Always 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 slee…
Subjectively, i feel like this is really hard to actually get right in practice.
During the pandemic i had decided to only go to sleep when i actually felt tired. Unfortunately, usually that ended up being at around 2 AM, possibly because using a computer in the evenings/nights was pretty bad for me being able to "listen" to the needs of my body. I noticed that i felt much worse when waking up, than i did when i was following a set schedule. Even with solutions like Redshift/f.lux, people probably still shouldn't use computers and possibly not partake in other activities in the late hours of the night, should they want to better gauge when they are actually tired and when it's time to sleep.
In regards to food and nutrition, it was also a similar situation. For a while, i decided to eat as much as i wanted when i felt hungry. Even though i didn't ever order take out, didn't drink things like Cola/Pepsi, kept myself hydrated to the best of my abilities, i still probably ate too much and that resulted in me gaining about 10-20 kg of weight in total, over a number of months (towards the upper end of a healthy BMI, bordering being overweight). It could have been worse, but if you want to consume food freely, it should probably be mostly veggies or nature products, as opposed to many of the comfort foods.
Now i'm mostly back to a set sleep schedule, limiting what i eat so that i feel a little bit hungry when i go to sleep and also doing cardio exercise every day regardless of how i feel when doing it (which has consistently been pretty horrible so far) and overall my wellbeing has gradually increased.
tl;dr - Understanding the needs of your body can be hard. I certainly cannot trust mine in that regard.