Sleeping

Hi all,

Anyone know a good remedy for not being able to sleep? Already tried reading book, read several, still can’t sleep properly.



Any ideas?



PS. And no voodoo witch craft either :wink:



DP

I program :slight_smile:

Best advice I can give you. Don’t worry about it, don’t fight it. If you can’t sleep get up and watch TV/read/program etc. I find that lieing there fighting it makes it worse.

Myself, I normally listen to the radio until I fall asleep. I start with hard rock, switch to soft, then to classical. Admittedly strange, but also very effective for me.

dont have a pc in my room :? so can’t program.



Radio thing might work. Il try that tonight.



Mojo, unfortunetly, my dad has put an alarm in the house. And our house is double storey house. And when we go to sleep, he raises the alarm down stairs which has the pc, tv…etc. So if I was to go down, the beeping would wake the entire neighbourhood up :’(



Thx alot guys



DP

Try to take a cold shower and then go in your bed… I do that sometimes, and it works great (for me, at least)…

Best advice I can give you is to get on a regular schedule. It won’t help you immediately, but after a couple weeks of going to bed and getting up at the same time, you’ll notice a difference. I don’t even have an alarm set in the morning any more.



Other things… don’t do anything but sleep in your bed. No TV, computer, reading… anything. That’s like training your body that your bed isn’t for sleeping. (One possibility is to always do the same thing before going to sleep… like reading a few pages or watching fifteen minutes of TV. That’s fine as long as you stop and go to sleep right after every time.)



Basically… Our bodies like regularity.



Also… avoid anything caffinated within say… 6 hours of when you want to go to bed. This includes tea, coffee, sodas, and chocolate.



Also, try not to eat anything within a couple hours of going to sleep. Your body needs to burn off that fuel, and will likely try to do it by giving you extra energy, or just turning it into heat (which will make you uncomfortable).



If you can’t fall asleep within 20-30 minutes of lying down (15-20 is a normal amount of time), you should get up and do something until you feel sleepy again. Ie, don’t let your body get trained into lying in bed and not sleeping.



Stay away from sleeping pills (or any other medication) as a way of falling asleep. Your body can become dependent on them. They’re fine to get your body back into a good pattern, but that should only take a week… two weeks tops.



I find that I need a ‘cool down’ period before I go to bed. The only time I really have to do my own stuff is in the evenings after dinner. If I work up until my normal bed-time (instead of, say, 30 minutes earlier), I can’t get my brain to turn off. I keep thinking about what I was working on (as of late, this has been jME stuff. Heh.).



Can you tell I’ve dealt with this before? :smiley:



Some other quick tricks…



As disgusting as it is, warm milk is apparently good, too. (May be obvious… but don’t let it sit out… heat it on the stove or something.) There’s some natural chemical that it has that makes you sleepy. Can’t remember what it’s called. Personally could never bring myself to drink the stuff.



Regulate your breathing. I think this is a meditation technique, but it works well for falling asleep, too. It’s like counting sheep (getting your mind to focus on something else) with the added benefit of regulating the oxygen in your system. Breathe in for four seconds, hold for four seconds, breathe out for four seconds. Repeat indefinitely.



Another trick that works sometimes is to focus on your body and to imagine it slowly changing, from toe to head, into solid grey (or whatever). Focus on and imagine an invisible line very slowly moving up your body, relaxing everything as it goes. This line erases all discomfort, tenseness, and agitation.



Other than that… something that Mojo said is also common advice (I like the other suggestions, too, actually.). The more you fight and stress over not being able to sleep, the worse it gets. Stress is not going to allow you to sleep well. Adrenaline is released into your system when you get stressed, which will keep you awake as a genetic self-preservation method.



Just remember that bouts of insomnia are relatively normal and common. You WILL fall asleep normally again, so you shouldn’t worry about having this problem forever.



Hope this helps.





–K

thx ken. Really appreciate your advice. Fortunetly, i dont find milk disgusting. Well, pure milk is just ewww. But strawberry milk or something is very nice and ive been drinking some of that recently, and it has helped to some extent.



Some of the ideas ive had about jME has been thought of when I was asleep! No seriously, im sleeping fine when I suddenly wake up and bam, the idea hits me in the face.



Thx for all the suggestions



DP