Should You Listen to Your Doctor?
by admin on February 9, 2012
Would you take financial advice from someone who is bankrupt?
Would you hire someone to teach you French who doesn’t speak it himself?
Would you hire a marathon coach who’s never gone past 20K?
I hope not. Yet there is one are where few of us hesitate to take advice from people who don’t really have it handled. Health.
Somehow a white coat and a university degree is enough to give them authority. But how many doctors are actually healthy? How is their health compared to the general population?
I’ve learned a few things about health. For one, you can’t be operating at optimal health if you don’t exercise at least 1-2 times per week at a very high intensity. No one who has any clue disagrees with this. Yet, how many doctors do that? And if they don’t is it because they don’t care to update their knowledge? Or because they know, but they don’t care about their health?
In either case, they don’t care. And you don’t want a person to give you advice who doesn’t take basic steps to improve their own results in their area of expertise.
Next time you go to a doctor ask: “What do you do to stay healthy?”
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In Search of Deeper Sleep: Starting the Magnesium-Sleep Trial
by admin on February 6, 2012
I recently announced that I was going to start doing some experimentation with my sleep and see if there are things I can optimize. In particular, I’m interested in whether I can improve the quality of my sleep through magnesium supplementation. At a later stage I may also look into how my different aspects of my daily routine affect my sleep.
Last October, I bought a ZEO sleep device that tracks various metrics about my sleep. I wore it on most nights and would quickly glance at some of the numbers in the morning, but I hadn’t used it in any meaningful way up to now. However, the big advantage is that I now have a substantial amount of data to figure out if magnesium really improves my sleep.
In total, I have data for 78 nights which is a pretty decent sample size. It is likely that my data is going to overestimate the real quality of my sleep somewhat. I lack data for nights during which the headband fell off (which probably happens more often when I sleep badly) or when I didn’t put it on in the first place (which was usually the case when someone stayed over. I also tend to sleep worse when I’m not alone.)
Nonetheless, I think there is some good data here to be able to figure out whether magnesium is going to make a significant difference.
The Data
ZQ
ZQ is Zeo’s own overall measure of sleep quality. It is some combination of how much you sleep and how deep that sleep is.
Mean: 79.4
Standard Deviation: 16.6
Total Sleep
Mean: 6:02
Standard Deviation: 79.4 minutes
Total REM
Mean: 1:46
Standard Deviation: 33.5 minutes
Total Light Sleep
Mean: 2:32
Standard Deviation: 42.1 minutes
Total Deep Sleep
Mean: 1:44
Standard Deviation: 27.9 minutes
REM-Deep Share
This is my own metric and measures the percentage of total sleep that I spent in REM or deep sleep. (REM sleep + Deep Sleep)/Total Sleep.
Mean: 58.6%
Standard Deviation: 6.4%
Comments
What was most surprising about my sleep data is how little I sleep overall. I would have guessed that my average sleep is around 7 hours per night, but instead I was just 6 hours. This is really not sufficient, although I’m rarely tired during the day especially since I started supplementing with Vitamin D.
Expectations
My expectations for this trial are that my time in REM and deep sleep increase. The metric I’m most interested in is the REM-Deep Share. If magnesium really is going to improve my sleep, I’d expect that number to go up.
Dosage
I’m going to start taking 400mg Magnesium citrate each morning starting from tomorrow. After I have data for about 30 nights, I’m going to analyze it again.
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