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hrjMy twitter plea for topic ideas turned up a request for a discussion of transportation systems in Alpennia, but I'm not sure I want to go into too much detail about how much of that is researched and how much is hand-wavy. Sorry!
So for a totally random topic, I've been thinking for some time of doing a follow-up to my attempts to address "tired/sleepy all the time" in a systematic fashion.
My day job involves "root cause analysis (RCA)", i.e., taking an observed failure and identifying the underlying causes--often at several removes--that can be addressed in order to eliminate the failure. Relatively simple causal chains can be identified and addressed easily. There's a RCA tool called "five whys" that's exactly what it sounds like: act like an annoying two year old and ask "why" of every answer that you get:
Failure: I'm tired all the time.
Why? Because I don't get the right quantity of sleep.
Why? Because I stay up until midnight playing video games and my alarm goes off at 5am.
Why? Because I'm addicted to video games and because if I don't get to work by 6am I can't buy more video games.
Why? ...
Eventually you get to an answer that is susceptible of a solution. (The above example is purely hypothetical, mind you. I actually have very little use for video games.)
But not all failures are that easy, either to analyze or to address. In some cases, while the failure has a simple cause, identifying the correct option from among several possible causes is more difficult. One of the standard RCA tools in the industry is called "MMEEPS" which stands for "Materials, Methods, Equipment, Environment, Personnel". Other analysis tools involve things like making "is/is-not" contrasts ("the problem exists in contexts A, B, and C, but not in contexts X, Y, and Z") or hypothesis/contradiction analysis ("here's a scenario that could result in this failure/here's a fact that contradicts that scenario").
But the most difficult failures to address are those where multiple unrelated causes combine to push a state from "undesirable" to "failed", or where the causal chain of a failure requires the combination of several "dominoes", none of which would result in failure individually.
It was pretty obvious that my sleepy/tired issues fell in this last group. It wasn't necessarily a "quantity of sleep" issue, though perhaps a "quantity of uninterrupted sleep" problem. What were the interruptions? Was anything else undermining the quality of the sleep that I was getting?
Observed interruptions: often woke up feeling too hot or too cold; often woke up repeatedly at what felt like regular intervals (e.g., 3-4 hours after going to bed, every 2 hours after that); woke up and couldn't return to sleep without audio running; woke up before my alarm and couldn't return to sleep; woke up because my leg went numb or more rarely had muscle spasms.
Issues contributing to initiation of sleep: severe tinnitus, "hamster-wheel brain" spinning through pointless problem-solving, more rarely specific anxieties, more rarely inexplicable complete inability to become sleepy until well after midnight.
Possible issues affecting quality of sleep: Do the audio books I keep running all night affect my sleep cycles or sleep depth? Are my sleep cycles badly aligned with seasonal or artificial light cycles? Is my bedroom too warm or too cold? Is my sleep interrupted by external noises? Do I have unidentified medical issues that are affecting my sleep?
It's easy to see that several of these could be acting independently, and that some are more susceptible of mitigation (as we say in the biz) than others. Here are the mitigations that I'd been using for some time:
* Mask tinnitus and distract hamster-wheel brain by running audio books at barely-perceptible volume all night. This is amazingly efficient for getting me into a sleep state and for helping me fall back to sleep when I wake during the night. Hazards: if sleeping when others are around, I need to use earphones which can cause discomfort; audio books must be chosen for familiarity (I don't want to get caught up in the story), lack of dramatic sounds (once made the mistake of listening to some crime drama with gunshots!), and a pleasant reading voice.
* Control light and darkness as necessary with the use of blackout curtains and a "daylight alarm clock".
* Mitigate leg nerve/muscle issues by the strategic use of body pillows. Also: train body never to extend the foot while sleeping as this will lead to leg cramps.
* Regularize bedtime and stick to it religiously.
But these weren't doing the trick and I decided to see what a medical consultation could do to tease out a few more addressable causes. The temperature regulation issue is most likely due to very mild post-menopausal hot flashes, but I ruled out the suggestion of hormone replacement therapy. There are trade-offs there that I wouldn't consider worth making. I had a scan of my lower back done to see if the sciatic nerve problems were due to anything that might be worth addressing physically. Answer: no, I'm stuck with it.
But of course one of the first things my doctor suggested was a sleep study to test for apnea. And that did turn up "mild sleep apnea". Just barely over the threshold where they recommend treatment using a CPAP (though not severe enough to expect any particularly dramatic results from using it). This is a case where the mitigation is easy to implement (assuming I found the CPAP easy to use, which I do) and therefore any degree of improvement is essentially "free". Honestly, the improvements seem very subtle indeed on a day to day basis. But I no longer feel like I'm dragging through every day just waiting to get back to bed. So I conclude that it's helping.
That's pretty much the only mitigation that came out of the sleep study. There are all sorts of recommendations for personal habits, but they come with trade-offs. For instance, they recommend not exercising within X hours of sleeping and not eating within Y hours. But the only place exercise fits into my day is after work and that's within the discouraged zone. And if I don't eat something after I get home in the evening, then hunger will wake me up, yet that meal, however small, is also in the discouraged zone. Life happens.
The other major mitigation that seems to have made a measurable difference came about by accident. One day I forgot my computer glasses at home so I used the older prescription that I keep in my desk for just such an emergency. Suddenly, half my chronic headache disappeared. No more sand-under-the-skull feeling. It turned out the glasses that are just perfect for working on my laptop at home were no longer appropriate for the just-slightly-longer screen distance at work, and I'd been straining my eyes without really noticing. I've been paying a lot more attention to focal distance and eyestrain since then. The annoying thing is that, not only are my eyes not stable, they aren't progressing in any particular direction. From week to week, my "easy focal distance" with a given pair of glasses can move in and out. Annoying. So I'm no longer juggling two pairs of glasses (with three lenses) but instead three pairs (with four lenses). And it's quite possible that I'd do even better with more variants so I can swap around depending on what my eyes are feeling like at a given moment. Not sleep related at all, but evidently a contributing cause to the "tired all the time" feeling.
And that is more in the exciting life of a root cause investigator.
So for a totally random topic, I've been thinking for some time of doing a follow-up to my attempts to address "tired/sleepy all the time" in a systematic fashion.
My day job involves "root cause analysis (RCA)", i.e., taking an observed failure and identifying the underlying causes--often at several removes--that can be addressed in order to eliminate the failure. Relatively simple causal chains can be identified and addressed easily. There's a RCA tool called "five whys" that's exactly what it sounds like: act like an annoying two year old and ask "why" of every answer that you get:
Failure: I'm tired all the time.
Why? Because I don't get the right quantity of sleep.
Why? Because I stay up until midnight playing video games and my alarm goes off at 5am.
Why? Because I'm addicted to video games and because if I don't get to work by 6am I can't buy more video games.
Why? ...
Eventually you get to an answer that is susceptible of a solution. (The above example is purely hypothetical, mind you. I actually have very little use for video games.)
But not all failures are that easy, either to analyze or to address. In some cases, while the failure has a simple cause, identifying the correct option from among several possible causes is more difficult. One of the standard RCA tools in the industry is called "MMEEPS" which stands for "Materials, Methods, Equipment, Environment, Personnel". Other analysis tools involve things like making "is/is-not" contrasts ("the problem exists in contexts A, B, and C, but not in contexts X, Y, and Z") or hypothesis/contradiction analysis ("here's a scenario that could result in this failure/here's a fact that contradicts that scenario").
But the most difficult failures to address are those where multiple unrelated causes combine to push a state from "undesirable" to "failed", or where the causal chain of a failure requires the combination of several "dominoes", none of which would result in failure individually.
It was pretty obvious that my sleepy/tired issues fell in this last group. It wasn't necessarily a "quantity of sleep" issue, though perhaps a "quantity of uninterrupted sleep" problem. What were the interruptions? Was anything else undermining the quality of the sleep that I was getting?
Observed interruptions: often woke up feeling too hot or too cold; often woke up repeatedly at what felt like regular intervals (e.g., 3-4 hours after going to bed, every 2 hours after that); woke up and couldn't return to sleep without audio running; woke up before my alarm and couldn't return to sleep; woke up because my leg went numb or more rarely had muscle spasms.
Issues contributing to initiation of sleep: severe tinnitus, "hamster-wheel brain" spinning through pointless problem-solving, more rarely specific anxieties, more rarely inexplicable complete inability to become sleepy until well after midnight.
Possible issues affecting quality of sleep: Do the audio books I keep running all night affect my sleep cycles or sleep depth? Are my sleep cycles badly aligned with seasonal or artificial light cycles? Is my bedroom too warm or too cold? Is my sleep interrupted by external noises? Do I have unidentified medical issues that are affecting my sleep?
It's easy to see that several of these could be acting independently, and that some are more susceptible of mitigation (as we say in the biz) than others. Here are the mitigations that I'd been using for some time:
* Mask tinnitus and distract hamster-wheel brain by running audio books at barely-perceptible volume all night. This is amazingly efficient for getting me into a sleep state and for helping me fall back to sleep when I wake during the night. Hazards: if sleeping when others are around, I need to use earphones which can cause discomfort; audio books must be chosen for familiarity (I don't want to get caught up in the story), lack of dramatic sounds (once made the mistake of listening to some crime drama with gunshots!), and a pleasant reading voice.
* Control light and darkness as necessary with the use of blackout curtains and a "daylight alarm clock".
* Mitigate leg nerve/muscle issues by the strategic use of body pillows. Also: train body never to extend the foot while sleeping as this will lead to leg cramps.
* Regularize bedtime and stick to it religiously.
But these weren't doing the trick and I decided to see what a medical consultation could do to tease out a few more addressable causes. The temperature regulation issue is most likely due to very mild post-menopausal hot flashes, but I ruled out the suggestion of hormone replacement therapy. There are trade-offs there that I wouldn't consider worth making. I had a scan of my lower back done to see if the sciatic nerve problems were due to anything that might be worth addressing physically. Answer: no, I'm stuck with it.
But of course one of the first things my doctor suggested was a sleep study to test for apnea. And that did turn up "mild sleep apnea". Just barely over the threshold where they recommend treatment using a CPAP (though not severe enough to expect any particularly dramatic results from using it). This is a case where the mitigation is easy to implement (assuming I found the CPAP easy to use, which I do) and therefore any degree of improvement is essentially "free". Honestly, the improvements seem very subtle indeed on a day to day basis. But I no longer feel like I'm dragging through every day just waiting to get back to bed. So I conclude that it's helping.
That's pretty much the only mitigation that came out of the sleep study. There are all sorts of recommendations for personal habits, but they come with trade-offs. For instance, they recommend not exercising within X hours of sleeping and not eating within Y hours. But the only place exercise fits into my day is after work and that's within the discouraged zone. And if I don't eat something after I get home in the evening, then hunger will wake me up, yet that meal, however small, is also in the discouraged zone. Life happens.
The other major mitigation that seems to have made a measurable difference came about by accident. One day I forgot my computer glasses at home so I used the older prescription that I keep in my desk for just such an emergency. Suddenly, half my chronic headache disappeared. No more sand-under-the-skull feeling. It turned out the glasses that are just perfect for working on my laptop at home were no longer appropriate for the just-slightly-longer screen distance at work, and I'd been straining my eyes without really noticing. I've been paying a lot more attention to focal distance and eyestrain since then. The annoying thing is that, not only are my eyes not stable, they aren't progressing in any particular direction. From week to week, my "easy focal distance" with a given pair of glasses can move in and out. Annoying. So I'm no longer juggling two pairs of glasses (with three lenses) but instead three pairs (with four lenses). And it's quite possible that I'd do even better with more variants so I can swap around depending on what my eyes are feeling like at a given moment. Not sleep related at all, but evidently a contributing cause to the "tired all the time" feeling.
And that is more in the exciting life of a root cause investigator.
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no subject
Date: 2015-11-13 04:58 pm (UTC)But while I can wish that by next year I'll be up until midnight as used to be usual, I doubt that will happen so long as I need to be to work at 9:00 instead of sleeping until 9:00 and getting in around 10:00 (ah, grad student life...)
no subject
Date: 2015-11-13 06:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-11-14 06:52 pm (UTC)I'd love to hear more about transportation.
no subject
Date: 2015-11-14 08:51 pm (UTC)The thing about transportation (and similar topics) is that there are entire swathes of world-building where I know just enough to make things plausible, but not enough to discuss them in detail. Barbara's swordfighting is one of those things. I will never describe a detailed blow-by-blow duel. But I can show her keeping up the regular grind of practice. And I can show her thinking of social interactions in the terminology of the sword. Similarly, I can do enough background research to have a notion of the importance of coaching routes, and how foodstuffs move into the city, and what sorts of things would be worth building transport canals for and which not, and what sort of geography would support canals (which is why canals are an issue in Turinz but not in Saveze), and what the roads would be like in winter, and…all sorts of things. But I don't know them in enough detail to explain the systems, only enough that I know the difference in transport time for a wagon load of wine barrels, versus a private coach that can hire changes of horses, versus a drover bringing cattle to the city.
no subject
Date: 2015-11-15 12:04 am (UTC)