Insomnia

[Gerontophile]

Insomnia

hobbes wrote:

Surely the foolproof way to get back to sleep is to have one off the wrist?

HAHAHAHAHA

[Gerontophile]

Insomnia

Bill Poster wrote:

It tends to wake the wife up, so 'no' is the answer to that...

and indeed

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA (for different reasons)

[Carcass]

Insomnia

Also, dare I say it *blows on knuckles and polishes them on lapel*, not drinking seems to do the trick as well.

[hobbes]

Insomnia

Is it not your fingernails you're supposed to do that with?

[Lucia Lanigan]

Insomnia

Yeah, I was surprised how much the quality of my sleep improved when I gave up drinking.

I can't handle Nytol, though. I wake up feeling lobotomised after I've taken it.

I've not generally had problems getting to sleep, but I have had the horrible "waking up four hours after you fall asleep" style of insomnia a lot. I find getting out of bed and doing something (reading, cleaning) is the best option; lying in bed awake but tired just guarantees I won't get to sleep properly again.

Also, I find the worst possible thing you can do for insomnia is stare at a computer screen.

[Guest]

Insomnia

My sleep actually suffered when I went off the beer for August and November. I found myself lying there still wide awake at 3am, my ears reacting to the slightest sound outside.

The flipside of this is on those occasions when I go to bed having had a fair bit to drink earlier in the evening, drop off easily enough, and then awake at 6am parched of throat and have to stagger to the fridge to drink some bottled water/orange squash.

[Sam]

Insomnia

I get to sleep fairly quickly most nights, but tend to stay up until 2 or 3 as the more anal among you may have noticed from the time signatures on my posts. I don't start work til 11 (well 10:30 actually, but no-one minds me getting in half an hour late I always do), which helps with this. Still don't get quite enough sleep though.

The exception to this is always Tuesday nights, when I have a salsa class until about 11, get home around 11:40 and have too much energy still going round my body to be able to drop off properly. Vigorous exercise isn't a good thing to help you sleep quickly.

I don't think running my website helps either. Partly because time differences mean I have to stay up until ridiculous hours mid-week to follow the Copas, mostly because I do my writing late at night and using your brain in that manner so shortly before trying to shut it down completely for the night also doesn't help, I suspect.

Probably nor does eating chocolate. But what the hell.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Insomnia

I stupidly nodded off for 3 hours earlier this evening. Now I'm completely awake. There's some cricket on about 3 and I'll probably watch that. Got Radio Carcass on at the moment. I don't recommend it for sleeping.

Wingco, does classical music work for you? Something that doesn't go loud/quiet, without recognisable words perhaps.

[garcia]

Insomnia

what has worked for me lately is listening to podcasts of plays and things like that, it takes away the boredom of lying awake and enables me to drift off eventually.

i am awake right now after a pretty weird dream, in which i flew to moscow in an RAF tornado and ended up being invited by a woman who turned out to be roman abramovich's girlfriend to have dinner at the oligarch's dacha. she was obviously sweet on me but i couldn't relax for fear of taking a beating from RA's goons. dinner was a little awkward. RA's house contained lots of obviously expensive antique furniture - but it all seemed a bit thrown together. RA was pleasant enough but it was embarrassing at the end when i asked for his email address and he refused.

[garcia]

Insomnia

tubby's mention of something that doesn't go loud/soft reminds me of the other night, when i drifted off listening to macbeth only to be jolted awake by a bloodcurdling scream - in confusion i panicked before realising it was macduff discovering duncan rather than a lunatic running around my house.

[tee rex]

Insomnia

"Letter from America" always worked for me. Not the content, which was usually worth hearing, but Alistair Cooke's voice, his delivery, the long pauses. A lullaby from Broadway.

Unfortunately he no longer provides this valuable service, but I'm sure you can get hold of a tape, or whatever it is people use this century.

[beak]

Insomnia

I find the same thing with William Burroughs recordings; turn the volume down low enough so it doesn't disturb you, and most of the words are indistinct. He had an incredibly relaxing voice.

[wingco]

Insomnia

Tubby, the "classical" piece of music which always gets me off to sleep is Gavin Bryars' The Sinking Of The Titanic. Soporific but superb.

[HORN]

Insomnia

I found getting out of bed when I woke up proved utterly self-defeating, in as much as I allowed it to become a reflex.

Breathing exercises seemed to work for a while but then I started, bizarely, to feel as though I was being manipulated (by myself, yes, I know), so lay there thinking "I'm not going to be fooled by that old trick".

Nowadays I stay in bed and attempt to do rock hard cryptic crosswords, which for my purposes means any cryptic crossword I can lay my hands on.

[Sits]

It's an old thread; I was struggling to find The Night Shift.

Anyway, I keep waking up at 3:30am - for the last week - wide awake and mind racing. Even getting up, going downstairs etc. doesn't help; my mind won't relax enough. So I'm losing a couple of hours a night roughly.

I know it's pretty lightweight by proper imsomniac standards, but I'm a delicate thing so any tips welcome.

[Lang Spoon]

The 6, 7 o’clock waking (up at 8) is wrecking me. Half awake dreaming about a Grotesque version of work till the alarm goes. Aware I’m not asleep, brain whirring. Half asleep at my desk by 3pm. Daylight helps impair proper sleep for another few hours, but eye mask means guaranteed sty, even if only wearing a clean one each night. And my bovine eyelashes get all smashed and crushed.

[Amor de Cosmos]

It's an old thread; I was struggling to find The Night Shift.

Anyway, I keep waking up at 3:30am - for the last week - wide awake and mind racing. Even getting up, going downstairs etc. doesn't help; my mind won't relax enough. So I'm losing a couple of hours a night roughly.

I know it's pretty lightweight by proper imsomniac standards, but I'm a delicate thing so any tips welcome.

I used to get this a lot when I worked at home and had multiple deadlines. I frequently ended up going into the studio (adjacent to our bedroom and working). Then, of course, I was wrecked later in the day. What worked in the end was finding something that used similar mental processes but I knew nothing about. In my case I'd design airships. It worked really well. I couldn't get anything wrong because I didn't know how to get anything right. I created an airship shopping mall, for instance. Looked great in my head but there it stayed, because I couldn't take it anywhere else. I think it lets imagination take over from (attempted) problem solving. Imagination is a akin to dreaming and dreaming leads to sleep or it did for me.

[Sits]

Oh I like that. I won’t use airships though. I’ll be original.

Thanks. I’m almost looking forward to waking up at 3:30am tomorrow.