I have a few other posts planned on this theme. This one has to come first because it was necessary to fix my lack of sleep before I could improve anything else.
Sleep is so important that it’s worth spending time optimizing it: through experimentation find the best combination of eye mask/no eye mask, ear plugs/no ear plugs, blackout curtains/no blackout curtains, pillow thickness, room temperature, pre sleep routine and mattress type that are best for you
About a year ago I was feeling strung-out, irritable, miserable. Looking for a likely cause I ruled out nutrient deficiency or some serious underlying health problem. In retrospect it took me longer that it ought to have, to consider that I might not be getting enough sleep.
I’ve always been a light sleeper, and it takes me a long time to get to sleep. I suppose I’d internalised the idea that I generally do okay without sleeping as much as others do. But prior to last year I’d never felt this sense that my body was close to breaking somehow. The decisive difference, I believe, was that the relatively new regime of getting up at 6–7 am — my young son’s preferred time of waking — had finally caught up with me.
I tried a bunch of things. The (temporary) use of the following practices fixed the problem better than I had hoped. After I began feeling better I dropped the most costly of these, and kept using the others. I’ll list them in descending order of apparent efficacy.
No screens, and more importantly no contact with people on the internet, after 8pm
This was difficult for me — as I’m sure it is for most habitual checkers of social media.
You’ve likely heard about the unwelcome effects of blue light on the our bodies’ circadian rhythms. For this reason I’ve had f.lux (Mac) running on my computers for a long time. After sunset it dims and warms the colours of your display to minimise your exposure to blue light in the evening.
But I’m confident that the substance of what I consume online is at least as harmful to sleep as the colour of the pixels shining at me. My feeds often contain posts that refer to some kind of outrage, some passionate political disagreement (perhaps one that I was already part of). Reading this stuff puts my brain on high alert. Since I’ve yet to fix my problem of giving too many fucks, I needed to be smarter about controlling my exposure to the things I’m likely to squander my fucks on — especially approaching bedtime.
I rediscovered my old e-ink Kindle, and read that instead.
Go to bed at 21:00
Previously 23:00 was typical. But since the screens curfew was already in place, this didn’t feel very painful at all. I enjoyed the unfamiliar feeling that comes with giving more time and attention to the ritual of going to bed, rather than robotically going through those motions while mentally preoccupied with whatever I’d just seen on TwitFaceTube.com.
No coffee, no refined sugar, no alcohol.
I missed the coffee and alcohol.
Use an Autogenics script
Autogenics is a simple relaxation technique. It works through reciting a mantra while directing your attention to different parts of your body. I was skeptical of it working, and also wondered whether my skepticism itself might get in the way of the desired effect appearing. But I was surprised by how well it worked immediately, even without lots of practice. By the end of the sequence, my limbs really do feel a good deal heavier and warmer (the suggestion of the mantra), and sleep comes much more easily.
Write todo lists, on paper
In order to properly relax, it helps me a great deal to ‘offload’ important things into a trusted system —a principle I first saw in the Getting Things Done approach. For me that’s a plain Moleskine Pocket notebook (note to younger self, that’s not ‘mole skin’). Items are formatted in a particular way that I’ve found easy to understand at a glance, and satisfying to cross off once done. Once tomorrow’s things-to-do are safely in the book, they tend not to flutter round in my head.
Visualisation as a way of accepting foreign sounds
I’m easily kept awake by sounds. Earplugs or white noise work acceptably sometimes, for the other times, this trick helps me. To the best of my knowledge this is my own invention.
I realised that if there’s a sound somewhere that’s interfering with my ability to sleep, my default mode of interpreting the situation is that this sound is coming at me from somewhere.
My alternative is to visualise the whole scene as if looking down from somewhere close by in the sky. I see myself in bed, and all around I see sources of noise (sometimes I’ll need to make an effort to hear other noises, so I can include them in the visualisation too). I see the sounds rendered as translucent spheres expanding from their positions of origin.
Perhaps part of why this helps is that the sounds are no longer coming at me, they’re not directional, just there in the world, like me, doing their own thing.