Step 1. No phone/TV/screens in the bedroom
Step 2. No screens 30 min before going to bed
Step 3. Go to bed at the same time each night
Step 4. Set yourself up to actually get enough sleep
Try this for 6 weeks and then if you seriously still cant sleep discuss with a doctor.
I’ve always found that point odd because for me I can’t sleep when hungry often my body’s wake up alarm is getting hungry so all eating dinner hours before sleep just makes me wake up starved in the middle of the night so I usually eat as late as possible so I can have my more consistent alarm clock wake me up instead of my stomach
I think people are built differently and what works for some people doesn’t work for others. I know people who can’t function without a hearty breakfast. For me, eating soon after I get up makes me feel sick. I feel best if I don’t eat for several hours after I get up.
For sleeping, I think the most important thing is routine / habit. If your body recognizes that you’re in the routine you do before bed, it knows what comes next. What that routine is can differ from person to person.
There are alarm apps that can be set up to require taking a picture of a specific thing to turn the alarm off. I used one in college, where I had to take a picture of my toilet. Ten years later I still wake up around 6am every day with no alarm.
Consistent sleep is the #1 sleep-related correlate of academic performance, even more so than duration or quality! Sleeping at the same time every night is incredibly important.
I don’t even need to do the no screens part. I try to read on my tablet before bed and end up passing out 15 minutes into it. It takes me months to finish books.
Someone gave me the advice of actually not reading before bed, because your body will associate reading with sleep and make it more difficult at other times.
I don’t exactly follow it, but reading is definitely effective at putting me to sleep
It seems obvious but also: don’t drink anything with caffeine before bed and don’t eat a good couple of hours before sleep too.
I’ve had many friends who’d have a tea before going to sleep to ‘calm’ them without realising most have quite a lot still. Or guzzling down a soda too.
thing is, this is basically just saying “just sleep bro”, i can’t do any of these things.
if i go without screens i will go mad from boredom, if i go to bed the same time each night i will lie awake in bed until i go mad with boredom or get up because fuck that noise, and what does “set yourself up to get enough sleep” even mean? that’s terribly vague.
i have yet to find anything that lets me get even vaguely consistently good sleep, i’ve tried all the things people say to do and it does NOTHING if it’s even feasible in the first place.
What’s happening with you when you get bored we tell people to stop using screens and coffee specifically because boredom is the goal you might need some medical attention if you can’t sleep when bord
what does boredom have to do with going to sleep? you need to be tired, not bored. if i’m sufficiently tired no amount of entertainment will keep me awake and if i’m not tired them being bored is just going to make my thoughts spin in circles and make me restless.
I know you got downvoted, but I do have autism and adhd and I feel this in my bones. It’s the opposite of neurotypicals— we actually need the stimulation in order to get to sleep.
Screens give off blue light, which your body uses to measure “daytime.” If you cant do screen free activities before bed, install a color corrector that shifts your devices outputs to red dominant light ~1-2 hours before you would like to sleep.
Break the habit of doing non sleep things in the afternoon in your bed. If the only thing you do in bed is sleep, it trains your brain to start internal sleep processes when you get into the sleep spot.
If you havent tried it before, try exercising 1-3 hours before you want to sleep. Can be simple like a walk or jog, or quick and short reps of jumping jacks, crunches, and stretches. Whatever works. The workout helps burn off energy and other hormones that keep you up, tuckers you out a bit, and very very lightly damages muscles which gives your body a “reason” to sleep. You do most of your healing asleep.
Sleepless rest is better than no rest at all. Lying awake for 2 hours and then sleeping for 4 does more for your body than just sleeping for 4 hours. Sleep is king, but even if you arent asleep, resting still helps your body recover. If you cannot sleep, try not to stress about not sleeping, because at least you are getting rest.
On your off days and free time, there is no shame in midday napping. Often, people try not to nap out of fear it will spoil their sleep. Sometimes, those naps help you catch up on sleep to get you back into a healthy sleep schedule. And, again, any rest is better than none.
of course i’ve been using night filters on my screens, as i said i’ve tried EVERYTHING to get better sleep and nothing works.
as for naps, those are even more impossible to achieve. the like… 5 times? i’ve managed to take a nap i’ve just ended up sleeping for several hours which only serves to further fuck up the sleep schedule.
Yeah people giving simplistic life advice generally don’t understand the actual issues because they don’t have the problem, it’s painfully common especially with things like insomnia, anxiety, and similar ‘just don’t worry about things’, ‘have you tried not being depressed and just going out and doing stuff?’, ‘just lay down and wait until you sleep’
I can lay my head on a pillow after a long walk, no screen time and all the other shit they say and still spend the entire night caught in churning and bubbling anxiety that builds and builds until I’m as wired as a crackhead.
I’m not saying don’t try things people suggest but I guess don’t expect them to work and beat yourself up with them. If you can’t find something that works for you then see a doctor about getting sleep drugs, while you meme seems to be pushing the Puritanical idea that anything but a natural life is bad that’s totally stupid and op should be ashamed.
We’re complex biological machines that go wrong in a myriad of ways, it’s perfectly fine to require the addition of outside substances to moderate and control your health - honestly future generations will probably be shocked how few people used sleep aids.
Of course not every drug works the same on everyone and many can have negative side effects so it can take some shopping around but talk to medical professionals.
(Full disclosure I don’t take medical sleep aids due to other complications but I know many who do and swear by them)
Moderate exercise for 20 minutes daily is also important for sleep regulation.
Although I will preface all this advice with the fact that if your natural circadian rhythm does not line up with the time you sleep your quality of sleep will always remain degraded.
Same here on the carbs. I notice when I eat after 6pm it’s going to affect me with either a not great sleep and the need for bathroom break(s) through the night. Low intake of sugar throughout the day I sleep much better and more soundly.
When I did Atkins many years ago, it was some of the best sleep I ever had. It was like I was a teenager again that could sleep all day and night.
They say that there’s two things you don’t skimp on: shoes, and your bed. You’re gonna spend half of your life in one, and the other half laying on the other.
I bought a nice mattress a couple of years ago during a clearance sale, and I would’ve paid full price for it even now. Best investment I’ve ever made, and I’ve had zero sleep issues since then.
Expand that to: “stuff that keeps you separated from the ground”. Tires fall in that category. If you live where it snows and don’t have good mass transit, get snow tires, and otherwise rotate, inflate and take care of your tires, and they’ll take care of you.
I slept fine when working a flip schedule. I programmed my into body that we will be going to sleep after we get home from work regardless of the time of day.
Someone sourced a couple higher in the comments. Their info showed 2% of the populous doing what “literally everyone” is doing. The other stat they included was 80% of the populous had never used a sleep aid in their life. So the talk of it being hyperbole is even a stretch.
Saying literally everyone in the U.S. is a cigarette smoker would be more accurate. (Not accurate)
It is hyperbole, but the problem is that it’s using a word that was supposed to specify that something was not hyperbole as hyperbole, rendering it useless.
Incorrect. People have been using it the way you are complaining about for hundreds of years. It’s a new phenomenon that people complain about it being used the way you disapprove of. I’d attribute the recent complaints to lack of literary exposure and anti intellectualism in recent years.
Except some of the earliest uses of the word “literally” that didn’t pertain to letters and glyps we in the form of hyperbole.
Literal as factual and literal as exaggeration both about the same age and precedent, and have been used long enough that it’s just part of the English language at this point.
May as well complain about how “discreet” and “indiscreet” are opposites, but “flammable” and “inflammable” are the same.
I think because it’s a pretty gross mischaracterization of the demographic? Usually hyperbole is used for effect to more emphatically illustrate a generally true or accepted point.
The number of Americans who use nightly sleep aids is extremely low. Like, a vast vast majority of people never take them. I don’t know anyone who regularly takes them, and honestly I don’t know many who take them even occasionally.
So this meme uses hyperbole to drive home the idea that Americans have a pill problem regarding sleep aids and no one in Europe does. I have no idea how the numbers shake out in Europe but I can say in America it is not as characterized. So it’s less hyperbole (exaggeration of a fact) and more like a lie.
2% of americans declare using sleeping aids daily.
18% declare using some some
So yeah the amount of people “litteraly using medication to sleep every night” ia quite low. The use amongst the population is still generally high so I wouldn’t directly classify that hyperbole as a lie. (but I’m not claiming I’m right on that it’s a feelings calculation).
I’m also pretty sure these numbers are underreported for example because of the stigma around using “recreational drugs” as an illegal mean to self medicate.
Also it’s nice for you to have nobody (that you know of ofc) struggling to sleep.
Where I’d personally feel more nitpicky about that meme is the opposition with Europe. I don’t think we sleep much better. A lot of people around me (and myself included) heavily rely on sedation in one form or another to have any semblance of sleep. Although there might be some selection bias since alot of folks I know are handicaped in one way or another so we don’t tend to have the best physical and psychic health ^^’
Appreciate you finding numbers when I didn’t go to that effort. It makes me wonder if numbers are pretty similar globally. 2% having chronic insomnia doesn’t sound completely out of line to me.
Yeah but there has to be some reality to it, sleep for a year makes sense because you’re saying ‘I’m super tired and I could sleep for a real long time’ all of which is true, this is saying ‘a majority of people in place A do this thing that is unknown in place B’ which isn’t even close to an approximation of reality.
Has no one in this thread never considered the root cause with these:
Anxiety. Americans are an anxious society. And that is with good cause, no social safety net, work 2 jobs to get ahead and a mass shooting every goddamn day.
American here: I don’t have any problems sleeping, nor does my wife typically, and I can’t say that I know of anyone that takes a sleep supplement every single night.
I take meds to help me sleep at night. My crippling ADHD keeps my mind from resting without help. I’m on stimulants, but my last dose is at noon. Any later than that, and they’ll just cancel out my sleeping meds.
I set an alarm and wake up an hour before I wake up to take my stimulants. I take them then sleep for another hour. That’s the only way they don’t worsen my insomnia. And I’m in the smallest dose and I take it before the sun rises.
I had severe insomnia before I got my stimulants and as long as I keep that very early regimen they don’t worsen my insomnia.
That is a good idea, but I can’t go back to sleep once I’ve woken up on most days because my dogs get way too excited about it being morning and have to play as hard as they can be and harass tf outta me. My goldendoodle puppy gets in my face and licks my nose every morning and demands that I flap her ears around while she does slammy-whammies. My beagle has to get big morning hugs every day, or he’ll just stare at me and yell at an ever-increasing volume.
I take my stimulant in the morning once the dogs have left me alone so I can get ready for the day. My afternoon stimulant is during or right after lunch and is mostly to try to keep the afternoon sleepies at bay. My work tends to slow down in the afternoons, so I get pretty sleepy on a lot of days lol. I took it at 2 pm once and I did not sleep that night. My ADHD is super bad, but I’m sensitive to stimulants. A low dose works incredibly well for me. I’m on other meds that can work as stimulants a bit, so I’m sure they’re giving my ADHD medication a lil boost lol.
Haha I’m the same, severely ADHD but really sensitive to the stimulants. But my metabolism is slow, so it lasts me most of the day when I take it early. And yeah I have cats… I keep my pill in bed, and when I roll over to take it, they literally step all over me on me face and slam their heads into my head hahaha.
I have the opposite issue as I’m unmedicated for my ADHD, I can drink coffee at around noon and it’ll quiet down my brain enough that it can help me sleep
Same here. According to This article which sources a study by National Center for Health Statistics, less than 2% of Americans use a nightly sleep aid.
A different study by the NCHS reported that 81% of Americans reported “never” using a sleep aid.
Anxiety, stress, and modern blueish, bright lighting/screens are a huge part of the problem. Humans didn’t evolve to deal with overstimulation in the evening.
I had insomnia and stress issues for years to the point I had a panic attack – I thought I was having a heart attack or stroke. Dealing with the stress and light were major steps towards resolving the problem.
I cut way back on the news and doomscrolling to no more than an hour a day before noon. I set my house lights to dim down with the sun, and no TV, phone, or computer screens for at least an hour before bed. If it’s unavoidable: dimming them and a blue light filter help.
Melatonin production stops once you start taking it artificially. American melatonin also can have fucked up stuff like melatonin tablets 1000% being over the shown amount it should contain.
I don’t know man… not sure exactly what you’re saying. Always wise to be cautious about taking any kind of drug or supplement, especially regularly. It doesn’t seem like melatonin is one to be worried about but if you’re saying you experienced problems with it after regular use, sure seems reasonable to lay off.
There is lots of variation in how individuals respond to specific substances so maybe it affects some people, including yourself, differently.
No caffeine or stimulants after noon. A considerable percentage shouldn’t have it after 10 am frankly.
Try this: 1 week of no caffeine and no chocolate At least 20 minutes of exercise - can be split upper day Finish eating dinner and snacks by 7pm No gaming or stimulating entertainment 30-60 minutes before bed. Manage noise, light and other triggers.
Smart watches or similar are good for watching your sleep quality.
Because it puts some responsibility back on the individual and makes it harder for people to blame “modern society” or capitalism or something for their problems.
I imagine because it’s trite and largely debunked pseudoscience from that weirdly Puritanical natural health ideology.
Some people can’t regulate insulin, some people can’t digest lactose, some people have neurological structures that inhibit motivation, some people have gastric complexities that cause pain and discomfort with bowel movements, some people are prone to migraines… And yes some people have genuine conditions that affect their sleep which requires medical intervention.
The childish notion that medication is bad and people who use it simply aren’t taking responsibility for their lives is not only stupid it’s hurtful and dangerous.
Stop trying to bully people out of getting the help they need just because you personally don’t need it.
I don’t think the comment to which I replied denied that some people have medical problems preventing sound sleep. As a matter of fact, I am someone who deals with chronic insomnia, and wouldn’t tell someone suffering therefrom it’s in their head.
Nor does the comment I replied to suggest people shouldn’t take their medications for various physiological or psychological ailments. It seems to just be a post of common sense tips to the average person without complicating medical conditions and for whom these tips would make some difference.
Not everything failing to explicitly carve out exceptions for every single minority case is an attack on them!
This whole meme is suggesting that sleep aids are a terrible curse on modern life and a lot of posters are agreeing and blaming people taking them - seriously go and look at how many comments say that people don’t sleep because they’re not willing to do work or take responsibility for their health.
I’m not even sightly exaggerating when I say that this kind of ‘don’t get your mental health condition treated because medicine is for losers’ mentally totally ruined a huge chunk of my life. ‘it just turns you into a zombie’, ‘you just need to learn to cope without it’, "exercise and diet are real medicine’ it might sound like happy well meaning advice ‘they’re over medicating to make money and hurting people’ might have some truth to it even, the problem is it builds a culture where people avoid seeking help for conditions that could be helped and this can have hugely detrimental effects on people.
Oh, I think I see what’s going on here. I think you’re answering me as though I’m talking about the actual post. But I’m talking specifically about the comment to which my initial comment is a reply. I think we’re talking about two different things!
I wouldn’t argue that you’re wrong that discouraging people from seeking medical attention or treatment is dangerous to their health! I do think medication is overprescribed in America, but I don’t think that it’s a blanket statement that should be used to discourage seeking medical care.
Having a very physical job is my secret. Constant running around to grab stuff, lots of math in my head, running a saw for hours. My fiance says I fall asleep within 5 minutes
I have what Misty would consider to be an honest profession. But I get yelled at externally and internally all day every day for the most infinitely small matters all day every day. Even with a clear conscious, that hard day’s work messes with my sleep.
I’m reassessing my life this fall. I’m pretty old, so new marketable skills aren’t really an option. Not sure what the next step is.
(It’s not where I work or who I work for. It’s the industry in and of itself. When you’ve got direct influence over other people’s personal finances, the darkest sides of humanity consistently emerge)
What troubles me is not the fact more and more people are requiring medication to sleep is the normalization of advertising sleep medication/supplements.
It’s a serious disorder. Taken to extremes, it can kill. It’s not something to be trivially dealt with.
I’m in Europe and I see melatonin gummy bears being advertised on cartoon channels. Straight to kids. Where are the toys commercials? Need to start hooking children to medication as early as possible?
It gets worse, further down that path of advertising meds direct to consumers. Your doctors will stop working with you and prescribing drugs they think you need in favor of waiting for you to tell them what popular drugs you want to try
That doesn’t happen in my country, as real medications are completely prohibited to be advertised; only over the counter and nutritional supplements are allowed. We have a very harsh and punitive supervisor on that front. Fines are high and hurt.
This late laxing on allowing the melatonin gummies and similars airing to children is worrisome but it can be put down at any moment. Nonetheless, it should never had begun.
Yeah, I don’t know anyone who takes sleep aids every night. I take them when I want to knock myself out and have a day off the next day, but otherwise no one I know even seems to be aware of Zquil/etc
I went through a brief period in college when I was taking a full load and working 30 hours a week. I needed to carefully plan my sleep schedule. I was taking sleeping pills to go to sleep right away and caffeine pills to get going, with coffee/soda throughout the day. Was it healthy? Absolutely not.
On the plus side, I developed a new drink at the cafe I was working at, The Opener; for those 5am shifts.
walk by coffee pots, start all of the machines.
walk to espresso machine, pull an espresso shot into a regular coffee mug.
set down all of my 'stuff’
at this point espresso has finished
take espresso mug back to coffee makers. At this point they are hot and flowing. Replace coffee pot with my mug.
Once mug is topped off with coffee, replace coffee pot.
Sip drink while turning on the lights and computers
Shit, I have at least a cup of coffee at night and I have no trouble sleeping like 99% of the time. And when I do have trouble it’s for unrelated reasons. I also eat late. I’m apparently doing everything wrong but I’m lucky I guess
Melatonin is fine from time to time when my sleep schedule is fucked in all directions and I want to regulate.
NyQuil front time to time when I feel a cold coming on.
Nothing wrong with that. If you find that you need them to sleep that’s likely not correct. They don’t typically work fast enough to put you to sleep. They only ensure your sleep is better if there are extenuating circumstances
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