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Comment by weinzierl | Hacker News Reader

>Tell me if this sounds familiar: you just turned off the light, your head is on the pillow, your eyes are closed, and yet, instead of drifting off to dreamland, you find yourself thinking about something that happened earlier in the day.

Hmmm no, doesn't sound familiar to me. I fall asleep quickly and it has always been this way. My sleep tracker says my average time to sleep is seven minutes. I always wondered how common this is?

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I wish I was like this. It takes me at least an hour to actually fall asleep, even if I'm so tired that I can't stay up to actually do anything.

I have been at both extremes. For as long as I can remember I have had insomnia. It is a miserable disorder. At night I would endlessly ruminate about personal relationships, how I could help others, and the occasional work problems.

Recently I moved to the Bay Area. I work alone and have few friends. With few relationships, for the first time in my life I started falling asleep in under 10 minutes. It's a gift but it comes with a price. When I started mentoring at-risk high-school students, I found the insomnia returned, so I quit being a mentor after a few months.

Perhaps with more conditioning, insomnia won't relapse so easily.

Edit: grammar

Since this is the internet, I am free to reply with hearsay... I read that if you fall asleep that fast, you might not be getting enough sleep the previous night.

I've heard the same thing from doctors; falling asleep in less than 10 minutes is generally considered indicative of sleep issues of one sort or another.

OTOH, ~90% of the population uses caffeine regularly, and given that it takes ~48 hours to completely purge your body of caffeine, I think that saying is only relevant to caffeine drinkers.

Coffee or no coffee, 10h sleep or 4h, it's all the same for me.

Since this is the internet, I am free to reply with anecdata. I get 7.5 hours of sleep just about every night, and I fall asleep in less than 15 minutes more than 90% of the time. I am a coffee addict, but I keep it to 2-3 cups per day (usually). Even the occasional after-dinner cup doesn't usually keep me up.

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