… I just wanna sleep
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My SO has been using ASMR with some ear buds for years. It occupies her mind and helps her relax enough to fall asleep. Great stuff.
She also needs her fan… Or some other form of white noise. It may be an ADHD thing.
- If you’re the kind of person to keep yourself busy all day, then when you’re trying to go to sleep might be the first time all day you’ve allowed your mind to wander! You need to find some other time in the day to allow yourself to daydream. Some tips are to not read anything while in the bathroom or turn the radio off in your car if you have a commute. Maybe even schedule some time to sit and think about things if you can.
- Only use your bed for sleep and sex. Reading, eating, browsing on your phone, watching TV, or any other activity should be done elsewhere. This way you train yourself that it’s sleeptime when you’re in bed.
- This is probably something that can’t be done if you have a rotating shift, but go to sleep on a regular schedule. Go to sleep at the same time every day. Staying up late should a rare occurrence. Your body will become tired at the same time each day and it’s much easier to fall asleep when you keep a schedule.
but how do i summon wondering at my own volition when i want it to instead of descending upon us when i’m trying to focus
Don’t use your phone at night. If you absolutely have to, enable adaptive warm light (if there’s such a feature on your phone), which gradually turns the white balance to warm in the evening. This is because staring at the screen will send the signals to your brain to wake up, especially the blue-ish spectrum of light, plus whatever content you’re engaging with (news, social media, texts from friends) will make your mind occupied.
But again, best is to not use your phone at all.
Read a book. Pick a topic you’re interested in, buy a book and just read before you sleep. Yes, I see the contradiction - an interesting book will make your mind occupied too. Yet I find that a book relaxes me in my own world, while on your phone you’ll meet many different topics, lots of quick stimuli, maybe that’s why. I don’t know.
These strategies work for me.
5mg melatonin and 200mg L-Theanine works for me. I order from Thorne. I believe they are reputable.
According to my SO’s sleep doctor, most people don’t need that high of a dose. He recommends 1mg.
Focus on your breathing, and how the air feels in the back of your throat.
Repeat a mdeditative mantra in your head.
Do the thing where you tense up your whole. Ody and then slowly release it from the fingers and toes inwards. I think this is what US marines use to get to sleep in adverse conditions.
Play an audiobook on speaker quietly under your pillow. The more boring the story, the better. They have non-story podcasts just for this too.
Look up Progressive muscle relaxation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_muscle_relaxation
There are plenty of videos on YouTube, try a few and pick one you like.
Concentrating on breathing also helps.
Exercise will control your circadian rhythm, set your metabolism on a more consistent routine, and help you sleep better. Endurance based exercises are best; cycling, swimming, running, rowing, etc. You need 1 hour every 3 days at a minimum in my experience. Don’t think in terms of a week, just do it somewhere between daily and every 3 days no matter what. Even someone like me that has major chronic health problems from a broken neck and back manages to pull off this one. In fact, I fall apart and turn into a sleepless zombie if I fail to maintain my exercise routine. I’m likely one of the most sleep deprived people here. This works when nothing else does or is possible.
I used to struggle with sleep. It turned out I’m bipolar. Thankfully, it mellows with age and I learned how to manage it. I was probably ~23 when I got diagnosed. Just sharing because it’s useful to know that sometimes there’s a very specific reason why sleep seems elusive.
You can get sleeping pills for such a situation. I also use melatonin gummies. You can get CBD gummies in a lot of places. Meditation might help.
The most important aspect of sleep management for me is keeping a solid routine. I go to bed at the same time every night and get up early even on my days off. Breaking that routine leads to issues, resuming the routine solves them quickly.
I turn the brightness on my phone as low as it goes, turn on night shift to get rid of blues, and read (white text on black background / dark mode).
Don’t read in continuous scroll; find a way to turn the page with minimum animation.
Read something you don’t find so compelling as to keep turning pages but enough that you’re happy to read.
I find history books most successful at the moment since there is often no desire by the author to build tension, suspense, etc that keeps you alert.
If I cant watch/listen to content I try to “render” a pov trip of like a rollercoaster or some sort of “on rails” vehicle going through some sort of landscape whether its a realistic cityscape, abstract and colorful shapes, a tunnel underground or though an ocean. I let my brain sorta just decide what it wants to do like if the landscape changes I dont try to go back to the previous one or try to “customize” it. Its a bit hard to explain what I mean without me sounding like im talking about my brain as a completely separate entity from myself but it really is like it has a mind of its own and im just letting it do its thing as long as the topic is “strictly” to generate a scene of going through a tube or riding a “pre determined” path. If it starts to get “bored” and even very slightly veer back into normal thoughts or something else I sorta quickly but gently nudge it into another scene or to increase the detail which is hard for maybe the first minute or two but with this method im asleep really quickly. At the start ill probably switch “scenes” a couple times a second.
It feels like im letting the brain sorta tire itself out with a method that can be described as gently guiding a boat downstream
Cheap version: listen to the sounds of your breathing. Relax all your muscles from head to toe, then just try and isolate the sounds of air coming and going as you breathe. Focus on it long enough and hopefully you pass out.
Expensive version: https://www.moonbird.life/products/moonbird - set it for 4 seconds in, 6 seconds out and just bring it under the covers and get cozy.
Your cheap version is my top recommendation. Basically, learn to practice mindfulness and use that when you go to bed. Focus on your body sinking into the bed, feeling cozy.
This is similar to the meditation technique of anapanasati (mindfulness of the breath). I couple that with repeating in my head “rising” on inhale, “falling” on exhale and focusing on the tickling sensation on the tip of your nose with each breath. Next thing I know I’m waking up in the morning.
Do you suffer from hot sleeping? I do. I sleep best with a big pile of blankets on me. I sleep with a weighted blanket among others. But that combined with a prediliction for hot sleeping, and I have trouble waking up in the night in a sweat.
I got so desperate, I actually almost bought one of those expensive cool water circulation systems. But then I realized a low tech solution. It takes a lot of heat to melt water. The amount of energy required to melt two liters of water is of the same magnitude as the amount of body heat given off by a human over the course of a night.
Specifically, I learned that those old timey rubber water bottles for bed use? They works just as well as cold packs as hot packs. So I got a few of those and tried it. And it’s helped immensely at improving my sleep.
I have two cheap Amazon special rubber water bottles with felt covers on them. I keep them in the freezer. Each night I grab the bottles, which freeze solid through the day. I simply sleep with them under the covers, and it immensely improved my sleep. The felt covers on the bottle act as insulators to ameliorate the temperature of the bottles. You can sleep with one against you and it just feels mildly cooling. It doesn’t feel like sleeping on a block of ice.
I would say this method is about 90% as effective as one of those expensive bed water cooling systems. I researched those, and they cost $500 and up. Plus they required regular maintenance and had all sorts of problems with leaks and mold. This? This system cost me about $20 and requires no more work than taking something in and out of the freezer.
If you have problems with hot sleeping, try the stupid solution first. Buy some big rubber water bottles and freeze them, or try other cold pack solutions or similar total heat capacity.
Doesn’t this leave you with wet patches in your bed though?
It doesn’t leave wet patches. If you used the bottle without the cover, it would. But the cover makes it so that heat energy only slowly leaches into it. In other words, the surface of the covered bottle is probably around 60F/16C. And the surface is fluffy, not smooth.
I think the bottles are sealed.
Water condensates on cool things and the body loses water vapor through pores.
I think the covers on the bottles should mostly prevent that though.The covers do mostly prevent it. They sometimes do get a little bit of condensation, but it’s not significant. The cover mostly takes care of it. You can get a little condensation near the sealed end of the bottle. It’s less than the amount of moisture you would generate via sweating.
timey rubber water bottles for bed use
So in the UK we just call these “hot water bottles”
Which I’m just now really thinking about as a term and on reflection it’s a pretty rubbish name for them
It’s doubtless an artifact of history. Rubber water bottles like that go way back. Before the days of electric blankets, space heaters, boiler heating, gas furnaces, etc, heating was often provided by wood- or coal-burning stoves. With a rubber bladder like that, you could boil some water on the stove and take it to bed with you. If all you have is a fire to keep you warm, it’s hard to use that fire to directly heat your bed. For someone sleeping in a cold bedroom in an old drafty house, a hot water bottle and a pile of blankets was how you often got through the cold winter nights. And stoneware versions of the same concept go back at least half a millennium.
But ice available in the home? Some homes in the late 19th century and earlier sometimes had ice boxes - literally just insulated boxes that you could put ice in to keep food cold. The ice had to be cut off of frozen lakes in the winter and stored in big insulated ice houses for the rest of the year. But such ice would be too expensive and precious to fill a water bottle with. Maybe someone really wealthy could afford to do that. Maybe you could do it if someone was severely ill and needed a fever cooled. But pre-WW2, even if you had access to ice, it was too precious for most people to be able to justify using it just as a sleep aid.
To make something like this practical, you really need a modern freezer. Even in the days of ice boxes, you wouldn’t be able to pull something like this off unless you were willing to use up two liters of expensive bought ice every night. That’s just not something most people could afford.
The first domestic freezers as we know them now didn’t appear until the 1940s. And it took decades for them to become ubiquitous in the homes of people in wealthy countries. It’s only in the last 50 years or so that you could just assume a random person in a developed country has access to a freezer. And there are certainly still people who don’t have such access.
So yeah, we’ve had hot water bottles for many centuries, but the concept of a cold bottle or cold pack is only something that’s been feasible for less than a single human lifetime. We were doubtlessly calling these things “hot water bottles” generations before the freezer was invented. It turns out they can also be used as ice packs, but the name was already established.
Thank you. Just ordered one and I’m very excited to try this. I’ve been researching the cooling loops but they seem impractical and too expensive…
Feel free to reply to this after you give it a try. It worked for me, but I’m curious if it works for anyone else.
I have been practicing the 99 count down of breath. Each breath count down.
Slow down your breathing as you count. Your thoughts will drift off and that’s good, but come back to it as soon as you realize you stopped counting. I rarely get past 50. The more you practice the better you will get at it, as sleep likes routine.I like to think of nostalgic memories.
