When I was little I always used to sleep with my father. He had a radio on at low volume every night. I had problems sleeping all my adult life. I only recalled this memory a few months ago and started using a radio myself and I can sleep now much faster (15-20 m). Without it, my mind wanders all the time.
Why Can’t I Sleep?
61–70 of 288 posts
Re: Why Can’t I Sleep?
#62Always the same old advise. Sleep hygiene, exercise, caffeine. Anyone with chronic insomnia can tell you none of that really works. For me it's always been impossible to fall into a regular day/night routine, it's actually whenever I try to force it I'm starting to rapidly feel worse. So the solution has been to just flow with it, I sleep when I can, stay awake otherwise. It's fine and I feel good, the real problem t…
There are a few things that actually make things worse that lead people to get stuck in a negative spiral. Basically alcohol makes you drowsy and helps you fall asleep. But you wake up dehydrated, not very well rested, and in some cases hungover. People drink coffee to fix that, which makes it harder to sleep. Stress levels feed into that as well as it leads to drinking and other ways for people to relieve stress. Social drinking & high stress environments are also a thing. I get sucked into that a lot and it's fun but definitely very bad for my productivity.
But understanding the causes helps. There's a bunch of things I simply don't do:
1) late night working. I can't get any sleep after that. My brain being hyperactive before bed time kills my productivity the next day. So it's a net loss. I'd rather wake up early than work late.
2) caffeine takes a long time to leave your body. I don't drink coffee after noon. Or tea. Or anything containing it. I also limit my intake to max 2-3 cups per day. I avoid the stuff entirely on weekends and try to not get too dependent on it. A nice side effect is that when I do drink coffee, it really works.
3) I don't work on the weekend. I need my weekends to reset my brain. Sleep is part of that. Not thinking about work for 2 days a week is part of that. Context switches are great for getting work out of your short term memory. I don't want to feel guilty about not working; so it's a rule I very break. It can wait and if it can't, it will have to anyway.
4) I don't set alarm clocks. I stopped doing this years ago and I wake up when I need to. It's uncanny; the rare times I do set an alarm clock because I need to be up extremely early, I actually wake up just before it goes off. Mostly on normal days I wake up around the time I would have set my alarm anyway; or slightly before that. In the rare case I don't, I apparently needed some extra sleep and its fine. Finishing your natural sleep cycle is more important than getting out of bed 20 minutes too early. I never miss meetings or get late to work (well working from home like everyone these days).
Re: Why Can’t I Sleep?
#63Since about three weeks ago I cannot sleep. It’s very strange. I know the feeling of anxiety and how it leads to not sleeping, it’s something I’ve had in the past at very stressful jobs. I’ve learned techniques to deal with this, like breathing and mindfulness. But right now this feels different. I’m tired, I’m lying in bed, and I don’t have any stressful thoughts. Yet somehow I just don’t fall asleep. It feels like…
This sounds a bit like it could be the prodromal phase in psychosis. I would take this seriously.
Re: Why Can’t I Sleep?
#64Re: Why Can’t I Sleep?
#65Always the same old advise. Sleep hygiene, exercise, caffeine. Anyone with chronic insomnia can tell you none of that really works. For me it's always been impossible to fall into a regular day/night routine, it's actually whenever I try to force it I'm starting to rapidly feel worse. So the solution has been to just flow with it, I sleep when I can, stay awake otherwise. It's fine and I feel good, the real problem t…
For what is worth, I have chronic sleep issues (not quite insomnia) and exercise helps, caffeine makes little difference and attempting to follow sleep hygiene worsens my quality of life too much.
Re: Why Can’t I Sleep?
#66> ...extreme night owls (who might naturally sleep, for example, from 2 to 10 a.m.)... Uh what's the next adjective after "extreme"? This reminds me of companies with so-called "flex time" where you have the option to come in as late as 9 if you want to.
> Uh what's the next adjective after "extreme"?
Yeah, seriously. What's my 6 AM to 2 PM schedule? Extremer?
Re: Why Can’t I Sleep?
#67Always the same old advise. Sleep hygiene, exercise, caffeine. Anyone with chronic insomnia can tell you none of that really works. For me it's always been impossible to fall into a regular day/night routine, it's actually whenever I try to force it I'm starting to rapidly feel worse. So the solution has been to just flow with it, I sleep when I can, stay awake otherwise. It's fine and I feel good, the real problem t…
Yea it’s really frustrating how everyone just assumes you are doing something basic wrong, as if you haven’t spent years on all the low hanging fruit. My body/brain simply will not allow me to sleep longer than 6.5 hours and that is often really pushing it. I have absolutely no signs of sleep deprivation. No daytime sleepiness. Every article loves to tell me how horrible it is for me, but there are no symptoms and no…
This seems to be a prime case of being misled that anything under 8 hours is bad. If you have no issues, 6.5 hours is a perfect amount with similar health outcomes to 8 hours across meta-analyses and all the Pop sleep science telling you that you need more is just adding needless sleep anxiety to your life in this case.
Re: Why Can’t I Sleep?
#68Always the same old advise. Sleep hygiene, exercise, caffeine. Anyone with chronic insomnia can tell you none of that really works. For me it's always been impossible to fall into a regular day/night routine, it's actually whenever I try to force it I'm starting to rapidly feel worse. So the solution has been to just flow with it, I sleep when I can, stay awake otherwise. It's fine and I feel good, the real problem t…
> Anyone with chronic insomnia can tell you none of that really works.
True, but that is a self-fulfilling definition. For most people, that advice will work. For the minority for whom it does not work, they have chronic insomnia. It does not invalidate the advice, it just means that some people are out of the norm and need something else.
That being said, I agree with you. We all would be healthier if we'd just sleep when tired, eat when hungry. But that isn't how our society rolls.
Re: Why Can’t I Sleep?
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you mean just before bed, or in general during the day?
"According to this study[1], morning exercise might be more helpful; there is no sign that evening exercise disrupts sleep, but it might not help as much either." From https://lorienpsych.com/2021/01/02/insomnia/ which also has other advice [1] https://sci-hub.st/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/art...
One positive effect of morning exercise may sinply lie in the associated tendency towards increased exposure to natural (i.e. more intense) light in the morning hours [I don't have a quote at hand, but Prof. Andrew Huberman speaks about the effects of calibrating one's circadian rhythm by morning light exposure in his YouTube podcast.]
Re: Why Can’t I Sleep?
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you can, and haven't already, take up running/jogging/walking. I'd be a mental wreck without it and the quality of my sleep is inversly proportional to how regularly I'm running. No running means lying in bed for 60-90 minutes before sleep. Running means out-like-a-light in about 45 seconds. I might even be stressed about something but my brain in just like 'LOL no bye-bye.' This plus at least 10 mins of meditatio…
I run 3x a week. I would like to every day, but my shins won’t allow me to.
Shin splints can be fixed. A good physiotherapist can tell you what's wrong.
Bad running form (over striding, low cadence), weak core and hips, weak glutes, pelvic tilt, bad desk setup, one body part overcompensating for another, and so on all lead to typical running injuries.