Dealing with Insomnia

> Finally, the world is asleep and even a person who has trouble focusing in the face of distraction has a chance of getting something done.

"The world is asleep" is basically my definition of serene and peaceful.

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A while back, there was a national holiday, so I had the day off. I didn't actually have anything I wanted to do with that day, so I used it to plan out my next work project. It was a very productive day where I went from being very unsure of how to do the project to having a blueprint that directed what I did for months to come. The project would be in a much worse place if it weren't for the thinking I was able to do on that one day.

It wasn't a productive day in the sense that I got a lot of things done (my usual definition of productivity), but it was productive in the sense that I got some important, deep thinking done. It's rare to get a chance to do such deep thinking.

This kind of productivity is hard to achieve in the face of distractions. But I think it is actually worse than that: It is hard to achieve when there is even a _risk_ of distractions. When my brain knows that someone could demand my attention at any time, it seems to limit the amount of working memory, focus, and time I can spent thinking about something.

But if I know that I don't have to pay attention to interruptions, the problem I'm thinking about can take over and I can spend time swimming in the problem instead of just splashing my toes in.

All this is a long-winded way of saying that knowing you _might_ be interrupted can be almost as bad as actually being interrupted.

I’ve struggled with insomnia my whole adult life and I can tell you the three factors that have helped the most are, in order:

- removing caffeine completely

- getting enough direct sunlight (hours per day)

- losing weight

Everything else (melatonin, blue light, exercise, sleepy tea, other drugs, etc) never helped or made my quality of life worse.

I had bad insomnia during graduate school, tried just about everything under the sun (medication, sleep studies, lifestyle changes, herbs) and eventually did CBT-I with a therapist, and that was my ultimate solution. She had me start with going to bed at 3am and waking up at 7am for a week. I was absolutely exhausted, felt like my days were dreams. Then, we pulled forward he’s time to 2am. Checked how long it took me to fall asleep, and if I reported it was quick, then pull it to 1am, etc. until I was falling asleep quickly but also felt refreshed. I kept this all down on some worksheets provided.

The key was absolutely no matter what, no matter how tired I felt, I had to wake up at 7am and get out of bed. No naps.

We found the optimal spot to be 11pm lay in bed, and wake up at 7am. I always keep that schedule, deviating only by 30min or so even on weekends. Haven’t had trouble sleeping since!

I also think going from graduate school (little solid schedule) to a corporate 9-5 job helped. Covid has mangled that a bit, but I still keep the same sleep schedule.

tl;dr- CBT-I was a life-changer for me.

What is surprising to me is that it even works, that it is 'poor' is a remarkable achievement given the location of the mic.

If you suffer particularly bad insomnia, I encourage you to do a sleep study. It was life-changing for me.

I was able to discover that I suffer from narcolepsy, a rare but nonetheless real condition. It's not at all like most people think: you don't randomly fall asleep during the day. But your sleep schedule isn't really a schedule so much as a stochastic random walk.

Even if you don't have a rare disorder, there's a good chance a sleep study will benefit you. For example, a coworker said that a CPAP machine was similarly lifechanging.