Get better sleep – Anecdata and sleep tech

I've posted this before, but a key feature that can help with falling back to sleep and/or insomnia is recognizing that we fall asleep when we warm up, not (necessarily) when we are warm. So if you aren't falling asleep, take off the blankets, make sure the room is as cold as possible/practical and then let yourself get really cold. Like shivering cold. When you can't stand it anymore, then cover yourself up lightly. You'll have a much better chance of falling asleep. This approach has helped several people I know, although not everyone that I've told, as we are all different and insomnia comes from many sources.

Also, try a sleep study! Sleep apnea is not just something that affects people that are overweight - I had it for nearly all my life, turns out, as do my siblings. It isn't a magic cure but my sleeping is probably 3x better with a cpap.

> Even had instance of waking up chocking, which was again due to a short loud thud noise disturbance by another flat.

Do you mean choking, as in gasping for air? This is a sign of potential obstructive sleep apnea, and it feels that solving the external issues is a (complicated) bandaid for something you might want to have a doctor check through a sleep study. (If you haven’t done so already.)

If you had more deep sleep, all these noises wouldn't be bothering you so much. IANAD, etc.

Here's my anecdata on getting better sleep. I've struggled with sleep a lot, I still do but not as much to the extent of previous years. I used to be at "Welcome to Hell, prepare to suffer, you'd wish you'd not be awake." (if one would follow this to its logical conclusion, one could see why this is problematic) And it is now at: "If you'd have slept 9 hours instead of 8, you'd probably feel at peak mental condition mate, try to sleep 9 hours, you can feel you could use the extra hour in this particular case :)"

I suffer from two things: being able to fall asleep and waking up after 4 hours.

Here's what I currently do/use/what works:

1. Airpods Max for suppressing noise in my room [1]. Plane flying by? I didn't hear it. The soft white noise is also nice. Playing music at night can sometimes regulate my mood. I don't sleep with it every night, only when I notice things in my room are too loud.

2. 0.3mg melatonin (taken 1 hour before sleep).

3. 10mg CBD (taken 1 hour before sleep).

4. A girlfriend to hug with during the night.

5. Meditation: in most cases this doesn't work at all, but around 10 to 20% of the time it knocks me out cold and then it's all I need.

6. Blue light blocking glasses (Flux for real life :) ).

7. A cold-ish room.

8. A heavy weighted blanket. This is especially helpful when I really feel like turning all the time, the heavy weight tires me out physically.

9. A sleeping mask.

These 9 things completely solve for being able to fall asleep. I don't have issues with it. They partially solve for being able to stay asleep. I sometimes still wake up. However, I have a higher likelihood to fall back asleep because the CBD + melatonin make me feel a bit woozy. Moreover, my girlfriend (if she's around), meditation, my heavy weighted blanket and chill music with Spotify + Airpods Max can all play their part.

[1] I have tinnitus so I need something over my ear as earplugs will amplify my tinnitus. Because of this, I need the best noise cancellation for headphones, and in my testing the Airpods Max won hands down. Moreover, it was the only white noise I could tolerate. I've tested Sony and Bose as well. Their white noise sound is too loud for me to be able to comfortably fall asleep. The white noise of the Airpods Max lowers my tinnitus a bit, but in return I hear white noise, which to me feels like a different tinnitus, albeit a bit nicer. I do suffer a bit in comfort and need to fix that with extra pillows which makes my position in bed a bit weird. If anyone has alternatives for this tip / setup (e.g. something else than the Airpods Max?), I'm curious :)

Thanks for chiming in. I find counselling useful, but not everybody does!

I enlisted the help of a psychologist advertising quick symptom-relief with his published set of CBT tools without first needing a protracted psychological deep dive. Avoiding imminent, life-altering consequences required fast results. I reckoned we could address less cut-and-dried matters down the line and gave it a shot. The tools worked, but I needed more connection. Our session began by quantifying the efficacy of parts of an exercise with 1-10 scales and a/b comparisons, and ended with him walking me through a tweaked version of an exercise and emailing me a copy in a word document. Exchanges not directly advancing that process frustrated him. A two-sentence response to “how are you doing?” felt inappropriate, like explaining the impact of unreliable transportation on your life to a busy auto mechanic expecting terse, actionable bullet points. He’d almost certainly have preferred a 1-10 answer. He was pretty upfront about it when we started, but I expected less of a departure.

That said, he’d have been perfect for my father— a lovely and very type-A retired engineer. At my mom’s behest, he gave therapy a shot with a trusted family counselor they’d previously used for family therapy. He truly gave it his type-A best, but couldn’t open up. The counselor essentially said that so many years of psychological self-policing rendered talk therapy too difficult to pursue barring a mental health crisis.

This is true ONLY if anxiety is a major trigger for poor sleep/insomnia. If so, then you need to treat your anxiety BEFORE trying to do any other sleep optimization experiments.

This comment got a lot of attention but the fact is that there are almost infinite causes for poor sleep. Many of us would do very well to critically investigate those causes and work to address them if necessary or desired, just like troubleshooting any other kind of problem.