… I just wanna sleep
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.
Two things that helped me in the past year:
- Avoiding caffeine after 10:00AM or so. I cut coffee completely, but I noticed positive effects by just drinking all caffeine before ~10:00AM.
- Sleep mask helped me a ton. Turns out we are super sensitive to the most minute amount of light.
- At least for me, not eating past ~6:00PM makes falling asleep way easier.
- Regular exercise (of any kind) allows you to fall sleep easier. Probably has to do with regulating hormones/biological subsystems.
- NO PHONE on bed. Bed is only for sleep and sex. In my opinion anyway.
Hope this helps!
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“not eating past ~6:00PM” sounds like nursing home to me
What I usually do is think about all the time today when I wanted to be left alone. To be uninterrupted. To just get five minutes to myself.
Because now, I have it. I have all the time in the world. I can do nothing. I can let my mind wander. No one will interrupt, no one will dump bullshit on me. Countless times today I just wanted a pause button for five minutes and now I have hours to just do nothing.
Then I wake up and realize “nope, all that time is now gone”. Can’t catch a fuckin break.
I’m gonna chime in here. My wife asks me this a lot because she too has trouble going to and staying asleep. I however have some kind of sleep superpower. I can be asleep within 2 minutes after going horizontal.
I’ve always done this: start building a scene in your head. Any scene. Action, nature, whatever. Now picture yourself there in first person. Focus on the details. Make sure the trees have leaves. The pavement has lines and cracks and texture. Imagine feeling the wind on your body. From grass to cars to sky paint as detailed a picture as you can. Begin to form a story. Walk around and interact with things, people, animals. Maybe you have a storyline. As a boy I had an action sequence I would play out every night. Cuz you know. Boys. But as I got older those turned into hikes in fun places. Or keeping company with my current crush. Or a fun road trip…You get the idea.
I promise not long after you begin you will naturally begin to drift off. At least this is what has always come naturally to me.
Good luck and sweet dreams!!!
This is going to be really hard for those of us who are aphantasic.
I’d never heard of this. So do you dream at all?
Very vividly and every night. I just can’t really call up pictures in my mind. I can call them up for maybe a fraction of a second with poor detail, but I can’t hold on to them.
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.
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.
Doesn’t this leave you with wet patches in your bed though?
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.
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.
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.
Apps that generate soft sounds of rain or waves.
People have said to relax your face and jaw. Take it a step further and relax your tongue from the roof of your mouth. It sounds silly, but I found it works for me.
That was a tip from the other site I saw years ago, and now if I’m tired and have 15 minutes I can usually grab a power nap by keeping this in mind.
This sounds very much like what I read about how pilots on the front line rest. They would spend a lot of time in the air, and anytime there was downtime you took it. Some kind of research went into it and they came up with an entire process that would involve relaxing your body from head to toe, and then visualizing yourself somewhere else, like a boat in a lake or relaxing on a hillside. If you fail, you do the whole thing over. With enough training your mind becomes very adaptive and you can fall asleep faster and in highly disruptive environments. I believe it also had roots in meditation, where the more you do it the easier it gets.
I have never tried meditation intentionally, but I’ve probably reached a similar state through relaxation. You’ve piqued my curiosity so I’ll look into it, thank you
wear yourself out during the day. easier to fall asleep if you’re exhausted
I had sleep issues for years, almost failed high school because of it and then I was late to my own graduation. Now I have a routine that serves me well: Wake up and go to sleep at the same time every day, no caffeine, no sugar at night, nightlight on my monitors at night, listen to boring audiobooks with a sleep timer, don’t lay in bed watching TV.
Obviously it’s person-dependent. I find what helps me most is turning on audio to something I actually want to listen to. That gets my mind off going to sleep. And I fall asleep instead of listening to the things I want to hear. So I’ve got a bunch of audiobooks from Audible. I’ve recently cancelled that, however. I’ve got so many, and plan to use the phone app Libby in conjunction with my local library. Also, I subscribe to a bunch of podcasts.
When I lie down I just set the timer to 30m or “end of chapter”, and I rarely have to extend that.
I went to the doctor and told them I had insomnia. Got diagnosed with depression. So now I take Seroquel and sleep ok. My point is to get a doctor’s opinion to rule out a medical condition.
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.
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.
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.
If you have the “eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee” like me, get a fan.
If you have trouble sleeping in general, it might be a bad habits thing. Melatonin supplements can help to get you tired. 1mg before you go to bed is enough, if you try to relax and sleep. They don’t do anything if you do stuff that keeps you awake however.
This particularly anything exciting like sports, listening to energetic music, watching tense movies, playing fast or demanding games etc. Avoid any such thing for at least two hours before you try to sleep.
I’ve found that I have to keep my hands off my body, the stimulation of being touched keeps me alert.
