Since this insomnia is apparently a high-impact topic, I might as well share some anecdotes from my own battle with sleep difficulties.
I’ve had some success with behavioral solutions to insomnia (“don’t use screens after 11 PM” type stuff). But the problem with behavioral solutions, in my view, is that they are too brittle. Life always happens and your habit breaks at some point. So in the spirit of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s comments on fragility, I’ve instead recently focused on finding “robust” or “antifragile” solutions to the problem of getting enough sleep. These tend to be technological. Right now I’m stacking a bunch of different technologies for better sleep:
Airway expansion. Note: I haven’t gotten a sleep study, and I doubt I would strictly meet the criteria for sleep apnea diagnosis, but I still seem to be benefiting a lot from this.
Lying on an acupressure mat. Note: I think the most common explanations for why acupuncture works are pseudoscience. I recommend this book.
If I have to get up in the middle of the night, I wear orange glasses to block blue light. I also colored the night lights in our house with a red marker so they emit less blue light.
It might sound like a lot, but the nightly overhead of maintaining this is not high—less than 1% of the time I spend asleep. In aggregate this all seems to improve my sleep considerably in a way that doesn’t depend on fragile behavioral interventions. (Some of the most valuable-seeming additions have been pretty recent, so we’ll see how things work long term.)
Note: I suspect my sleep problems are more “physiological” than “psychological” in nature. CBT-i might work better for someone whose problems are more psychological.
Since this insomnia is apparently a high-impact topic, I might as well share some anecdotes from my own battle with sleep difficulties.
I’ve had some success with behavioral solutions to insomnia (“don’t use screens after 11 PM” type stuff). But the problem with behavioral solutions, in my view, is that they are too brittle. Life always happens and your habit breaks at some point. So in the spirit of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s comments on fragility, I’ve instead recently focused on finding “robust” or “antifragile” solutions to the problem of getting enough sleep. These tend to be technological. Right now I’m stacking a bunch of different technologies for better sleep:
Ebb forehead cooler device
Weighted blanket
f.lux
White noise machine
Eye mask
Glycine
Airway expansion. Note: I haven’t gotten a sleep study, and I doubt I would strictly meet the criteria for sleep apnea diagnosis, but I still seem to be benefiting a lot from this.
Lying on an acupressure mat. Note: I think the most common explanations for why acupuncture works are pseudoscience. I recommend this book.
If I have to get up in the middle of the night, I wear orange glasses to block blue light. I also colored the night lights in our house with a red marker so they emit less blue light.
It might sound like a lot, but the nightly overhead of maintaining this is not high—less than 1% of the time I spend asleep. In aggregate this all seems to improve my sleep considerably in a way that doesn’t depend on fragile behavioral interventions. (Some of the most valuable-seeming additions have been pretty recent, so we’ll see how things work long term.)
Note: I suspect my sleep problems are more “physiological” than “psychological” in nature. CBT-i might work better for someone whose problems are more psychological.