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by corrral 1461 days ago
> very hard to go back to sleep if woken up in between

Melatonin solves this for me. It takes very little (~0.3mg) to achieve about the largest clinically-observed effect. Makes it easier for me to stay asleep.

For getting to sleep earlier (or even just at a normal, but still fairly late time) reliably, I've found two solutions:

1) Approximately no electricity after sundown (or just a little after sundown, in the Winter). No light sources brighter than a few candles (enough to read by). Warm light only. Nothing with a screen except an e-ink reader. You can still: play music; listen to music (if you can be disciplined about it, a couple moments of screen to put on another album is probably fine, if you don't have a screen-free way to do that, or otherwise, find a screen-free way, it can be done cheaply); listen to podcasts or radio (ditto); play board and card games (~10-20 candle power scattered around a room is a tiny fraction of typical nighttime house lighting for a room, but is plenty to do this to); read (aloud!); write; talk. But you must turn off the electricity-powered 24/7 carnival. Entirely. Ultra-bright lighting (once you're used to low-light the amount of light we flood our houses with at night will seem outright insane), computers, video games, Netflix. Zero, zero of that.

2) Weed. [EDIT: I have tried prescription meds for this, too—the ones I tried did work, but not as well, left me feeling like shit in the morning even if I got a solid 8 hours of sleep, and especially left me feeling like shit if I tried to use them late in the evening after I realized I was going to have trouble falling asleep, rather than just taking them every day at a set, earlier time]

4 comments

> Approximately no electricity after sundown (or just a little after sundown, in the Winter).

Jesus God, where do you live? The sun goes down at 17:00-17:30 for most of the year here. I'd lose all of my free time if I did that.

IME melatonin an hour before bedtime, and setting screen color temperature to a really low value works wonders (I've been using 2000K at night and 3200K in daytime, sometimes even 1800K). I can stare at the screen for 16 hours and then go straight to bed, and be off in a few minutes.

> Jesus God, where do you live? The sun goes down at 17:00-17:30 for most of the year here. I'd lose all of my free time if I did that.

Medium-ish Northern latitude. Dark around 1700 in the depth of Winter, maybe 2130 or 2200 at the height of Summer. Of course that includes daylight savings fucking with the clocks.

Weed helps me get to sleep, but it does not help me get restful sleep. Quite the opposite, in fact: if I smoke weed before bed, I wake up tired the next day.
Weed if you do it regularly makes you feel very foggy headed the next morning.
I've had the same effect from marijuana which I attribute to weed likely reducing REM sleep