I don't think it's that my sleep quality is bad: I fall asleep quickly (usually within 10 minutes or so of turning the light out) and don't often wake up during the night. I don't usually remember dreams or have a sense that my sleep was disturbed.
For example in sleep apnea it's possible to wake up dozens of times per night and not remember anything about it. These people also fall asleep quickly because they're exhausted. I'm not saying that you have sleep apnea, just saying that not remembering waking up or falling asleep quickly aren't great indicators of healthy sleep.
As a side note some sleep medications (benzodiazepines, z-drugs) also impair short term memory, and people who use these might not remember if they wake up in the middle of the night, which makes these drugs even more popular.
I'd like to have a series of discussion posts, where each post is of the form "Let's brainstorm things you might consider when optimizing X", where X is something like sleep, exercise, commuting, studying, etc. Think of it like a specialized repository.
In the spirit of try more things, the direct benefit is to provide insights like "Oh, I never realized that BLAH is a knob I can fiddle. This gives me an idea of how I might change BLAH given my particular circumstances. I will try this and see what happens!"
The indirect benefit is to practice instrumental rationality using the "toy problem" provided by a general prompt.
Accordingly, participation could be in many forms:
* Pointers to scientific research
* General directions to consider
* Personal experience
* Boring advice
* Intersections with other community ideas, biases
* Cost-benefit, value-of-information analysis
* Related questions
* Other musings, thoughts, speculation, links, theories, etc.
This post is on sleep and circadian rhythms.