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Lie still in bed

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Re: Lie still in bed

#81

Post by samstave »

Tempest1981 wrote: post #53
toddmorey wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Podcasts have been a godsend for me. I can’t lay in silence, either, because then my mind just races. But with a podcast you can just close your eyes and listen. It almost takes me back to my parents reading to me. Science / nature podcasts work really well. I avoid true crime, social issues, politics, tech, or work topics. The Ologies podcast is amazing. There’s even a podcast called Nothing Really Happens designed…

Yep, pick one where the host has a monotone voice, and play it at 0.75x speed

Lex Fridman (love him) has the most monotone voice and at 1.25 he still sounds like .75...

Ill put on long form pods so I dont have to mess with anything until I fall asleep.

Here is one thing that happens very often to me. I have always been a rather lucid dreamer, vivid dreamer, and I have had dream story lines last literally decades in my dreams. I have had dreams where I have a story take place - then that story will continue like a year or two later, and I recall how they connect.

Anyway - Ill be listening to a podcast, and then every DreamNPC will be talking to me but whats coming out of their mouths, are the voices from the podcast. i.e. One dream, I was rescuing my daughter from a car crash and taking her to the hospital, and everyone at the hospital was insisting on taking my daughter to mars. And I was running to get her out of the hospital and away from all the people in there trying to take her to Mars... (I was listening to a long form pod of colonizing mars/getting to mars etc... and thats what all the NPCs were spewing to me.

Also - there are several triggers that alert me to the fact that I am dreaming:

I attempt to use my phone in any capacity - its impossible to press digits - and eventually my phone will crumble/disintegrate in my hand - and this alerts me that I am in a dream and I am aware of it.

If I attempt to read numbers - such as those on a price tag for an item in a store. Once I realize how hard it is to read any numbers - I am aware I a dreaming.

If I am trying to clean up a mess - I cannot pick things up, and I wobble-around as if I am black-out drunk and keep falling over and dropping the things I am trying to clean up - then I realize its a dream.

Also, I have several 'dream houses' and 'dream neighborhoods' that I am familiar with in my dreams - and when I see them/am in them again, I know I am dreaming. But sometimes, the dreams are so intense, that when I wake up I can still be confused thinking that some aspects of the dream actually happened, and it takes me a moment to register that these things were from the dream, not wokeness :-)

-

There have been times where I realize I am dreaming, then I force myself to 'wake-up' and I believe that I am woken up, but then one of the above triggers happens, and I realize I am still in the dream.. sometimes multiple times in the same dream - this one is scary though, because this happens when all my surroundings in the dream are the same as my real-life surroundings, and so it takes one of the triggers for me to recognize that I am actually dreaming...

Also, I have had dreams that I can recall from when I was a kid, then I have an experience in real-life - and then I can remember the dream from when I experienced it as a kid... (like a weird deja-vu dream-wormhole.)

I love dreaming -and I have a terrible general memory for daily mundane things - but I can vividly remember my dreams.

Re: Lie still in bed

#82

Post by jimmydddd »

larodi wrote: post #71

Such articles are… really laughable, as people differ in their physiology and circadian rhythms and it is NOT generally advisable to blindly follow someone else’s experiences with sleep. There are books like ‘While we sleep’ which can give you some insight into the complexity of causes and effects and even this book was heavily criticised although the author did some actual research with cited sources etc. And I’m sa…

Steve Pavlina recommends i) waking at the same time every day, and ii) going to bed when you are tired. If you stick to i), ii) will eventually stabilize, although it may change from day to day. At the beginning you typically stay up too late for a few days. But after a while, with a consistent wake up, your body adapts to a beneficial sleep time. Of course, YMMV.

Re: Lie still in bed

#83

Post by lo_zamoyski »

Waterluvian wrote: post #14

The best kind of parody: the one you almost can’t tell is parody. My sense is that the core issue with people who actually think this way is that they lack empathy. They assume that their context is shared by everyone. So if one simple trick worked for them, it surely must work for everyone else.

You're free to disagree. It's a blog post. No need to reach for ad hominem.

Re: Lie still in bed

#84

Post by smeej »

larodi wrote: post #71

Such articles are… really laughable, as people differ in their physiology and circadian rhythms and it is NOT generally advisable to blindly follow someone else’s experiences with sleep. There are books like ‘While we sleep’ which can give you some insight into the complexity of causes and effects and even this book was heavily criticised although the author did some actual research with cited sources etc. And I’m sa…

I don't think the point of the article was actually about sleep at all. It was about where to apply willpower to effect any kind of habit change.

It's just an example in his case that the habit he wanted to build was going to sleep earlier, which he tried to do by just lying still in bed at the time he wanted to sleep, and resisting the urge to do anything else, first for two minutes, then for four.

But he applies the same principle to exercise and other things, which is actually the point. This isn't a sleep prescription article.

Re: Lie still in bed

#85

Post by intrasight »

I've suffered insomnia most of my adult life. Took Trazodone for years and decided to eliminate that dependency.

My technique - YMMV

Lie still on my back. Play a boring (at night anyway) history podcast. Mentally focus on my breath. Might even count them. I rarely get beyond 30.

Re: Lie still in bed

#86

Post by smeej »

Most of these comments are about sleep, but the article really isn't. It's about where to apply willpower to change a habit, slowly but surely.

I found the part about recognizing small changes rather than fixating on the end goal especially helpful. You don't need to go to sleep an hour earlier to be building a habit. Two minutes more effort counts.

Re: Lie still in bed

#87

Post by ChoHag »

jimmydddd wrote: post #82
larodi wrote: post #71

Such articles are… really laughable, as people differ in their physiology and circadian rhythms and it is NOT generally advisable to blindly follow someone else’s experiences with sleep. There are books like ‘While we sleep’ which can give you some insight into the complexity of causes and effects and even this book was heavily criticised although the author did some actual research with cited sources etc. And I’m sa…

Steve Pavlina recommends i) waking at the same time every day, and ii) going to bed when you are tired. If you stick to i), ii) will eventually stabilize, although it may change from day to day. At the beginning you typically stay up too late for a few days. But after a while, with a consistent wake up, your body adapts to a beneficial sleep time. Of course, YMMV.

After a while this may invert and you find that whatever time you go to sleep (within some degree of normal) you'll wake up precisely n hours later, for whatever value of n your body's settled on.

No more need for an alarm clock.

Re: Lie still in bed

#88

Post by Pooge »

I used to be really bad at falling asleep. I'm not talking 30 minutes or 45 minutes, but sometimes 3 whole hours without being able to get 1 second of sleep. I didn't even touch my phone once while in bed.

I also had a lot of trouble finding the right position in which to sleep to feel comfortable (not even talking about finding the right mattress/pillow combination).

Somehow, I trained myself at sleeping on my back (I was a big stomach sleeper). It's actually easier than you think. Couple that with counting backwards from 200 to 0 - and starting over whenever I reach 0 or forget where I was because my mind wandered - and I now fall asleep well within 1h on average.

Now I don't have any pain at all when I wake up, I don't need to spend hundreds on finding the right pillow/mattress combination and I have less trouble falling asleep. I don't actually think about it a lot, but I'm only in my 20s and I can't fathom the life problems I avoided solving this one early on. I'm really happy.

Re: Lie still in bed

#89

Post by saiya-jin »

larodi wrote: post #71

Such articles are… really laughable, as people differ in their physiology and circadian rhythms and it is NOT generally advisable to blindly follow someone else’s experiences with sleep. There are books like ‘While we sleep’ which can give you some insight into the complexity of causes and effects and even this book was heavily criticised although the author did some actual research with cited sources etc. And I’m sa…

I wouldn't make such a drama out of it neither, those suggestions do work for most of people, but as usual HN crowd ain't very representative since a lot of brilliant people have these quirks that are also messing up their sleep.
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