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I am someone who had suffered with insomnia for decades and mostly resolved it in the past few years. I'm not sure why you think eating in the morning is necessary for getting a good sleep - I rarely eat breakfast and usually sleep great these days. The thing that helped me was going to a therapist and doing CBT-I. Probably the top three things for me were just getting out of bed if I couldn't sleep, forcing myself to exercise even when I am completely exhausted and learning to be okay with sleeping poorly. Putting a lot of pressure on yourself to sleep well and thinking about it all the time can for some people like myself, lead to poor sleep. That being said, this is what worked for me and I would encourage anyone with insomnia to try CBT-I - it may sound dumb to some people with loads of advice you can find on the internet with respect to getting good sleep, but having someone tell you what to do and then holding you accountable can help a lot when trying to fix a difficult problem like insomnia.

learning to be okay

Cannot stress enough how I second that. A nervous person (who you, a reader, completely are, despite thinking you’re normal) is at risk of self-feeding the problem they have with something.

Also as a person who couldn’t find interest in life events anymore in general (not suicidal, just boring to death), CBT theme itself is like a fresh breath. Like as a geek you never knew what a computer is and just found out.

Yeah. A lot of people think therapy is about changing yourself, but honestly there is nothing shamefully wrong with most of us. We need shy, anxious but smart and kind people and we need oblivious plow ahead people and charming slightly narcissistic charismatic folks. We need some contrariness and some obedience. Some deep thinkers and some rush in and try it folks. Creative folks and measure twice cut once folks. Even with sleep, if you have to keep your little group safe at night in pre history having a variety of sleep schedules is good. The old people get the dawn watch, teenagers stay up first watch, the sleep shifted get second watch. It all works out.

Therapy makes a difference thru acceptance and working with you as you are more than fixing. Part of that is getting a more realistic way of perceiving your self as you are, and part of that is finding the strengths in how you are. Also taking very good care of your precious life. Sleep when you are tired. Eat when you are hungry. Seek help when you could benefit from it. It you hate someone, don’t hang around. Etc etc.

Between the acceptance, self awareness, less shame about your actual self, and a life that meets your needs, therapy can transform your life, but not by transforming you. You are fine.

A lot of people think therapy is about changing yourself

This was my concern as well, I asked about it on third or fourth session right after acute symptoms relaxed. I really didn’t want to change into someone else. The therapist laughed and said to not worry, because I lived more than 30 years along with my core beliefs and it would take an inhuman effort to move that mountain even slightly. All you do is getting familiar with yourself and being aware of tons of your automatic thoughts and what they result in, if you allow them to act without your noticing. Speaking in software terms, we are legacy monsters with no source code or self-testing, and CBT is basically a set of (pretty effective) blackbox testing methods with a goal to (a) create additional routines to work around detected issues and (b) accept that this is you and it’s normal/okay/justthat.

> waking up early, at the exact same time, every day

If you can do that, congratulations, you don't have insomnia.

> need to eat a heavy breakfast (…) Some people think they are special snowflakes who "have never been able to eat in the morning"

If I don't wait one or two hours after waking up before eating I'll puke, or at best have some severe nausea for hours, no thanks.

I'm insomniac and it drove me quite close to death, try getting a total of 6h of sleep in a week, 48h without rest, or staying still and conscious for 8h. Sleep deprivation is torture and everyone has their idea of how badly people manage their lives, how insomnia isn't a thing, and how they should just "go to bed", "quit screens", or "eat proper". You think we have not tried everything and anything?

Melatonin saved me, not condescending uninformed counsel. When I started taking melatonin I discovered what feeling sleepy was like. I only knew exhaustion until then, and it was not always enough. I've been able to sleep for the past two years and it still feels like a luxury.

I don't know anyone without insomnia who does all that.

If they have insomnia they don't need to pay specific attention to those points

You probably also don't know any life-long skinny people who count calories.

The point is that the "insomnia advice" is treated as "do literally all of these things, some of which are fairly oppressive lifestyle restrictions, or we will ignore your complaints of insomnia."

There's no recognition that there is variation between people and maybe we should make things easier for a diverse set of needs rather than forcing people to do a bunch of labor to comply with someone else's lifestyle.

Wait till you hear how we treat those with substance dependence.

I also don't know any former obese people who count calories.

If we were looking at kids with sleep trouble who stayed up late with bright screens blasting hyper-stimulative entertainment and carnival-bright indoor room lighting, and we believed that sleep quality and quantity had gotten worse for kids over the decades as room lighting had gotten brighter (y'all seen a '50s or earlier house with electric lighting that hasn't been re-wired? They're not lit up like a modern house, usually, and lower-light set-ups continued to be fairly common, if less the overwhelming norm, through at least the 70s) and electronic screens per house had moved from "none" to "one tiny one" to "several per person, in many sizes", the very first thing we'd do is cut off their electronic screen-having devices—all of them, not just cell phones, all of them—and lighting brighter than ~100 lumen per room strictly at sundown. "Well of course they can't sleep!", we'd say, tutting and looking on with the authority and perspective of parents.

"But I'm having trouble sleeping and I'm bored, can't I just watch a couple episodes of something?" they'd say. NO, we'd say. "Well how about I work on some homework on my computer?" NO. "Alright, well I guess I'll text my friends" NO. "But..." NO.

And if sleep across the population of kids had indeed been getting worse over that time period, I'd bet that'd fix it for most of them.

We have trouble enforcing rules like that on ourselves, though, and maybe even trouble recognizing what's surely suspect #1 in any kind of declining sleep quality epidemic.

(as for any "tricks" we're all sharing, the ones I've had success with are: a loud and powerful fan for air circulation and noise-masking; keeping the thermostat for our bedrooms quite low at night, even in the Summer; heavy curtains; and a weighted blanket, which if nothing else is very good at keeping any sheets or other blankets under it in place all night—and yes, I'm terrible at sticking to the obvious solution above, just like everyone else, but damned if it doesn't work like a charm on my stupid "I think I might have an abnormal sleep cycle LOL yeah, must be that, not all the low-effort hyper-stimulative entertainment" ass)

I agree with this. Everybody I've met who complains about sleep has terrible sleep habits. When I get loose about my habits, my sleep deteriorates, but when I'm good, I sleep like a machine: asleep within 5 minutes, out like a rock, spring out of bed in the morning like a fully charged battery. No morning grogginess; it's like a switch. No drowsiness during the day. I haven't had caffeine in years and never feel the need because I get proper sleep.

No caffeine after 2pm here, exercise 3 times a week and 2x daily dog walks. No phone or devices after 9pm, bed at 11:30 and out of bed at 8:15 7 days a week (thanks dog). I still go through multi week long stints of lack of sleep, grogginess, general unpleasantness in the mornings until 12-12:30.

Generalizing that everyone has terrible habits is ridiculous, it's the equivalent of telling someone who is suffering from depression they just need to exercise to feel better, or someone who is obese to just "eat less"

I'm not telling anybody anything. I'm saying a lot of people with bad sleep, including most of the ones I've met, have terrible sleep habits. Just like a lot of people are fat because they have bad diets. If you're unable to walk or have some metabolism issue, that can make it really hard to stay slim. For you, perhaps you have an undiagnosed sleep issue (in which case seeing a sleep doctor would be helpful); but your experience does nothing to change the fact that other people have poor sleep for no reason but their poor choices.

> Notably usually absent or poorly followed: - waking up early, at the exact same time, every day.

I think not being able to wake up early at the same time every day is actually a symptom of insomnia. If you've been up half the night and only fell asleep an hour or 2 ago, jumping out of bed when the alarm goes off is pretty hard actually.

I have a genuine pathological inability to wake up early in the morning.

Even if I eat 10 mg dexamphetamine and a Red Bull as soon as I wake up, I will sometimes fall back asleep. Some mornings I don't even get that far, and manage to sleep though half a dozen alarms.