Okay, so I forced myself to write this tutorial before I managed to find a complete solution to my sleeping problems. Right now, I have figured out a big chunk of them. If you wonder how to fix your sleeping problems, keep reading. I will present you with a few ideas I didn’t find online and come up with them myself. Those practices turned out to work when nothing else did.
I even remember sharing my sleeping problems with my loved one, but she was used to me not sleeping, so she shrugged her shoulders, accepting it as part of my natural flow. Sometimes being unable to sleep can be highly frustrating, especially when you are giving it all out and you find out that there are tough times ahead of you where you’ll need more energy than ordinary days.
Please elaborate on what a sleeping problem is
Now that’s a very thoughtful question everyone should ask themselves in the first place. I am still not convinced that having a different sleeping regime from other ordinary people should be defined as a sleeping problem. I understand how sleeping during the day can fundamentally intervene with your life. With that said, I’m still not convinced that this can be defined as a sleeping problem condition unless it negatively affects your life.
All the solutions to sleeping problems online weren’t enough
- Find the most comfortable spot on your pillow or get a better pillow
- Sleep in a dark, quiet room with an inhabitable temperature
- Change your bed
- Take 3mg doses of melatonin (Taking 20mg actually helped a lot, but it’s NOT recommended for your health! Consult with your doctor!)
- Eliminate alcohol and stimulants like nicotine and caffeine
- Take care of your anxiety and depression
- Exercise regularly
- Count sheeps
- Limit activities in bed
- Make sure your bed is comfortable
To sum it up, I’m doing around 60 pull-ups a day + 60 parallel bar dips + 150 punches, impact speed, stretching and many others. I have a very comfortable bed and pillow. I only use my bed to sleep in it. I’m not an active user of caffeine nor a smoker. My day is full of tasks that make me feel meaningful, and I don’t see myself depressed very often. I don’t sleep during the day and rarely do power naps (5-10min) when I have an extremely rough time. I do yoga, and in my free time, I climb the mountains. Huh?! So what now?
Finding the causes of your sleeping problems
When you have insomnia, you’re never really asleep… and you’re never really awake. Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy, to the point where weeks feel like a single day. And months feel like a single week and a few days ago feels like just yesterday. So what’s left? What’s the cause of my sleeping issues? I wanted to figure that out once and for all. After carefully observing, I narrowed it down to these two.
- Issue №1: Can not motivate oneself to go to bed
This should be related to discipline, right? A simple timesheet with a checklist would do? Nope. There’s always something unfinished in that checklist that must be finished before going to bed. There’s always something more exciting and challenging than getting your eyes closed like a dead person. - Issue №2: Can not Fall Asleep
This is rarely the case because I’m deadbeat when I’m going to bed. Going to bed on time feels like I’ve eaten ten lemons. It’s pointless. I’m fresh as a daisy.
The techniques that worked
Since I was 17 years, I’ve had this insomnia problem, and it got worse with time. I hadn’t thought of it as a problem until it became one. Feeling tired during the day and exhausted while actively living all night and sleeping just a few hours per 24h isn’t ideal, especially when six hours is plenty of time to recover and recharge for the next day.
Falling asleep in 20 seconds
The only method that helped me in the second case, “№2: can not fall asleep“, was a combination of a military technique I read somewhere with an ancient breathing technique I grabbed from a yoga book. I call this one “falling asleep in 20 seconds”, but before you master it, it may take longer.
Why does it work?
What it does is it essentially shuts down your racing thoughts. It works like a mantra – a program that runs inside your brain with a much higher priority than everything else. You do this until the background processes die entirely. You can compare it with the times when you’re trying to shut down your Windows, and it starts reminding you that you haven’t saved some files. Updates await your inspection when hundreds of dialogues pop up on the screen. And if you are like me, you read every one of them because Windows (even Windows 10 AME) is a trouble maker. The goal here is to hold the hardware “shut down button” for a few seconds and switch the power off while suppressing every dialogue that comes to the screen, entirely ignoring it.
How does it work?
- Ventilate the room; Turn your phone off; Remove every irritant
- Go to bed and close your eyes
- Turn your palms upwards like you do when performing yoga – Nidra. Try to keep them away from objects.
- Slowly breath out everything.
- Breathe in profoundly and very slow. So slow that it’s barely enough. This way, you’ll slow down your pulse.
- Try to control your chest movement to be very slow and breathe out
- Repeat this until you get comfortable
- Now try to breathe in for exactly eight seconds, hold it for eight more seconds and release it for another eight seconds.
- Now in your mind, start repeating the phrase “Don’t think” so fast that it becomes your priority number one to obey it, ignoring every other instruction your brain gives.
If you performed this ritual without success, you probably did something wrong. I am a very prominent insomniac myself, which gets me to shut down in twenty seconds. If it doesn’t help, you should go back to the previous subheading and reread “The causes of your sleeping problems“.
Issue №1: Can not motivate oneself to go to bed
Motivation is still a problem, but I’m trying different solutions. I’ll gladly share it with you once I find one that I feel is the ultimate solution, just like the 20 seconds hack. In the meantime, I’m open to suggestions. Seriously, write 📝 down a comment, and I’ll get back to you!