Oh yes, following a siesta pattern, I forgot that one. Do you ever have naps or siestas, and if so, what does it do to your sleep?
How much caffeine are we talking about? I tend to have small pieces of dark chocolate, often only 5g or so, and will occasionally have a cup of fairly weak tea (often white tea or green tea). The tea is mostly for medicinal purposes, I find that it's an effective bronchodilator when I get air hunger.
I've a feeling that blood sugar levels were fairly important for me with regard to the racing heartbeat and associated stuff. Not that it was being formally monitored, but I can spot the difference between eating something sugary, eating a refined grain, and eating a wholegrain - it makes a fairly big difference in how I feel. Same goes for regular mealtimes.
What sort of range of number of hours are we talking about, and which was the magic number for you?
Since you're so responsive to oral melatonin, I'm curious about the darkness side of things. How dark is your bedroom? Do you ever get exposed to more light during the night, for instance for a trip to the toilet? I never got anywhere with the one brand of melatonin tablets I tried, but I find that darkness therapy (which stimulates natural melatonin production) has a profound effect on me, similar to that of a good sleeping tablet. Speaking of which, have you tested yourself when on a sleeping tablet, and if so, what did you find?
Hormones - entirely possible, yep. I'm fairly sure there's been research into PMS and insomnia, and a lot of hormonal issues are exacerbated by insufficient melatonin, e.g. breast cancer rates are sky-high in shift workers. Are you doing FAM tracking or something, then?
I'm guessing that you've already spent quite a bit of time devoted to improving your sleep before getting this gadget, which may be why you're only seeing minor differences. I might have a single cup of tea during the day, perhaps once or twice a month, but I would never even dream of having three cups of coffee in a day, as some people do. We're at the fine-tuning stage, eh. It's a pity that occurs when sleep is still moderately crap, but eh, that's ME for you.
It's hard to say for sure whether anything is or isn't affecting things, because there is some degree of natural variation from night to night even if I seem to be keeping things as consistent as possible. And, of course, there are so many factors that it would be difficult to control them all. Generally my pattern of activity, sleep time, diet, etc. is pretty consistent most of the time, but who knows what other details might be affecting things. If I haven't noticed changes, it just means that I haven't noticed a consistent pattern of changes from that activity, or that the variation isn't any different than between any other nights. Obviously things I've mostly discounted could still be an impact, or might have a bigger impact on some other people than on me. I'm the first to say that we're all a unique little puzzle.
But for what it's worth, I would be happy to share anything I have or haven't noticed.
Naps - Haven't noticed any difference at all in what shows up on the zeo. Haven't done a lot of formal investigating on this one, though. I do know that the naps themselves tend to be full of REM sleep when I have them. That seems to be a good thing for me, so I think I would probably be better off napping more often.
Caffeine - I'm talking about a small amount of dark chocolate (maybe a quarter to a third of a chocolate bar at most). Though again, I didn't really
feel the difference the frequent mini-awakenings made, just noted they seem to be more frequent with caffeine any time in the day. They still show up without any caffeine at all, though, so that can't be the sole cause anyway.
Blood Sugar - I think this is involved in the heart/sweating/wired feelings too. Dr. Myhill mentioned something about a cortisol response triggered by low blood sugar,and I think she's on to something. Mine doesn't seem to get better if I go without carbs, though (she advocates a paleo diet, I believe). I seem to feel better if I eat something right before bed to get me through to my next meal. I'm not sure that the hypoglycemia I tend to experience is reactive at all. Seems to have some other cause.
Range of Hours - I don't know if I have a "magic number", since the better nights sleep still come infrequently. I do know that six, seven, or eight hours is not NEARLY enough for me, as I consistently feel much worse in the morning on those nights (truly awful on the unfortunate six hour ones). Nine is about my average now, because I get awakened when my husband gets up. Eleven or so seems much better, and gives me a much better chance of feeling at least a little better in the morning. To my knowledge every morning that I've been pleasantly surprised by waking feeling better has been after at least ten or eleven hours or more. Really I should probably switch my schedule over to that all the time. It gets complicated with the husband involved, though, as I tend to wake up and have trouble getting back to sleep if he comes to bed when I'm already sleeping, and I don't imagine he's crazy about the idea of losing eleven hours or more every night.
Darkness - I had already blacked out the windows in the bedroom and was trying to dim the lights before bed when I started using the zeo. That alone seemed to help quite a bit. I noticed a very tiny bit of impact from the other brands of melatonin I tried, but not nearly enough to actually put me to sleep, even at triple the dose. Just the Douglas Labs stuff (they should be paying me for this!). As with many supplements I take, I've found that the quality difference between brands is dramatic. Or there's something else in it that for some reason works profoundly for me. Either way, I will never, ever, ever be giving it up now.
I used to have to get up to go to the bathroom every night. For some reason that went away (no complaints there!). I'm not sure how much impact the light had, as just waking up for any reason enough to become truly conscious tends to make it VERY hard for me to get back to sleep, whether I get up out of bed or not. I think that has more to do with the weird cortisol stuff for me (I get almost like an adrenaline burst shortly after waking, but without the emotional side, and I know that my waking cortisol tested off the charts high, so I figure it seems likely that it's something along those lines. Either that, or it's related to my OI issues. Seems to also trigger sometimes when I roll over).
Sleeping Medications - I have generally stayed away from hardcore sleeping pills, since thankfully I found the Douglas Labs melatonin pretty early on in my experimentation, and it's enough to get me unconscious on all but the weirdest nights. It seems to be common wisdom that sleeping pills don't do a lot to improve quality anyway, just quantity, and I have a history of responding horribly to medications, so I've shied away from them so far. I did use the zeo under the influence of an antihistamine once that caused drowsiness, and maybe a drowsiness-inducing muscle relaxant a couple of times. As I recall, there weren't any major differences, though (which again surprised me greatly). Haven't given it a firm trial, though, since I didn't want to take that sort of thing unless I really needed it. My husband has used the zeo when taking 5-htp and when taking Trazodone (he has some insomnia and sleep disruption too, of a different kind), and they each had a HUGE impact on his sleep cycle patterns. So I'm sure that they would probably change something.
Hormones - At the moment, I'm just trying to track when I get the weird sleep symptoms and look very generally at where I might be in my cycle. To be honest, I'm amazed that this hadn't occurred to me sooner, but I haven't really paid attention to it at all before last month when I made the connection that it had been really bad and, hey, I'm just about to start my period (duh). If it looks like there's evidence for a correlation, I might get more detailed with it.
And you're right - I had already tried everything I could easily think of to improve my sleep before I got the machine, so I'm sure if I had been testing sooner I might have noticed more of a difference. I think darkening the room was the biggest impact for me of those kinds of interventions. No electronics before bed did make it much easier to fall asleep too.
It's funny when I go to write up posts like this one and am forced to articulate what is better or worse for me... I tend to find a lot of things that I know to be true and that my gut tells me would really help me, but that I'm not doing consistently. Like naps. I know that rest is better for me. I'm sure of it. And I know that for some reason my brain seems to benefit from more, more, more REM sleep time. Yet I don't nap often. I think sometimes I get so caught up in the day to day struggle and the search for more answers that I lose sight of the easy things right in front of me. Do less. Rest more. Get better.