I wrote [1] about my tip for falling sleep: Daydream. I now coach my own kids to do the same and it works.
Essentially do not think about things that has happened; It just gets you annoyed with regrets that can not be changed. Do not think about the future; You will get excited, anxious, annoyed and too worked up to sleep. Also covers sports, politics, relationship, technology etc.
Think about things that do not affect you as a dream. A fantasy world etc. That has nothing to do with you personally so that it is just calming but distracts you enough until you are soon asleep.
For years I fell asleep thinking about some math problem I was working on. Worked wonders, never had any issues falling asleep.
Then I left academia, and were no longer thinking about math all day. An unforeseen consequence: I started having issues falling asleep.
Now I need to regularly look up puzzles or maybe challenging programming problems, just to have something relaxing to fill my mind while falling asleep.
This has the exact opposite effect on me because I find it too mentally engaging and it also ends up tied up with anxiety. I can end up in weird spirals and have to stick on some noise to break my brain out of it. I do envy the ability to relax that way though.
This is definitely anti-advice for me. Obsession with a problem is a stimulant, and a mind that doesn't want to put something down will be in pain soon. I noticed this with my kids learning to crawl. They were so intoxicated by the new activity and mobility it represented, they wanted to do it all the time, and so they did it to exhaustion. For a few days, it made them alternate between excited and miserable. Then it became just another thing they knew how to do, ending the oscillation. But I can't help but think there was a good lesson there.
I have certain books that I just gave up on for this reason. Once it becomes my "bedtime book" its impossible for me to read a few pages and not nod off!
I have occasionally had an opposite experience with you: sometimes I worked out some math problem in my dream and I woke up to write it down.
If I think about some problems while I'm trying to sleep, it would just keep me awake though.
What kind of problems would you be thinking? How does that work—Is the thinking process making you tired so you fall asleep, or does it make you more relaxing?
For me I sometimes fall asleep to undergrad math problems, the more challenging ones. By then, I'm too tired to want to write things down (since that will wake me up), so it's really hard to make actual progress, or thoroughly plan out the formal steps required to verify a proof approach. So I just keep turning it over while trying to keep everything in my head. The focus required stops my mind from wandering and getting distracted.
That's something I've actually been doing for years.
In my case, the fantasy that tends to work best is one where I become something akin to Batman, fighting crime in my hometown of Rio de Janeiro.
I begin to imagine where I'd set up my Batcave, the types of villains I'd confront, the kind of vehicle I'd use to navigate the city, and then I gradually fall asleep.
I experiment with various stories, but it's safe to say that the superhero genre has a much higher success rate for me.
I like to write short fiction sometimes as a hobby (usually just for myself, or occasionally posted anonymously on the internet), with a big reason being that I have something to think about when I'm trying to fall asleep or distract myself from anxiety. The only annoying thing is that sometimes I come up with a great idea as I'm falling asleep, and get excited to put it down in writing, only to find the next morning that I can't remember what it was.
This is what I found as well, too late in life, but definitely works.
The only problem was that sometimes the daydreams would come on their own, and sometimes memories would come instead.
I read somewhere, maybe here, about inventing situations...one in particular was being dropped onto an island with nothing...and going from there. What do you see? What do you do first? Are there other people? Animals? I use that one quite often!
A variant of this technique I'm using since age ten, is to project myself in aspirational situations, tipically what I want to be when I grow up. So I'll be a cosmonaut or a famous writer planning projects and interacting with people
I empathize and can second this as well. For a few years I’ve been visualizing a spaceship I travel in. By now there’s a lot of detail, so it doesn’t always work; but if the day got me in a sour mood, at least I know my ‘special’ space is waiting for me at bedtime.
> I’ve found something similar: to fall asleep visualise something vividly. It could be a scenario (a daydream as you suggest) or a scene.
This method also has the advantage for those of us who can't normally visualise while awake. When you are on the boundary of sleep you can somehow take advantage of your dream circuits to help you out. This is the only time of day I'm able to see anything but black when closing my eyes.
I don't need to tell myself to daydream. I spend most of my life, I sometimes think, inventing worlds and indulging in various fantasies. I really should write some of them down sometimes.
I used to be really bad at falling asleep. I'm not talking 30 minutes or 45 minutes, but sometimes 3 whole hours without being able to get 1 second of sleep. I didn't even touch my phone once while in bed.
I also had a lot of trouble finding the right position in which to sleep to feel comfortable (not even talking about finding the right mattress/pillow combination).
Somehow, I trained myself at sleeping on my back (I was a big stomach sleeper). It's actually easier than you think. Couple that with counting backwards from 200 to 0 - and starting over whenever I reach 0 or forget where I was because my mind wandered - and I now fall asleep well within 1h on average.
Now I don't have any pain at all when I wake up, I don't need to spend hundreds on finding the right pillow/mattress combination and I have less trouble falling asleep. I don't actually think about it a lot, but I'm only in my 20s and I can't fathom the life problems I avoided solving this one early on. I'm really happy.
Moreover, I find Shinzen Young's reframing helpful: "Amazingly, it’s possible to get a good night’s rest without necessarily sleeping much or at all. Two things are required: (1) that the body get rest by lying very still and corpse-like. (2) that the consciousness get rest by engaging in a systematic focusing technique." https://www.shinzen.org/help-for-insomnia-yet-another-use-fo...
There is no possibility of this anyhow working. Sleep is not "mind rest", it's a neurological process completely different from and incompatible with consciousness.
You can relieve some fraction of cognitive fatigue by taking a mental break, but this compares to sleep in much the same way as duct taping a broken tool compares to mending it properly.
You're absolutely right. On the other hand, really extensive meditation can have some very strange effects on sleeping and some other things, so I personally withhold judgement.
If nothing else, take into account the studies that said that the placebo effect can actually help about 30% of people -- even if they know it's a placebo. So I don't know. Things get weird quickly.
I agree that this sort of rest is not equivalent to sleep. Nevertheless, this and similar techniques work well for reducing sleep anxiety. Less sleep anxiety tends to result in more and better quality sleep.
It may not alleviate the need for sleep altogether, but if you meditate a lot, like 10 hours a day, you can function well long-term with very little sleep.
I find that a good systematic focusing technique is to 'look' at the patterns inside your closed eyes when lying on your back. When I do this I see very little at first, maybe some fuzzy indistict patterns ... but then the patterns become progressively more detailed until I am in an interesting dreamlike state with fascinating visual effects and characters. Sometimes I find i can influence these dreams - I guess this is akin to lucid dreaming. A most entertaining way to fall asleep!
Will try this! Sounds like a good strategy to roll over to 200 once you reach 0. In the past when I tried the "endless counting" strategy that was still too much brain activity.
Counting backwards from 200 and starting over is easy enough to be done almost mindlessly, but at the same time hard enough to make you concentrate and thus keep your mind from wandering.
You can put pillows on the side to make it harder for you to roll on your side or stomach while asleep. It can also help alleviate some tension in the arms if you put them on top of it.
Depending on the mattress, you might have to put a pillow under your knees. Sometimes I don't and my legs begin to feel uncomfortable, and sometimes I can sleep just fine without support for my legs.
But look out for signs of sleep apnea; I only get it sleeping on my back, which I rarely do. Possibly in some cases sleep apnea might be part of why it doesn't feel comfortable to sleep on your back. The other issue that is worse for me when I end up on my back is my mouth drying out (not good for teeth).
The most negative influence on my sleep by far is from using my phone in bed, as I suspect it is for many others. Not only when falling asleep, but also when waking up reaching for the phone is too easy and robs me of any chance of falling asleep again.
The only trick I've found that works quite consistently for me, is removing the phone from the room entirely. This makes my laziness work for me for once, as getting the phone from another room altogether is too much of a hassle.
Similarly, if you want to stop eating after a certain hour, 9pm in my case, brush your teeth at that exact time. After that I can't be bothered to eat since brushing my teeth again would be a hassle.
100%. Started this recently. It works perfectly if you can withstand the withdrawals!
The moment you start doing this, is the moment you have to confront how incredibly addicted you actually are to your phone and the internet.
It will feel like you are being tortured. And it's very easy to give in because the immediate consequences are quite tame (getting to sleep a bit later, little less energy the next day). But over time they add up.
I highly recommend trying it and observing your mind go crazy. You can truly start to understand addicts and what they go through.
The biggest revelation was that cold turkey doesn't work too well. Instantly cutting off access to your phone can cause you to be consumed by the desire to have access to it (moreso than you even felt before), and you lose a lot of mental energy fighting against this. Which can disrupt your work, and disrupt your sleep even more so than if you allowed yourself access to it.
I think this is the reason most people don't do it even though its such a simple and obvious advice.
If you’re that addicted you’ve got real problems and you should absolutely be following through with this and other things to break that addiction. I question how many people would really react like that. I use my phone in bed at times I shouldn’t but it’s a complete non issue to not have it in bed.
I struggled with insomnia about 6 years ago and realized using my phone and computer was the culprit. I now shower in the dark and go straight to bed after. No screen time. I fall asleep usually in minutes though occasionally I'll struggle with sleep if I haven't hit the gym that day.
I read something to the effect that for most people, the required willpower to not do something (e.g. not have a snack) is not achieved by gritting your teeth and forcing yourself not to give into the temptation that’s right in front of you, but to remove it all together. For example, I live in a city and ate dinner every night at a healthy vegetarian cafe on the way home from work, and ate a breakfast of cereals at work. This allowed me to turn off my fridge at home and keep no snacks or food at all in the house. I still had the urge to snack, but the amount of work it would have required (going out to buy some snacks first) made it impractical enough that I didn’t give in.
In my experience lying still doesn't really work, because it's a deliberate practice with a goal and your brain starts analyzing that as well. You know the inner voice that says: I am still not calming down, I am still awake.
I once read that sleep therapists sometimes give people with bad sleeping problems the opposite advice: keep your eyes slightly open and try to stay awake. Not in the sense that you should put on loud music, put lucifers between your eyelids, etc. But just lie down and don't try to fall asleep. It often works, because people let go of the goal to calm down and get asleep (which makes it hard to do exactly that), once you let go, your body does what it wants to do, calm down and sleep.
A similar approach works very well for me: just stop caring. Ensure that you are on a regular schedule for going to bed and waking up (so that you biological clock doesn't get confused), don't drink alcohol (bad sleep quality), don't do anything exciting the hours before going to bed (heated discussions on HN), and write down stuff that bothers you before going to bed. Let your body do the rest. If you are awake for some more time, then just interpret it as: my body isn't tired yet, I am just going to enjoy the cosiness of my bed.
This agrees with all those times I wake up a bit before my alarm rings and then I can't go back to sleep UNTIL my alarm rings and then suddenly all I want to do is drift off...
Instead of trying to focus on nothing at all, the standard trick to get around this problem is to focus on something extremely boring, such as your own breathing. The traditional "counting sheep" method of sleep induction could be considered a variant of this.
I use MandaloreGaming's videos. They're longform content that I like, since I'm not learning new/essential information I can tune in and out, and his voice isn't too harsh.
People are different, so it is hard to make some advice that works for everybody. That being said, I totally agree with your conclusion. You do not have to lie still in order to go to sleep, or any other reason. In some sense, if you are in such a situation (being tired, needing to wake up early etc), lying still in the bed is already better than any alternative you can do, eg staying in front of a screen. Sometimes you may sleep. Sometimes you may not sleep. Ime, under this intention, it becomes easier and easier to sleep. Just do not put sleep in your mind as a goal, accept that you may not sleep or you may sleep (even better cultivate being indifferent towards either outcome) and lie still. Personally I have learnt that lying still is more important than eventually sleeping or not. It can even be enjoyable in itself.
Disclaimer: I have only had insomnia episodes that have lasted up to a month or so, so more chronic episodes can be different.
I’m pretty high on the neurotic scale. Two things that have helped me immensely:
1) I turn on an audio book that I love and know well with a 30 minute sleep timer. Recently this is the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It doesn’t keep me awake because I already know the story well. But it keeps my mind occupied enough to avoid the rumination. Podcasts don’t work for me because it’s new material.
2) Guided Yoga Nidra in bed. This involves a long sequence of instructions to notice and relax individual areas of the body. Thumb, index finger, middle finger, ring finger, pinkie finger, front of the hand, back of the hand, wrist, and so on. This keeps the mind occupied and also helps release tension.
I use soccer podcasts. Not American pundits who like to argue with each other loudly, but brits who don't raise their voices, yapping about teams I don't have any particular emotional connection to, with nothing particularly insightful to say about them...
Podcasts have been a godsend for me. I can’t lay in silence, either, because then my mind just races. But with a podcast you can just close your eyes and listen. It almost takes me back to my parents reading to me.
Science / nature podcasts work really well. I avoid true crime, social issues, politics, tech, or work topics. The Ologies podcast is amazing.
There’s even a podcast called Nothing Really Happens designed to help insomniacs sleep.
I used to be the same. But I find it just keeps me up more because there is so much potential for it to become interesting...even the most boring pods. Now I remove my bed from the bedroom and if anything I use a Calm sleep story.
ASMR? There's a woman called yang haiyang who doesn't mean to do ASMR, which is probably why this works for me. I put on a video of her making yogurt or drawing or talking about some trip to a local museum and pass put. Whenever I can't get to sleep I toss one of the dozens of videos she's uploaded that day on.
Lex Fridman (love him) has the most monotone voice and at 1.25 he still sounds like .75...
Ill put on long form pods so I dont have to mess with anything until I fall asleep.
Here is one thing that happens very often to me. I have always been a rather lucid dreamer, vivid dreamer, and I have had dream story lines last literally decades in my dreams. I have had dreams where I have a story take place - then that story will continue like a year or two later, and I recall how they connect.
Anyway - Ill be listening to a podcast, and then every DreamNPC will be talking to me but whats coming out of their mouths, are the voices from the podcast. i.e. One dream, I was rescuing my daughter from a car crash and taking her to the hospital, and everyone at the hospital was insisting on taking my daughter to mars. And I was running to get her out of the hospital and away from all the people in there trying to take her to Mars... (I was listening to a long form pod of colonizing mars/getting to mars etc... and thats what all the NPCs were spewing to me.
Also - there are several triggers that alert me to the fact that I am dreaming:
I attempt to use my phone in any capacity - its impossible to press digits - and eventually my phone will crumble/disintegrate in my hand - and this alerts me that I am in a dream and I am aware of it.
If I attempt to read numbers - such as those on a price tag for an item in a store. Once I realize how hard it is to read any numbers - I am aware I a dreaming.
If I am trying to clean up a mess - I cannot pick things up, and I wobble-around as if I am black-out drunk and keep falling over and dropping the things I am trying to clean up - then I realize its a dream.
Also, I have several 'dream houses' and 'dream neighborhoods' that I am familiar with in my dreams - and when I see them/am in them again, I know I am dreaming. But sometimes, the dreams are so intense, that when I wake up I can still be confused thinking that some aspects of the dream actually happened, and it takes me a moment to register that these things were from the dream, not wokeness :-)
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There have been times where I realize I am dreaming, then I force myself to 'wake-up' and I believe that I am woken up, but then one of the above triggers happens, and I realize I am still in the dream.. sometimes multiple times in the same dream - this one is scary though, because this happens when all my surroundings in the dream are the same as my real-life surroundings, and so it takes one of the triggers for me to recognize that I am actually dreaming...
Also, I have had dreams that I can recall from when I was a kid, then I have an experience in real-life - and then I can remember the dream from when I experienced it as a kid... (like a weird deja-vu dream-wormhole.)
I love dreaming -and I have a terrible general memory for daily mundane things - but I can vividly remember my dreams.
From the age of 11 to mid 30s I found it very difficult to sleep without being able to listen to something to distract myself for the same reason. Being in a dark silent room with my eyes shut was the worst thing ever.
A few things really helped me. The first was meditation because it allows you to become mindful of your feelings and recognize what you’re feeling. This mindfulness makes it much easier to practice emotional regulation, which is essential for self soothing. And finally ER allowed me to learn to love myself and separate myself from my bad past experiences and mistakes.
Journaling about your demons and past cringe or dramatic or bad experiences in extreme detail also helps a lot. Bonus for journaling in a way that is compassionate to yourself
Then you should take some time earlier and face the demons while you are not trying to sleep. You have to think about thing - if you don't do it at day-time, the brain will force you at night.
I discovered that having my phone next to my bed makes it too easy to say ‘ah, I can’t sleep, let’s just check HN for a while’, and it also makes it too easy to turn off my alarm in the morning. I’ve started putting it at the other end of my room before sleeping, and so far the results are promising.
There is an amazing trick that I now use almost every time I want to sleep: the 4-7-8 breathing method. I don't remember using it and not falling asleep in less than 5 minutes, whatever the stress I was in.
I used this for a while, combined with (usually once, before the breathing technique) a sort of "bed yoga" thing, tightening muscles and then relaxing them until I start to feel at-one with the bed, an unusual feeling I can't much describe.
I now don't have to consciously do the breathing counts or the exercise; my brain and body can find their way to that same place with just careful, slow breathing with the long exchale, and a focus on that feeling.
But on its own, the 4-7-8 trick is enormously impressive. You don't even have to trust that it works. Though no caffeine after 2pm probably helps too.
Yeah this works in a lot of situations but I've learned it as 4-8-8 like 20 years ago out of some self-help book I don't even remember the name of. Barring the garbage about "yoga mystic woo woo" stuff I've used it to calm down in all kinds of situations that were stressing me out. Not sure about sleep though, as I've rarely had issues getting to sleep, waking up is the tough part.
As a few of the commenters here are pointing to different breath patterns, and each has some science behind them, but what can't be ignored is that counting these breathing patterns is giving your brain a boring yet focused activity which aims to prevent the mind wandering and getting caught up in the thoughts that often keep people awake.
I went through a period where I'd wake up aboud 2-3 hours after going to bed and couldn't get back to sleep for most of the night.
I used a related technique to help. I count backwards from 1000, and force myself to keep my eyes closed. It's a task that takes just enough brainpower that it's hard to do on autopilot while my mind drifts to something else. If I do wander off I just go back to counting whatever number I remember.
It's been almost totally successful in the 2 months I've been doing it.
My sister once taught me a small trick to calm myself down when I was anxious but had no idea what I was anxious about: Count down from a random 3-digit number, subtracting 7 at each count. (e.g. 794, 787, 780, 773, ...) Do it until I drift away and lose track, unable to continue.
It works. I guess it's kind of in that "takes just enough brainpower" league. This takes more brain power than simply counting down though, and I'm not sure if this actually helps one falling asleep...
Another technique I derived from this is to do a countdown in the foreign language I was learning. Several years ago it was in English, and right now it's in Japanese. It also takes more brain power than counting down in my mother tongue, with the additional benefit of getting a little bit of practice. Killing two birds with one stone I guess :p
The "buy a blank PDF" part of that site made me chuckle. I wonder what accounting reasons there would be to do that rather than just ask for a tip, or if he did it simply for the humor.
It's 50% a joke, 25% laziness (because I didn't want to have to figure out how to generate a PDF and create a product for ezch post) and 25% an experiment because I had a tip link and over several hundred thousand views I had 0 tips.
Soliciting donations without a permit is potentially illegal in my country, so selling a worthless item might be a better way to go about it. Might be something like that.
Wow, a permit is 300 EUR + 120 EUR / year. There's no way this can really cover a single person asking for donations on their website, can it? That's insane.
It also looks like you need to specify information about your "organisation", including specifying a treasurer? How could a single person even fill this out if they wanted to?
~~
It appears permits aren't given to individuals and there is simply no legal way for a given person to ask for donations in Finland.
I think it's a non-issue since I doubt this would count as a donation in a legal sense. It's the same with Twitch streamers. You pay them because they do X and then it's a regular work income, not a donation.
Most of these comments are about sleep, but the article really isn't. It's about where to apply willpower to change a habit, slowly but surely.
I found the part about recognizing small changes rather than fixating on the end goal especially helpful. You don't need to go to sleep an hour earlier to be building a habit. Two minutes more effort counts.
I appreciate that you recognize that. I'm not sure if I'm not writing clearly enough or if HN as an audience is a bit pedantic, but most comments here seem to have missed that.
Well, I really appreciate it. I'm planning to apply it in two ways specifically: Increasing my daily average step count by only 2% per week, and decreasing my daily average calories by only 1% per week. Both numbers are high enough that I think I should be able to round to whole numbers pretty well. Using the rule of 72 for some quick math, I think that means I can double my step count in 36 weeks. (I haven't figured out quite how the math works for the calories if I'm counting down, not up, but I'll get it!)
I have a strong tendency to err on the "either I jump all the way to my goal or I've failed" side and burn myself out, so I'm actually going to try to use my will power to refrain from walking more steps, or eat a couple more calories. I'm hoping it'll help drive home that I succeed in the long run when the short-term change is small.
many life advices would additionally claim that one should mostly abandon "end goal" thinking and instead focus on how to live a rhythm/pattern of actions that you can celebrate today, and that cumulative could result in the goal you care about (given a reasonable amount of successful dice rolls) .
This is a sort of values based form of living vs target fixation. I go to the gym because I value my health today and therefore eat healthy + go to gym. I don't do it because I want the end state of "abs".
My perception is that stoicism has been a buzzword on HN for the entire time I've been here (~since 2017?). The uptick in various forms of doomsaying around that time might have had something to do with it.
People online were talking about zen and minimalism as being pretty trendy in 2010, so back then I had predicted that probably by now maximalism or something would be trendy as a response. I don’t think simple cyclical trends is a great model anymore.
It certainly seems to be the trend currently. There’s money and brands to be made convincing people to stop distracting themselves with all the trends you made money and brands convincing them to do.
It's possibly just that you're noticing it. Tech people on the internet have been like this for as long as I can remember the internet (31 years in my case).
Makes sense. Read the basics about the Autonomic Nervous System, the sympathetic and para-sympathetic branches.
You don't want to stay in sympathetic activation. Browsing on a phone may seem relaxing, but it keeps your sympathetic nervous system engaged. Think of it as "goal oriented activity".
I've got into a habit of laying on my back for like 10-20 mins before I turn to the side. It really does help calm me down a bit. I don't try to "stop thinking" or count or anything like that, just laying on my back and feeling the sensation.
Some arguments in favor:
- if you work in IT likely you're sitting a lot, and your psoas shorten. When you lie on your back it opens the psoas a little bit, so you feel that very gentle stretch in the tummy area
- for anxious people, we are designed by nature with eyes that can scan in front of us, but our back is less secure. I think lying on your back for a little while, lets you "secure" this area, as well as release the neck and back muscles a little more
Following this intuition, in the summer when it's too hot to have a blanket, I found a trick where I would roll my duvet in like a long tube, then when I lay on my side, I would pull the "tube" with one arm, and press it against my back. This way I would not be covered on top, but have a more secure feeling in the back and I think it also helped me fall asleep.
Think of lying on your back as rest. It's not about willpower so much, but engaging the para-sympathetic part of the nervous system, which is typically about release/relaxed curiosity (ie. feeling the body a little bit) rather than being engaged and pursuing what nowadays is typically an endles stream of content.
I also struggle to sleep due to anxiety about what I could or should be doing. I started using a visualization meditation technique.
I don’t watch a wide variety of tv, instead I tend to watch my favorites over and over again so I have a pretty good visual in my head.
I have ripped the audio from my favorite shows and put them on random with a 30 minute sleep timer. I focus on visualizing the episode as I’m listening to it as that keeps my mind from wandering, but since I know the episodes so well it also isn’t a struggle.
I’m rarely still awake by the time it stops playing after 30 minutes. And if I am or I wake up in the middle of the night, I can just tap the button on my nightstand and it continues playing for another 30 minutes. No need to open my eyes or take off my sleep mask.
For reference my primary shows are futurama (original seasons), psych, and next generation.
If I ever have to rely on listening to something to get me to sleep, it's Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet by Gavin Bryars.
I am an atheist and attach no meaning to the religious aspect of the little loop of vocals, but it's an extraordinarily striking piece of music with an unusual pattern of repetition.
This comment reminded me that I did something similar as a kid in the 90s. I recorded TV shows as audio onto cassette tapes and listened to them before bed to make falling asleep less boring. In retrospect, the coolest thing about it was the intensity and persistence of visual recall.
Just like you can practice going to sleep at a
reasonable hour, so can you practice keeping
your bed made, liking a particular food, or
doing collage.
This is so true and so powerful. People in general really underestimate how "hackable" their brains and habits are.
It's probably the single biggest fixable difference I see between people who are successful and happy and those who aren't.
I think the general HN demographic is perhaps more inclined to recognize this than the general population. Not that the hacker community has a monopoly on it by any means. Athletes, successful executives, etc. They know it too.
Edit: I want to be extremely clear. I am talking about a mindset of self-improvement. It is not a magic cure for anything. I am not telling you that you can just magically "mind hack" problems away.
I recognize that there is a fine line to walk here. There are a lot of people who think that your depression or your ADHD or your whatever is a result of you simply not trying hard enough or not finding the right "hack." Those people are wrong, and that attitude is misguided and hurtful.
In my experience happiness and success is the result of finding a happy middle ground between (a) learned helplessness (b) a toxic and delusional belief in magical positive thinking. You should believe that you can continually hone your skills and habits. You should not take that sort of attitude to a toxic extreme, and you certainly should not use it as a tool to hurt and judge others.
I find it extremely naive, and I highly doubt there's lack of unsuccessful people who hold similar views. Maximal versions of the belief are actually quite fashionable from time to time, "The Secret" book for an example.
In reality, you can try liking a particular food containing Coriander, but your genetics can interfere, and try as you might, it will still taste like soap. You can lie in bad every night in total silence, counting from 300 to 0 again and again, and still fail to fall a sleep in less than 40 minutes. Moreover, after you practiced and practiced to go down from 2 hours to 40 minutes, all you need is to attend one wedding or going single time to pub with friends after few months, and you are back to square one.
One thing I'm in agreement with the author on - you have limited amount of willpower. Some have more, some have less, but regardless of how much you got, you will be much more successful in life if you invest it breaking barriers you can overcome and avoid fighting losing battles.
you will be much more successful in life if you
invest it breaking barriers you can overcome and
avoid fighting losing battles.
Cheers to that. I don't see any conflict between what you wrote and what I wrote.
genetics [etc.]
Please, be reasonable. I said that it was valuable and powerful to realize our brains are hackable, not that it was some limitless ridiculous sci-fi ability that could rewrite or circumvent your genetic code or other hard limits.
I understand that there are people who seem to believe such things, but if you re-read what I wrote (or maybe read it for the first time) I think you'll find I very clearly never hinted at such nonsense.
My issue was with the sentence from the article that you have started your comment with its quote, and described as so true and so powerful. In contrast to how you perceived that sentence, it had an immediate and strong negative effect on me when I was reading it in the article, exactly because
> genetics [etc.]
are known to be the underlining cause for the pains and struggles experienced by many night owls struggling to cope with society where everyone is expected to be a morning bird. And just like genetics interfere with the ability of some people to go to sleep at reasonable hours, genetics have very strong influence on the possibility that with practice you will be able to teach yourself to appreciate particular foods
I am a night owl too, and I recognize that this is probably some kind of biological predisposition for me.
Yet I didn't feel offended or threatened by the article. Of course I can probably improve my sleep habits. I didn't interpret the article as telling me I could rewrite my DNA at will.
It's like if I told you that you could practice tennis or swimming and you found it very obnoxious because genetics probably prevents you from being Roger Federer or Michael Phelps.
At any rate, we're on the same page. I don't think you can magically stop being a night owl or whatever.
Some of the best advice I've ever received is, "Don't overestimate what you can do in a day, but don't underestimate what you can do in a year, never mind a decade," and I think it's relevant to your comment and this article.
We live in a "success now" culture. It's almost anathema to be willing to be bad at something long enough to become good at it. If you haven't demonstrated an aptitude for something, don't touch it.
But the compounding effect of even very slight changes over years can change everything.
You can't double your performance overnight. But if you get 1% better every week for 70 weeks, you can double your performance that way, and you're not even a year and a half in.
So can you start sleeping an hour earlier? Not overnight, no. But can you get 1% better at it per week for a few months by practicing and succeeding at small changes? Yeah, you probably can.
ADHD chiming in. That approach just doesn’t work when you have to actively spend nontrivial brain energy to even brush your teeth, every day. There is no such thing as a hackable routine, atomic/keystone habits, or „too lazy to stay on track“.
Also ADHD here, with a thought that might be useful for you. I am not even a little bit refuting the "non-trivial brain energy to even brush your teeth" bit. That 100% takes brain energy for me.
But I would challenge the assertion that we don't have habits. They're just not necessarily the habits we want, but they do get made and broken and exist. As an example, if there's a project I want to work on (getting that motivation is a different problem), I will feel vaguely uncomfortable unless I grab my bag and laptop and drive to a particular coffee shop that's a non-trivial distance from my house. And once I get there, I am generally quite productive. After I eat a meal (remembering to eat is a struggle sometimes, of course), I don't feel "at ease" until I have a cigarette.
I've found it slightly useful to not think about habits in the way that the positive-thinking motivational speakers talk about habits, but rather at least spending a bit of time reflecting the things I do when I'm in "autopilot mode". I'm not very good at changing the things I see, but recognizing that they're there has been a bit helpful in tweaking them or at least figuring out why/how they work.
I have ADHD. My intended habits are very fragile, and if a single visual cue goes missing, I'll skip a step -- if my wife removes my antiperspirant from the counter, then I just unwittingly skip that step that day. I rely on rube Goldberg machinations.
I have one trick that works, but I hate it. I build checklists with routine tasks, like morning and evening routines, or packing for a trip, etc, and automate sending them to the relentlessly annoying iOS Due.app, which can send reminder notifications about a timed task every minute once due and syncs with watch, so I can dismiss them once complete -- I have them scheduled spaced out enough to generally allow completion of one task before the next one comes due. I turn on Announce Notifications for the Due.app so the phone speaks the tasks aloud, and just wear airpods so I alone hear the announcements.
I used this successfully for 6 months to emulate being a conventional person, and it was successful, but it didn't end up building any very strong habits that could stand alone outside this system. It felt like an oppressive dystopian crutch that I was embarrassed to need. However, one situation where I do love it is "before I leave the house to go to X" checklists, if I schedule backward from the time to leave, I end up not forgetting anything and leaving on time, which is not normally easy for me, otherwise. That reduces a common stress.
Oh, and outside of habits, I do really like dictating a stream of consciousness list of things I have to do to my phone, and have a shortcut run it by GPT3.5 to extract task names, estimate on task durations, and order tasks in a reasonable way, which it is surprisingly able to do with a good prompt, and then automatically feed the results into Due.app. I haven't figured out the psychology of when I do and don't like nagging reminders.
> However, one situation where I do love it is "before I leave the house to go to X" checklists
Not diagnosed with anything, but I put things in my shoes, such as the occasional paper envelope that needs sending.
The computer chair is another "an item is physically obstructing me I must deal with it before I continue" destination. (Example: Some dirty laundry, indicating I need to start the washing-machine I loaded earlier.)
First, as a fellow ADHD person... damn. I empathize.
My life is a whole bunch of Rube Goldberg-ass workarounds too. It feels like nothing but workarounds sometimes. A thing held together with so much duct tape that I sometimes wonder if it's just duct tape all the way down.
it didn't end up building any very strong habits
that could stand alone outside this system
I mean, I would say that using the system you came up with was a valuable habit and that is the kind of "hacking" I was thinking of when I wrote the parent post.
Some folks interpreted it as me saying that ADHD (which I initially never even mentioned) and other problems could just be magically mindhacked away or something.
I don't feel that's what I wrote, and it certainly not what I believe.
ADHD chiming in. That approach just doesn’t work [when you have ADHD]
Professionally diagnosed ADHD here as well. Extremely aware of the hurtful and unfair "lazy" stigma.
Positive thinking, an improvement mindset, and life hacks are not cure for ADHD. There's no cure! I'm not one of those people who's trying to tell you that the cure to your ADHD is "just try harder" or some bullshit. I know we have all heard that too many times in our lives.
But our brains are still hackable. Our habits are still improvable. I'm in middle age and I'm still finding improvements and workarounds.
Just a thought. I am diagnosed with ADHD as well and struggle at times.
actively spend nontrivial brain energy to even brush your teeth
I doubt you'll see this but this statement has really stuck in my mind. Do you think that neurotypicals aren't spending non-trivial brain energy to build and maintain habits?
I agree that this kind of thing is harder for those of us with ADHD. It is not just a discipline issue.
But, I don't know. I think people who aren't good at _____ often see people who are good at _____ and think it's just some kind of magical innate thing they didn't put any work into.
Oh, I totally get your point. And of course habits require energy spending (but less and less over time). But with adhd it’s kind of different game.
Like a mental „erectile dysfunction“ - if you *really* are in the mood it can be done, but if not there is no way to force it. (Except for some pills.) it’s not a willpower issue to begin with.
Not only it is not working, believing it does work with regards to other people, especially one's children or pupils (with or without ADHD) can be toxic and harmful. I have been too lazy to stay on track on many things, yet on others I wasn't to lazy to fight day after day til I won. I surely am happy I didn't keep putting effort in the hopeless efforts to improve my penmanship skills.
I'm having a hard time not saying something really snarky here, but that's not particularly productive. Your comment isn't going to bring any good into the world, it just serves to shame someone who's struggling. We've got enough of that already.
While I agree that it’s quite common these days for people to use ADHD as an excuse for why they can’t do X, in this case I don’t think your dismissal of others’ symptoms is fair. It’s generally true that people with ADHD are unable to form and maintain routines without significant external incentives and that maintaining those incentives is a precarious and exhausting endeavour. As many others in this thread have noted, they lack habit forming momentum and end up quickly depleting their “willpower” since it’s constantly necessary for even the smallest of everyday tasks. Their routines are also easily disrupted by a change in external input and it can be quite hard to recover.
That said, different people experience more or less severe symptoms and if you are able to tolerate ADHD medication it can significantly reduce the effort required.
The biggest problem of our modern age is the removal of agency.
We are being pathologized by pseudo-science all around us.
When people mention "willpower", everyone today is looking for a diagnosis as an excuse instead.
Some things really are as simple as articles like this.
The failing is education. People don't understand the way they have re-shaped their brains from pretty much everything spawning from the internet and tv.
>When people mention "willpower", everyone today is looking for a diagnosis as an excuse instead.
>People don't understand the way they have re-shaped their brains from pretty much everything spawning from the internet and tv.
Sounds like people are looking to understand, but maybe according to you they are looking in the wrong places?
Also, who is everyone? I think a ton of Westerners and especially Americans have been conditioned into believing various convenient lies that advertisers and cultural mythology tells, along the lines of "you can have everything you want without doing hardly anything at all as long as you belong to the right groups and spend your money 'correctly.'" As I think you correctly identify, this is further exacerbated by modern tech which treats attention span as a commodity and tries (often very successfully) to hack and hijack it for the benefit of advertisers and data miners.
It seems to me the above is far more damaging to everyone's ability to execute plans involving willpower than any increasing awareness and expanding diagnostic criteria for various physical and mental health disorders.
What diagnoses are we talking about here exactly that everyone is looking for that are totally bunk and pseudo-science? Depression? ADHD? Autism? Anxiety disorders? It's true that as awareness spreads there will be more people who incorrectly think "maybe this is totally me, and it's why I haven't been able to achieve what I want..." But identifying this as the reason people don't have any willpower, I think puts the cart before the horse. People already didn't have much willpower (and also don't know how to use what they have effectively)... so they are looking for reasons for that and end up looking in the wrong places.
Also, just because something can be explained in simple terms does not mean it is simple for everyone nor that it is easy. If it is easy for you, great. You're probably lucky in more ways than you realize.
I think that's legit. Given the entire panorama of experience, the sights sounds, smells, feelings, thoughts, etc. People are moving into thoughtland and becoming alienated to all else. The office job, the tv, videogames, the computer, social media. All push you into living in your head. Our whole population turning into videogame characters, living inside a personal Matrix kind of thing. It's a kind of zombie apocalypse.
Re : willpower.
I think that willpower is applicable if that's your thing, but that's nobody's thing really. Most of us are just a leaf on the wind that way. What really matters is the various localized wind gusts, if you get my meaning. That's temptation. I mean, in the classic sense. Temptation sucking us in to dreams, distorting our perspective. And boy, the #1 product in our culture is temptation. Temptation by the trainload.
Most sleep problems cannot be solved by sitting still. You should go to the doctor, get a sleep test and look for more serious treatment methods. I wouldn't recommend wasting your time with such suggestions.
I think most of what we call "sleep problems" aren't actually pathological but are a consequence of our lifestyle in one way or another. and anecdotally those can be solved by lying still.
Acces to a doctor appears to be quite inequal in Canada as I can log on to my doctor clinic portal and book an appointment to see my doctor in the next week. However, I live in a town with a research hospital affiliated with to an university, so maybe that help.
Of course it can be tried. but this solution may only work for those who do not have chronic sleep problems. It doesn't work for someone with sleep apnea or parasomnia.
The best kind of parody: the one you almost can’t tell is parody.
My sense is that the core issue with people who actually think this way is that they lack empathy. They assume that their context is shared by everyone. So if one simple trick worked for them, it surely must work for everyone else.
I think perhaps you synthesized the "surely must work for everyone else" part. The author claims it worked for them, and suggested others try it. That's all.
Is it really parody though? I haven't read other posts of the author to be able to know. It does make sense to me.
When someone tells me they can't do something the problem isn't usually that they can't, but that they don't want to. In particular I like to apply it to acts for reducing one's environmental footprint:
- Want to become a vegetarian? Just stop eating meat.
- Want to switch to a more environmentally friendly mode of transportation? Just stop using your car. Or just stop putting gas in it so you won't even be able to use it.
- Want to reduce your consumption? Just stop buying useless stuff.
And whenever I say things like that, I agree it looks like I'm lacking empathy, because they focus on the action. But the real challenge is the "want to" part. Because once you want to, you can often just do it. And if willpower is lacking, that just means you don't want to enough.
Of course you can then take my logic and apply to everywhere it doesn't, like telling me that won't help a blind person to see again. That's beside the point.
That part was obvious enough. The icing on the cake is that they fail to point the reader to in-depth reading material, written by experts. Doing so would serve to acknowledge to the reader the author's own limitations, and to point them in the direction of some better help, since the reader might actually need it if they're reading that.
That's all the author had to do to keep this post from being a complete eyesore. But frankly, an eyesore is wishful thinking when you consider that some could actually end up trying this for weeks, failing, and getting epicly discouraged.
Though in all likelihood it won't matter either way as the two kinds of people in today's Internet are those that trust everything they read, and those who fall out of the gene pool.
This is my case, my trick is to imagine pleasurable fantasy scenarios and go over the smallest details.
I go a little bit more meta, and start imagining myself sleeping.
Kind of… say I’m part of the Start Trek crew. I imagine how would it be to sleep in the Enterprise. How is the room? What furniture is there? Is there a window/screen showing the outside? Etc…
Sounds similar to my trick, although I'm not sure if I really delve into details. I think the main purpose is to push out everything else from my mind, since whenever I have insomnia, it's not because I'm looking at my phone, but because I can't get something out of my mind.
I don’t know if that matters unless you think about things that require action.
My own experience is that if I think something needs to be acted on, and it’s very quick or very urgent, I just do it and go back to bed. If it’s neither, I write it down. I find either of those to be easier than trying to sleep with the endless nagging by the back of my brain.
I find any advice with regards to falling asleep to be very dependent upon the person. Everyone is my family seems to have different sleep styles and it isn't because of people using phones in bed.
So try a lot of different things and do what works.
I disagree with the point about exercising. Some days I look forward to running because I remember the great runs where I felt energetic. But once I'm out running I realize it's a bad day and it takes willpower to keep going.
I think the general point still stands though. It's just that because you didn't use up your willpower to get started, you get to use it to keep going.
I find that my diet affects my sleep as much as anything. I eat lower carb (one carby meal a day allowed, others are "keto" style, I just never could give up carbs completely, I always ended up backsliding) and having a regular sleep schedule, 6-7 hours a night is fine. If I'm just "eating whatever" (and I love carbs and junk food) I'd have to sleep 9-10 hours or I would be a wreck the next day. One thing I have always been blessed with was being able to go to sleep though, only the most stressful times in my life have I ever had insomnia.
Im not a bad sleeper but it drove me insane when i wasnt able to sleep anymore about month ago. I was doing like the article suggested, lying in bed, but when it was 3-4 AM i kinda gave up and started just doing stuff. Then i either held off for next evening or slept in the day.
What changed it for me was turning my massive portable AC on and let it hum through the night. I think my body just dont sleep that well when its hot/warmish.
So there can be multiple factors in play. I agree though being really pedant about sleep rhytme helps, especially waking yourself up in the same time.
I had RLS pretty bad, and that makes it impossible to lay still in bed. I "cured" the RLS somehow. It was probably either, or a combination of, going keto and/or giving up a lifestyle of chronic cardio exercise. I've been RLS free for over a decade now. Lying still in bed is possible now, though still not super easy for me, but at least RLS isn't part of the problem.
Isn’t that just a symptom of ADHD? I would say the advice still holds. Movement is just to stimulate your mind to retain focus, but in this case we don’t want stimulation, so you’ll still be able to (with will power) remain still in bed.
A rule I set is that I don’t ever lie down on my bed unless I’m sleeping which means you don’t relax and use phone. Better if you don’t use your bed ever for any other activity than sleep and f’ing
Getting really tired of these posts telling me how to sleep.
I tried going to bed earlier. Getting enough exercise, but not too late. No coffee after lunch. No eating after 20:00. I would have 8 hours of sleep or slightly longer and feel exhausted every day.
Turns out if I go to bed later and sleep 6-7 hours, I feel much better, even if my "sleep scores" are much worse.
If I'm not tired, I can lie with my eyes closed for hours. It's better to get out and do something else for an hour, then try again. For me, at least.
> Getting really tired of these posts telling me how to sleep.
Haha -- if you meant it as a joke! And if you didn't... nobody is telling you how to sleep. It's just someone with an opinion.
> Turns out if I go to bed later and sleep 6-7 hours, I feel much better, even if my "sleep scores" are much worse.
Sleep cycles are generally between three-and-a-half and four-and-a-half hours long, I think, but maybe yours are slightly on the shorter side.
Either way, if you're getting two cycles in and you wake up cleanly after the second one, that is a great place to be. If you're sleeping such that you're being woken by your alarm in the middle of a sleep cycle, that is hell after a while.
Before the industrial revolution really settled in, before the electric light, many people used to routinely have "first sleep" and "second sleep", splitting up two cycles, and they would have meaningful time to do stuff in between. There are references to it in stories and it's seemingly where the whole "midnight adventure" trope in children's stories comes from.
Sometimes I am like this, depending on my stress levels. That time in between sleeps can be lovely if you know you have time for it.
You're right. I am a terrible sleeper, and these articles with advice on sleeping just grind my gears.
When you spend so much time exhausted, wondering what you do wrong and trying to improve, "just lie down and close your eyes" sounds like a parody.
It's like telling someone that you do math by reading the problem, thinking about it, and writing down the answer. Obviously it works for some people, but this advice will not help anyone do math.
I have been there, when I was younger. Indeed I think maybe age alone is to some extent a moderating influence. Usually I don't have an issue now -- I have learned to breathe and sort of "find" restfulness somehow I can't really explain.
I don't personally believe that the idea in the blog post -- exerting willpower to lie still in bed -- is actually a strategy, anyway.
But when I am super-anxious, which does happen, I instead take a completely different approach, which is that sleep is less important than being rested.
I decouple the two. That is, I focus not on going to bed, but resting in some comfortable place, because I think there are fewer sort of "back of the mind" objections to that. It's far less commitment.
When I was staying in my father's large, by-then-empty house 18 months back I could not settle at all to go to sleep.
After only one night I got a sense of why: the size of the place and the location of the bedroom was unsettling and felt insecure.
But there's a room near the front door, not very warm, but it had the comfiest chair in the house, for some reason. I sat in that chair with the heaviest blankets I could find, in the dark. In my clothes, still -- no "getting ready for bed" ritual to speak of. Just rest, knowing that I wasn't trying to sleep.
And then at three or four in the morning, after some snoozing, with the alarm set, I would go up to the bedroom with as few lights on as possible, and get more conventionally ready for bed before the nagging thoughts could raise any objections, and I would swiftly fall asleep knowing that the sun would come p in a couple of hours.
It was enough sleep to survive, and completely enough rest, for the two or three months I was there.
Turns out my Dad used to do exactly the same thing, in exactly the same chair.
So if you'll forgive some more advice, in your shoes this is what I would try: give up on sleep. Focus only on low-stakes, low-effort rest. Perhaps sleep will sort itself out in that context.
This makes a lot of sense. For those who are struggling with sleep, I'd wholeheartedly recommend adding this to a CBT program for insomnia, which was immediately effective for me. Here's a book that outlines the steps: https://www.amazon.ca/Sink-Into-Sleep-Step-Step/dp/082614815...
For me, to get good sleep, I need to have a surprising amount of exercise during the day and have tried hard at something so that I'm mentally tired. That plus not eating any calories at all for the 4 hours before bed and I'm pretty guaranteed to get good sleep.
I’ve never actually slept. I lay still in bed, until I find myself waking up. Time has passed, but I have no idea what happened during the time in between laying down and waking up. I only feel the effects of having slept. Similarly there is a version of me that has only ever slept, and knows nothing of the awakened life. Yet still I wonder, if there is even a third version unknown to both of us?
Unbeknownst to you, what actually happens is that as soon as you fall asleep the universe is disassembled and then immediately re-assembled a few hours in the future.
My most powerful "getting to sleep hack" involves paradoxical intention... if I'm ever unable to fall asleep I think to myself "I wish I could stay awake but I'm just so tired" and I'm out within a few minutes.
I've been trying this over the years but unless I'm completely comfortable I'm unable to fall asleep. This means perfect position (tossing over for hour or more in new unfamiliar bed), perfect hydration (no need to drink or pee) and perfect sound (rain is ok, for ticking clock in another room I eventually give up and go take out the batteries).
My mom worked night shifts as a nurse most of her life. It gave her the opportunity to be with us during the day but also took a toll on her sleep habits and health. She had a lot of trouble sleeping so she said she would just lie still in bed and that would get her _some_ rest. At least most rest than she would get by actively trying to sleep.
- get some exercise during the day. 30 minutes of exercise is basically free from a time perspective, because of improved sleep
- if I need to fall asleep earlier, get up earlier
Sometimes my brain is too busy, and an audiobook with a just-interesting-enough-to-listen-to-but-not-care-about can help disengage from the thoughts of the day.
On the topic of sleep deprivation, also consider all the gradient of rest + recovery that you can do to support your body even if it's not getting the best sleep.
Mindfulness Meditation, NSDR[1], Box Breathing[2], Saunas / Cold showers, adequate protein intake, basic movement like walking for bloodflow/lymphatic drainage etc.
Research shows that there's genetic disposition to being a morning person or night owls. Sure, humans can adapt to any routine, or at least to many routines that are going against their nature, but at least with regards to some areas there's a cost associated with going against one's nature.
I used this same technique to induce lucid dreams when I was younger. My theory for why it worked was that one part of the brain was sending a 'roll over' signal to another part of the brain in order to check if it was ready to enter the next stage of sleep. By purposely ignoring that signal and remaining still, I was able to fall directly into a dream while still conscious.
I'm sure there was a bit more to it than that. I also kept a rigorous dream journal, and had several other rituals and practices that I've since forgotten. But lying still was definitely a big part of it.
Cooling my forehead by applying water has helped me fall asleep, especially on warm days. I suspect an inability to fall asleep plus chaotic mind wandering is often related to an overheated brain and that this is a good artificial way to help the body cool your head. Brain cooling is supposedly one of the purposes behind yawning, but at least for me, yawning can't seem to keep up
Note: if you try this, don't dry the forehead after applying water. The main longterm cooling mechanism is through slow evaporation just like with sweat
I have never had any sleep issues and people are always surprised to hear my tactic: I just really enjoy the bed. It’s clean, it’s soft, I’m tired. I enjoy lying in bed. Sometimes I just don’t want to fall asleep because it feels so nice. I always fall asleep very fast.
Useless information probably, but who knows. Also, it’s not really a tactic. But perhaps you can try it, look forward to lying in bed. Enjoy it, it’s me time, I can think about whatever I want, I have all the time in the world. So nice. I’m gonna go right now.
This strikes a chord - though I have no issue falling asleep, I totally agree with this method for moving closer toward a desired outcome.
If someday I want to play the piano effortlessly and beautifully, I should start by spending time with my fingers touching the keys. Habits can be formed slowly and as an accumulation of many positive steps in the direction toward a goal.
I recently broke a shoulder blade and was forced to sleep on my back without shifting for a few months. It became somewhat tolerable but my heels would go numb from the lack of any movement. I'm enjoying the ability to spend more time on my side and change positions now.
Such articles are… really laughable, as people differ in their physiology and circadian rhythms and it is NOT generally advisable to blindly follow someone else’s experiences with sleep.
There are books like ‘While we sleep’ which can give you some insight into the complexity of causes and effects and even this book was heavily criticised although the author did some actual research with cited sources etc.
And I’m saying this as someone who had major problems with sleep for more than year, but now sleeps daily an average of 7-8hours.
The only thing actually recommendable (IMHO of course) is to not force yourself into sleep, as this may very well backfire. Laying still and stuff like that is a rather forceful technique. For hyperactive and hollering people (with ADHD and alike) it may even amount to torture.
All the CBT that you can apply is NOT universal. Techniques such as not eating too much, not drinking alcohol at night, cooling the room, counting eyes closed, doing exercise, having blinders, doing meditation if you want… are absolutely NOT universal and what works for someone may actually be bad for you and me.
In reality the most common advice - to meditate before sleep - may result in contrary results. Courber intuitively there is evidence that sleep deprivation may actually help depression, rather than forcing sleep patterns.
Please consult sleep experts, rather than consulting random articles although they may seem plausible.
I don't think the point of the article was actually about sleep at all. It was about where to apply willpower to effect any kind of habit change.
It's just an example in his case that the habit he wanted to build was going to sleep earlier, which he tried to do by just lying still in bed at the time he wanted to sleep, and resisting the urge to do anything else, first for two minutes, then for four.
But he applies the same principle to exercise and other things, which is actually the point. This isn't a sleep prescription article.
Willpower isn't all or nothing. I can't will myself to go to sleep an hour earlier, and if I set that as my standard, I'll fail.
But can I will myself to lie still in bed for two minutes? Much more likely. And, having succeeded and begun the building of a habit, can I lie still for 2.2 minutes the next night? Yes, I probably can.
I thought the point was to rethink how and where we apply willpower and set ourselves up to succeed more often by moving the "succeeding" bar within the realm of our current willpower, rather than holding some standard of "success" that our willpower can never meet.
Where there’s lack of sleep, willpower is one of the first things to be affected. So the authors advice only applies in a narrow set of cases. Exercise, for example, might be a better way of getting out of the vicious loops caused by lack of sleep.
willpower is a vacuous self-help concept as you have as little control over your 'willpower' as you have over your sleep. To pick OPs example, people with ADHD often have executive dysfunction. They're unable to follow these kinds of routines because their brains don't work like this.
And ordinary people too just vary in their conscientiousness (which unlike willpower is a real, measurable trait), and that is going to determine how effective these kinds of regiments are for you. But you cannot simply change your basic psychological markup. For someone who simply cannot conform to a normal sleep schedule it may be much better to adjust their life to their sleep, not the other way around.
> people with ADHD...because their brains don't work like this.
You might be surprised to find out that there is actually no proof of this.
The biggest thing impacting people with ADHD symptoms is the diagnosis. It implies they have a brain disorder, and cuts short any exploration into environmental causes of their symptoms.
And an environmental cause may in fact be, simply not trying some simple advice from this article. Resolved by education.
I would be very surprised because that's complete nonsense. ADHD is a neurodevelopmental disorder with changes in both neurochemistry and structural development of the brain [1]. This is why drugs like Adderall are highly effective in treating the symptoms of ADHD. You cannot cure disorders of the brain by reading blogs on the internet, and it is this kind of ignorance that has given people with neurological issues a lot of grief and shame in the past.
You will find a lot of research, but there are no meta-analyses of brain imaging or gene studies showing any correlation to those diagnosed with ADHD. Even the diagnostic manual, the DSM-5, explicitly states that no biomarkers for diagnosis exist. The descriptive diagnostic criteria for ADHD were simply made up by a group of psychiatrists in the 1980s from their observations. So the definition of ADHD is entirely recursive.
So all we know is people have some basket of symptoms, and an impairment in their ability to live their life, but an entirely unknown cause.
You may also be surprised to find that there is no proof of the link between depression and serotonin either - which is the main theory for treatment.
Steve Pavlina recommends i) waking at the same time every day, and ii) going to bed when you are tired. If you stick to i), ii) will eventually stabilize, although it may change from day to day. At the beginning you typically stay up too late for a few days. But after a while, with a consistent wake up, your body adapts to a beneficial sleep time. Of course, YMMV.
After a while this may invert and you find that whatever time you go to sleep (within some degree of normal) you'll wake up precisely n hours later, for whatever value of n your body's settled on.
On the heels of the thoroughness of your reply, I’d like to offer what I think research indicates is a universal technique; reduce or eliminate blue light in the evening and early morning.
If your TV, tablet, or phone, has the ability to dim the screen in the evening, turn it on. Also check the settings and app stores for something that reduces the amount of blue in the screen’s output. Our species is conditioned into a consistent circadian rhythm by the rotation of our planet and the observance of light from the sun. This appears to be true regardless of location and culture and modern technology and modern indoor work environments have interrupted this natural cycle.
Also, as we’re heading into fall, you may want to look for a “blue light” emitting lamp for winter if you find yourself in a more depressive state, of stuck in doldrums. The tilt of the planet reduces the amount of light in the northern hemisphere. The addition of blue light during normal waking hours has been shown to decrease sadness and seasonal depression. With it still being off season you may find them for less right now.
I wouldn't make such a drama out of it neither, those suggestions do work for most of people, but as usual HN crowd ain't very representative since a lot of brilliant people have these quirks that are also messing up their sleep.
Essentially do not think about things that has happened; It just gets you annoyed with regrets that can not be changed. Do not think about the future; You will get excited, anxious, annoyed and too worked up to sleep. Also covers sports, politics, relationship, technology etc.
Think about things that do not affect you as a dream. A fantasy world etc. That has nothing to do with you personally so that it is just calming but distracts you enough until you are soon asleep.
[1] https://blog.flurdy.com/2010/02/excellent-tip-on-how-to-go-t...