Hacker News Reader

Comment by koheripbal | Hacker News Reader

I found something that works for me. One of the things that prevents adults from sleeping is worrying about life problems. Getting your brain to shut up about problems that you cannot fix at night is the problem.

My trick is to listen (not watch) to old television shows ...all night. I selected a few hundred hours of old television that'd I'd seen many times before, got a pair of very comfortable ear buds to sleep with, and I just listen to the old TV shows for 8 hours straight. It works amazingly.

Now I sleep through the night, every night, despite having even worse life problems than when I started. One interesting side effect is that I don't dream the same at all. If I dream at all - it's actually about the show that I'm listening to. It doesn't seem to have any negative impact though.

View on HN

One of the things that prevents adults from sleeping is worrying about life problems

And that adult may not even realize it, because that worry is usually covered by layers of coping. “I’m fine” is adults worst enemy.

My trick is to listen (not watch) to old television shows ...all night

Before using a technique described in itt’s root comment, I also used for-sleep hour+ long asmr videos. Cannot compare their effectiveness because I don’t have a tv.

If I dream at all - it's actually about the show that I'm listening to. It doesn't seem to have any negative impact though

Make sure they don’t broadcast red propaganda in the middle of the night! /jk

note: I don't have a TV either - I use my phone and the Plex app.

This.

Being a very anxious person in nature, I will add there is something that positively helps anxiety in repetition of something known.

I can't put my finger on it but, I always feel aliviated when a new episode starts after the previous one. It's one of the things that has helped me most during hard times, and gave me back being able to fall sleep at night.

This human truth is at the heart of many religious practices. Time as we experience it has aspects of repetition and aspects of novelty. Doing something again and again makes it powerful for us.

For the general issue of worries keep me up at night, I have found that after a few years of meditation, this has almost stopped being issue for me. Maybe if there is some big issue I will wake up one morning early and not be able to stop the thoughts from waking me, so then I bring my problem solving techniques to it and resume sleeping well. Granted some types of stress, financial, child well being, relationship, are more destabilizing and force a higher level of practice than others (like a recent car accident where no one was hurt but my pride and my car and maybe my trust of highway 87). But three slow deep breaths, with all my attention I can summon, note the beginning of the pause and plan reflex, and then nicely numbered breaths, connected to many hours of sitting meditation and those basically chill experiences, and I can let sleepiness do its thing without fuss.

Now I understand why my grandmother would pray, saying the Hail Mary prayer again and again and again, when she was going through emotional times.

I just put on a twitch stream and listen along until I fall asleep. As you say it just allows my brain to switch off and allow me to sleep.

I 100% agree with this!

It has absolutely changed the way I sleep (combined with not having caffeine with dinner or later). It has to be TV shows that I've either seen before or don't really care about what happens. Only difference is I use the sleep timer and just turn the TV back on if I have trouble falling back asleep.

That's exactly what I do! I slowly switched to listening to an audio book with my eyes closed.

But I am with you, old tv shows where I already know the ending are distracting enough not to think about tomorrow, but since I've seen them already I don't stay awake to find out what happens

New content keeps me awake.

...but it also cannot be the same content every night, so I have a few hundred hours of several old shows hosted on my Plex server that I play each night.

It's novel enough that it keeps my brain occupied, but not so new that I care about missing anything.

It's a nice sweet spot.

My next step is selecting very specific episodes that I think have good stories that I actually want to reinforce. I find I really internalize certain scenes if I happen to be in the correct part of my sleep cycle while it's playing.

I've found myself doing similar, being able to "focus" on something that also doesn't require paying attention too helped immensely in dealing with an active inner dialog. For me it was the old seasons of AVGN combined into single videos.

I’m using Hearts of Space or the chillout mixshows from truehouse.net for the same effect.

Of the latter, I prefer the shows I’ve been listening to for over a decade.

I'm going to try this. Maybe start with Bob Ross.

What would you recommend for comfortable earbuds?

I used to find the first generation Apple AirPods to be quite good. For me, they sat relatively flush in my ear, so falling asleep with them in wasn't uncomfortable, and they'd be just loose enough to gently fall out without me noticing once asleep.

The latest gen don't work as well (for sleep) as their shape is slightly different (more "bulbous" perhaps) and are much more uncomfortable to fall asleep with in my opinion.

As to how wise it is to sleep with tiny bluetooth transmitters inside your skull... that's a different question.

7 years ago I woke up at 2AM to a commotion outside. It was my neighbors home - on fire - and by the time I got outside to check what was going on, the fire jumped to my home. Had I not heard the noise, I would've probably died in my sleep.

Given that situation or any other possible emergency that may occur in the middle of the night, sleeping with earbuds playing old TV shows seems like a very bad idea...

Be careful.

Luckily my wife wakes up if a pin falls on the ground. Also, the volume for my earbuds is quite low, and I can still here the kids going to the bathroom at night.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com