When I can’t sleep, I turn around and sleep “upside down” - moving my pillows to where my feet were beforehand, and my feet to where my head was beforehand - and I stick with that for a week or so. It gives me a week or so without insomnia and then wears off, so I have to turn myself back around for the next 7-12 day period.
Admittedly this could just be a me thing, but let’s put our faith in this method and let the power of placebo effect take hold. Boom, minor bouts of sleeplessness are cured.
What are your own examples of this?
Here’s how I quit smoking about 15 years ago.
Step one: for about a month, every time I smoked I told myself I’m ready to quit. Every cigarette, every time.
Step two: the next month, every cigarette, every time, I told myself they stink and taste like shit.
Took about 3 weeks into the second month and I never picked up another. Oh and I can be around other smokers and don’t crave them. They still fucking stink.
YMMV
smoker in my early 20s and this advice might change my life.
If you can’t sleep. Get up. Get out of your bed for a while.
Staying awake while laying in bed often changes the association of sleep with the bed. Removing sleep conditioning effects.
Also as someone who has had insomnia since I was a child. I can tell you if I lay in bed. Unable to sleep. And Stay there. Rolling around. I won’t ever fall asleep.
But if I force myself to get up. Maybe have something to drink. Walk around a bit. Stare out the window for a bit. Then go back , I’m more likely to fall asleep.
And if I’m having really bad insomnia. I go for a walk. At this point I’m my life I can tell if it’s going to require a walk or just getting up and moving around the apartment/house for a bit.
Even a 15-20 min walk can do wonders. But I typically do 30 to 1 hour walk. It depends on how I’m feeling.
You would think exercising in the middle of the night would wake you up more. But nope.
9/10 times I go for a short walk. I get back and fall to sleep almost immediately.
It’s hard to force yourself to get up when you are exhausted and just want to sleep. But it’s do the walk or not sleep at all.
Also. Going out at 2 or 3 am on a week day is kinda of an interesting experience. Depending where you live, you might be the only person around.
It’s eirie and surreal. Subliminal spaces.
I quite like it. That also helps motivate me to do the insomnia walk. (Sometimes I ride my bike instead which is really nice as there are minimum cars. -make sure you are in light clothes and have lights and reflectors on your bike).
Yep. Doctors and randos alike will keep telling you to just try harder. Fuck that.
Read a book. Work some more on your project. Go for a run. Don’t try to sleep.
Years of reading in bed late at night while exhausted have conditioned me to associate reading with falling asleep. I don’t have insomnia much anymore, often the opposite. Any time I want to lay down and read my book before bed, I’m out like a light before I finish a single chapter. It could be a super power, but it also means it takes me months to finish a single novel. Also not ideal when I occasionally need to read reports or training materials at work and get to the end and my head is on the desk and I can’t keep my eyes open.
Hah, you swapped insomnia for reading-induced narcolepsy. Neat!
The suggestion would be to not read in bed
If you feel like you are about to sneeze, but you don’t want to (maybe you are on a video call, or trying to be quiet, whatever), tickle the roof of your mouth with your tongue. It works surprisingly well.
If you feel like you are about to sneeze but can’t quite manage it (and do want to), tilt your head upwards and look into a bright light.
Works if you’re photosensitive to any degree, which most people are.
Staying warm actually does ward off illness. Specifically, you need to keep your nose warm or else its local immune response becomes surprisingly ineffective.
I wanna make a nose-hat now to keep warm
Nose warmers is a thing, a silly thing, but a thing.
In a financial negotiation, avoid saying a number first, even if it seems like you’re being rude, just say stuff like “what’s your budget” instead. This trick sounds really stupid but somehow it is extremely effective.
Absolutely. And in a more general sense, whenever negotiating with businessmen, tell yourself they’re nasty rotten pirates beforehand and throughout the process. Visualise them having peglegs, hooks, eyepatches and battered old sea hats. Do NOT give in, do NOT name that number before they do.
I prefer to think of it like a competitive game; you’re trying to win and you aren’t going to go easy on anyone, but you still treat your adversaries with as much empathy and respect as that allows.
When you sprain your ankle, DON’T MOVE. I used to try and walk it off because that’s what everyone does and even coaches recommend it, but that’s when the actual damage is done.
Spraining is usually just your tendons/ligaments going into emergency mode (getting very short/tight). So if you try to walk while they are still tight, they will actually tear, doing damage that takes weeks to heal. If you instead just keep that ankle perfectly still for like 30 seconds to 2 min, the ankle will be completely fine.
Trick is, you have to overcome the social pressure to hurry it along (i.e. on a hike at work, or on a sport field).
I sprained my ankle once trying to dodge out of the way of a classmate I was trying to avoid when i saw them at a park 😂 What you say is correct. Kind pf wish I’d gotten it checked at the time but it could’ve been worse and I rested soon after hobbling out of view
If you’re experiencing brainfreeze, press your tongue to the roof of your mouth. Works for me every time.
This has never worked for me
You could also try drinking some warm water, that could help. I’m sorry it didn’t work for you. 😕
If you have a song stuck in your head, and it’s driving you a bit mad: listen to it. Something about your mind trying to fill things in (it’s been many years since I’ve read this bit of advice, and unsure entirely on why).
Basically songs stick in our head when we can’t finish them, so songs with really subtle endings or heavily repeated phrases will stick the most.
Or try to rememberr how the song ends.
If you’re clumsy, do a grappling martial art like wrestling or Jiu-Jitsu. After 6 months even if you still suck at that martial art (e.g., me) your nerves and muscles will know how to move shockingly efficiently.
Ballet or other dance classes can also help agility.
Don’t be a cunt.
Simple advice that works. More people should try it.
But that doesn’t sound counter-intuitive my dear fellow
don’t be a cunt.
I flip around when I can’t sleep as well. It only works sometimes for me.
This probably isn’t very useful to most but you’d be surprised how much info you can get from paying attention to the smells around you. I use odor for navigating places like malls.
I have insomnia and I’m just here posting this shit.
I think that’s good advice! We should all try and be a bit more attuned to our senses.
Helps with personal hygiene, too 🤫😅. But - at least for me - a disconnect with our sense of smell largrly comes from living in a city, spending too much time indoors, and spending too much time in our own space which smells like us. So having bad hygiene makes it harder to smell which makes it harder to identify that we have bad hygiene!!
But yeah, I follow my nose a lot more than other people and it makes the world a much more interesting place. People who’ve been to a lot of food markets, perhaps at christmas, understand this.
In your head, change the name of a food you wish to avoid. I’ve done this with McD’s.
In my head, it’s been called McDicks since high school. I, personally, don’t enjoy eating dicks. So, when I see the sign, and I feel like a Big Mac would go down easy, I say to myself, “I don’t eat dicks.”
It works.
For those who enjoy eating dicks, well, you’ll have to choose another association. Also, I didn’t think the phrase “feel like a Big Mac would go down easy” would be so overtly sexual.
I honestly hate mcdonalds anyway, but the range of stuff I’ve tried there is very limited - maybe if i had a big mac I’d succumb to the MiccyD.
For me it just feels like food designed to make you sick, either because you’re compelled to eat too much or because it’s sooooo unnatural.
There was this movie on Netflix called Spiderhead where they’re testing drugs including one that makes people overeat until they hurl, and watching it reminded me exactly how i felt whenever I went there as a kid. I steer clear now. Trauma!
For me it just feels like food designed to make you sick, either because you’re compelled to eat too much or because it’s sooooo unnatural.
McDonald’s has been specifically engineered for over half a century to be as pleasing and addictive as possible, by a huge corporation who hires legions of scientists in various disciplines to achieve that singular goal.
In my mind, it’s akin to smoking: the first few times you try it, it’s gross; after that, it’s a dopamine hit that’s easy to become reliant upon.
If you’re stuck on a creative project or out of ideas on how to approach a problem, and you feel a little fatigued mentally, have a cup of coffee or something with caffeine and lie down for a short nap.
It’ll take some time for the caffeine to kick in, so you might even drift off, and this way it seems to stimulate the mind in a way that produces insights and ideas more than just keeping you from feeling tired.
It puts you in a hypnagogic state (between asleep and awake), where your brain’s filter is switched off.
Taking LSD has a similar effect, but is frowned upon in most work environments.Nappucino! Works every time
You are the first person I have ever met (other than my mom, who I learned it from) who does the “sleep upside down” thing. It totally works!
Thanks, i was worried it would be too widespread and nobody would find it remarkable 😂
Erin in The Office does it too.
Drink more water. Eat more fiber.
Yeah if you like poop and pee
Go on…
“if”
“like”
“poop”
Man, I still eat like shit, but when I switched to drinking only water (instead of mainly soda/juice), I was easily able to lose the excess weight that had been building up.
No other changes. Just drink water. Only water. Water is good.
I keep a pitcher of cold, filtered water in the mini-fridge by my desk. That shit is delicious. And I don’t even miss anything. If you’re struggling with the switch to water, get yourself some good water.
I mean, you can also get some taste in your water by drinking tea.
If I wanted it to taste bad and bitter, sure.
/c/ShitUSiansSay
To those consuming this, 100% try it. The first 3 or 4 days suck because your body expects calories with it’s drink and the buzz of sugar and caffeine. You can escape this by having a small chocolate with your water when you feel the craving.
Second point, mineral content, processing, temperature, and plumbing play a big role in your enjoyment. Personally I can’t drink cold water, it has to be room temperature and tap water here is too mineral heavy. Instead I refill 5 gallon water jugs and use a water crock.
yes. you need water more than calories and while the rule of threes is basically about calories with the three weeks if you don’t have fiber with those calories you will have a medical emergency on your hands. Granted though you can have to much water and fiber so its kinda a balance. I mean granted with water its more about to much water and not enough electrolytes.
Dude, what on Earth are you blabbering on about?
Hyponatremia . We called it hyponatriosis or ‘water-drunk’ in the army. We had a girl in our platoon over-hydrate and go floppy on a march, and my swear-to-god buck-oh-five bunkmate had to play crutch for the rest of it while we all redistroed all their collective gear. (calm your breathing: they marched in back with the medicos under obs the entire time, and we didn’t fail the little exercise we were on, and it was her choice to continue at every stage, and she was lauded for it afterward. This is a heroism story.)
Water with occasional electrolytes ok?
Also did you all reprimand the
deadweight“hero” in private or not?
Rule of threes (survival) - Wikipedia https://share.google/Gc0HVUDXToxTKHD0A
Why is this a Google link?
water and fiber and the need for both in a diet but also that they can be overdosed.
