Ask Lemmy

Eyes closed. Preferably without dying.

With your mother, usually.

the one where I'm unconcious for a couple hours while vividly halucinating

Two cats at once. I get the part of the bed not taken by the cats. I'm motivated to lie very still by the cats and the obvious repercussions for moving.

If that fails, the podcast Casefile - gruesome true crime stories recited by a very slow talking Australian fellow. It almost always puts me out. In bed or on planes.

Mine is really weird and hard to describe. I'll try to be concise. I close my eyes (no shit Sherlock) and I imagine faces of people. It can be someone close, a star of a TV show, anything. Then I change element of their face one by one (e.g. their eyes). And I keep going. And everytime the face changes enough I question myself "I know this person, who is this ?". And when I answer the question, the face is clearer (because I've put a name on the face so it is easier to imagine it and correct it) and I can go on again until I fall asleep.

To combat jet lag, or otherwise reset your sleep schedule if it has drifted...

1. Go 24 hours without eating.

2. Go to bed early enough to make sure you get 8-10 hours before you normally want to wake up.

3. Using an alarm, wake up a bit earlier than you usually want to wake up.

4. Make a big breakfast, eating when you normally want to wake up.

Now your body will have reset its circadian rhythm, and you'll naturally wake up at that time.

If I'm having a hard time getting to sleep, I put on a podcast and that usually does the trick. Need to find something in the sweet spot where it's engaging enough that it'll hold my attention without being so interesting that it keeps me awake.

Don't ever read or look at a phone in bed. Just get in and immediately try to sleep.

Smoke some weed to get sleepy

My bed is exclusively for sleeping and sex. No food. No coffee. No TV. So my body has learned if we’re not doing one thing then we’re doing the other.

My mind does have a tendency to wander/worry/race though so I put on a podcast when I lay down to distract my brain. I’m usually asleep within 5-10 minutes.

If I'm struggling to sleep because I have a lot on my mind I'll just read until I'm sleepy again - otherwise I end up getting more and more stressed.

sleeping technique

No idea what you mean by this.

Imagining something fantastic like living in an asteroid mine and managing things. Or trying to not think anything. Both works for me. And of course working 60h a week and spending my whole free time with my kids leaving me completely exhausted falling in coma in a second. Good night!

100mg trazodone, 25mg doxylamine, 5mg melatonin, ~.5L whiskey or vodka.

Mix, inbibe, hope for the best.

Eyes closed, dreaming deep. That’s the way I like to sleep.

Dark room, turn on something boring/soothing on TV, turn sleep timer on 30 min, turn tv screen off, lay in a cozy comfortable position and close my eyes and listen.

The App 'Calm' which is good for meditation also has sleep stories. There is a great one by Levar Burton describing the solar system.

I get into a state of anxiety sometimes where thinking almost anything will trigger a cascade of neurotic thoughts. This has led to many sleepless nights. Whilst it doesn't always work, I found one effective technique to make your brain sleepy is just try to think of the most boring, unstimulating ideas. For some reason, I find it really effective to think about plain flat colors like brown or grey. I'm not getting much inspiration to proceed with an inner critical monologue when I think about the colour brown or grey. Not objects in these colors, just the actual colors. I imagine myself in a sea of that color and it is calming and neutralising, for reasons I don't fully understand.

These days it involves using a CPAP.

It might be weird but it works for me:

I imagine I am doing skeleton in the nude. IE sliding down an ice chute in the buff. It works especially well when I can't sleep because I'm hot.

Concentrating on breathing using my diaphragm.

I stole this actually from sitting meditation. Laying on my back this usually puts me too sleep in a couple of minutes. It's especially useful when my mind is racing.

Put in earplugs, put a xylimelt lozenge against my gums so my mouth doesn't dry out, put on my CPAP mask, put pillowcase over my face to keep complete darkness while I sleep during the day. Wake up 6 hours later.

I'm a skydiver type if I don't have a backpack.

20mg of Melatonin 2 hours before bed.

For most nights... Just get in bed and sleep, though sometimes my brain just goes into a sorta fear episode...

Idk what it is, I just start feeling scared for no reason. If that happens, I just pull some long video on my phone and doze off watching it.

I smoke a joint around 1h before bed, I lay down, watch some unfathomably long video about something dumb (a bad game, Elon musk, the UK etc.), then I fall asleep, wake up an hour later to my computer playing the weirdest fucking thing, close the lid and go back to sleep. Works wonders.

Ambien

Earplugs, cold room, thick blanked and a pillow under my knees/between my legs depending on wether I'm on my back or side. If on top of all this I don't fall asleep/wake up in the middle of the night anxious about unfinished tasks that would be great.

Lights out and Kindle with the lowest luminosity posible. I can't barely read 10 pages.

Normally in bed

On my side, head sandwich between two pillows with my arm over the top pillow, and Youtube playing a long video or a playlist.

Staying up until I'm sleepy, then closing my eyes until I'm no longer tired.

I've conditioned myself to fall asleep after I put my CPAP mask on.