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Comment by codyb | Hacker News Reader

I've always said to insomniacs that they should read textbooks. They'll either end up geniuses or fall asleep like the rest of us.

Is it making light of what's probably a very serious issue, I suppose so.

This article makes me very glad that I can fall asleep easy at night. Just another thing to be thankful for. The few nights I can't fall asleep quickly are torture, I cannot imagine what it must be like for someone to suffer through that frequently.

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> I've always said to insomniacs that they should read textbooks.

I'm not a good sleeper and quite like reading. If I'm in a state where I'm very tired but also having trouble getting off to sleep then I'm generally too tired to read. I may be able to manage a paragraph or two before my eyes start to lose focus but that's it.

I'm not wide awake and fully functioning, I'm lying there tired but unable to get off to sleep - these are quite different states.

The best thing I can do is to close my eyes and build 3D models in my head and fly around them. That sometimes helps, I think it concentrates the mind.

I’ve started doing that whenever I have trouble sleeping. I start with a random world, set it to orbit, then make another world, have it orbit the first world, then add a third. I let them all orbit eachother.

That’s super cute!

Do people who do this 3D modelling in their mind thing do a lot of visual things regularly? I would find it difficult to start doing that without being distracted by the million thoughts after 10 minutes.

Well, I’m not sure. I used to do a lot of drawing when I was a kid, but now I do more programming and teaching.

I think the exercise is really just to distract me from thinking “go to sleep go to sleep” over and over lol.

That's meditation. I do the same thing but slowly imagine athletic form in sports moves (e.g. positioning of hips while kicking a soccer ball). Imagining and focusing on an imaginary dot in your vision is the same thing I think, but I can't seem to do that well. I wonder if anyone with this realization has taken it into awake meditation -- e.g. starting a daily meditation practice using the tools they've been developing to fall asleep.

I fall asleep easily, but frequently wake up at 2:30AM and have trouble getting back to sleep until 4:00AM, which is just an hour before I would normally get up. It does kinda suck, but I'm sure it could be a lot worse.

I used to keep my old physics textbook next to my bed. Interesting enough to find something to read, dry enough to put me to sleep in a couple paragraphs. Ha!

The same here. For me, exercises seem to ease the problem.

But the amount of exercise is important, and once in a while I need to take some rest, then the same issue hits me again. Maybe I need my own dry textbook..

Same here, had this problem for few years, the thing that helped me was a bit surprising - Magnesium L-Threonate. I must have been depleted of magnesium, maybe from drinking coffee? Other forms of magnesium didn't helped (but I haven't done proper experimentation on myself). With this form of magnesium the results were pretty much immediate. You can try it if you want, it may help as well.

I had a similar experience but with magnesium citrate, I think any organic salt of mg will likely help as they all have good uptake/absorption qualities, as opposed to mg oxide. I also got some beneficial effects from medium strength b vitamin pills and a high dose of b12 in the methylcobalamin form, taken sublingually.

The thing that helps me get to sleep is thinking in fiction. Any non-fiction subject results in my brain going into overdrive.

Same with me. I start to think fiction and then I kind of blur the line between a dream and my thinking and just falling asleep.

I like to think about scifi stuff when I can't sleep and someone recommended audio books in one of the comments. There is a podcast by Isaac Arthur about science and futurism, and he provides narration only versions. Honestly this is a miracle for my sleep.

It's very interesting and because it doesn't have music and loud sounds it will not wake you up if you fell asleep.

https://soundcloud.com/isaac-arthur-148927746a

(I think there is a bug in soundcloud where the RSS feed does not show past a few tens of older episodes? Not sure where to get all of them)

I think you can import the URL into your podcast reader.

Reading textbooks doesn't work if you're interested in the subject. If you're a software engineer, writing code doesn't help either. Doing anything you like to do doesn't work.

One thing that helps me is playing a very lengthy fiction audiobook like LOTR or ASOIAF while I lay in bed with the lights off. I love those books, but I usually get tired after listening to a chapter and fall asleep within the next 15 minutes. Note that this is at 4-5am... so... it's not like I've solved my problem.

About reading textbooks: you'll get tired, put it away, turn of the light and then can't sleep and is not tired. Turn on light, read again, get tired ... Etc.

You don't learn anything and you don't sleep.

Try audiobooks! No need to turn of the light, just listen in the darkness :)

Many audio-book apps have a sleep timer feature, so you don't have to worry about the book playing the whole night if you fall asleep in the meanwhile.

I want to second audio things. I don't do audio books, I have a philosopher with a soothing voice I listen to when I go to sleep.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/opaoujvykzxxtzo/Eckhart%20Tolle%20...

This is the track if any are interested. I find the content engages my mind but is relaxing, it is easy to slip into sleep.

I do the same with listening to NPR, the BBC World Service, or some Ken Burns documentary. Sometimes just some classic tv works too. Anything to provide a bit of background noise and something for me to listen to other than my own repetitive thoughts. Plus having a bit of background noises drowns out any other noises that might wake me up. And if I can't fall asleep, at least it's something interesting.

I also find NPR great for falling back to sleep for an hour or two when I wake up and it's technically morning, but not my normal wakeup time. Worst case, I'll get to listen to the radio for a little longer in the morning. Almost always it ends up calming me down enough that I fall back to sleep though.

Exactly. And one of the reasons why I think NPR is different from other things I can listen to is the lack of ads. I know there's placement and sponsorship, but they don't have other ads spliced in (usually at a much louder volume, with random noises and music and ways to get attention) that easily wake me up.

This is what I do, with a little yellow led reading light. The light is very important. Red might be better (last rally codriver said it's easier on his eyes at night...) but haven't tried yet.

On another note it also helps to pay attention to my heart rate and what I am thinking about. IE if I think about scaling an in memory graph db my heart rate jumps and I can't sleep. Maybe common sense but fun to play with.

When I was too stressed out to sleep during college exam periods, I did actually use my introduction to group-theory to lull me to sleep :-)

Seems like a great idea. I will try this.

You'll have to change your username after just a few sessions! ;-).

I will say, the problem for me, and I have very few sleep issues, is that when I do try this technique, I get very involved in whatever it is I decide to start studying.

It's a great relief from whatever's been keeping me up, but not a great solution for sleep.

At least in my case. So I recommend things which aren't screen related. Math books, with their problems you can hand write are a great fit.

Alternatively fiction works well for me too. I key every vocabulary word I learn into Anki which helps as well.

Good luck and happy new years, I hope you get some rest my friend.

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