Thinking of yourself as an insomniac may be a part of the problem | Hacker News Reader

Thinking of yourself as an insomniac may be a part of the problem

theguardian.com

398 pointslxm172 comments

This is exactly the Zen moment that fixed my lifelong insomnia: lying in bed relaxed with my eyes closed, even if I'm not asleep, leaves me feeling worlds better in the morning than fretting about not being able to sleep. It's something that happened when I forgot about it completely. Once I realized I could literally just lie in bed for 8 hours and be OK, I was able to let go.

It's like a trap that closes tighter about you the more you struggle, and releases if you allow yourself to relax

Once I really got that, sleep became regular and uninterrupted

My mum always taught me this, and I've always found it works.

Simply lying/relaxing in bed for an hour or two can leave you feeling surprisingly refreshed.

> Lying in bed, relaxing and not focusing on not being able to sleep.

That sounds a lot like meditation! Let your thoughts flow, do not grasp onto them, simply lay there and breathe. It really does help. I have been doing this for the past two weeks and it has helped me realize that my "sleeping problems" are mostly self-created. I found my biggest problem during bedtime was always rooted in thinking. In hindsight, it makes total sense that training myself to let go of my thoughts was the solution. The short term gratification of interesting thought is outweighed by the long term benefits of healthy sleep.

I have started meditation with one of the aims being to improve my sleep. I still have problems sleeping, but it helps a lot when you are able to let thoughts go without ruminating on them.

I like to think of meditation as garbage collection for the brain. If you don't do it at a specific time to suit you, your brain will do it at the only time it's idle (when you're trying to fall asleep)

Yep. The book 'Quiet your mind and get to sleep' has this sort of advice.

For me something that helped was a cheap fitness watch for $29 that showed me how much sleep I was getting according to the watch.

This certainly isn't the case for everyone, but for people who have some trouble sleeping sometime, possibly exacerbated by disruptions to sleep due to small children or something it's very useful.

I can relate to this too - I also sometimes feel anxious when going to sleep, there's something strange about going away and coming back and continuity of self. I think the only reason people aren't afraid of it is that everyone is used to it.

One thing that helped was recognizing that I've never failed at eventually going to sleep - which then relaxes me and makes it easier to actually fall asleep.

That's utterly fascinating. What a bastard the human brain is. I'm going to try that.

I discovered this recently too. Even in the instances when I still don't get to sleep (eg my 1 year old coming into bed and wriggling in her sleep waking me) I've still felt more refreshed when I've relaxed rather than laid in bed wound up. I'm not into new age / whatever stuff but I like to think of it as night time meditation as while it's still not as good as sleep it's still a great deal better than full blown insomnia! And best of all, sometimes it clears your mind enough to actually sleep.

> It's like a trap that closes tighter about you the more you struggle, and releases if you allow yourself to relax

That is a beautiful analogy. Both in terms of accuracy and imagery.

> 1 year old coming into bed and wriggling in her sleep waking me

I respectfully suggest you put a stop to that before it becomes a habit, as your child needs to learn to go back to sleep in their own bed.

Quietly & calmly return them to bed, tell them to go back to sleep, wait outside a few moments, then go back to bed. Repeat as necessary.

It will take a few nights, but they'll soon realize bed-hopping is not accepted.

(Not to mention, 1 sounds pretty young to have moved from a cot to a bed.)

> It will take a few nights, but they'll soon realize bed-hopping is not accepted.

Honest question: why is this not accepted? Maybe it’s because I didn’t grow up in the West (I’m from Eastern Europe) where we didn’t have that much real estate space and as such us, kids, didn’t have “our own rooms” to sleep in, but I’ve turned out to be a quite a well functioning adult even though I shared my bed with both my parents and with my grand-parents (when my parents were “shipping” me in the winter to live with them). In fact, the very nickname which I’m using on this website reminds me of one winter when I was 7 or 8 and I was watching a Soviet TV show based on a Jules Verne book at my grandparents’ house in the Carpathians. I remember that it was aired each Tuesday night, I was watching it while I was in the same bed with my peasant grandpa’, my brother was in the other bed in the same room with my grandma’, there was nothing wrong with it, it didn’t even crossed anyone’s mind that would be something wrong with it, to this day those moments remain some of the most important in my life. I get that lots and lots of stuff gets sexualised in the States and in the West generally, I guess this is where this phobia against kids sharing beds with adult relatives comes from, but it wasn’t always like this, and saying that letting a kid sharing a bed with a adult parent or close relative is wrong goes against most of our history as a species.

When kids are babies there's a concern about things like the covers suffocating them at night

Later it's more of a practical thing -- the bed's small enough already without a wriggling 4 year old!

> why is this not accepted?

Possibly a poor choice of words on my part. My comment had nothing to do with sexualisation (that didn't even cross my mind), but purely from the point of view of sleep hygiene for both parent and child.

Being able to go back to sleep by oneself is essential to good sleep, and something that people who didn't learn as a young child can struggle with into adulthood.

For the parent it can interrupt their sleep, as the GP mentioned. For someone who already has sleep difficulties, this isn't ideal.

Most practical reason: because as a parent who wants a good night's sleep, it's beneficial to train your kids to sleep well also. :). (And also because good sleep habits - by which I mean being able to fall asleep in your own bed without needing elaborate rituals or snuggling with a parent - are useful for life.)

Really, I think it's mostly about getting them used to the sleeping arrangements you want to have. If they're going to bed share until six, great, let them stay. But if you have them in their own room, teach them to sleep that way.

Note that doesn't mean no snuggling and reading. It just means that when it's time for sleep, learn to sleep in your target bed.

With infants, which doesn't apply to the GP, the current recommendation is to sleep in the same room but separate bed, to minimize the chance of getting squished or suffocated.

>Most practical reason: because as a parent who wants a good night's sleep, it's beneficial to train your kids to sleep well also

I think it would be good to get some evidence here that describes that sleep is most beneficial in the circumstances you are describing.

> learn to sleep in your target bed.

Children aren't NPCs in a video game, tho.

Edit: Apparently they are. My mistake.

Don't worry, whenever parenting advice comes up on HN I'm often as surprised as you are now.

FWIW: After I taught my kids to sleep in their own beds both my health and their mood improved.

YMMW but I was starting to get ill after not sleeping a full night for months.

Emphasis on taught because while we knew we had to teach or kids to eat and walk it never occured to me I had to teach them to sleep.

This isn't our first child and we do normally follow that advice. Unfortunately the 1 year old is teething again at the moment and not coping with it well at all. So bringing her into bed is sometimes the only way we can get her to settle (it's basically that or nobody in the house sleeping on a night due to her screaming. Plus I don't think it's really fair on the baby to put her through that stress when it's teething pain which is out of her control).

Our other kid is 4 years old now and sleeps really well on a night because we followed that advice but as I'm sure you'll know all to well yourself, sometimes as parents you have to break your own rules for your child's wellbeing.

I think as a parent you can generally tell between your childs "i want my own way" screams and their "i'm actually distressed for some reason" screams. Once her teething pains subside I assure you we'll go back to the "tough-love" approach.

> I'm not into new age / whatever stuff but I like to think of it as night time meditation as while it's still not as good as sleep it's still a great deal better than full blown insomnia!

There's a reason advanced mediators have vastly reduced sleep requirements (four hours a night or even less).

For me it was an unintended side effect from starting to meditate. It dawned on me one night that I could just quiet my mind long enough to fall asleep. I wish someone had told me that was a use for the skill, I would have learned it way sooner.

Years ago I noticed that when I used meditation techniques to quiet my mind, it made me sleepy. It's possible that it was just revealing a bit of underlying sleepiness that was usually masked by busy activity. So, I started using it when I was having trouble sleeping, and it worked like a charm. I've been doing it for years and taught my kids how to do it. My elementary school kid, who tended to be on the anxious side, really liked it.

Only problem is that now I get even sleepier when I try to meditate. ;-) Oh, well, I'd rather sleep well than meditate if I can't have both.

Yup. I did a Sleepio course that had a good trick for this: Remember that you've got through every single day after a bad night's sleep before just fine. Even if you don't sleep a single moment, you'll get through the day. You've done it loads of times before and you'll do it again.

For me a big source of panic was worrying about the impact on the next day a bad night's sleep would have.

I still have nights where I don't sleep from time to time, but I've stopped caring about it.

Nice.

"Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain" - Ralph Waldo Emerson

So if you fear death . . . ?

If you fear death, dying will certainly cure you of that fear.

Man, generally I don't have sleep troubles[1], but I hate not getting sleep. It destroys my next day. Like, objectively. I don't operate well without sleep, so the thought of "you'll get through the day" doesn't ring nice for me. The same is true if I stab my foot with a knife, but it doesn't mean I won't dread experiencing the recovery from the knife wound lol.

[1]: I sleep well, I get plenty of it. The only downside I have is restless leg syndrome which, according to my wife, has me kicking and moving my legs a lot at night. I imagine that impacts my quality of sleep, so I try to get a bit more sleep due to that.

Getting a lot of sleep != getting quality sleep.

If you have restless leg syndrome, you don't sleep well.

Agreed, but sleeping more still helps me. Maybe I could be happy with 7h/night without restless leg, but that doesn't change the fact that 8h for me is currently better than 7h. 7h just isn't enough. Which was my point - I get enough (more than average) to ensure I feel refreshed the next day.

It's definitely a problem though. I'm not a fan of medications, but I've not researched a natural remedy - perhaps I should.

Restless leg/limb has nothing to do with involuntary movements, so I don't think that's what you have here. RLS features a restless sensation, and sensations generally require consciousness.

No idea - when I'm awake it's definitely a restless sensation. Ultimately I'm the one that moves my leg, but it becomes nearly impossible to resist. It's a hard to describe feeling, a growing tension that almost buzzes electricity - not painful, but .. insanely insistent regardless.

I only found out that I kick in my sleep from my wife. She says it's worse on days when I actively, while awake, complain of restless legs.

Beyond that I've got no idea. It's not something that seemed to be dangerous nor bother me enough to see a doctor due to the infrequency that it bothers me while awake. If it occurred often while I was awake though, I'd have to see a doctor. No question.

Unsolicited advice: try taking 300mg of magnesium a few hours before bed. My RLS used to be rampant, and since I started supplementing Mg I haven’t had a single instance of it.

I use magnesium glycinate chelate because I’m a sucker for fancy vitamin sales pitches, but I’m sure other formulations work just as well.

> Remember that you've got through every single day after a bad night's sleep before just fine.

Not everyone has gotten through every day just fine, though. Drowsiness increases the chance of automobile accidents, decreases working memory, and, over time, contributes to stress-related diseases.

> It's like a trap that closes tighter about you the more you struggle, and releases if you allow yourself to relax

So it's saidar, not saidin :)

I find that works well for jet lag also (when your body really doesn’t want to be asleep).

I'm always able to fall asleep pretty well in familiar environments but in new environments I can rarely sleep.

The whole "lay down with your eyes closed but not actually sleep" thing does work. I survived like this for 5 nights in a row with a maximum of 2 hours of REM sleep in the last few nights. I don't know how but I was quite functional during those days too.

You probably slept more than you think. I have the same issue and for a while after changing cities I was sleeping awfully. Yet I was still functional, my gym performance barely suffered, and the problem has almost entirely gone away now, mostly through telling myself "whatever, I'll be fine".

This would never work for me. The idea of lying awake in bed for 8 hours doing nothing sounds like torture.

It's a very zen realization: don't try. Just be.

My wife meditates while sleeping (she figured it out because she only really takes the time when she's in bed and it always put her to sleep - so now if she wakes up in the middle of the night she just meditates and goes back to sleep).

Yes the worst thing yon can do to fall asleep is to trying to fall asleep.

> Once I realized I could literally just lie in bed for 8 hours and be OK, I was able to let go.

I think you still need REM cycles to be OK.

edit: Ok, I guess the purpose of this thread was to make everyone feel better, but technically I don't think it's possible to survive without REM sleep.

https://www.quora.com/Is-it-in-anyway-possible-to-survive-wi...

In the vain of feeling better: I find it easier to sleep once I realize I can just skip all obligations the next day and be fine if I don't get any sleep. Eventually I will sleep because it'll be impossible not to. That or I'll die, and I'm not particularly worried about sleep deprivation induced death.

You need REM to feel great.

You will still be far more OK then if you stared at a computer or something.

> and that even severe sleep deprivation poses no real risk of poor performance, health troubles or early death.

I struggle to see how anyone that has or even seen someone with severe sleep deprivation can say this with a straight face.

You stop functioning as a human. You can not think straight, and it's not "oh, silly me I forgot I needed to serialize access to this function" kind of thinking, but more like - "oh, have I always had foot on my left leg?".

Yes, often stress of not sleeping is the reason for not being able to sleep. I just have a hard time imagining that I could convince someone with sleep problems to actually believe that it isn't bad. Yet people in this thread seem to agree... So I might be wrong on that.

My mother used to work odd hours and always maintained that it isn't that bad to just rest rather than sleep if you're unable to. I truly wished I believed that but my experience has been quite the opposite. I could just as well run a marathon as lying awake in bed and I'd be equally exhausted the next day.

This is also in collision with something that has worked well for me, just get up if you can't sleep. Do not condition your brain that it is OK to lie down in bed awake. That's a habit you don't want to get into, better get up and do something for about an hour and try again. It sucks and it's hard to motivate yourself to get up 03:30 in the morning because you want to be able to sleep in the future, but in the long run it is worth it.

And that advice (echoed by many) is quite in collision course with the advice here.

Not saying that either is "right", but for me lying in bed awake just does not work. And I've really tried to commit to it.

> but for me lying in bed awake just does not work.

Maybe because you're subconsciously thinking "I wont function as a human tomorrow" the whole time ;)

That is often very much part of it, yes. And knowing that a bad night paradoxically makes it harder to sleep next night sure doesn't help.

But I can also have sleepless nights where I manage not to think, just lie there and exist. More pleasant but I can't say it makes any difference next day.

Just as you can be wildly off in your estimate of how much you slept during a night you can be wildly off in your estimation of your own alertness and mental state. You can be wrong about how you feel, for much the same reason placebos work or people are suggestible; we don’t actually have a privileged window into our own minds, we’re observers too.

I agree. I've tried to keep a detailed log of my sleep, including how I felt next morning and throughout the day and to my frustration I never figured out how to even remotely reliable measure sleep/rest.

Is sleeping 8 hours better than sleeping 4 hours? Depends...

I already accept that I have bad sleep patterns and not worry about it, but still I get "brain-fog" most of the days and perform poorly. Wish to know how solve that!

Have you tried getting more sleep? ;]

I sleep erratically but is common to sleep 12 hours!

>I just have a hard time imagining that I could convince someone with sleep problems to actually believe that it isn't bad.

I think you might be missing the point. The goal isn't to convince people that not having sleep isn't bad, the goal is to let go of a circular thought pattern so that you can rest.

Yes, but it is hard to break that pattern because you know it is bad. And "pretend it isn't bad" isn't very convincing to someone right in the middle of it.

> I struggle to see how anyone that has or even seen someone with severe sleep deprivation can say this with a straight face.

One of the things that sleep disruption or deprivation can impair is the ability to judge one's own alertness. That's arguably one of the reasons that it contributes to so many harmful accidents. If sleep-deprived people consistently realized how messed up their heads were, they might take fewer risks and do things more slowly, but they often try to proceed as if they were fully functioning.

It's 3am in the states, and I'm at the computer. I slept for five hours, from 9 until 2. I was woken up by timer that was accidentally set to turn a TV on.

After lying in bed relaxing for an hour or so, I got up. Started working.

This happens quite a bit, and it used to bug me a lot. I finally made my peace with it, not because of any Zen moment (Sorry DrPhish), but because there was nothing else to do. It is what it is.

So I stopped complaining, I stopped worrying about it, I stopped trying to figure out if I was getting the right sleep or not. Instead I sleep when I'm tired. If I wake up and can't go back to sleep? I work. Eventually my body will catch up with whatever it wants to do. I work for myself. If I want to sleep, I sleep. This is one of the benefits of being self-employed.

On the plus side, you can get a lot of stuff done in the middle of the night. I do my best creative work when I'm up in these dark-of-the-night hours. It's quiet, it's peaceful, and I have time to think about and consider things instead of feeling like I'm on a treadmill.

I really enjoyed this article. It's interesting that I arrived at the same place without realizing what I was doing. I'm going to save it to share with my friends next time I hear them complaining. :)

> It is what it is.

Sounds pretty Zen to me. :)

This reminds me of "second sleep" from medieval times.

Was there ever other sources for the second sleep, other than "At Day's Close"?

"He knew this, even in the horror with which he started from his first sleep, and threw up the window to dispel it by the presence of some object, beyond the room, which had not been, as it were, the witness of his dream." Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge (1840)

"Don Quixote followed nature, and being satisfied with his first sleep, did not solicit more. As for Sancho, he never wanted a second, for the first lasted him from night to morning." Miguel Cervantes, Don Quixote (1615)

"And at the wakening of your first sleepe You shall have a hott drinke made, And at the wakening of your next sleepe Your sorrowes will have a slake." Early English ballad, Old Robin of Portingale

The Tiv tribe in Nigeria employ the terms "first sleep" and "second sleep" to refer to specific periods of the night

Taken from (http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-16964783). The article references "At Day's Close", sure, but it also references many other sources.

> I work. Eventually my body will catch up with whatever it wants to do. I work for myself. If I want to sleep, I sleep. This is one of the benefits of being self-employed.

Yea, this is huge. I have in office days and in home days. I dread getting bad sleep before an in office day. Not because it's terrible, but because I don't have the reserve to last a 9.5h day in a boxed in stuffy environment. At least my home doesn't feel as draining as in the office, and I can do 4 hours of work at home and take a nap if I had bad sleep before.

The sad thing is, because our work culture focuses on hours over work, if I have bad sleep before an in office day I'm vastly less productive, because 3-5 hours into the day, I lose steam. Yet, I don't do anything to fix it. I just sit there, being unproductive, with drifty tired thoughts.

"non-complaining poor sleepers" – who sleep badly but don’t define themselves as insomniacs – don’t suffer the high blood pressure commonly associated with severe sleeplessness. Meanwhile, “complaining good sleepers” – who get enough shut-eye, but are heavily invested in their alleged insomnia – were essentially as tired, anxious and depressed as those who genuinely didn’t sleep.

Causation vs correlation? This could easily be the other way around, maybe it's because they don't feel good they complain about it...

The key is that the non-complaining people also "sleep badly" (and fewer hours).

So whether they complaining insomniacs don't feel good and thus complain, or complain and thus don't feel good, we at least know that it's not the sleeplessness (as it is common to both groups).

How much sleep someone needs varies a lot. Maybe the non-complainers simply didn't need that much sleep?

>How much sleep someone needs varies a lot.

From everything I've read (at the medical documents/research, not the lifehack level) it doesn't vary much. It varies only a little with age and the presence (or not) of a gene, but it's the same across such groups (e.g. not some individual organism preference).

Those that sleep less simply damage their body, and will pay for it later and with reduced functioning (compared to enough sleep) -- it's not that they actually "need less". Same for those that sleep more.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12683469

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12603781

Most researchers now believe that the relationship between sleep duration and mortality (link is external) is best described as a U-shaped curve with the right side of the “U” considerably higher. That is, less than 5 1/2 hours of sleep is associated with some degree of increased mortality. However, sleeping beyond 9 or 10 hours per night, is associated with a markedly increased mortality

That's a pretty wide range just saying.

Isn’t that assuming that lack of sleep affects everyone in the same way? Different people need different amounts of sleep.

I am a night owl and so find a shitty nights sleep will result in a shitty morning; but I’ll feel much better by the end of the day. Whereas a morning person might wake up without issues and only pay the price later on (and counter with an early night).

>Isn’t that assuming that lack of sleep affects everyone in the same way? Different people need different amounts of sleep.

Not according to all medical advise I've read (no lifestyle advice / lifehacks).

The body really needs its sleep, and the amount is more or less fixed to 7-8 hours.

There's only a small (1-2 hours variation with age, not with individual people).

There is at least some variation. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/genetic-mutation-...

This is probably good advice for people who have occasional insomnia.

But if you have insomnia more regularly, especially for days at a time, or you consistently don't feel rested despite believing that you've slept, you really should try to talk to a doctor - not to ask for sleeping pills (although that may be a result), but to start the process of finding out if there's a larger problem that can be treated.

I deal with delayed sleep onset, which is livable - it just means that it takes me longer to fall asleep, and occasional insomnia on top of it wouldn't be a big deal.

But I also suffer from a REM-related parasomnia which apparently has never been officially described or named, so instead gets stuck in the "Other parasomnias - unspecified" bucket. Basically once I fall asleep, the NREM phases look perfectly normal, but once I enter REM, I suffer multiple arousals (basically I wake up, but for too short a period to be aware that I'm awake). So rather than going through REM phases, I spend that time waking up multiple times per minute.

Unfortunately so far nobody has been able to suggest a treatment. Gabapentin helps a little, but it's far from a solution.

I had been recommended agomelatine (in the form of Valdoxan) for my anxiety, but it's primarily a sleep regulator. I'm not a doctor, don't know much about medicine, but maybe it's relevant, dunno.

Agomelatine is being studied as a sleep regulator since it acts on melatonin receptors, but it's primarily used as an antidepressant. Interestingly, I see that there's no tapering needed when discontinuing this, so it may not hurt to ask my doctor if it's worth trying.

I take gabapentin for nerve damage (I have a spinal condition) and amytryptline because it helps with spasms.

I've slept better since I've been taking the amytrypline though it wasn't taken for insomnia (which I've had since I was 17).

Amitriptyline is primarily an antidepressant, and it's very common for them to cause drowsiness, but there doesn't seem to be many studies as to how well they help maintain sleep, which would probably be key to my issue.

It's good that Amitriptyline is able to help you with spasms, though!

It's quite commonly used off-label for sleep at doses below it's antidepressant dose.

Yeah the medication has been incredible at managing my issues, I only take the full dose at of gabapentin at night though as I find it makes me 'wooly' headed if I take it during the day.

I'm sure you've already investigated this route, but I thought it worth pointing out that this sounds like sleep apnea.

That's certainly one of the first things they checked for, which is understandable.

They started with a home sleep study (you pick up the equipment and are shown how to put it on before bed), but it showed that my breathing was fine, blood oxygen levels were normal, and I snore less than the average person.

So that's when they had me do the full study where you sleep in a lab hooked up to monitors to track breathing, brainwaves, muscle movements, etc.

When my father did his sleep study, they found that for every hour he slept, he only got 15 minutes or less of restful sleep. Sleep apnea is crazy.

My own sleep study, done at age 24, showed that I had (have?) mild to moderate sleep apnea. They recommended I don't drink, lose ten pounds and exercise regularly. No CPAP until it's worse. I chose to suffer poor sleep instead.

How to Fall Asleep in Two Minutes or Less

781 points by rhapsodic 35 days ago | 190 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16671944

I started doing this after I read that article last month, and it has worked wonders for me. I was surprised it worked so well.

Yes. Telling myself it was not a big deal led me to crave the 3am wake-ups as an opportunity for writing some of my most fluid code. Now I know the door to productivity is clearing my sleep debt and developing the kind of surplus to where there is no such thing as early. Speaking of, it's past my bedtime...

After two burnouts nowadays if insomnia sets in I just turn the alarm off, accept that it is one of those nights and relax. If that won't work due to racy thoughts I just get up and do something. The next day is immediately cleared from appointments, duties, plans and exercise. Good sleep is priority 1 over work, exercise and even food. I'd rather be unemployed than being a walking zombie ever again.

I've found that if I get up and write down my thoughts, afterwards I'll be able to sleep. I just write whatever I'm thinking at the moment. Sometimes I end up with some very interesting insights by doing this. After an hour or so, I feel a change in my mental state where I become more significantly more relaxed and less stressed. When I go back to bed I sleep like a baby.

I'd advise to always have a notebook next to your bed in any situation - for getting thoughts out of your head in a general sense like this, writing down work ideas [I always get sparks of inspiration just before falling asleep], writing down dreams if that sort of thing interests you.

What about sensitivity to noise? The guy upstairs walking around in an old uninsulated house causes thumping which instantly wakes me up. A rug didn't help. Next door, my bedroom is next to stairs where stompers stomp up and down the stairs morning and night. Earplugs and noise machines don't help.

While thinking causes me to remain awake, sensitivity to disturbances causes me to wake up. It's been a sort of punishment my entire life, made worse because no one takes me seriously or cares, since they cannot relate.

I moved to a highrise cos I had the same problem. Plus something about having a doorman made it easier to fall asleep.

I can totally relate to ppl not taking it seriously.

I was afraid it would be worse.

In part, no matter what something "should" be, I seem to end up with the worst version of it.

I moved to my own house -- all to myself. To end up with the loudest neighbors yet. Car stereo subwoofers "thudding" through my sealed up house, along with indifferent law enforcement.

I didn't want a huge drive, nor to be socially isolated (hah!).

I bought into what was supposed to be a modest but nice community. I didn't have the money for a snobby one where law enforcement has a big stick up their butt.

In retrospect, on that point, be very careful about the community. If I hadn't become so afraid of apartment/condo neighbor noise (after repeated experiences), I could have afforded a more upscale one. Or buy out in the sticks with enough land to physically keep neighbors at bay. But then, of course, you have the challenge of Internet connectivity -- among other things.

I'm going to have to be honest here and say that moving to an upscale neighborhood lowers the chances of thumping noise / party noise type environments. In NYC at least, the higher end areas have snootier people and police who are more active. As a super light sleeper and tech geek who needs to concentrate, I have to ally myself with the snooty.

I have a similar problem. Luckily the combination of ear plugs, a room fan, and a dose of melatonin usually works on restless nights. I think it will end up forcing me out of the city life eventually, though.

I have soft foam earplugs (33 db attenuation), one 'fan-based' noise machine, one speaker noise machine playing a rainstorm (the thunder helps mask the stomping somewhat), and it helps a bit. Just a bit. It's very frustrating.

I can totally relate.

If I could "do it again", I would respect myself first, and realize that until I got myself out of such circumstances, the rest of my life was not going to advance.

I had years, decades of people telling me I "just need to get used to it". And I tried. And tried. And tried.

And tore myself up more and more, inside. And missed out on many things.

Work. Social life. Everything. Find comfortable, dare I say "nurturing" circumstances for yourself. That's the only way, I now believe, that the rest improves.

Look at other people's reactions. If they see you stressed, uncomfortable, etc. If they think you aren't taking care of yourself. You may get a moment's expressed "sympathy", but then they will avoid you.

Wishing you better circumstances -- or rather, the presence and coherence of mind and emotion to get yourself to them.

It happens to me as well. I fixed it with earplugs (silicone type such as these: https://www.ebay.com/p/10-Pairs-Blue-Soft-Silicone-Earplugs-...)

So I used to have the same problem until recently. The way to get over it is to pay attention to how you feel every time you hear these noises and to train yourself in to feeling that the noise isn't really a big deal (you could even take this further and start to have positive associations with the noise - it's the sounds of your home, where you are most comfortable). I used to wake up to every little thing, now I live next door to a fire station with sirens blaring every hour, and a major construction project going on next door and it doesn't bother me at all.

With my old job I would often get really frustrated as I saw the potential hours of sleep disappear to insomnia. And I bet it was a feedback loop.

With my new job I work from home. So I no longer fear having to drive or be socially present on terribly little sleep. As a result I'm so much more relaxed when I go to bed and the times I lose sleep are becoming quite rare.

When I was young I thought that a job fitting my lifestyle was maybe 5% of the perk. But today I believe it's probably 50% of my compensation.

I think most of the syndromes that people suffer from are needlessly reinforced by treating them as an aspect of one’s fixed identity

I hear from many people that they have problems sleeping, I have never ever had that problem. Imho the big difference was almost always them telling me: they fret about not being able to sleep vs. me telling them: I can truly enjoy just getting into bed and I sometimes wrestle to not fall asleep because that feeling of being tired and hitting the bed is just so nice I want to extend the time I experience it... The wrestle is always useless because sleep comes very fast.

Even when I don't fall asleep immediately I can enjoy taking the time to think about work or plan the next day or think about future vacations or what I'm going to do to my home server when 18.04 comes out or the latest episode of Isaac Arthur [0], there are many nice things to think about with little else on the mind. It's almost a shame sleep disrupts my train of thought sometimes :)

I'm a bit of a fretter myself but never about sleep.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZFipeZtQM5CKUjx6grh54g

My wife is the same. I am more of a night owl and my ideal lie-in-bed time happens in the morning. Unfortunately society seems to frown on doing that.

I think accepting the situation for what it is also helps in other circumstances. E.g. you're in the gym and about to work very hard on a few sets. Just accept there's no getting out of it, and you have to do it. Then it's not so bad. Climbing a mountain? abandon all hope and just get on with it. Same with work. You just accept it, rather than resist it.

A couple years ago I was diagnosed with DSPD (delayed sleep phase disorder) after several months of non-24 hour sleep cycles.

The advice the specialist gave me was similar: don’t worry if you can’t sleep. If that means you have to get up and do something, do that and try again later. If you’re relaxed enough just laying there, do that.

I’ve not been able to rid myself of the timing issues that plague my sleep, but my secondary insomnia is completely gone, and most of it was because of my attitude toward sleep (and a little because of better sleep hygiene lengthening the cycle time of my delayed phase).

100%.

The book that helped with my insomnia (cured it, actually) more than anything else I tried (incl over the counter sleeping pills, CBT, etc) was "acceptance and commitment therapy."

Specifically the book "The Sleep Book."

I believe that the article is right about how the labels we create for ourselves start to define us, to many of us the real question is how to stop caring, or being afraid, or being anxious though.

You can tell someone to stop fretting about something - but probably a good psychologist is a better way to hear these pieces of advice, not to mention how we are bombarded by advertisments and beliefs in our everyday life that go against the message of "don't fret".

I just had this insight yesterday! And now there is a thread on this.

I have been trying meditation/mindulness for a while. So, I have been trying to meditate before sleeping, relaxing my muscles. And sometimes it worked, sometimes it dint.

Yesterday I had an epiphany that I might be grasping for relaxation while trying to follow my mindful and muscle relaxation exercises. So, all I did was forget about muscle relaxation and just laid there, falling asleep in 5 minutes.

Check this other thread that someone posted above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16671944

It talks exactly about what you are saying in your 2nd paragraph. Similarly, sometimes it works for me, sometimes I focus too much on checking if I'm relaxed and I cannot sleep..

I've had this exact problem especially on nights before important or stessful events the next morning such as job interviews.

At first, the anxiety of the interview is what keeps me up. Then, as it gets later and I check the clock, I get stressed about the lack of sleep I'll have the next day.

Sometimes getting up, going to another room and getting a glass of water before returning to bed and resetting the process has helped.

Lay down on something not too hard or soft, close your eyes and relax. RELAX: scan your body with your interior perception and notice where tension is and then relax it. There are books and courses and online videos for relaxation techniques. Even if you don't actually fall asleep, you will get rest. Most of us burn calories maintaining muscular tension that has no real purpose. It is hard to sleep unless you are physically relaxed.

But again, even if you don't actually fall asleep you will still be rested when you get up, if you relax.

If you cannot make this work for any reason go see a doctor.

Hope I don't sound like a jerk, but this is from my personal experience. I think most (but not all) people who have trouble sleeping are just doing it wrong as ridiculous as that sounds.

Ooo! One other tip: Darkness. The darker it is the better you will sleep. Put black electrician's tape over all those LEDs and get thick curtains, whatever it takes.

(In re: noise, no advice. I'm a city kid and I find it easier to fall asleep with some traffic and sirens. YMMV.)

Right... but for actual insomniacs this advice blows. Get diagnosed one way or the other and avoid self diagnosis.

As someone who recently got over insomnia, this is actually really great advice for insomnia (assuming your sleep issues are not due to sleep apnea or restless leg syndrome).

Definitely agree that our way of thinking of sleep plays a critical role in how we sleep, i.e. "To fall asleep naturally, as opposed to just crashing into sleep when our wings melt, or knocking ourselves out with alcohol or drugs, we must be willing to do two things. We need to lose our mind – to surrender our waking sense of self. And we need to invoke sleep" from this article entitled "Falling for sleep: When wakefulness is seen as the main event, no wonder so many have trouble sleeping. Can we rekindle the joy of slumber?" on Aeon (https://aeon.co/essays/the-cure-for-insomnia-is-to-fall-in-l...).

This has worked a treat for me so passing it on.

1. Make a list of the 3 things to do tomorrow.

2. Pick a scene from your life of some length that you remember with great detail and with some fondness. Start playing it back in you head, let you mind tell it as linearly or non linearly as it wants.

I have a poker hand where I made an apparently crazy call [Not really, there was massive pupil dilation by an amateur]. It's a good candidate because of length and some vivid moments in the hand with big characters involved.

3. got to 2. If you're conscious of repeating, appreciate your relaxed state.

I love this article. It makes so much sense, applies to other areas and bucks the current trend or micro managing yourself.

Imagine what telling someone who suffers from anxiety that they suffer from anxienty does!

I don't know if I am alone in this but I find that listening to audio books puts me right to sleep within a few minutes. There is something soothing about listening to a steady spoken voice on a moderately interesting subject, typically some scientific field other than my own.

Same, but podcasts. There have been days where it wouldn't work and I go thru 1-2hrs of them, but generally they work very well.

I always worried about not getting enough sleep until I started tracking it: I realized that I never sleep the "good 8 hours". I am completely fine with a bit less than 6 hours.

This knowledge helped me stay calm while trying to sleep.

I found big difference in the way my sleep goes, if I leave the phone outside my bedroom, ie. in the kitchen.

If my phone is even on silence mode but on the night stand, I wake up and want to check on it immediately.

Personally solved this years ago - turn off Wi-Fi was data when I head to bed, that way only calls (usually urgent) wake me up, sms's aren't usually a bother. Only turn it on once I'm up in the morning.

This is brilliant, I'm surprised phones don't have this built in.

a lot do as "do not disturb" but i've found them to be annoying in one way or another (e.g: blinking LED in a dark room, or applications not abiding or whatever)

so, I take the shotgun approach and kill all data.

As someone who recently completed CBTI for my insomnia, I can't recommend this approach more. I sleep quite well now. Definitely combatting poor attitudes regarding sleep is very important.

Somehow having boring HN stories/comments to read, or mind-numbing twitch streams to stare at on my phone in bed exhausts my mind way faster than staring at the ceiling and churning.

I recently fixed my sleep problems by getting some earplugs and learning how to use them properly (there's a technique). I couldn't believe the difference it made.

I wanted to try them, but don't you feel pressure inside the ears... which would make it uncomfortable to sleep?

Buy several of different sizes to find one model that works.

Buying a foam mattress topper and high quality pillows was the best thing I ever did for my sleep.

I went years without before housesitting for a friend and realizing how much better I slept.

I'm interested in getting a new pillow. What makes a high quality pillow a high quality pillow? Any recommendations?

I was always against the idea of memory foam pillows. I thought they'd be too hot, they would feel "odd", they'd swallow my face and suffocate me... To cut a long story short we stayed in an AirBnB a few months back that had them and they were an absolute revelation. My wife and I ordered some there and then and they were waiting for us when we got home.

You can pay a fortune for a name brand one but ours are just no-name pillows from Amazon. I think the pillows in the AirBnB were from IKEA, IIRC.

Ended in psychiatric ward because it was “not a big deal”.

Wake up 4 hours after sleeping. If I tell myself to just stay in bed, I fall asleep again and get a full rest. So, there's some truth to it.

Sometimes I can be asleep even though I feel as though I'm awake. I know because my wife will wake me up because I've been snoring.

something that's always worked for me: slow your breathing and take medium-deep breaths while continually telling yourself nothing but "I am breathing deeply". I'm usually out in 5 minutes.

So, imposter syndrome can help break you out of bad groups too? :)

Also cut down on the caffeine, screen time, etc.

No-one likes to hear this but it's true. Cut out caffeine in the afternoons (it has a ~6hr half-life in your system) and install F.lux or something to lower the colour temperature of your monitors.

(Anecdatum: When I want to stay up late, I turn off F.lux and it adds probably 2 hrs before I start feeling tired.)

Thanks for the F.lux recommendation

There is absolutely no proof flux or night mode works. Night mode is not a substitute for less screen time.

Night mode does absolutely nothing to me

Plenty of people know this, and do it, and still struggle. I limit myself to maximum of 2 coffees a day, no later than 3pm, and no phone/games after 10:00 and I still find myself lying in bed awake at 3am regularly

Because it's not enough to do one thing, you have to do all the things: exercise, go outdoors, socialize, live. It's like a chain: it only works when all the links are intact. A 99.99% chain is as good as a 1% chain.

Worth adding that there is great variability of the half-life of caffeine in different people, in part due to different phenotypes of the enzymes responsible for its metabolism (among other variables). For instance, I metabolize it slightly slower (if you can trust 23andMe SNP data enough for that kind of a prediction), so it could be even longer for me. iirc nicotine has also been shown to speed up caffeine's metabolism.

Don't force yourself to sleep. Worst that can happen is that you are tired the next day.

If you wake up at night do not look at the time. It does not matter. It will only serve to hurt you. Just close your eyes and relax and never ever look at the time. The sky is dark and your alarm didn't go off and that's all you need to know.

Speaking personally as someone who usually gets enough sleep, I'd much rather wake up of my own accord than by alarm. If I wake up within an hour of my alarm, I just get up.

Try a sunrise simulator alarm. It will gradually turn on the light 20-40 minutes before the wakeup time, relying on your body to pick it up and wake up more naturally.

Sure, no big deal.

Adjacent HN article https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16954079 . `Health dangers of sleep deprivation: "If you're not sleeping enough, "you will be both dead sooner, and the quality of your (now shorter) life will be significantly worse"`.

What I understood the authors point to be was not that missing sleep is no big deal, but that focussing on it being a big deal amplifies the insomnia itself, while being relaxed about the need for sleep allows you to sleep more easily.

Yep fully got that. Big catch 22 though, as you're only likely to read said article if suffering from bad sleep.

(And: My thoughts were more like, if you don't read HN, then that's whole lot easier.)

The mind is a bitch.

funny how in the top stories in HN at the moment there is another article about the dangers of not getting enough sleep.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16954079

though maybe don't read it if you want to try this one.

The article here is not about that less sleep is okay, but that worrying about it is counterproductive because it keeps you awake even longer.

I thought the headline alone already pretty much shows the core of the argument. It does not say "It's not a big deal", but "Tell yourself it’s not a big deal". It's about your mental state, not about the sleep duration.

my point is, it's hard to relax and not worry about it when you read another article that says, you are gonna die early :)

Yeah, but that's an "in the long run" type of thing. You're not going to die early from a couple nights of bad sleep. Take it one day at a time and say "I'll be fine tomorrow if I don't sleep, I've been perfectly functional before on little to no sleep"

How I solved it:

Work from home and get up whenever you want. Whenever I had an episode of wakefulness, usually between around 2 and 4 am, I would get up, watch a video, and get back to sleep, (perfect external aluminum) blinds fully closed, and sleep until 10 or 11 am. So I would always get a a full amount of sleep.

I recovered from (long-term very low-dose) chronic heavy metal poisoning (treated with chelators) for years, turned out that was the source of my occasional sleep issues. During the long excretion phase (years) the problems got pretty bad, so I got to test what the best methods are pretty thoroughly.

That means you have to find a way to have no time pressure before noon and be able to use that time for sleep. Then worrying stops. I found that interruptions, while inconvenient, don't matter, your brain gets used to it and adjusts. What matters is that you get the full amount of 7-8 hours. How do I know? The last hour of sleep is different - if you get that last hour or not makes a big difference. It was all a lot more intense for me for a few years so I could get a good look at sleep phases. The worst one is the initial 1-3 hours, and the worst time is ~3 am. When you have issues such as my heavy metal problem that's the nightmare "I have cancer I'm going to die" hour (anxiety/panic attack, no factual basis). Somebody else asked about just this here, I don't want to tell them I suspect they may have a problem similar to what I had... base on my experience that is a sign that something is not right, chemically, in the brain.

One of the top stories on HN right now.

"Health dangers of sleep deprivation"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16954079

And then we have this. Do journalists get together to troll their readers with clickbait?

I don't see any trolling. This article makes clear that there are health dangers, but why it's important not to worry about them.

Its a big deal. Sleep deprived people make mistakes and cause more accidents than normal. There is a minimum need to sleep and the body will try to take a nap, microsleep or just give up(blackout)...and some people consider it okay.

Read the fine article please.

Read this fine article and stop blindly downvoting facts. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16954079

> stop blindly downvoting facts.

The point is that those facts are irrelevant, in much the same way that it's irrelevant to bring up that tomatoes are botanically a fruit when discussing fruit salad.

Nowhere does the article say sleep deprivation isn't bad for you in myriad ways. Rather, it's making the point that, for people who are sleep deprived due to insomnia, stressing out about your lack of sleep compounds the problem, by making it even harder to fall asleep. So one way to solve insomnia-related sleep deprivation is precisely to not make a big deal of it, and remove the anxiety component.

``So one way to solve X is precisely to not make a big deal of it, and remove the anxiety component.`` Weight gain? Cancer? School shootings? Climate Change? Air Pollution? Worrying all about that bad stuff is counter-productive and causes stress which makes it worse... With this genius method they all can be solved by removing the 'anxiety component'(also known as reality), therefore making the problem go away..eventually, you just need to stop caring about the problem!

Anxiety is an actual mental health issue that heavily influences sleep patterns. It also influences eating habits (emotional eating is a well-understood maladaptive coping mechanism) so the same argument can actually (in some, but not all, cases) apply to weight gain, yes.

Climate change? Air pollution? If you don't see how these are completely different problems that are completely unrelated to your mental well-being, I don't know what to say...

Weigh gain? Worrying about Weigh gain creates stress Climate change? Worrying about climate creates stress Air pollution? Worrying about air pollution creates stress

What?

Of course, worrying about _anything_ creates stress. But that's as far as it goes: Worrying about air pollution creates stress, but stress doesn't create more air pollution. Worrying about climate change doesn't make climate change worse.

The problem is closing the loop — worrying about sleeplessness produces stress, which then goes on to make the sleep disorder even worse. Same with weight loss and emotional eating.

Worrying about air pollution creates stress which combined with air pollution itself, reduces health more than air pollution alone. How hard is it to understand?

The "anxiety removal" leads to not caring about the problem. Its not closing the loop. Its allowing the existing problem to escalate. >Worrying about climate change doesn't make climate change worse. If your quality of life is affected by climate change, worrying about it will reduce it further.

Or you can just schedule time to worry about things and have other time where you don't worry about things... it takes a bit of discipline, but if you worry about everything 24/7 you're going to be very unhealthy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com