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Comment by hvidgaard | Hacker News Reader

One of the things I believe people like you have great success with, is routine and wind down. Set a bed time, and 1 hour before that you stop everything that'll keep you awake. Put on some quite music, e.g. easy listen or classic, and do something benign. Some people draw, some knit trivial stuff like blanket patches, others meditate. The important thing is that it is something your mind will not continue to work on after you put it down. This really helps myself, and my children wind down and get ready to sleep, and my day improved 10 fold when I got this procedure down.

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I had huge issues falling asleep. I was unable to fall asleep before 1am and had to get up at 6am. So Monday - Friday was a downward spiral of sleep debt and all of stresses that come with that.

I eliminated blue light (mostly) after 8:00 and it help slightly but within the margin of error.

I then added 15 minutes of mindfulness meditation everyday at lunch. Nothing wooy just mindfulness.

Within 2 weeks i was naturally getting tired around 10:00 and able to fall asleep in less than five minutes.

Quit meditating (because its a pia to find the time, it shouldnt' be but it is) and sleep problems returned.

I didn't even attribute my sleep improvement to the daily practice until i noticed my sleep was all messed up again.

It works and its just 15 minutes. People's millage may very but it was life changing for me.

Good work, and pretty nice that something as seemingly simple as 15 minutes of mindfulness yielded great results.

Are you fast paced in general? It is my experience that mindfulness enables the brain to put things away easier throughout the day, but it is really difficult the first week or so, because you actively have to let thoughts fly away.

I am. Before meditation i was never present my head was in a million different places. I could be having dinner with my family but really i was solving a coding problem, thinking about an interaction i had at work, recalling <horrible thing i did when i was 6). It was hard the first week i used the headspace app and started at 10 minutes a day, got up to 30 minutes using the app but could never keep up with a daily habit. 15 minutes seemed to be the magic number for me. It was long enough to help and short enough that i was able to incorporate it daily.

Well, I would die of boredom not doing anything interesting for a whole hour.

That is kinda the point.

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