Are you just always tired? Do you have some kind of bedtime ritual? Have you had issues sleeping in the past and how did you handle that?
My husband can do that, and honestly I think it’s because he doesn’t sleep deeply enough, and gets up too early. So exhaustion works.
I fall asleep ina reasonable amount of time (satisfied with it) and exercise is the main thing I can tell helps me. Next most important I wait until I am actually sleepy before trying to sleep. Smaller factors but still helpful - progesterone (post menopause) before bed, putting down the phone an hour before bed, and a routine - I take a shower & do skincare.
Some things that help me at least:
- Only use bed for sleeping.
- Don’t use screens at least an hour before bed.
- Keep phone out of arms reach when in bed. Ideally in another room (these devices weigh heavy on our psychology, and the further they are from us, the less distracting they are).
- Leave blinds open at night so you wake up with the sun. Try to sync your body / circadian rhythm with your environment if possible.
- Get lots of walks and outside time during the day. If you have a lot of energy, work out more during the day.
- No coffee / intoxicants in the evening.
- Drink lots of water.
- Don’t try to fix your sleep problems at night. Most of your remedies should be getting on the right foot the next day, and making habits of those.
Use a chair when doing anything productive, when laying down avoid using your phone at all, wait til your eyes glaze basically
I tire my brain out, whenever I lay down, I dont want to move at all, I fall asleep in whatevery uncomfy position dehydrated
weed
I’ve had problems with insomnia in the past.
I generally find the easiest way for me to sleep is to be very physically tired.
I’ve always been this way, but every so often I still have trouble turning my thoughts off enough to get to sleep.
There’s a technique I use on those occasions that helps a lot. Basically, just try to imagine a shape - it could be a circle or a sphere or a triangle or whatever - and just try to rotate it in your head. Pick a colour too. Try to keep it going. Any time you lose focus because another thought takes over, try to get the shape back.
Similar. For me it’s finding something just difficult enough to keep focus on but not so much as to keep me awake. People have told me to clear my head of thoughts, but that doesn’t work, so i crowd them out.
Counting sheep is too easy. Try counting in base 2: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, etc. If that doesn’t work, try Fibonacci: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 (keep adding the previous 2 numbers.) If you are visual, do the shapes or imagine every branch of a tree.
Is this something you thought up yourself? I’ve never heard of this technique before but it sounds like it would be really good for meditating
Narcolepsy - a blessing and a curse.
Children.
I there a powdered form I can take it in or is this like an adrenochrome situation?
You’ve got to harvest them at your nearest pizzagate parlour. If you’re U.K. like me, we’ve only got one branch, the Pizza Express in Woking.
Ah, no problem. My buddy Hil-dog can hook me up.
Easy-peasy. No sweat.
As someone who used to be like that but now has a real fucked up sleep schedule due to unemployment, I can tell you the deciding factor is a consistent sleep period. The vast majority of my career has been waking up at 4am and going to sleep at 8 or 9pm. Thats easy to fall into and even when you’re off your body just knows when its time to sleep and when its time to get up. Ive gotten up on time a few times despite the alarms failing to go off for whatever reason. You want good sleep? Set wake up and bedtime. Your body will adjust.
I only use my bed for sleeping, when I go lie down body knows it’s night night time
I lay down, close my eyes, and then in my mind I imagine slowly pushing all sensation down to my feet starting from my head while I slow my breathing. I’m usually out before I even get to my knees.
A strict wake-up time that’s the same every day helps. I put the alarm far away from my bed so I have no choice to drift back off.
All the usual tips apply: a cool room, no blue light at night, no distractions in the bedroom, get up for a while if it’s not working…
Easy, I wake up three hours later and toss and turn or give up and read.
Train yourself. Pavlov’s sleep. Every time you go to bed, watch/listen to the same thing. Eventually, your brain associate the thing with “time to sleep”. That’s how it works for me, anyway. I turn on the same movie and pass out in minutes. Don’t do it with one of your favorites, though.
And also, don’t do things like lay in bed watching TV or messing with your phone all the time. You want the bed to be mostly mentally associated with sleep
I did this with the original Twilight Zone episodes! As soon as I hear that iconic intro I feel tired. It doesn’t work perfectly and I sometimes still have trouble sleeping but it helped a lot. It took years of doing this. I picked Twilight Zone because it’s interesting enough to turn on but not interesting enough to stay awake for.
I have seen every episode hundreds of times at this point I bet.
Fun story, i used to do a lot of fly-in/out for a mine close to the artic circle which involved getting stuck on loud propeller planes for hours.
At some point, I realised that I could fall asleep before take-off but rarely during. Unintentionnally, I trained myself to fall asleep before takeoff.
Now, I just fall asleep before takeoff in any plane which makes my wife mad when she is excited to travel somewhere and I just doze off …
The only time I’m able to fall asleep with something playing is when I’m majorly sleep deprived or I’m sick. My brain can’t turn off when it’s by itself, much less when there’s something playing. If my brain is being handed information, I’m immediately wide awake for it.
My “thing” is a Hercules movie from Mystery Science Theater 3000. Those movies are so low intensity, and I’ve fallen asleep to them hundreds of times over the past few years. I put a sleep timer on my ancient iPad on low brightness and low volume for 15m, and I’m usually asleep before time’s up.
I usually fall asleep to random youtube iceberg videos. Never thought about doing the same piece of media every night. My initial thought is that I’ll get bored of it after x amount of sleeps and then my mind starts wandering into my anxious thoughts. I’ll give it a shot though
Maybe finds a few you like and make a playlist, then just watch those specific ones? Something that you can mentally focus on when in bed with your eyes closed, but also something that’s not competing to hold your visual attention as well as no giant volume swings for your audio attention. Don’t want to fall asleep to quiet dialog only to be woken by the shootout in the next scene, or fall asleep to a mellow ballad and awoken by a rock track, for example.
Edited to add: around getting bored with it— I have changed what I listen or watch every few years, but it’s a very slow ramp up of new and ramp down of old. Something your brain recognizes and likes, but isn’t trying to stay awake to read the next page or see the next episode or upcoming challenge or whatever.
I think at the core, I am applying the same idea or concept of getting into a routine but i don’t focus too much on the words they’re saying as much as the tone or cadence of speech. Honestly now that I think of it, it feels like falling asleep in a lecture lol. Like it doesn’t matter who’s talking or maybe even what they are talking about, as long as they keep droning on monotonously
