Magnesium helps me sleep (Potassium may help even more)

After 20 days of taking a bath in Epsom Salts (MgSO4), I definitely went into deeper sleep than I have.  This has been one of the more clear results.

Column1	nothing	mask/earplugs/magnesium pills	magnesium bath	magnesium bath And Potassium
z score	75.6	71	67.2	69.3
deep	37.4	32.5	30.2	32
awake	17.4	20	13.5	10.8
awoken	3.6	4	2.8	2.5

Clear reductions in # of times awoken and time awake.  It includes a recent night that had 0 wake ups.  Unprecendented.

You can also see that when I started adding potassium to my diet the time awake and times woken were even better.  I have been high potassium for 13 of the 20 bath taking days.  I don't know if the addition of Potassium was truly a help or whether that was just a result of taking the bath consistently.  I am planning on doing both for the time being.  I figure pretty soon there will be a time where I can't do both and I can see then if the effect is synergistic or not.  Not going to do an experiment just for this.

What is also interesting is the lack of improvement in deep sleep.  The two (awake time and deep time) are clearly not perfectly correllated.  A subjective analysis shows that sometimes I would go into deep more than once (Something I rarely did before) and rarely woke up in the middle of the big initial deep sleep (Something I did often before).

This makes some sense since deep sleep is the physical recuperation portion of sleep and I haven't really increased my physical exertions.  Perhaps it would increase if I exercised more.  Staying asleep certainly isn't enough.

I plan to continue with Magnesium and Potassium.  The next big sleep thing will be using the emWave2 that arrived today.  I am skeptical on this one for sleep.  I generally have no problem falling asleep.  If my theory on deep sleep is correct it seems like it wouldn't affect that either.

I may expand to starting Dual N-Back training as well,  I have enough cognitive performance data now and there are reports it increases REM sleep.  Starting emWave and N-Back Training at the same time may be a bit too much right now.

Quick Blood Pressure Update - magnesium and more vitamin D

I ran out of prescription so I am going to go awhile before refilling it and see what happens.

Relevant items include going from 4000IU of Vitamin D tablets to 5000IU of gelcaps a day.  Its more and I am told that gelcaps lead to more reliable absorption.  I am pretty good about taking the tablets after food so in theory only the increase in IU's will change.

Also, magnesium apparently can affect blood pressure so we shall see.

I am still taking Vitamin C.

Back to the Drawing Board on sleep experiments

Upon the collection of further data, I have basically made no progress on improving my sleep.  In fact, in general, I am worse than I was during the control week.  Check it out.

Column1	nothing	just mask	any mask	mask/ear plugs	mask/earplugs/magnesium
z score	75.6	72.2	74.4	74	71
deep	37.4	36.8	35	34	32.5
awake	17.4	22.8	17.8	17	20
awoken	3.6	3.2	3.4	3.4	4

Its not the proudest I have ever been of a table, but the results are pretty clear if you take a second.

Lets talk about the magnesium a second.  I noticed one thing....I pooped more.  Turns out the poop part is very common and means it isn't really getting into your system.

In follow on research, I have become convinced that I still am not getting enough magnesium (most people aren't).  And if you are deficient, in a cruel twist of fate, it can be hard to get it orally (thus the squirts). 

So now the next step...ditch the sleep mask, earplugs and take epsom salt baths to get magnesium topically. 

Sleep updates - Sleep Mask/Earplugs = good, caffeine = bad

So wearing a sleep mask and earplugs definitely reduces the number of times I wake up (3.6 to 2.5) and the amount of time awake (17.4 to 12.8).  However, it didn't seem to do much for the amount of deep sleep I got (37.4 to 38.3).  I rarely felt tired during this time (didn't really want to take a nap), but I also didn't feel particularly energetic.  I don't have a better way of describing it.  There was also no real increase in productivity during the time of this improved sleep.

These results are confounded a bit by the fact that I also cut out caffeine for all but one day of this trial.  I don't think the results are largely due to that though.  One day, I intentionally drank an above average amount of caffeine and that was the night I only woke up once for two minutes and had the second highest amount of deep sleep ever.


I did notice that I had a headache for three days after quitting.  Which seems like withdrawal...that isn't cool.  I also noticed I didn't have the afternoon dip after I got through the headaches.  So I probably will continue to avoid caffeine even though it doesn't appear to directly affect sleep.

Bottom line....a lot of waking/wake time is bad for deep sleep, but there is clearly more to increasing deep sleep than just sleeping through the night.

I am going to try experimenting with 800mg of Magnesium now.  There is a lot of anecdotal evidence in forums and from Tim Ferriss that it improves sleep.

Even more Vitamin C does not equal even more Blood Pressure Reduction

After increasing Vitamin C to 1000mg, There was no further reduction in blood pressure.

I have gone back to 500mg of Vitamin C.

Vitamin C seems like it lowers Blood Pressure

After 8 days of control data and 8 days of taking Vitamin C...it appears to have lowered my blood pressure about 5 points.  112/75 to 107/70.  

Even though I had seen the research, I have to tell you I'm a little surprised.  There was a drop on the first night.  I did everything I could to keep everything else the same.  In fact, I really used it as an excuse to eat kinda crappy.  The sleep experiments did continue at the same time, but I can find no connection between any of the sleep results and the blood pressure.

I think I am going to up the dosage to 1000 mg (+90 mg from multivitamin). 

Orange Glasses don't work....but Sleep Mask might

There is no connection between the amount of deep sleep I get and the Orange Goggles (37.4 vs 37.7 min) The theory that I need to wind down more to get more deep sleep is not true. No matter how I sliced up the data it took about 50 minutes before I hit deep sleep.

In retrospect, this makes a little sense. If there were any problems with me and light...It is probably that I am not getting enough rather than too much. May explore more time in the sun in a future experiment.

So it must be interruptions that are taking me out of deep sleep.

There is clearly a connection between the number of wake ups, time awake, and deep sleep. The x-axis below is number of times to wake up. You can see amount of deep sleep decreasing as the number of wakes.

The trouble is the Sleep Mask doesn't appear to be doing the trick. It decreases the average number of wake ups (4.3 to 3.2 per night), but doesn't significantly change the amount of deep sleep (36.8 to 38 min night). It actually appears to have increased the amount of wake time (18 to 22.8 min).

My only guess is sound. I live in an urban area next to a train track. I haven't personally noticed noise in the night but it is all I got.

I'll start tonight wearing earplugs along with the sleep mask and see what happens.