Most of the comments here seem to focus on one type of insomnia — falling asleep. Most of the time I can easily fall asleep but I often wake up in the middle of the night or very early in the morning for no reason and I can’t go back to sleep.
Can easily fall into a light sleep which lasts about 30 minutes, then I wake up. I've never been able to figure out of it's something environmental pulling me out, or just me.
Those 30 minutes are just enough of a power nap I'm up until 4:00am.
At this point I know trying to go back to sleep is futile so I just get up and go do something productive.
Where do you get 300 mcg slow release? I struggle to get a 500 mcg spray in India and they recommend 2000-4000 mcg (4-8 sprays) and there are 5000 mcg pills. I suspect they are an order of magnitude more than the body produces so I get withdrawals when I'm off them.
I did not yet find a source for 300mcg slow release, I take 300 mcg vanilla melatonin.
I take melatonin in syrup/drops form -- it is jus that I take 2 or 3 drops (150mcg each) instead of 10 or 20, as is advertised.
I was saying that I'd love to find a source for slow release, because then I could first take the melatonin drops, and just as I would be about to sleep, I would take the slow release melatonin -- that way, I'd extend the 5 hours to 6 or 8 hours of good sleep.
I've had this too, but nowadays I go to sleep fine. I've made and seen a few adjustments:
- Use a sleep mask and earplugs, or do the poor man's version like I do (pillow on the top of your head).
- Get into a situation where you can't feel stressed. I'm in that situation right now. I feel too underpaid to be stressed. In that sense, being underpaid is much more of a good thing than a bad thing, since my performance is good enough.
- Get into a situation where you don't feel mildly depressed.
> I feel too underpaid to be stressed. In that sense, being underpaid is much more of a good thing than a bad thing, since my performance is good enough
Being underpaid allows me to switch jobs very easy so that I don't have to compromise on my values. I now see the ones being overpaid as being in a trap.
I've been this way since teenage years -- very light sleep, once I wake up its hard to go back to sleep, and I've had long periods where I could not fall asleep for hours.
It was all related to stress and anxiety and perhaps lower natural melatonin production.
300 mcg of melatonin helps tremendously with falling asleep, and after a week or so of usage, I find I no longer need it, I can fall asleep naturally until the next bout of anxiety/anger/depression.
I know antihistamines help me stay asleep, but I try to stay away from them.
What I've found works great for staying asleep is reducing stress and anxiety, no stimulants (after having COVID-19 I quit all stimulants because I haven't had my heart checked yet).
This is a fun list, but insomnia, and poor sleep quality are a serious problem.
I've been an insomniac all my life, and when I got an Oura, started to understand that even when I do sleep, I'm not getting good quality sleep. I'd done sleep tests a few times as a kid, so knew about my central apnea, but didn't know about the lack of REM I was getting.
That's why we're creating https://soundmind.co, it's a headband that monitors your sleep state, and uses different audio tones to adjust your sleep state.
Falling asleep is only part of the problem. If you're keen to find out more, check out the website, and sign-up to get on the waitlist.
I've just completed 4 nights of sleeping with passive auditory signals adjusting my sleep, and it's amazing the difference in the sleep charts. I'll be writing up a blog-post shortly.
As with others I have been suffering from frequent attacks of insomnia over my life, while anecdotal I have found my stack that has been working for me for the past 4 months.
- Supplement L-Tryptophan
- 350 mg Magnesium Carbonate before bed
- 3 mg melatonin (bioavailability is claimed to be between 10~15% - was on 10 mg but I found I was waking up too frequently)
- 10 minute meditation with calm app
- Timed air con.
If I do wake up, I immediately meditate.
It is a ritual, but I am sleeping well most nights.
I used to take 3mg melatonin -- this used to work for a day or two, but then it stopped working.
I switched to 300mcg or 450mcg and it just keeps working, no tolerance whatsoever (actually, after 4-5 days of getting into a sleeping routine with melatonin, I find I no longer need it and I can just fall asleep on my own).
300mcg means I don't notice the melatonin working, I just fall asleep.
450mcg of melatonin -- I actually feel it kicking in like I'm a child wanting to stay and watch the movie, but I just can't stay awake.
As a side there has been some interesting studies around Magnesium L-Threonate with regards to sleep and memory, which I am curious about - but it is possible to become "addicted" to it which has me cautious.
I found a few anecdotes on reddit about how a user had “withdrawals”. I’ve used bottles of the stuff, have randomly run out and not re-ordered for months/years, and never noticed any withdrawal symptoms. If you have any studies, I’d be interested, but I think this is just reddit lore at this point.
I wish I could do that... If I don't get enough sleep, it's hard to focus, listen to people in meetings, think of complex solutions. It kinda ruins my whole day...
I've been using something called Intermezzo, which is basically 'baby Ambien'. It's a crazy mild dose, sublingual so you don't need to even get up and swallow a pill. Knocks you out for maybe 4 hours on a good day. The idea is to knock you out just enough to get you into a sleeping habit on your own, not sedate you into oblivion.
It works OK, I guess, but every now and then I power through it and end up having not so much a trip as ... something like lucid dreams written by a bored, disinterested TV script writer.
It actually is literally Ambien, or at least the identical active ingredient, just at a lower dose. Also taking it sublingually gives it a more rapid onset of action.
Ambien never did much for me, but I'd be curious if the sublingual delivery worked better.
I love zolpidem too much, that's why I don't use it.
The best functional case for zolpidem/ambien that I've found is to first fall asleep with melatonin, and if I waked up before 4 AM, I'd take 5mg of zolpidem and be back to sleep in 30 minutes.
However, if I take 10mg of zolpidem and don't immediately go to sleep, I start hallucinating and I quite like it: first colors go away and the fonts seem to lose texture/wash out, then the sweetest audio hallucinations start that narrate what I'm reading, embellish the story or just thin, otherworldly voices that talk to themselves.
Same here, I just never go to the 10 mg dose. I ration zolpidem as much as I can - only got to tolerance (for the 5 mg dose) after over 2 years of sparing use.
It's a bit more subtle than that: the correct dose is about 300 to 1000 micrograms. Doses significantly larger than that will not work for most people. The effective dosing window for melatonin is narrow, so more is not better.
It doesn't help that most melatonin available OTC in the US is in doses of 3mg to 10mg. This stuff is not useful. You need the 300 microgram pills, the 1 milligram pills, the liquid, or as a last resort the 3mg pills with a splitter.
This is why I listen to audiobooks when trying to fall asleep. If I can't fall asleep, I'd rather someone read me a bedtime story than have my own thoughts bouncing around the inside of my head all night.
This is precisely what I do. Pretty much anything that sends my mind off into a cool direction works well. Some narrators are better than others (Stefan Rudnicki has a great voice, and William Dufris does a wonderful job of voicing characters).
I searched high and low for headphones that I can sleep in. I can't sleep on my back, so big cans are right out. I hate earbuds and things that poke into my ear canal, and headband-like arrangements slide around, are hot and compress my ears painfully. I finally found a set of small, disk-like phones that fit flat and in the center of my ear, just outside the ear canal; with a little extra padding these are very, very comfortable.
[The product I liked are Bedphones, from dubslabs.com; they are expensive, but I found them totally worth it. I use the wired version, and they tend to tangle badly unless you take a little care wrapping them up, but I hate having yet another device to charge]
----
"Really? Doctor, I think your stories are simply divine--"
"Thank you."
"Oh, I really do. I put one of your tapes on my player and let it lull me to sleep almost every night."
"Higher praise a writer cannot expect," Jubal said with a straight face.
My bedphone experience was not good. Spouse complained about noise leakage, and they stopped working within a month. Otherwise, they _could_ be more comfortable than ear buds depending how well they fit. Most wired earbuds survive <6 months in bed. Generally they short out from being slept on, crushed, rolled over etc.
Wearing silicon tipped in-earbuds all night is likely courting ear infection. I have settled on JBL T205 Earbud Headphones. They are in-ear but without silicon tips (i.e. ear canal is not sealed shut all night), are comfortable enough, last 6-12 months and are cheap.
Wish someone would make a pair that would last at least a couple years. Hate the waste.
I use these [0] and they're pretty high quality, very reasonable price, very long battery life, and low-profile enough that you can even lay on your side and it doesn't feel uncomfortable (for me at least) though I still only use it in one ear at a time, the one not on my pillow.
I find that Airpods Non-Pro will stay in when I'm on my side and when I roll over. I'm a terrible sleeper and change position a fair bit, but there's no problem falling asleep with them in. I often wake up with them both still in.
I loved listening to Isaac Arthur's youtube videos, and it helps a lot in falling asleep(then I discovered low dosage melatonin).
His voice is so calming and re-assuring and the background music also helps.
The O'Neill cylinders series never failed to make me sleep -- I could imagine myself living in such a neat space, floating in the middle of such a cylinder, producing large amounts of food, the world's problems far away, and boom, I'm asleep.
I think I used to fall asleep like this when I was kid imagining I was travelling in captain Nemo's submarine.
Audiobooks work for me too but my insomnia is mostly waking up in the middle of the night or waking up too early in the morning and can’t go back to sleep. So I end up sleep deprived. And with my partner sleeping next to me it is not an option to listen to audiobooks and fall asleep.
My partner never hears it: I use a pair of bluetooth earbuds, but I leave one out of my ear on the side I lay on. I fall asleep that way, with a sleep timer on the audiobook player. If I wake up in the middle of the night, I just start it up again.
I like there to be a little acting. I've had books where the delivery was fairly monotone, with no difference in delivery between scene description and a character speaking in anger or surprise etc. It sounds weird, wooden & stiff. I can see how that has the potential to be more distracting when trying to get to sleep though.
I have both insomnia and delayed sleep syndrome, and I was born with both. As a newborn I was only sleeping 1-2 hours a day. I almost destroyed my family, if you've had children imagine having a baby that's awake 22 or 23 hours per day, everyday.
I've been in sleep studies and what they've learned is that the normal fall asleep process for me happens very quickly and it's very easy to to disrupt.
During my teenage years I was averaging 4-5 hours sleep every 2-5 days. In my 20's, 30's, 40's and early 50's I averaged 1-2 hours of sleep a day. With a lot of 2 and 3 days of no sleep.
A few years ago I started using an app on my iphone called Brainwave, it's a binaural beats program. This program has saved my life. Since I've started using the program I'm getting about 4-5 hours of sleep per day.
I use small wireless ear buds, and I use the deep sleep program. It runs for the entire time I'm in bed, the program will put me down, keep me asleep, and then wake me up.
I notice that people with sleep problems usually really want to fall asleep and focus on that. Of course they do. I however usually go along a list like this:
- This bed feels good
- So nice to be not standing or sitting, my feet are even tingling a bit
- This bed really feels nice, I don't want to fall asleep, I want to enjoy this feeling just a bit longer...
- Maybe there is something nice to think about while enjoying this feeling of just lying in this nice clean bed with a perfect temperature...
- ... zzz
Maybe I'm just lucky I slipped into a nice mental routine by accident.
To clear the mind, I recommend just the free intro sessions of headspace (and possibly more), sometimes I do the "thoughts are clouds and I want a blue sky" -trick when the focus on the bed doesn't seem to work.
I think the mistake good sleepers (of which I'm one) often make, is that they think it's just a case of not doing something correctly.
Instead the approach should be along the lines of how we think of depression, where your brain either naturally or through some other phenomenon fails to follow the correct "natural" steps. Training definitely helps, but there are still many that struggle while doing that correctly.
I myself lie down on my right-hand side for 30 seconds to a few minutes, thinking about whatever I want. Then I turn onto my left side and I just go to sleep.
Yeah that is very probably true. I saw this up close with friends that had a baby that was very easy on them... and then they had a second kid which they confidently treated exactly the same... and it turns out to be a relationship wrecker ;)
If you live where it’s legal, a micro dose of THC has done wonders for my Insomnia. For me, my insomnia manifests with a difficulty in falling asleep. Completely sleepless nights are not uncommon. 2-4 hours of waiting to fall asleep was the norm. 2-5mg edible thc about 2 hours before bed and 0.5 mg melatonin 20 minutes before bedtime and I am able to quiet the mind and drift off to sleep on about 20 minutes. Keeping the dose low means you don’t get high, (but you still might get some munchies and enjoy some music a bit more than being completely sober) and also means there is no morning hangover.
I think insomnia is a way of blaming a human for not being on the industrial day cycle.
I don't think there is anything wrong with staying up late through the night and sleeping into the day.
If I am not falling asleep, I get up and work on something, rather than allowing myself to become attached to the idea of going to sleep at a certain time.
When I feel so tired that I have no choice but to pass out, that is when I lie down and sleep like a baby.
I feel extremely blessed/fortunate to have discovered letting my body dictate when to sleep and when to wake, and hope that my message helps someone else.
So much this. My work allows me to work whenever I want (even move hours or entire days off to the weekend if it suits me better). Worked wonders for my mood and actual health. No more sleep stress and being tired at work (or while working from home). Every employer should take note that its absolutely useless to force strict working hours when some of your workers will be at the mental capacity of a jacket potato.
Same goes for school and early hours.
I know for school as well as for work there is a lot of productivity to gain when most people work at the same time (easy meetings, no need to repeat stuff, for schools that's basically the only way etc). But at least have an option of two to three core working hours?
Also, good thing my SO is catching on and understanding that I'm just not an early bird (unless I wake up at 1am and stay awake). She fully understands.
Quite jealous, I had a similar setup till all the US staff in my org wanted "moar agile meetings" and of course they want all the meetings in prime time PDT slots, screw anyone else not in that time zone. Now I'm forced into sleep schedules I just cannot get used too.
What if some people due to stress can do this for 24h cutting in half effectively their sleep to an average of 4h which is thought to be very bad for health?
45 made me smile. I remember being in Tel Aviv and running out of Melatonin. I went to a pharmacy and asked for it. The guy, having quite an attitude replied to me, "This is not the US, you need a prescription for Melatonin". By the way, at that point I hadn't even visited the US yet and my english accent makes it clear that I'm not from the US. Anyway, I really enjoyed the post. I'm lucky to not have to struggle with insomnia anymore, it can be very painful.
haha thanks for the correction! I wish the pharmacist could see it, he probably wouldn't make the comment about the US. It wasn't an autocorrect mistake.
I've heard that one of the side effects of going to med school is constantly becoming aware of symptoms of whatever rare condition one may be studying at the time.
Spot-on. In my second year of med school (1971) half the day was spent in pathology lecture/lab. I developed swelling in my neck lymph nodes and went to student health. In the waiting room I reviewed my life to that point, knowing without any doubt that I had Hodgkin's lymphoma. The doctor took my history, examined me, and ordered a Monospot test. It was positive. I started my second life that day.
I've started to listen to hours long super dry economics podcasts every night and it works better than anything I've ever done to knock me out and as a side effect I've learned a ton. The problem is it usually also eventually wakes me back up but I usually am able to quickly fall back to sleep.
Tolkien's Silmarillion using Audible with a 15 minute sleep timer.
Works like a charm. I'm usually asleep so fast I have to start back a chapter. Honestly, I still don't really have any clue what the book is about. Ancient trees and elves I assume.
(For the pedantic, that's a joke. About the book, not its effect on my sleep.)
I had a particularly bad bout of insomnia this year. I recall one night just lying in bed and analyzing my entire life in my head, all my actions and mistakes. Oddly the only other time I've managed to stay so fixated on that topic was during a moderately negative trip.
I can sympathize. I am finally (late 40s) able to sleep several hours in a row after decades of not being able to sleep continuously for more than an hour or so. Ironically, I need to get up at 4:45am for my job but can't go to bed until 11pm. Ha ha. I get to sleep in a bit on weekends so can't complain. My issues were related to chronic illness. I hope you get some relief.
Yeah I've never had it quite that bad. It's been on and off for a few years. The peak was when I would maybe go a few days without only a few hours, but I've mostly started to fix things the past few months. I worked a night shift position maybe 3 or 4 years ago and I wonder if that put me off.
I've thought about it but I'm very bad at expressing things linearly and find myself having to jump around erratically even in my head. I've had the same problem the few times I've considered writing tech related material.
I fall asleep quickly (a few minutes at most). If I don't then I code/debug in my head (this is not a joke, I do that and I like to code) and usually sleep within minutes.
Then comes 2 am and I often wake up. If there is no stress then I fall asleep and it's fine. If there is stress then I digest it and cannot fall asleep.
To that I found a solution that sometimes work: I have a pen and paper next to the bed and I write inthe night that thing I am thinking about to not forget it in the morning. My brain acknowledges and I can fall asleep.
I don't know if that's just for sake of the joke or if you are living this problem yourself, but you can try apps like Digital Detox (for Android), or any other app that locks you out of your device.
Also, keeping the device(s) outside of the bedroom is quite efficient.
I turn my phone completely off at night. There's maybe a little bit of anxiety (what if there's an emergency and someone tries to call?) But then of course, they can't call because my phone is off and whatever the crisis is it will still be there in the morning.
When I wake up and have that urge to check my phone "real quick" to answer some insane question in the middle of the night, I remember that I have to wait while the thing boots up first, so I grumble, roll over, and go back to sleep.
