Are you just always tired? Do you have some kind of bedtime ritual? Have you had issues sleeping in the past and how did you handle that?
Are you just always tired? Do you have some kind of bedtime ritual? Have you had issues sleeping in the past and how did you handle that?
Train yourself. Pavlov’s sleep. Every time you go to bed, watch/listen to the same thing. Eventually, your brain associate the thing with “time to sleep”. That’s how it works for me, anyway. I turn on the same movie and pass out in minutes. Don’t do it with one of your favorites, though.
And also, don’t do things like lay in bed watching TV or messing with your phone all the time. You want the bed to be mostly mentally associated with sleep
I did this with the original Twilight Zone episodes! As soon as I hear that iconic intro I feel tired. It doesn’t work perfectly and I sometimes still have trouble sleeping but it helped a lot. It took years of doing this. I picked Twilight Zone because it’s interesting enough to turn on but not interesting enough to stay awake for.
I have seen every episode hundreds of times at this point I bet.
Fun story, i used to do a lot of fly-in/out for a mine close to the artic circle which involved getting stuck on loud propeller planes for hours.
At some point, I realised that I could fall asleep before take-off but rarely during. Unintentionnally, I trained myself to fall asleep before takeoff.
Now, I just fall asleep before takeoff in any plane which makes my wife mad when she is excited to travel somewhere and I just doze off …
The only time I’m able to fall asleep with something playing is when I’m majorly sleep deprived or I’m sick. My brain can’t turn off when it’s by itself, much less when there’s something playing. If my brain is being handed information, I’m immediately wide awake for it.
My “thing” is a Hercules movie from Mystery Science Theater 3000. Those movies are so low intensity, and I’ve fallen asleep to them hundreds of times over the past few years. I put a sleep timer on my ancient iPad on low brightness and low volume for 15m, and I’m usually asleep before time’s up.
I usually fall asleep to random youtube iceberg videos. Never thought about doing the same piece of media every night. My initial thought is that I’ll get bored of it after x amount of sleeps and then my mind starts wandering into my anxious thoughts. I’ll give it a shot though
Maybe finds a few you like and make a playlist, then just watch those specific ones? Something that you can mentally focus on when in bed with your eyes closed, but also something that’s not competing to hold your visual attention as well as no giant volume swings for your audio attention. Don’t want to fall asleep to quiet dialog only to be woken by the shootout in the next scene, or fall asleep to a mellow ballad and awoken by a rock track, for example.
Edited to add: around getting bored with it— I have changed what I listen or watch every few years, but it’s a very slow ramp up of new and ramp down of old. Something your brain recognizes and likes, but isn’t trying to stay awake to read the next page or see the next episode or upcoming challenge or whatever.
I think at the core, I am applying the same idea or concept of getting into a routine but i don’t focus too much on the words they’re saying as much as the tone or cadence of speech. Honestly now that I think of it, it feels like falling asleep in a lecture lol. Like it doesn’t matter who’s talking or maybe even what they are talking about, as long as they keep droning on monotonously