Fastest way to get to sleep: 1. be a cat 2. find a mousepad or keyboard
Judging by my Facebook feed, basically all of my friends are crazed insomniacs. I’ve been dealing with sleep issues since I was a little kid — from insomnia to sleep paralysis (seriously — and my sleep paralysis is worst when I’m ovulating).
During my junior year of college, I got insomnia so bad I had to go on prescription meds — I tried everything, but my stress just caught up to me in a way that necessitated seeing a doctor. Don’t fuck around with insomnia. It can hurt you. After days of virtually no sleep, I actually did start getting visual/audio distortions, not to mention paranoia. If it gets that bad, see a doctor. Don’t torture yourself. There’s a lot of stigma attached to any brain meds, including sleeping pills, but there are a lot of options out there beyond Ambien and Lunesta, which admittedly are terrifying due to that whole sleep-driving thing. (For me, the ticket was Trazodone, which has a pretty chill side effect profile.)
If the following guide doesn’t help you, and you’re hesitant to take medicine: there aren’t a lot of meds that will screw you up worse than a few weeks of not sleeping. Take it from experience. As a young Michael Jackson said, the love you save may be your own.
But if you’re not at the point of I-need-to-get-to-a-doctor-before-I-strangle-my-neighbors-in-a-fit-of-insomniac-rage, the following tips should help you find some rest:
- Practice good sleep hygiene. Stop looking at lights or screens about an hour before you want to go to bed (if you absolutely MUST spend another hour on Reddit, dim your screen and get a free program called f.lux, which makes your monitor mimic the changes in natural sunlight). Turn off all blue or white lights in your room — turn your cellphone upside down if it has one. Red LEDs are okay. (Quick, imprecise science behind that — light stimulates proteins in your eyes that tell your pineal gland to stop producing melatonin, the sleep chemical. This is why in nature, we wake up with the sunrise like the good Lord intended.)
- Have a routine. Take a shower (the cold afterward will help you sleep), floss your teeth, do some nice yoga poses (Google “yoga for sleep”), and do this every night so your body knows routine = sleep. Try your best to go to bed and wake up at the same times every day. Seriously: resist the urge to sleep in. It will only confuse your body and make sleep harder on subsequent work nights, and plus, those extra morning hours on weekends could be used for way sexier things than sleep, like finishing your novel or playing video games. (Sexy is relative!)
- Make sure the temperature is nice and cool. Cool temperatures encourage sleep. 68 degrees fahrenheit seems to work well for me. If you don’t have much control over the temperature, this fan is the tits (bonus white noise). Sometimes in the summer, I’ll get desperate and just run my pajamas under lukewarm water.
- If you can’t sleep, don’t try to force it. Get up and do something to take your mind off things, like knitting or reading. Go back to bed when you get tired.
- Orgasm. Look, it helps. PROTIP: I’ve been seeing a lot of vibrators on Groupon Goods lately. Way more interesting than the $10 mesh bag they were advertising a few months ago. (To be fair, a $10 mesh bag? DEAL OF A LIFETIME.)
- Melatonin is a good OTC way to get into a natural rhythm, though it won’t conquer insomnia. Remember that the ideal dose for a human brain is 3mg, but my local Walgreens seems to sell bottles of mostly 5mg and 10mg. Why?
- Try some herbal shit. Legit, some of this stuff works: chamomile tea (delicious), valerian (smells like doggy doo, but very calming), hibiscus, and passionflower have all seemed to help me. Tazo Calm tea has a really lovely mix of herbs, and tastes fantastic. I actually drink chamomile tea throughout the day to promote continuous wellbeing (and because I’m naturally sort of an edgy motherfucker).
- Still not working? Try Benadryl. It’s non-addictive, pretty gentle, and effective.
- None of this shit working? Go to a doctor. Find somebody to drive you, if you can. Get a bus ticket. You really shouldn’t be driving right now.
- Get mono. This cured my insomnia a few years ago. Seriously, mono was one of the greatest things ever to have happened to me, as much as it sucked. I recommend it to any insomniac with a hardy liver and gallbladder.
