The Stages of Insomnia
mcsweeneys.net
mcsweeneys.net
Can easily fall into a light sleep which lasts about 30 minutes, then I wake up. I've never been able to figure out of it's something environmental pulling me out, or just me.
Those 30 minutes are just enough of a power nap I'm up until 4:00am.
At this point I know trying to go back to sleep is futile so I just get up and go do something productive.
I hope I can find some slow release, 300mcg melatonin to take after my melatonin drops to extend this great sleep to 8 hours.
I take melatonin in syrup/drops form -- it is jus that I take 2 or 3 drops (150mcg each) instead of 10 or 20, as is advertised.
I was saying that I'd love to find a source for slow release, because then I could first take the melatonin drops, and just as I would be about to sleep, I would take the slow release melatonin -- that way, I'd extend the 5 hours to 6 or 8 hours of good sleep.
- Use a sleep mask and earplugs, or do the poor man's version like I do (pillow on the top of your head).
- Get into a situation where you can't feel stressed. I'm in that situation right now. I feel too underpaid to be stressed. In that sense, being underpaid is much more of a good thing than a bad thing, since my performance is good enough.
- Get into a situation where you don't feel mildly depressed.
Being underpaid allows me to switch jobs very easy so that I don't have to compromise on my values. I now see the ones being overpaid as being in a trap.
It was all related to stress and anxiety and perhaps lower natural melatonin production.
300 mcg of melatonin helps tremendously with falling asleep, and after a week or so of usage, I find I no longer need it, I can fall asleep naturally until the next bout of anxiety/anger/depression.
I know antihistamines help me stay asleep, but I try to stay away from them.
What I've found works great for staying asleep is reducing stress and anxiety, no stimulants (after having COVID-19 I quit all stimulants because I haven't had my heart checked yet).
I've been an insomniac all my life, and when I got an Oura, started to understand that even when I do sleep, I'm not getting good quality sleep. I'd done sleep tests a few times as a kid, so knew about my central apnea, but didn't know about the lack of REM I was getting.
That's why we're creating https://soundmind.co, it's a headband that monitors your sleep state, and uses different audio tones to adjust your sleep state.
Falling asleep is only part of the problem. If you're keen to find out more, check out the website, and sign-up to get on the waitlist.
I've just completed 4 nights of sleeping with passive auditory signals adjusting my sleep, and it's amazing the difference in the sleep charts. I'll be writing up a blog-post shortly.
- Supplement L-Tryptophan
- 350 mg Magnesium Carbonate before bed
- 3 mg melatonin (bioavailability is claimed to be between 10~15% - was on 10 mg but I found I was waking up too frequently)
- 10 minute meditation with calm app
- Timed air con.
If I do wake up, I immediately meditate.
It is a ritual, but I am sleeping well most nights.
I switched to 300mcg or 450mcg and it just keeps working, no tolerance whatsoever (actually, after 4-5 days of getting into a sleeping routine with melatonin, I find I no longer need it and I can just fall asleep on my own).
300mcg means I don't notice the melatonin working, I just fall asleep.
450mcg of melatonin -- I actually feel it kicking in like I'm a child wanting to stay and watch the movie, but I just can't stay awake.
It works OK, I guess, but every now and then I power through it and end up having not so much a trip as ... something like lucid dreams written by a bored, disinterested TV script writer.
It's a bit more subtle than that: the correct dose is about 300 to 1000 micrograms. Doses significantly larger than that will not work for most people. The effective dosing window for melatonin is narrow, so more is not better.
It doesn't help that most melatonin available OTC in the US is in doses of 3mg to 10mg. This stuff is not useful. You need the 300 microgram pills, the 1 milligram pills, the liquid, or as a last resort the 3mg pills with a splitter.
Ambien never did much for me, but I'd be curious if the sublingual delivery worked better.
The best functional case for zolpidem/ambien that I've found is to first fall asleep with melatonin, and if I waked up before 4 AM, I'd take 5mg of zolpidem and be back to sleep in 30 minutes.
However, if I take 10mg of zolpidem and don't immediately go to sleep, I start hallucinating and I quite like it: first colors go away and the fonts seem to lose texture/wash out, then the sweetest audio hallucinations start that narrate what I'm reading, embellish the story or just thin, otherworldly voices that talk to themselves.
https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2380057.m...
I searched high and low for headphones that I can sleep in. I can't sleep on my back, so big cans are right out. I hate earbuds and things that poke into my ear canal, and headband-like arrangements slide around, are hot and compress my ears painfully. I finally found a set of small, disk-like phones that fit flat and in the center of my ear, just outside the ear canal; with a little extra padding these are very, very comfortable.
[The product I liked are Bedphones, from dubslabs.com; they are expensive, but I found them totally worth it. I use the wired version, and they tend to tangle badly unless you take a little care wrapping them up, but I hate having yet another device to charge]
----
"Really? Doctor, I think your stories are simply divine--"
"Thank you."
"Oh, I really do. I put one of your tapes on my player and let it lull me to sleep almost every night."
"Higher praise a writer cannot expect," Jubal said with a straight face.
- Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
There is no issue with recommending products on HN AFAIK. I have come across some great products after recommendations on here in the past.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07Q7SVYBQ/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...
Wearing silicon tipped in-earbuds all night is likely courting ear infection. I have settled on JBL T205 Earbud Headphones. They are in-ear but without silicon tips (i.e. ear canal is not sealed shut all night), are comfortable enough, last 6-12 months and are cheap.
Wish someone would make a pair that would last at least a couple years. Hate the waste.
There's a series by Ken Scholes that uses both of them (along with others, it's a full cast!) and it's amazing: https://www.audible.com/pd/Lamentation-Audiobook/B002V0RHPI
His voice is so calming and re-assuring and the background music also helps.
The O'Neill cylinders series never failed to make me sleep -- I could imagine myself living in such a neat space, floating in the middle of such a cylinder, producing large amounts of food, the world's problems far away, and boom, I'm asleep.
I think I used to fall asleep like this when I was kid imagining I was travelling in captain Nemo's submarine.
I've been in sleep studies and what they've learned is that the normal fall asleep process for me happens very quickly and it's very easy to to disrupt.
During my teenage years I was averaging 4-5 hours sleep every 2-5 days. In my 20's, 30's, 40's and early 50's I averaged 1-2 hours of sleep a day. With a lot of 2 and 3 days of no sleep.
A few years ago I started using an app on my iphone called Brainwave, it's a binaural beats program. This program has saved my life. Since I've started using the program I'm getting about 4-5 hours of sleep per day.
I use small wireless ear buds, and I use the deep sleep program. It runs for the entire time I'm in bed, the program will put me down, keep me asleep, and then wake me up.
- This bed feels good
- So nice to be not standing or sitting, my feet are even tingling a bit
- This bed really feels nice, I don't want to fall asleep, I want to enjoy this feeling just a bit longer...
- Maybe there is something nice to think about while enjoying this feeling of just lying in this nice clean bed with a perfect temperature...
- ... zzz
Maybe I'm just lucky I slipped into a nice mental routine by accident.
To clear the mind, I recommend just the free intro sessions of headspace (and possibly more), sometimes I do the "thoughts are clouds and I want a blue sky" -trick when the focus on the bed doesn't seem to work.
Instead the approach should be along the lines of how we think of depression, where your brain either naturally or through some other phenomenon fails to follow the correct "natural" steps. Training definitely helps, but there are still many that struggle while doing that correctly.
I myself lie down on my right-hand side for 30 seconds to a few minutes, thinking about whatever I want. Then I turn onto my left side and I just go to sleep.
I don't think there is anything wrong with staying up late through the night and sleeping into the day.
If I am not falling asleep, I get up and work on something, rather than allowing myself to become attached to the idea of going to sleep at a certain time.
When I feel so tired that I have no choice but to pass out, that is when I lie down and sleep like a baby.
I feel extremely blessed/fortunate to have discovered letting my body dictate when to sleep and when to wake, and hope that my message helps someone else.
Same goes for school and early hours. I know for school as well as for work there is a lot of productivity to gain when most people work at the same time (easy meetings, no need to repeat stuff, for schools that's basically the only way etc). But at least have an option of two to three core working hours?
Also, good thing my SO is catching on and understanding that I'm just not an early bird (unless I wake up at 1am and stay awake). She fully understands.
And so is undersleeping.
My strategy is two-fold: 1. Don't sleep when you don't want to. 2. Sleep as much as you want when you do.
Your scenario seems to skip the second part, which is also important.
made me laugh; must have been an autocorrect for "struggle"
Works like a charm. I'm usually asleep so fast I have to start back a chapter. Honestly, I still don't really have any clue what the book is about. Ancient trees and elves I assume.
(For the pedantic, that's a joke. About the book, not its effect on my sleep.)
Do you listen to the recordings? What do you do with them?
2-4 hours nightly for now half my life (young 20's) now. Caused by other somewhat severe med issues, may hopefully be getting under control soon...
Then comes 2 am and I often wake up. If there is no stress then I fall asleep and it's fine. If there is stress then I digest it and cannot fall asleep.
To that I found a solution that sometimes work: I have a pen and paper next to the bed and I write inthe night that thing I am thinking about to not forget it in the morning. My brain acknowledges and I can fall asleep.
Check email.
Regret screen exposure.
Bury phone.
Also, keeping the device(s) outside of the bedroom is quite efficient.
When I wake up and have that urge to check my phone "real quick" to answer some insane question in the middle of the night, I remember that I have to wait while the thing boots up first, so I grumble, roll over, and go back to sleep.