I have been suffering from insomnia when I started college in 2015. I had to wake up at 6:00 everyday to catch the bus and then get back home at 20:00 the earliest. Dine, play some videogames, do some homework or whatever, and it is already midnight. I try to sleep and I only close my eyes around 1:00. Sleep for 5 hours and then wake up the next day. It was a living hell, but I survived with damages. The damage being not being able to sleep for more than 5 hours, and most importantly, unable to go to sleep easily.
I have been frustrated with it a lot, and I tried everything you could think of, from sleeping pills, to meditation, to developing a sleeping routine, and so on, but nothing worked. Some even backfired. I remember I started abusing sleeping pills at some point and it was a very bad experience, to say the least.
And so, I started regarding the whole thing from a different angle. I experimented with my body A LOT and I finally came to understand the REAL variables that DO AFFECT my sleep, and they change from one person to the other, depending on your genes, developmental history, and so on.
So in this post I will give 3 tips that have worked for me personally. And always remember that sleeping is a habit and you need to put in the work to acquire it.
So without any further ado, let's jump to the first tip!
1. Eliminate any alarming/sedative substances.
For me, those are caffeine and nicotine. For others it could be weed and alcohol. Whatever it is, just eliminate it.
I never knew that my body was that sensitive to drugs until I quit snusing/smoking and drinking coffee. My worst sleeping nights are the nights when I get nicotine in my blood and drink coffee in the morning. I tried a few sedative pills before and their effect was even worse, in that I would feel lethargic the next day.
Quitting coffee and cigarettes was difficult, but it had the best results I have ever experienced thus far. This advice might be cliche, and I have read it everywhere on the web that you need to stop drinking coffee or smoking cigarettes 6 hours before sleeping or whatever, but that never worked for me. What worked for me was to quit them once and for all. So quit your substances.
2. Reschedule you biological clock
This is also something I found in one of the comments on some Reddit post on how to sleep better, where the reddittor is a backpacker who travels across the globe and always has troubles readjusting his biological clock to the country of residence. It might take him a few days if he does not do the following the method, but he finally figured it out. And this also helps with sleeping a lot.
Assuming you go to sleep between 22:00-23:00, stop eating food and drinking water between 14:00-16:00. Unlike a myriad of posts on the internet, what really determines your wakefulness is not the amount of light reflected on your retina, but the time when you are eating food. The logic behind this is that you are telling your body when to wake up and find food and when to go to sleep because there will be none. The same way your brain needs sleep to process the information, your tummy needs as much rest.
He also recommended that you eat a good nutritious voluminous dish first thin in the morning that you will fill you up for the upcoming couple of hours and around lunch to just grab a few snacks here and there and drink a lot of water and call it a day. If you do this for 3-5 days, your body will readjust accordingly and falling sleep at night will be easier.
I have personally tried this and it worked like a charm. And I noticed that not eating will automatically make me tired and that helps tremendously with sleeping. I never feel hungry at night because I was raised in a household where dinner is served at 17:00 so I never had any issues staying full.
But with a lot of you, I am sure you will feel hungry at night and my advice is to fight the urge to eat at that time for a few days and it will disappear eventually for reasons that might require another post to explain.
3. Drink multivitamins
Minerals and vitamins are as important to fall asleep as a good pillow and a bed. Unless you're going full ADHD on your mineral intake, you will always be in deficit, and that is not a huge problem per se. It will not affect you on the long run, but it does affect your sleep. So just make a trip to the grocery store and pick a multivitamin tablet and drink a pill everyday when you wake up, and it should help you falling asleep.Things to bear in mind
- Not sleeping at night does not automatically mean that you will not be able to survive the next day.
Probably one of the things that hindered me from sleeping the most was the belief that if I do not sleep tonight, I will not be able to function at full capacity the next day. The irony in this is that I have been sleep-deficit my entire life and have achieved a lot. However, the day I accepted that not sleeping enough will not affect my academic and professional performance is the day I started sleeping better and excelled even more at my job.
- Compensate for the missing hours of sleep by taking a 30-minutes nap at some point of the day
If I do not sleep enough at night for some reason, around 14:00 I will find myself falling asleep and I usually put the timer to 30 minutes. After exactly 30 minutes, I would wake up fresher than ever and carry on with my life.
- Do whatever you can to make yourself sleep better
For me, I bought an old school clock with that ticking sound and placed it right next to my head. Growing up, there was an old big clock in the hall at the center of the house, and I could hear its ticking every night I went to sleep and now it usually helps to have a clock ticking around like hypnosis. It drives some people nuts, but for me it is always a plus. Figure out your own sleeping habits and do them.
I hope this helps somebody out there and if it worked for me, rest assured it will work for you too! Let me know if you had any success or questions!
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