An insomniac's journey to regular sleep | Hacker News Reader

An insomniac's journey to regular sleep

sleepedy.com

22 pointsrahulshiv11 comments

I’ve always had problems staying asleep, especially if I’m under stress or have a job interview. I’ll wake up around 3 or 4 and not be able to sleep again.

Not being able to sleep before a day of those fucking asinine whiteboard interviews has probably cost me millions in lifetime income.

Anyways, these are the things that help me sleep:

1) Only one coffee a day max, always right after lunch and before 3pm.

2) Set an alarm for bedtime and stick to a consistent schedule.

3) Don’t work or code right before bed, do something mindless for an hour like watching a show or playing a game.

4) To fall back asleep, use meditation exercises. Here are mine in order of most effective to least effective:

- Focus on your breathing and nothing else

- Imagine sinking deep into the ocean or into space

- Starting with your feet, imagine a warm calm and move up your body and out through your hands and head. (This takes practice to not immediately feel itchy all over)

For a guided intro to sleep meditation, I found this scifi-themed video to work for me: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bFqEWrw6jyg

At times I’ve listened to the entire thing at 4am with eyes closed and not fall asleep, but overall had more success than just remaining in my own thoughts.

3) Don’t work or code right before bed, do something mindless for an hour like watching a show or playing a game.

You tried not even touching a device or computer for 1.5-2 hours before bed? I find it also works great.

I find what I do on the device matters more than anything. Like arguing on reddit/twitter/here is the dumbest thing to do in general, but even dumber right before bed.

Reading a book or something doesn’t seem to be much different for me than reading something online.

There’s an accessibility setting in iOS to dim the screen when you triple click the home button as well. I use it along with night mode but most of the benefit seems to be from making it so uncomfortable to read my iPad that put it down and go back to sleep.

I found two cups of coffee in the day made it easier to sleep than one. Quizzed my doctor on this and the reason given was the liver will process it out of your system once a threshold is reached. The threshold varies amongst people too.

When I first got prescribed medication for sleep (and other stuff, but it hit two birds with one stone I guess), it fundamentally changed my life. Often people think that the only medications for sleep are either benzos or Z-drugs, but that's not true. There's a particular anti-psychotic that works incredibly well for sleep, and doesn't have any of the long term cognitive side effects of the more traditional sleeping medication.

There are risk to every medication, of course, and anti-psychotics are no exception. But I think people fetishize behavorial treatments instead of medication. My motto: better living through chemistry. Do your own research, figure out what medication you want, try them out, whatever. People are far too risk-adverse around drugs. Some of them have substantial upsides if used properly. Of course there are downsides as well, but that's true for just about everything.

Finding the right treatments for sleep and energy during the day has given me a significant edge over the competition. Drugs aren't just to solve problems, they are to make us better. And we, as a society, need to start embracing that.

Are you referring to mirtazapine or amitriptyline or trazodone? I've seen by of those three being used for sleep aside from their primary indication.

Seroquel. It's often prescribed off-label for sleep. Very small doses are sufficient for sleep, so a lot of the side-effects listed online aren't applicable (we're talking like 25-50mg for sleep vs 300-900mg for anti-psychotic uses).

The problem with taking sleeping medication is that you are treating a symptom and not a cause. In most cases insomnia is related to stress, and ironically insomnia itself causes stress which worsens itself.

Something that helped me sleep a lot better was the realization that one bad night’s sleep doesn’t have a huge impact on my performance the next day, as long as I’ve been sleeping well-ish the previous days.

Helps address that stress when you have a “critical day” upcoming.

This is great. I'm going through this right now. Been a long time since I slept well.

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