No pharmaceutical aids preferably
If you’re feeling restless, get up and do something for a bit. Preferably something analog (no screens) like light reading or make yourself a snack or do some sewing, whatever activities you have around. Don’t do this activity in bed, either! Go in the living room or wherever isn’t your bedroom.
And if you’ve already done that, the next thing that helps me is knowing that “lying in bed awake” is still resting your body and is almost as good as falling asleep. It relieves the anxiety around needing to fall asleep which then makes sleeping easier.
And as long as you get the rest you need, it’s actually not as big a deal if you don’t “fall asleep.” You might feel like you’re awake but often you’re actually just in a really light sleep. So don’t stress about it! Just lie down and rest and everything will be ok 😊
I just count my breaths 😎
There was a US military list of things to do to sleep . You know, for when your warcrimes keep you awake
Punch the clown. 60% of the time it works every time.
I have a very long list of heuristics for this, as I’m a nerd with this topic, and also tend to be the de-facto expert in my wider family for sleep help. I need to clean up the raw notes before I could list them.
But I’m going to give you an inconvenient truth: Good rest begins 48-hours before.
Most of the major factors in sleep originate from your body’s 48-hour cycle, which includes digestive tract, your sleep and wake the day before, your exercise on both days, sun exposure, your 48-hour hydration consistency (yes hydration correction takes this long or more), what you ate yesterday, and what you ate within 4-6 hours before bedtime.
If you’re trying to fix sleep while already in bed with insomnia, then you already did something wrong and cannot really correct course in a healthy way. Whether it’s alcohol or benadryl —These sleep aids to force you through the night will have you pay a price later. Your REM will be worse. Your deep sleep will be worse. You will be more irritable the next day and peter out faster. You’ll compensate with more caffeine or something stronger, your cortisol levels will be higher and you’ll be more prone to snack cravings and quick dopamine hits, and those things will lead to a downward-spiral for your next night of sleep.
But hey, Life happens. People have crying babies, etc. Disruption to the best routines is bound to happen. Tricks near or especially at bedtime can only increase your sleep inertia so much. Most have been listed, but if you just need a nudge, then (1) Turn off the phone and read a book, or at least read articles and stay away from videos. Turn on night mode and dim completely. (2) Keep room as cold as possible. (3) Get a white-noise generator or fan. (4) Practice deep breathing techniques to preoccupy your mind and move your ANS from sympathetic to a parasympathetic state. (5) Don’t be afraid to let your mind wander. Make up a story in your head. Find your happy place in your thoughts so you set yourself up for a “win-win” while just lying there. (6) Magnesium Glycinate tends to be a safe sleep aid that actually improves REM, but take with meal otherwise it can have laxative properties to the sensitive. Just some stuff off the top of my head.
Easily falling asleep but waking up in the middle of the night with insomnia “tired but wired” is a different albeit related beast…
I attempt to calculate the amount of energy needed to levitate a gram of liquid mercury while reading manga.
I relax every muscle that I can and then allow my mind to just wander randomly. Usually puts me out.
Sometimes I design starships in my head.
I do some slow breaths in through my nose and out through my mouth, which helps lower my heart rate a little.
Then I have some go to scenes to imagine. Usually it’s imagining myself on a beach, lying comfortably on the sand (maybe with a book and a cocktail), focusing on the sounds of the waves lapping on the shore. That tends to relax me
That’s the neat thing, you don’t.
I’ve been doing it right all along!
Loading up a nice 2 hour video essay from a soft-spoken British YouTuber usually works for me lol.
Box breathing
Instructions unclear; inhaled a fart
That’s Dutch oven breathing. Easy mistake to make.
There’s also hotbox breathing if you wanna get real high, and Matchbox Twenty breathing if you’re not crazy but just feeling a little impaired.
Damn, I’m proud of that one. Too bad nobody will see it buried down here haha
And if you don’t like this, try cyclical or resonant breathing techniques. They’re proven to be equally if not more effective. Cyclical is more for panic-attacks and high anxiety during the day though, as I understand.
When I can’t fall asleep it’s usually because my mind is racing and worrying about things so I just put on a podcast that’s only mildly interesting enough to distract me but not get me fully engaged.
I do low volume old radio shows, Vincent Price in The Saint puts me down in about 10 minutes, CBS mystery theater can do it in 4. Just interesting enough, usually no big volume shifts and I love the music.
Another trick for the same problem is to tell yourself “this is not the time for that, I’ll worry about it later”. If that doesn’t work then yeah, a boring distraction usually does the trick.
Just eat a loaf of banana bread and a pint of ice cream. It works, but it’ll cost you a toe each time because of the sugar-blood. But that’s still 10 free nights of sleep paralysis and diarrhea.
Easy. I keep a copy of “Medicare & You” to read before going to sleep on my nightstand. Not even 5 pages in so far this year.
Meditation, masturbation and moderation. The last one is the most important, a well habituated bedtime will help you sleep better.
The tricky part is getting that habituated bed time started. If I dont sleep for 36 or 48 hours I have an easier time to meet a bedtime deadline but if I have anything over 4 hours of sleep, my brain is running at 150% for at least the next 24 hours. I practice good sleep hygiene, get a 3-5 km walk 4 or 5 times and 3 lifting sessions a week but my mind won’t stop. I’m physically exhausted 90% of the time yet my brain says “no, you don’t need to sleep”
Annecdotally (and ironically because I just woke up from indigestion and cant sleep) I never had good sleep hygene until I took a nightshift job in college over the summers. Having to flip my sleep schedule by staying up somehow snapped my circadian rythym into being good and predictable.
Do you mean that you now sleep normally or that you now sleep as if you worked nightshifts?
I mean that i sleep normally now and have for over 5 years.
This sounds like over-tiredness honestly
In the sense that I’m pushing myself too hard physically and that prevents me from sleeping?
I become manic like this and unable to control my thoughts when I’m overtired and have pushed myself too hard in a day or over some period of time. Also happens when I stay up later than normal. I think it happens to a lot of people and they just struggle to notice it. We’re probably best off just sleeping at the exact same time each day and that fixes the brain into a routine of calming down at bedtime
I used to be too exhausted from work to sleep properly. Like, “me time” starts at 9:30, I don’t even have time to sit down or watch anything or play a game. My mind rebelled against sleeping. So I would play games for 3 hours. IMO about 3 hours per day for personal time is the minimum. But I wouldn’t get enough sleep like that.
The long term fix was to get a situation where I don’t have to work from 07:00 to 21:30 continuously (in this case for clarity I’m classifying travel time, cooking, eating, chores, parenting, etc, as work)
