As described in Melatonin, I’ve always had struggles with falling asleep once I’ve woken up and could basically never fall back asleep: neither when waking up very early in the morning, nor at any time throughout the day before night has once again fallen.
At least until A long, lost Easter weekend. During that weekend I napped several times a day and had very little energy. Whilst it’s improved since then, I still felt tired very often and frequently even very tired throughout the day, which was really getting in the way.
At one point, just at the threshold to falling asleep, I regained just enough consciousness and awareness to realize that I’m the source of the gentle background noise. So, I installed SnoreLab, an app that records mic input throughout the entire night, analyses the sounds and gives you some graphs, a Snore Score1, and lets you play back the potentially snore-y parts of the night. Perhaps I wasn’t getting enough oxygen, degrading my sleep quality so much that I was tired all day? I’ve tested for 4 nights, with some gaps in between:
- overall, it was always less than 1h per night
- throughout the night 1-3 periods of harder breathing, light snoring or actual snoring
- on average, 60% of the snoring sounds detected being soft sounds (either harder breathing or sometimes just from moving or changing position)
- Snore Scores of 13, 16, 5, and 10 (average: 11), where the average new user score is 2521
- total sleep time recorded always less than the 8h I typically have as my at-least. But often I woke up, ended the session and then eventually fell asleep again for some time
So, this doesn’t seem to be the problem. I’ve had digestive issues starting approx 1-3w after I had taken oral antibiotics. A messed-up gut microbiome could reduce the production, conversion and uptake of vitamins3. Especially B-vitamins, which are important for energy, get (along with K) synthesized in the gut. However, the fatigue only set in after the digestive issues got resolved.
The vitamins stored in my body could have been depleted whilst dysbiosis limited uptake, however, B-vitamins are for the most part water-soluble and aren’t stored for long, which would lead one to expect the fatigue to set in MUCH earlier and not after the poor digestion already got resolved.
Footnotes
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“Snore Score: The Snore Score is our measure of snoring intensity. A higher Snore Score indicates louder or more frequent snoring. The average Snore Score for a new user is around 25. A lower Snore Score is better!” ↩ ↩2
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We can assume selection effects. ↩
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Dysbiosis reduces synthesis and absorption, which compounds any dietary shortfall, which can tip someone into a functional deficiency even if their diet is otherwise fine. I’m on a good supplement regime, which ensures good intake, however, a possible dysbiosis could limit the amount that’s actually taken up. ↩