring within 5 minutes and has an internal alarm clock for 5am...
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
Melatonin is only good if you have problems falling asleep. If you don't have problems falling asleep, but can't maintain sleep (like me, I'm 60) you should try 5-HTP and/or Magnesium Glycinate. But in any case you need first to manage stress, which can raise your cortisol levels (the so-called stress hormone), waking you up in the middle of the night.
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I've been on this site for nigh 2 decades. The honesty has always been concerning, refreshing and challenging. Many of us have been here so long, we are either reaching or have reached the end of our "careers" - whatever the hell that means. For me, my career has been running out of mouths to feed before running out of money. Setting humor aside... I'm 64. Here comes the question... How are you sleeping? I tend to crash around 10 or 11. But if I've been thinking about something, within a few hours I am wide awake. It's a little after 3am EST. Is this an age thing? Don't go medical on me - I'm just looking for general thoughts. I have a bottle of melatonin - meh. I tried a bottle of sleep aid from Costco (never again). This is border line (to be honest, probably well past) sleep disorder which is weird for me. Meanwhile, I hate my wife ;) She's snoring within 5 minutes and has an internal alarm clock for 5am...
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
No, I've always been a morning person. I can't code anything difficult after 9 PM. I go to sleep at 11:30+/-. I sleep soundly until 4AM, when an alarm wakes me so I can turn my disabled wife over :-(. It takes awhile to get back to sleep, maybe 30 minutes, but then I'm asleep until the morning alarm at 8:40. Sometimes I will wake up as early as 8 on my own. When I was working, I went to sleep at 11 and up at 6:30, and by Friday I was a zombie from the missing hour of sleep, so clearly what I needed hasn't changed, just now I'm actually getting it.
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I've been on this site for nigh 2 decades. The honesty has always been concerning, refreshing and challenging. Many of us have been here so long, we are either reaching or have reached the end of our "careers" - whatever the hell that means. For me, my career has been running out of mouths to feed before running out of money. Setting humor aside... I'm 64. Here comes the question... How are you sleeping? I tend to crash around 10 or 11. But if I've been thinking about something, within a few hours I am wide awake. It's a little after 3am EST. Is this an age thing? Don't go medical on me - I'm just looking for general thoughts. I have a bottle of melatonin - meh. I tried a bottle of sleep aid from Costco (never again). This is border line (to be honest, probably well past) sleep disorder which is weird for me. Meanwhile, I hate my wife ;) She's snoring within 5 minutes and has an internal alarm clock for 5am...
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
I'm 74 now and still at it, I work because that is what drives me. When I was young I'd stay up until 2 AM and then get up at 6 AM for my job. Now that I am 74 I say up until 8 or 9 PM and sleep until 2 or 3 AM and then I am up and working on some problem I have been churning over in my sleep.