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.
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.
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.
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?
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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
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 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
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.
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'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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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[ 7.8 ms ] story [ 4702 ms ] threadIt’s indeed difficult to lie still when you have RLS, but general sleep hygiene helps with it.
Serendipity, since I am reading this article now?
I am going to give this a try - the narrowing down of any challenge to its prime implicant makes a great deal of sense.
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?
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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.
Happy to report I've had one person buy the PDF.
Seems like I’m seeing a cultural shift happening in the last few months to people re/discovering zen-stoicism-minimalism
Probably the cyclical nature of trends
However, the frequency seems to be increasing, though my caveat is that this increase is cyclical - so not “new” per se, but cyclically new.
Sometimes intolerably smugly, like Jack Dorsey.
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 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…
For me, works wonderfully.
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/09/16/health/4-7-8-breathing-te...
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.
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.
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.
But I guess if trying to sleep helped someone get to sleep… awesome!
It's underrated.
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.
Understatement. An amazingly high portion of Canadians don't have a family doctor <https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/despite-more-doctors-many-cana...>. In Atlantic Canada (the four easternmost provinces, for non-Canadians) it is impossible, repeat impossible, to get a family doctor if you don't have one <https://web.archive.org/web/20190226051406/https://www.thete...>. It's one thing to have shortages in rural areas—that happens in the US too—but Halifax?!? I've heard the same occurs in Vancouver too.
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.
Disclaimer: I am not a doctor/therapist.
Disclaimer: I have only had insomnia episodes that have lasted up to a month or so, so more chronic episodes can be different.
http://www.angryflower.com/221.html
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavasana?wprov=sfla1
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
e.g. count down from 1987 in 23s.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1693610/
And rain videos also work.
1. Lie on my back on the bed. Place my hands beside my torso, palms facing down. Keep my legs straight, but free and relaxed.
2. Close my eyes and focus my attention on the region between my eyebrows.
3. Relax my breathing and make it regular and slow.
4. Actively imagine my stress and anxiety to be a form of fluid, filled in my body and then imagine it evaporating from my finger tips.
I do this for about 30 minutes everyday, and the days I do it, I have no recollection of my sleep. I mean, no dreams, no moving about, nothing.
I also found that this form of sleep, makes me absolutely refreshed even if I sleep for only 5 to 6 hours.
Morning, midday, evenings, before bed?
A few times during mid day.
- work out daily (lift and/or cardio)
- move phone away from reach
My key ingredients to sleeping like a baby, deep dreaming almost nightly. 31yo ymmv
So try a lot of different things and do what works.
How did I do it? My only goal was to do at least 1 min of meditation a day but every day. No excuse.
It’s my opinion that this is the best and easiest method to build a meditation practice.
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.
Seems like a slight overstatement.
No more need for an alarm clock.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2894421/
They key point is "emerging".
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.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-022-01661-0
You can't "practice" having an arm if it was amputated.
A classic example of an exception that proves the rule.
On the other hand, wrong takes on something everyone feels they have expertise in are what cause the most comments here on HN.
[1] https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/
Outrageous!
Give me the secondhand wisdom of authoritative strangers every time.
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.
What was the trick?
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.
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.
Addiction.
My technique - YMMV
Lie still on my back. Play a boring (at night anyway) history podcast. Mentally focus on my breath. Might even count them. I rarely get beyond 30.