Comment by nstricevic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nstricevic | Hacker News Reader

I nap for 20 minutes every day at work (at my previous company, for 4 years or so and now since I'm working remotely). Here are my steps for taking a nap:

1. Find a good place to nap. Use the same place every day. I used to nap under my desk on a lazy bag at my last job.

2. Quickly find a comfortable position. Quickly fix everything that bothers you (like watch on your wrist or anything else that's making you uncomfortable).

3. Start breathing from your stomach - not your upper torso. Your stomach should raise up and down, not your upper torso.

4. Relax your whole body. In the beginning, start by relaxing one by one region. First your toes. Then your lower leg, then your upper leg. Then the other leg... Until you relax your whole body. It should feel as your mind is separate from your body. Like it could go out of it. Your body should be completely numb. Later, as you progress, you will be able to relax your whole body with a few breaths. As if some force flows from your stomach and removes spasm from your body as you breath out.

5. Start removing thoughts from your brain. As you start thinking about something, just stop. Another thought comes in. Kill it. Just kill thoughts. You can think only about your breathing. Nothing else.

That's it. With these steps, I'm able to feel a sleep in just a few moments. I use that all the time.

Bonus: I have a special position that I "developed" that mitigates office sounds. I nap on my back, slightly turned on left side. I put my left ear on the pillow or a lazy bag. I put my right hand over my right ear and over my head. That way, a pillow isolates my left ear, while my right biceps isolates my right ear from sounds. I found this to be very effective.

Good luck napping.

> 5. Start removing thoughts from your brain. As you start thinking about something, just stop. Another thought comes in. Kill it. Just kill thoughts. You can think only about your breathing. Nothing else.

If only it was this easy!! It almost feels like a variation of "start outlining the owl... now when you have the outline, just draw the rest of the owl". :-)

I actually can do that, but instead of falling asleep I go into a not very pleasant "meditative" state that I have to exert effort to exit (a bit like sleep paralysis).

It's more like taking steps that eventually equate to running a marathon. Drawing an owl has many different actions that you can fail to adequately describe. Here the task itself is very simple. You just need to repeat it many more times than seems reasonable to you in your untrained state.

I phrase it as its no different than exercise. You'll never get good at it if you never try. And it gets easier with time and practice, just like running a mile.

The key here is that this becomes easier as you do it. It's hard fighting off those few first thoughts, but I personally find that once I do, my brain is put into slow gear and fewer thoughts come up. This has an accumulating effect and I'm asleep before I know it.

This takes practice. Try it first for one minute, then two. It's just like physical exercise, but with your mind instead.

For many people, and myself, telling yourself to think of something is a good way to make your mind blank.

I have heard several guided meditations having an instruction like "let your mind do whatever it wants to do". Surprisingly it works very well to let the mind do nothing.

Here's a technique that works for me:

So, when I close my eyes I can "see" things. I don't know if it's light coming trough my lids or blood vessels or just my mind's eye. I don't know. But what I'll do as a last resource when I have trouble sleeping is to pay full attention to those things and find patterns in them. I even say out loud in my mind like: "oh there's a dog", "a canoe", "a cigarrette".

Then I'm dreaming in no time.

I told my wife and she says that she sees nothing when she close her eyes so, maybe this won't work for everybody.

I see something as well. I’ll definitely give this a try, thanks.

For years growing up, I'd notice that sometimes when I had my eyes closed, there were sometimes glowing circles in the darkness. Sometimes they'd be colorful and others they were like the typical photo of an eclipse. It was usually just as I was drifting off, I'd notice them.

Years later I realized that I could make them appear at-will by wiggling my eyes around (a la REM), and that lead me to conclude that it's likely my overly-long (i'm severely myopic) eyeballs physically stimulating my optic nerves.

I don't notice it as much lately, and I avoid doing it on purpose, in case it's not healthy.

I'm not myopic and I see those too.

I've found that the approach of "killing" thoughts sets up an impossible and never-ending conflict that distracts from the goal of trying to fall asleep.

Instead I try to focus on something, e.g. my breath entering and existing my nose or lungs. Then, as thoughts arise I simply acknowledge them and 'let them go' returning my focus back to my breath.

It's perhaps a subtle distinction but it works much better for me than thinking about thoughts as a game of whack-a-mole.

It sounds a lot like the "body scan" meditation. I expect there are scripts/videos available to follow until you get used to doing it without.

It's still helpful to know that this is the "right way" to do it. For years, my wife struggled with falling asleep, and was jealous of my ability to just stop thinking and log out.

She told me that she wasn't able to just stop thinking. She went to sleep by distracting herself with a book, TV, or tablet. Her approach was to do that restful activity until the intense thoughts of the past day and plans for tomorrow dropped off and were replaced with sudoku numbers or the TV program that were calm enough to sleep, or did those things from midnight until 3-5am when she was so exhausted she couldn't think about anything anymore and just slept for a couple hours.

The insomnia got really bad after our first kid. She tried changing diets, cutting out blue lights with tablet apps or bulbs for reading that were so warm they were basically orange-red, changing her soda habit to eliminate caffeine after noon and food after 6pm, changed mattresses and pillows, changed bedroom temperatures, blankets, and sleepwear, took melatonin, benadryl, and other sleep aids, ran white noise and fans...it didn't work.

But eventually (after seeing a doctor) the root cause was isolated to that reading/TV/tablet habit. It doesn't help. What you have to do to fall asleep per this article, the parent comment, and my wife's doctor, is to stop thinking. Meditative breathing exercises were eventually the solution we reached, but it all basically amounts to training your brain to stop thinking thoughts that aren't about your going-to-sleep process. The process, not the annoyance of your inability to sleep and the tiredness you'll feel in the morning and how long has it been and what is that clicking sound and did I forget to lock the doors and I feel a little thirsty but I don't want to have to pee. Kill the errant thoughts, go to sleep.

>5. Start removing thoughts from your brain. As you start thinking about something, just stop. Another thought comes in. Kill it. Just kill thoughts. You can think only about your breathing. Nothing else.

I prefer the "Mindfulness" method of this technique. It does not involve "killing" the thoughts that pop into your head, but rather acknowledging that these thoughts have distracted you from your breathing, being okay with that, and simply returning to the breath. The distracting thoughts will come back, and that is okay. Just return to recognizing the different parts of your breathing: the points between inhaling and exhaling, the feeling of your abdomen rising/falling.

This is like giving an advice to someone who doesn't know how to bike. Get on the bike, hold the handle bar so the bike doesn't fall, place your butt on the seat, place your feet on the pedals and start pedaling.

Good luck biking

OF course practice is part of it. No help at all to ridicule the process, but to describe it helps folks to know how to begin.

The instructions are not wrong, and your snark is not helpful.

Perhaps the missing instruction is:

> Practice until the desired effect happens regularly, then continue to practice.

> Start removing thoughts from your brain. As you start thinking about something, just stop.

I had a hard time sleeping just last night. I couldn't stop thinking about things - I even had to eventually google the chemical composition of Sodium Bicarbonate, and of course what exactly Bicarbonate was...then of course that led to questions on Sodium Bicarbonate vs Sodium Chloride...it's a never ending process for me sometimes at night.

I will certainly try this though.

I can relate to this! Letting go of these thought trains is so very hard and keeps me up, my partner hates it when she sees my phone screen light up at night...i don’t blame her but ironically it’s a faster path to sleep for us both.

This can be done with practice. There are several meditative practices to overcome an obsession with transient thoughts. Check out Daoist meditation as a start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daoist_meditation

There are many good guided audio meditation available these days as well.

Have pen&paper nearby. When things come up that are hard to dismiss directly, write them down. Then you can forget it and continue in the morning (or not).

> a pillow isolates my left ear, while my right biceps isolates my right ear from sounds

Have you experimented with any kind of ear plugs? I have really good hearing which makes falling asleep stressful if the house isn't otherwise quiet, even with white noise.

I'd love to find a good set of ear plugs or ear muffs or something that can be worn to sleep. Like a sleep mask, but for your ears.

You might be able to use normal, foam earplugs. If you sleep on your side, only use one plug for the ear that's not on the pillow. You'll need to get used to having them in your ears, though. I wore them as much as possible (even during the day) for a few weeks until they didn't bother me. Now I sleep like a champ. The only downside is I cannot sleep w/o them.

In my experience, most drugstores sell several different variations of foam earplugs, and the ones that work best for me are the ones with the greatest noise reduction — at least 32db NRR or better.

But the biggest single device that has helped me more than anything is my CPAP.

If you have trouble getting to sleep or staying asleep, it would be a very good idea to have a sleep study done to see if this isn’t a problem that could be at least partly solved with the right equipment.

The CPAP is a life-changer, at least for me.

>5. Start removing thoughts from your brain. As you start thinking about something, just stop. Another thought comes in. Kill it. Just kill thoughts. You can think only about your breathing. Nothing else.

You won't really appreciate the benefits of ADD until you read things like these.

I've found brain.fm fairly effective at making me fall asleep for a nap. They have a nap category where you select the length of time you want to sleep.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com