[depressedpanda]

I have a form of insomnia where I just can't convince myself that I should just go to sleep and stop checking YouTube, hackernews, Wikipedia, various interesting articles.

At it's core, solution presented in the article -- apart from methods for dealing with anxiousness -- is to deprive oneself of sleep, but making sure to always wake up at the same time.

My issue is that I don't have any major problems when getting little sleep and I don't have anxiety. I just want to do more than there are hours of the day.

Several days of too little sleep do end up being detrimental, however, so I would really like to break this habit.

I would love to hear if anyone here knows of a way to deal with not wanting to go asleep, because there are other more interesting things to do. How do you convince yourself that you want to go to bed most of all, and not do anything else?

[zaptheimpaler]

I had (have) a similar problem. For me it was a few things:

1. I did not recognize I was stressed, but I was - a lot. One day I bought a smartwatch that tracks stress levels (Garmin Vivosmart) and saw how high it was: 80-90/100 most days. That opened my eyes. You can be stressed and not know it.

2. I manage anxiety. First step was observing when it is there, what exactly it feels like. For me, it often manifests as jaw pain, body aches, tinnitus, tunnel vision, "narrow" thinking etc.. Then strategies to lower anxiety - quit smoking, meditation, more than anything building awareness of what it feels like for you so you can manage it - meditation helped with that.

3. Crystal clear goals, detailed goal-setting, and an acceptance of/commitment to slow and steady progress. Compulsions to read "interesting" stuff came from either a desire to escape the present moment, or idea that I was not reading/learning enough - which was a vague, unreachable goal that feels forever out of reach given the infinite amount of content on the web.

4. Feeds are designed to be addictive - stop it. Just don't do it for a few days and see how much clearer your mind is. And you will probably realize you don't "learn" anything from that kind of unstructured dopamine-seeking - it is more like watching TV all day than learning.

Basically i had forgotten what relaxation feels like, to the point where anxiety-driven thinking felt completely normal. It is not. Find ways to reduce anxiety even if you don't think you are anxious and stick with them - nagging thoughts, random pains, tunnel vision kind of thinking are all signs of anxiety. I'm still working on it, but this was a huge revelation to me - the idea that when you are anxious for long enough, you literally forget what calm feels like. Well actually the idea itself doesn't do much for me, but experiencing it.. that changes things.

This post is nice too (no affiliation at all):

https://medium.com/the-strategic-review/background-ops-2-key...

[gerbilly]

>Basically i had forgotten what relaxation feels like, to the point where anxiety-driven thinking felt completely normal.

This is a very insightful observation.

I have seen this in myself.

[zaptheimpaler]

Thanks. If you see this - I saw you mentioned flexible working hours in your job and would really like to talk about that - can I get in touch with you over email? My email is in profile.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

I've had the same problem for a very long time. The solution I found was to choose a subject that I am really interested in and that's really useful to study, but that severely taxes my mental faculties. I then dedicate the last few hours of the day to studying it. The intense mental effort almost never fails to put me to sleep within a very short time after beginning.

Reading about such a subject (rather than say, coding) works best. In fact I discovered this effect when I noticed there were a few papers I have still not managed to finish reading, even after several attempts (see for example [1]).

If all else fails, I put on a youtube video of a Noam Chomsky talk. That never fails. [2]

____________

[1] Nienhuys-Cheng and de Wolf, The subsumption theorem in inductive logic programming: facts and fallacies.

https://homepages.cwi.nl/~rdewolf/publ/ilp/ilp95.pdf

[2] To clarify, I love Noam Chomsky and I consider him a great teacher to me, both in politics and science. It's the way he talks that gets me: he's so calm and his voice so smooth and soothing, that even when he's talking about very upsetting subjects like climate change or nuclear war, my mind just shuts down and I go to sleep like -this.

[gamerDude]

For me. It is just habit. You go to bed at a certain time. And you reward yourself for doing it. Basically any habit is formed by the set of trigger, action, reward. The trigger is something that happens, an alarm, seeing a time on the clock etc. The action, get ready and go to bed. The reward needs to release dopamine. That can be as easy as just congratulating yourself.

Other methods including enrolling other people into it. Your significant other either going to bed with you or keeping you accountable. Friends who will give real consequences for failure. A system that auto donates money to a charity that you hate or a personal enemy if you don't go to bed in time. Etc.

[csmajorfive]

I would recommend finding some evening activities that you enjoy but are less stimulating. For example, I find it much easier to drift into sleepiness when I'm watching Netflix on the couch rather than sitting upright at my computer actively engaging in a quest for more information.

[NicoJuicy]

Had the same problem, realizing longer hours don't make you more productive helped.