Sleep Hygiene
Here is a list of what I found to be the most helpful
interventions for sleeplessness and insomnia. The first four here helped me
transition from 5 hours of sleep per night to at least 7 within a week.
Get outside in the sun for least 10
minutes, first thing after waking. Early sunlight resets and supports a
healthy, regular circadian sleep cycle. Sunlight directly after waking works
best, but direct or indirect sunlight anytime during the day is beneficial. The
bright light convinces your brain that now is the time to be alert and energetic
which will help you feel tired by nighttime and sleepy by bedtime.
Stop eating four hours before bed.
Don’t overeat for dinner. Eating late meals keeps you up and burdens the
digestive system. Snacking right up to bedtime keeps the mind in a state of
agitation and. If you tell yourself that you will not eat during the four hours
before bedtime, you will find a part of you relax knowing that hunger and compulsive
eating are off the table.
Set an alarm every morning,
including weekends. Don’t hit the snooze button.
Fatiguing your neck muscles before
sleep can help you greatly to crash. When your neck is tired your body knows it
needs rest. I lie in bed on my back and touch each ear to the
surface of the bed 40 times, turning my neck from side to side. You want to
hold your head an inch or two off of the bed and alternate between tapping your
right and left ears to the bed surface.
Do not take naps and don’t sleep in,
this only confuses your sleep cycle. Going to sleep earlier than usual when
tired often backfires because it throws off your cycle.
Exercise during the day will help
you to wind down at night and sleep much harder. If you can fatigue your
muscles, heart, and breathing apparatus, then they all crave deep restful
sleep. I shoot for an hour of some kind of exercise every day.
Don’t work out too hard in the
second half of the day. Do push-ups and heavy weights by midday. Try to
stop exercising two hours before bed. Yoga and stretching are fine though.
Turn down the screen brightness on
your devices three hours before bed. This light is confusing your sleep cycle,
making your body think that it is the middle of the day. Set your phone,
tablets, laptop, monitors, and televisions to a lower brightness setting. You
can also program your cellphone to reduce the amount of blue light it emits two
hours before bedtime. An hour before bedtime dim or turn off some ceiling
lights.
No caffeine, THC, or alcohol. They
have been shown to dysregulate sleep in a dose dependent manner.
No action movies, horror movies, or
videogames two hours before bed. Watching violent or suspenseful content will
keep you from getting to sleep, reduce sleep quality, and make it more
difficult to stay asleep.
It’s OK to get bored a few hours
before bed, it gets your adrenaline and your dopamine down. So, do something
relaxing.
Read before bed. No electronics an
hour before bed. Practice stimulus control and relaxation techniques.
Play piano music or soothing songs
an hour before bed.
It is difficult to sleep well in a
hot room. Keep your bedroom cool, around 70 degrees, and undress, use lighter
blankets, or use fans as needed.
Drink two to three glasses of water
four hours before bed and then stop drinking so that you don’t have to wake up
to pee as often.
A warm shower or bath two hours
before bed will help you sleep. A cold shower early in the day might help you
sleep but a cold shower late at night will keep you up.
Don’t talk about things that are
upsetting or seek out conflict before bedtime.
Sleep in your bed, don’t rest in it.
You want your body to associate lying in your bed with one thing, deep sleep.
Don’t allow people to keep you up
late at night. Tell them firmly that you prioritize sleep.
Stay calm while sleep deprived.
Whenever you sleep poorly, make sure you stay calm and take it easy the next
day. Trauma can be multiplied by sleeplessness.
Dopamine Detox
Here are my rules for controlling dysregulating stimuli in life. This
can help with anxiety, depression, sleeplessness, and other issues.
Overstimulating things cause unhealthy
dopamine swings which can drive compulsive and self-destructive behavior. Very potent stimuli of any kind do this. These include, extremely
palatable food, suspenseful and thrilling television, and unattainably good-looking
people. They all set an unrealistic threshold for dopamine release. The higher the
artificial dopamine peak, the more you drop below baseline once you no longer
have these stimulants. This leads to tolerance and withdrawal. This
is because, after large releases of dopamine, dopamine becomes depleted, and the
default, baseline level of dopamine drops, leaving you feeling lousy, anxious,
and restless. This causes you engage in the same overstimulating activity that
made dopamine surge before, and this reduces the baseline even more. To
avoid this cycle, try to follow these rules:
No Instagram
No TikTok
No video games
No violent shows
No fight videos
No injury videos
No sweets
No MSG
No overeating
No drugs
No alcohol
No stressful music
No overstimulating sexual content
No unnecessary spending
Only relaxing music
Here are some other strategies to
find calm and reduce your reliance on overstimulation:
Listen to soft piano music while
you work on the computer.
Embrace feeling bored. Just accept
that you are in a healing state and don’t fight it.
Just like eating sweet or salty
foods, spending money makes you wanna spend more money. But when you stop for a
few days, you gain peace.
Not scrolling social media or
overstimulating myself makes me bored and eventually makes me want to read
which is the best thing I can be doing.
You should spend a day weekly
without any cellphone, app, or streaming use.
You should spend 24 hours fasting
every week.
Do hard things like meditation, weight
lifting, hard work, fasting, and cold plunges that deplete, but then replenish
dopamine to healthy levels.
Remember: “The monotony and solitude of a
quiet life stimulates the creative mind.” Albert Einstein
Years of social conditioning causes
us to have a dependency on other people. We seek external validation, and many
people feel they only get dopamine from interactions with others. You
should be comfortable and content by yourself with nothing to do.
The energy you put into seeking,
maintaining, and recovering from relationships and social interactions can be
put into creative efforts.
Loneliness increases inflammation and
stress but peaceful self-sufficient solitude does not. We should crave time
alone. Imagine not needing anyone. What would that feel like? Be able to be
powerfully alone.
Non-searching, nondependent,
mindful, satisfied solitude is what we should be able to achieve.
Embrace being bored and you will
become calmer.
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