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Sleep: The How-To Thread

Eponastill said:
The go-to method round here when you can't get to sleep is the alphabet game. You pick a reasonably neutral, not-too-hard-not-too-easy subject like Biscuits or Birds and work through the alphabet trying to think of something for each letter. It's totally like what Min Bannister suggests - enough to stop your brain ruminating about other things, but not enough to require proper alertness. Sounds too simple but usually works a treat :)
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I did exactly that the other day, but wanted something a bit challenging and so chose bands or performers I had seen in concert over the years.

Came up with the following (and then felt quite annoyed that I'd never managed to see Van Der Graff Generator, Yes or ZZ Top).

A: Ash Ra Tempel
B: Blackfoot Sue
C: Curved Air
D: Deep Purple
E: Emerson Lake & Palmer
F: Focus
G: Gong
H: Hawkwind
I: Ian Hunter
J: Jethro Tull
K: Kevin Ayers
L: Leaves' Eyes
M: Mostly Autumn
N: Nick Harper
O: Opeth
P: PFM
Q: Queen
R: Razorlight
S: Spock's Beard
T: Thunder
U: Uriah Heep
V:
W: Wishbone Ash
X: XTC
Y:
Z:
 
From my teenage years onward I've gone through periods of insomnia - I still get the occasional bout, but much less regularly than I used to.

Without any sense that I was consciously doing so - I developed a couple of tricks to help me relax my way into sleep:

The oldest - which I think I've been using as far back as my pre-teens - is to close my eyes and picture myself on some sort of invisible vehicle travelling along a mountain road at quite high speed. It always begins on the road in the mountains, as I can see the sheer sides of the crags sweeping up away from me - but once I've started moving the landscape around me changes. Clearly my imagination is at play, but I have absolutely no surface awareness that I am consciously changing my surroundings - it all just appears to flow naturally, and once I'm out of the mountains the landscape will change apparently of its own accord; forests, moorland, river valleys, fields, riversides, back to the mountains - it all just sweeps past me as if I'm on a real journey.

The more recent trick is to shut my eyes and imagine myself in another bedroom that I have slept in. I mentally realign the room, recalibrate the doors and windows and rearrange the furniture, reimagine what I can see from outside the window - change, via my imagination, the entire spatial fabric of my immediate surroundings. I will do this in great detail - to the point where I find myself mentally wandering around another room, in another time, rediscovering things that I'd forgotten years - sometimes decades - ago. This can occasionally be somewhat disconcerting - sometimes the picture becomes so vivid and 'real' that I'm almost convinced that if I open my eyes I will actually be in that place. And occasionally I'll even find myself reimagining the actual place I am sleeping before I open my eyes - you know, just in case!
 
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Spookdaddy said:
The oldest - which I think I've been using as far back as my pre-teens - is to close my eyes and picture myself on some sort of invisible vehicle travelling along a mountain road at quite high speed. It always begins on the road in the mountains, as I can see the sheer sides of the crags sweeping up away from me - but once I've started moving the landscape around me changes. Clearly my imagination is at play, but I have absolutely no surface awareness that I am consciously changing my surroundings - it all just appears to flow naturally, and once I'm out of the mountains the landscape will change apparently of its own accord; forests, moorland, river valleys, fields, riversides, back to the mountains - it all just sweeps past me as if I'm on a real journey.
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That's pretty cool. It reminded me that I tried blowing myself into space a few times then floating around looking at stars. Somehow I forgot about this so I will try it again tonight!
 
Min Bannister said:
That's pretty cool. It reminded me that I tried blowing myself into space a few times then floating around looking at stars. Somehow I forgot about this so I will try it again tonight!
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That used to work for me when I was a kid. I always dropped off after imagining a space journey. Hardly ever had dreams that I could remember, though.
 
Last few days I've been up before 5am and still busy when I was home. So come about 10pm it's solid sleepy time.
Last night I started my bedtime routine - lie down, start something soporific on the Mac, take specs off, pop sleep mask on, dig head into pillow...

Out like a light right away with my specs on, no sleep mask. Woke up an hour or so later for t'cludgie in the same position.
Quick bog-run, back to bed, woke up at 7am. Bloody great sleep performance there.
Olympic level. :cool:
 
This year, I've started waking at 5 ish and spending the next hour and half trying to fall back sleep without much success. During the summer, I presumed it was do to early light but it is still happening. Annoyingly, the gain of an hour with the clock change has made it worse as I now wake about 4 ish!

Often, it is accompanied by a raging morning glory which I get rid of by going for a pee.

Counting doesn't work for me.
 
flannel said:
This year, I've started waking at 5 ish and spending the next hour and half trying to fall back sleep without much success. During the summer, I presumed it was do to early light but it is still happening. Annoyingly, the gain of an hour with the clock change has made it worse as I now wake about 4 ish!

Often, it is accompanied by a raging morning glory which I get rid of by going for a pee.

Counting doesn't work for me.
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:thought: Quite a lot of information there.
 
escargot said:
:thought: Quite a lot of information there.
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Watch this...




flannel said:
Often, it is accompanied by a raging morning glory which I get rid of by going for a pee.
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Doesn't the weewee go up your nose though?

I find it usually takes too long for dicky to diminish and I wet the wall, so I run outside and wee over the fence. The neighbour doesn't know what's going on, but their cat poos on our lawn, so all's fair I reckon.
 
I swear by audio books. Nothing too exciting, at the moment I'm bingeing the Miss Read books (1950s tales of village life). I leave them running overnight, which does somewhat mitigate what I can listen to as I wake up if the book finishes. I really wish Audible would install a loop function or the ability to segue from one book into another.

It's like having a soothing adult voice reading to a child, and soothes me to sleep and keeps me there. If I do wake up, then my brain hooks into the story and falls asleep again rather than doing that rotation of 'did I pay the milkman? How long til pay day? Is that noise water getting into the loft? Did I do that thing I was supposed to be doing for work?'
 
catseye said:
I swear by audio books
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Try the 2011 Shadow Over Innsmouth read by Richard Coyle. Never fails.

I have several private Youtube playlists I go to. The Star Wars OT radio edits and Mighty Boosh radio series are good. I have ancient history lecture series' and also use Flight of the Concords a lot. Kiwi dialogue. Soooo soporific.
 
skinny said:
Try the 2011 Shadow Over Innsmouth read by Richard Coyle. Never fails.

I have several private Youtube playlists I go to. The Star Wars OT radio edits and Mighty Boosh radio series are good. I have ancient history lecture series' and also use Flight of the Concords a lot. Kiwi dialogue. Soooo soporific.
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Podcasts are a good call. Think we need a whole stream of 'stories that are completely boring' - and yes, I do listen to the 'Nothing much happens' ones...
 
James_H said:
I listen to podcasts or (gently talking) radio, either the voices blur into each other and I drift off, or I've got something to keep me occupied as I lie awake. Radio 4 is good for this, as are things like Unexplained or dark histories.
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That's a good call!
I think it was @escargot who first alerted me to the Dark Histories podcast and I've recently got into the habit of listening to one each night (last night's was the Beast of Gévaudan and I reckon Ben called that one right as hybrid wolf-dog attacks).
So the episodes with a Fortean theme tend to keep me intrigued, which means I will listen through to the end and then go to sleep.
Some episodes though, notably those true crime whudunnits, which seem to comprise at least half of the Dark Histories content, I find far less enthralling and I usually fall asleep well before the end.
 
Try not to drink caffeine beverages, don’t watch scary movies, and most of all don’t have a “ blow out “ fight with your partner before bed.

Try not to go to bed mad or worried, which is hard to do.

If all everything fails if possible have sex.
 
catseye said:
Podcasts are a good call. Think we need a whole stream of 'stories that are completely boring' - and yes, I do listen to the 'Nothing much happens' ones...
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Have you tried 'The Boring Talks' on BBC iPlayer? They are, in fact, rather interesting but on niche and seemingly dull subjects. 56 so far, from toilet roll tube serial numbers to Jeremy Bentham via basalt and roads that don't exist. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/series/p05t3gr2?page=3
 
I read this whole thread earlier this evening. From morning glories to having sex to pod casts. Fantastic.

I used to find years and years ago that my mind was so active I couldn't get to sleep or I'd wake up during the night and my mind would fixate on a problem and it'd go into a loop of repeating endlessly. My mind would play the tape to the end and then go back to the beginning interspersed with what I should have done and or said. That cursed phrase 'should have' claims so many victims along with 'everyone', 'everybody' and 'always', etc.

Then by chance I bought a tape cassette, remember them, by Richard Chandler one of the inventors or pioneers of NLP. In that cassette he talked about how to shut the mind up. Amongst many other suggestions, which all worked well, was if your mind won't give you peace, just keep repeating mentally 'shut the fuck up'. After a while the mind will do exactly as it's told. Repetition causes the problem and repitition can cure it.

I've never had a problem getting a good nights sleep since. If I find mind focusing on a particular problem in negative way, whether awake or going to sleep or during the night, I just have to think 'shut the fuck up' and it's instantly gone like magic.

As mentioned above, alcohol can also do wonders if the hangover isn't included.

Morning glory and going outside in the early hours to pee up the fence as the only option. Wonderfull.
 
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AnonyJ said:
Have you tried 'The Boring Talks' on BBC iPlayer? They are, in fact, rather interesting but on niche and seemingly dull subjects. 56 so far, from toilet roll tube serial numbers to Jeremy Bentham via basalt and roads that don't exist. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/series/p05t3gr2?page=3
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Do they run on a continuous loop? My problem with podcasts is that they don't run for 12 hours and I need continuous sound to keep me asleep. I don't sleep deeply enough to sleep through the ending of the sound, which is why I can only run audio books that are 12 hours + (not that I sleep for 12 hours +, but I do sleep for around 9 hours) and need something that won't end while I'm asleep and wake me up with sudden silence. I'm in a campaign with Audible to be able to 'loop' books, so you could pre-set another to start as soon as the previous one finishes, because I'm running out of books that I want to listen to that are long enough to keep me asleep.
 
catseye said:
Do they run on a continuous loop? My problem with podcasts is that they don't run for 12 hours and I need continuous sound to keep me asleep. I don't sleep deeply enough to sleep through the ending of the sound, which is why I can only run audio books that are 12 hours + (not that I sleep for 12 hours +, but I do sleep for around 9 hours) and need something that won't end while I'm asleep and wake me up with sudden silence. I'm in a campaign with Audible to be able to 'loop' books, so you could pre-set another to start as soon as the previous one finishes, because I'm running out of books that I want to listen to that are long enough to keep me asleep.
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same issue. Always tacking on eps to stretch the playing time.

Fall of Civilizations podcast is loooong and very wordy, Recommended.
 
catseye said:
Do they run on a continuous loop? My problem with podcasts is that they don't run for 12 hours and I need continuous sound to keep me asleep. I don't sleep deeply enough to sleep through the ending of the sound, which is why I can only run audio books that are 12 hours + (not that I sleep for 12 hours +, but I do sleep for around 9 hours) and need something that won't end while I'm asleep and wake me up with sudden silence. I'm in a campaign with Audible to be able to 'loop' books, so you could pre-set another to start as soon as the previous one finishes, because I'm running out of books that I want to listen to that are long enough to keep me asleep.
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They normally will play one after another on the BBC app/website, there's a total of at least 10 hours :)
 
The Alexa app will read out Kindle books to help you sleep. Its style is only slightly livelier than that of a Speak Your Weight machine. Helps the process along.:wink2:
 
escargot said:
The Alexa app will read out Kindle books to help you sleep. Its style is only slightly livelier than that of a Speak Your Weight machine. Helps the process along.:wink2:
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You can set Word to read out the text of manuscripts. I sometimes get it to read books I'm in the middle of writing, because hearing is a good way to pick up on repeated words. It's like being read to by Stephen Hawking.
 
catseye said:
You can set Word to read out the text of manuscripts. I sometimes get it to read books I'm in the middle of writing, because hearing is a good way to pick up on repeated words. It's like being read to by Stephen Hawking.
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The Guardian website will read out articles which is great until you've had enough and want to stop it. It carries on droning until you turn off the speakers.
 
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