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luminosity comments on Procedural Knowledge Gaps - Less Wrong
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When you are getting into the routine this one of the hard parts. So use whatever assistance required. For me that has included a bottle of energy drink and a modafinil tablet sitting on top of the alarm clock. Sure, you can turn it off but it isn't much more effort to down the stimulants at the same time. A sledge hammer approach. It more or less guarantees you will be able to get up 30 minutes later. I often deliberately allow myself another 30 minutes to sleep after I've taken the stimulants so as to cooperate more effectively with my instincts. They don't like me @#$@#$ing with them and forcing them up but they don't care at all if I give them stimulants and let them do their own thing.
(The above is not something I tend to use long term.)
At about this time you can also take a dose of melatonin (which is essentially what you are doing with the light manipulation anyway). I have found this useful from time to time.
I've considered using melatonin before, but some cursory searching didn't reveal an easy way to get my hands on it from Melbourne. Since you live here too, I presume you have found a source. Would you be able to share that with me? Thanks.
Some pharmacies have begun to sell it, however the dosage can sometimes be ridiculously small. I got mine online. Possibly from cognitivenutrition.com. Maybe bulknutrition. The price was trivial. I got 3 mg capsules although I may perhaps get 1mg capsules if I buy again.
I take 0.4 mg an hour or two before sleep, then 0.3 mg timed-release (sold by LEF) just before getting into bed.
That took a lot of tweaking to find.
This advice seems reasonable. However, I don't see why timed-release melatonin wouldn't be helpful in preventing early awakening (especially assuming you want to sleep past dawn), and I don't understand their recommendation to use timed-release only when trying to shift sleep by more than 1hr (1hr earlier, I presume).
What are the downsides of taking larger doses than necessary?
U-shaped response curve, so it starts losing effectiveness & nasty headaches are the consequences of a melatonin overdose that I know of.
and also grogginess in the morning if you get anything less than 8hrs of sleep, at least in my experience
In my experience too.
Surprisingly few, at least considering melatonin's role in there among the neurotransmitters doing some rather drastic regulation. People can (and do) take thousands of times the natural level of melatonin without too much trouble. (It is a ridiculously powerful antioxidant. The kind of thing people like to experiment with.)
Something I find is that if I have, say 6mg I can reliably expect to wake up about 4 hours later, alert. I exploit that sometimes if I need to drastically alter my sleep patterns. But it isn't what you usually want to aim for.
I haven't heard of nasty headaches (I don't doubt that it could well be possible...) but mild headaches are common. Similar to the kind you get when you are mildly dehydrated. Quite probably related, too, because they respond well to drinking a lot of water. As do the dry mouth and eyes that sometimes occur.
Grogginess during the following day is perhaps the most annoying side effect.
I bought some for someone else a matter of days ago (she's living kind of hand to mouth at the moment, so I sprung the cost for her,) but I didn't notice until after I placed the order that I had selected the highest available dosage, 10 mg per pill. Would it be best for her to start with fractions of a pill per night? Her sleep issues are pretty serious.
10 mg? Wow. I didn't know they sold them that high!
If I was using it myself I would just take the 10mg tablet and see what happened, it isn't going to do anything particularly harmful. But if I was supplying them for someone else I would either split the dose or buy new ones. Some people are reluctant enough to try pills that an initial bad experience will turn them off completely.
It is actually pretty hard to say. Response to melatonin in humans is just bizarre. For some people 0.1 mg is too much while others could gulp down that 10mg tablet and it'd be just right. The degree of sleep difficulties don't necessarily come into it.
It could work wonders if her difficulties are melatonin or sleep-clock related or it could do absolutely nothing. :/
She's bipolar, and apparently bipolar individuals tend to be chronically low in melatonin.
Ouch. Yes, and also a group that responds very well to getting a consistent, stable sleep pattern in order.