… I just wanna sleep
Sleeping is my super power - I fall asleep within two or three minutes every night. Here’s how I do it.
- No caffeine ever.
- Listen to the same white noise track every night while sleeping. Your brain will recognize that the track equals time to sleep.
- Go to bed at the same time every day, even on weekends.
- Don’t hang out in bed. The bed is only for sleeping or sex. No phone use in bed.
Not possible when you works different shifts
Howso? Like some nights you get off at 5pm and sometimes you’re working til 9?
Sometimes I work all night
That there is your problem. Circadian rhythm is a real thing.
Yup, ok, that’s like trying to sleep on extra super difficult mode. Follow all the advice you like on here, but definitely get yourself some sleep meds. A therapist can prescribe them for you, and they’re typically easier and cheaper to find/schedule than a regular doctor.
That’s unfortunate. Hopefully you can at least have a set schedule on most nights since you can’t do it every night.
To add to this. If you can’t sleep after about 15-20 minutes get out of bed and do something to relax your brain. Reading or meditating works well. Definitely no phone or TV, don’t read anything captivating. Read something boring you aren’t into. After you feel ‘sleep pressure’ go back to bed.
Over time this helps your body associate the bed with just sleeping. But it takes time and dedication. Find a routine.
Also highly recommend always going to bed and getting up at the same time, even weekends.
difficult when you only have 1 room
Like a studio apartment? Maybe it would help to have a “daytime setup” for your bed where pillows and cushions make it more like a couch, and a “nighttime setup” where it’s made up to sleep.
more like, I live with my parents, but hey, thanks for the tip! I never thought about this, I’ll try it.
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?
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.
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.
Work out. It helps reduce stress and just makes you more tired
- 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
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.
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.
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
Sleeping hygiene is a good point. No phone in bed.
But also try to make it cozy
Have a nice duvet cover, I like cotton. No synthetics. Change it more often.
Temperature in your bed room should be lower, open your window before going to bed.
Have good curtains. But not too dark. Whenever I have a window shutter and I close it completely, I just don’t wake up and sleep over 8-10 h.
Here are my things I do when I can’t sleep
If my feed are cold, wear socks, or cloth but don’t heat the room too much.
Try to sleep in a different room (if you can). When I am just too active I move to my sofa for a change. It really helps me.
Important question. Are you alone or is someone next to you. If your sleeping schedule or preferences don’t mix with your partners, try separate beds. Cuddling sounds cute until you cannot sleep because of a snoring person next to you. And don’t be angry when your partner prefers to be separate.
I follow all those ideas except the couch. When I can’t sleep I change the scene, I sit in my bed and start reading. Eventually I’m sleepy enough to lie down again.
If I can’t sleep again I go back to reading. This is just to not associate lying down in bed and not sleeping. Reading in another room is probably best though.
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.
If you have the “eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee” like me, get a fan.
Don’t use blue lights. That includes most lights. Use red or orange lights after dark. Blue light wakes you up. (I mean do this in addition to some of the other suggestions.)
First your bed is for sleep and sexy times and nothing else. That way your body is conditioned to go to bed whenever you lay down. Doing other actions in your bed reduces this impulse.
Second, monitor your stimulant usage which includes tea, soda or coffee. Caffeine impacts your sleep more than many realize.
Finally stop lolking at screens an hour or so before bed.
If you want to jumpstart a sleep hygiene routine, complete physical exhaustion will help.
The bed thing is not possible since it’s the only private place I have in this house and even that my room is shared with my uncle that sleeps in other bed at the other side of the room.
For me I need some background noise. Something to keep my mind from wandering.
I used to have a playlist of more relaxing songs I’d listen to when trying to fall asleep. But lately I honestly just put on a youtube video I’ve seen before. In particular videos where it’s mostly just someone talking about something. Being the computer nerd I am vwestlife of cathode ray dude are my go tos
I fall asleep basically every night to a video essay on YouTube. Special thanks to Fern, Lemmino, and Tilted.
I do this in recent times, but I have to be honest, it’s clearly less helpful and worse than the old days when I fell asleep to a book. And even now when I try substituting a paper book in for audio or video content I fall asleep faster.
So I guess that’s a tip? Paper over audio over video?
Relax all the muscles in your face.
Specifically the jaw.
I found that I was unconsciously clenching my jaw and would lie awake for hours. Once I started consciously unclenching I would fall asleep really quickly.
wear yourself out during the day. easier to fall asleep if you’re exhausted
