I’ve been working on my sleep. Formerly, I would get four and a half to five and a half hours of sleep per night, and I thought that was healthy. It’s not. I’ve now achieved seven hours of sleep a night on average.
I’ve been working on falling asleep and have come up with some ideas. First, a few poignant quotations:
“Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed…. But then begins a journey in my head”
—Shakespeare
“Man finds nothing so intolerable as to be in a state of complete rest…. Then he faces his nullity, loneliness, inadequacy, dependence, helplessness, emptiness.”
—Pascal
“When we are at rest is when we become restless.”
—Often attributed to Pascal
“Sweet sleep, thou comest like a cloud on wings, and all is peace and quiet”
—Author unknown, but often attributed to Goethe
I’ve found that “falling asleep” is not what happens. We can fall down or fall off a bike, but we can’t fall asleep. We don’t fall into sleep, we relax into sleep. For me, I need to get physically relaxed and, what’s more important, mentally relaxed.
Relaxing my body is pretty easy. I scan for areas of stress and find a comfortable position where I sleep best. With a relaxed body, if my mind is active, restless, I tell myself that what is going on in my mind will be there tomorrow. I can deal with it, if necessary, tomorrow. That helps sometimes. If I have a lot of things on my mind, I write them down and get them out of my mind.
I’m now getting to sleep easier. I thought I would share these ideas with you. Falling into sleep is really relaxing into sleep.
Carl Barney
January 8, 2025
To get a night’s sleep between 11:00 and 7:30 when I get up for sports, Alexa reminds me at 8 like a mother hen, ” Philip, start winding down. I have to be finished with dinner and in bed reading a book soon after which is how I like to spend the last hours of every day. Turn down the lights after 9:00. Put away the phone with its blue lights. No TV after 9:00 or 10:00 because that’s a blue light. Take a melatonin around 10.
Unlike Jenn, not reading fiction or a novel at the end of the day because I would want to know what happens next.
Instead I have something really boring by the side of my bed. And I shift from the novel or short stories to a textbook In the last hour after 10: Calculus. Or better yet, Organic Chemistry. It’s not very interesting and it’s hard to follow and repetitious with formulas so it’s ~ excruciatingly ~ boring. And sleep i nducing. …SNOOORE…
I’ve never yet gotten past the first chapter of that textbook 🤣.
I need 8, preferably 9 hours of sleep to wake up. Very refreshed and bounce out of bed alert.
And the sbove sequence does it. I don’t necessarily do every one of those things, but even the majority is enough.
Putting off the worry whilst getting to sleep shows the invariable power of procrastination. Although laziness pays off eventually, procrastination always pays off now.
I love to fall asleep listening to an Ayn Rand novel, on slow speed (.5x). I am always impressed by how well her fiction translates to being narrated, especially by Christopher Hurt. There are many audiobook apps that allow the audio to fade out after a chosen number of minutes- but if you are still awake then, you can continue to listen by giving your phone a little nudge. Listen Audiobook Player is the app I like (I put it on an old, sim-card-free phone so it can’t disturb my sleep).