Hoping one or two of you who use the Apollo can comment on the following:-
My wife has no trouble falling asleep but usually wakes up 4 hours later and just can’t get back to sleep again. Did anyone of you who use the Apollo have any experience of this and if so, does it cure the problem?
Sleep is amazingly complex. Part of middle insomnia (waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to get back to sleep) is the Cortisol Awakening Response. The HPA cycle is about 90 mins so to get rid of cortisol may take that long.
I personally make major use of Melatonin for getting back to sleep, but if I have higher cortisol levels (which can be spotted with a jump in heart rate) and I cannot get them down again through breathing exercises or otherwise, then I know I need to wait a while before the cortisol goes. At times it is worth getting up and going back to bed. Blue light blocking glasses (to keep the light from the iPRGCs) can be helpful, but that does not affect cortisol.
To see the cortisol effect use a fitness tracker to monitor heart rate and if someone gets up (to go to the toilet) watch that the heart rate drops back to the prior rate. If it does not then you probably have higher cortisol.
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Drinking alcohol also increases the incidence of sleep awakening.
One reason many of us have suffered from the same symptom is because of the countless thousands of years we existed before electricity, or even candles for that matter. Why do you think the ancients knew so much about star and moon patterns? Because they were up in the middle of the night watching them.
“However, these wakeful periods in the middle of the night might not be so abnormal. In looking at the history of human sleep, documented evidence shows that people would purposely divide their rest into periods. This practice is in sleep science known as biphasic or segmented sleep”.
“However, these wakeful periods in the middle of the night might not be so abnormal. In looking at the history of human sleep, documented evidence shows that people would purposely divide their rest into periods. This practice is in sleep science known as biphasic or segmented sleep”
There was a period when segmented sleep was the norm.
The only reason I fight it is because of my schedule. I did try after reading an autobiography of a guy staying in a remote cabin without electricity and just going with the flow. He woke in the middle of the night and went outside to watch the night sky.
No, problem, wake up, read a book until I was sleepy again, and then sleep until you wake up again. No alarm clock!
“He knew this, even in the horror with which he started from his first sleep, and threw up the window to dispel it by the presence of some object, beyond the room, which had not been, as it were, the witness of his dream.” Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge (1840)
“Don Quixote followed nature, and being satisfied with his first sleep, did not solicit more. As for Sancho, he never wanted a second, for the first lasted him from night to morning.” Miguel Cervantes, Don Quixote (1615)
“And at the wakening of your first sleepe You shall have a hott drinke made, And at the wakening of your next sleepe Your sorrowes will have a slake.” Early English ballad, Old Robin of Portingale
The Tiv tribe in Nigeria employ the terms “first sleep” and “second sleep” to refer to specific periods of the night"
When segmented sleep was the norm
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There are many reasons early awakening, known to doctors as sleep maintenance insomnia, may take place. The most common, but hardest to diagnose, is depression. Another common cause is hypoglycemia – you have been fasting for hours and if your blood sugar drops too low, the brain triggers the release of norepinephrine to wake you up to get something to eat. Another common problem is restless leg syndrome or leg cramps. Another is nocturnal polyuria (having to pee). It’s the hardest one of all to solve, believe me I speak from experience.
Thanks for all the responses so far.
We clearly know the cause of the wake-up, what I’m interested in is if the Apollo device is any good at sending the person back to sleep as i have noted from other threads people have mentioned this device as being good for the initial falling asleep.
@desertshores you have a very good point about this possibly being my wife’s natural sleep rhythm although she could override it for the first 30 years of her life, and unfortunately our current life with school-age kids just doesn’t allow to go with the natural rhythm. We have a few more years to go before we have that particular luxury!
Anyway, any comments for any Apollo device users, would be very much appreciated.
You’re talking about this device, right? Anyone using it?
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Yes, that’s the one.
Some people mentioned it as an aside in other threads.
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Edit: since I just read Appollo Neuro’s website and apparently they have more completed and ongoing trials currently. But - admittedly without taking the effort to look into them: I assume they are all sponsored by the company?
Undoubtably that would be the case. Who else would have any motivation to test? It is the same for OneSkin. They have very favorable testing results, including compared to a rapamycin skin cream, but all company sponsored. I did my own test using my right arm and left arm. OneSkin trounced my rapamycin cream.
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@zazim Do you happen to have any before/after pictures? I thought their prices were quite exorbitant - am I wrong? I also have this perhaps idle hope that targeting some pathways of ageing with drugs such as Rapa, may also result in better skin quality for your age. And thus I’m a bit hesitant to use separate items to rejuvenate the skin. As that would make it more difficult to judge through personal observation if a drug may indeed effectively target some pathways of ageing, if that makes any sense at all 
Unfortunately I don’t have good pictures to document my experiment. But you could easily replicate it with one bottle of OneSkin. I can see wrinkles on my face. I used oneskin and my rapamycin cream on my face. I’m sure there was a benefit because I hadn’t used anything previously. But I can still see the same wrinkles pretty much.
Where I noticed a difference was on my hands. It was shocking how visible my veins were on both. I used oneskin on my left arm and nothing on my right. Later I started using my rapamycin cream on my right arm. Over time, the OneSkin made a substantial difference that was very noticeable to me. The veins were much less prominent on my left hand versus my right hand.
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I would recommend watching the videos from the founders of OneSkin. My gist is that four or five women that were educated in Brazil took their PhD’s to Silicon Valley to use their expertise in manufacturing in vivos skin cells to test cosmetic products. Apparently most of the commercial products did not work well. It seems like the VCs pressured them into taking their peptide and making a cosmetic company. It seems to have worked. I think that they tried to see whether their molecule would work more broadly on other cells and did not have the same success. But that is my surmise.
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You mentioned VCs. What’s a VC?
Vc = Venture capitalists
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In an ideal world, experts say, you would get both ample exercise and ample sleep. But a new study suggests that exercise could potentially help counteract the health consequences of not getting a proper amount of sleep.
The new research builds upon a large body of work showing just how critical both sleep and fitness are for overall health. Various studies show that healthy amounts of each individually are linked to increased longevity. And at least one suggested that sleep problems tended to increase the chances a subject would die during the follow-up period but that regular exercise helped eliminate that risk.
A team of researchers based in China wanted to better understand the protective power of exercise, so it examined data collected in the United Kingdom from over 92,000 adults between the ages of 40 and 73. Participants spent a week between 2013 and 2015 wearing a wristband that measured how much they exercised and slept, which the researchers used as an indication of their lifestyle habits.
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How does it work? It says it ‘trains your body to recover from stress’ but how?
I looked at the site & saw stuff about how great it is, but nothing obvious about what it actually does. It has a lot of smoke, no fire smell to me. Anyone have any experience?
What OneSkin product did you use?
I use the face cream and the body lotion.
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Researchers from Washington University in St. Louis found people who took suvorexant, a common treatment for insomnia, for two nights at a sleep clinic experienced a slight drop in two proteins, amyloid-beta and tau, that pile up in Alzheimer’s disease.
Though only short and involving a small group of healthy adults, the study is an interesting demonstration of the link between sleep and the molecular markers of Alzheimer’s disease.
Sleep disturbances can be an early warning sign of Alzheimer’s disease that precedes other symptoms, such as memory loss and cognitive decline. And by the time the first symptoms develop, levels of abnormal amyloid-beta are almost peaking, forming clumps called plaques that clog up brain cells.
Researchers think promoting sleep could be one avenue to stave off Alzheimer’s disease, by allowing the sleeping brain to flush itself of leftover proteins and the day’s other waste products.
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