Sleep

I’ve been having trouble with insomnia for several years. It came in waves, a couple weeks it was better, a couple weeks worse. I’ve been using a sleep tracking app to keep track of how bad I slept. I’d look at it and analyze everything and feel sorry for myself.

Say it was like 3 years and say I spent on average 2 hours a night not being able to sleep. That’d be over 2000 hours lost, and that’s probably a conservative estimate.

I always knew one had to get up regularly, but haven’t been doing it since probably 2012. I’d try to limit blue-light in the evening, and did all kinds of things which are tangential to good sleep. Anything but regular sleep schedule!

About two weeks ago I decided enough was enough, deleted the sleep tracking app, set up a “dumb” alarm for 7:07 every day of the week, and reduced total time in bed to something uncomfortably short (around six and half hours). For the past week I’ve been sleeping great, all thanks to these two things. I still have trouble getting up at 7:07, but that’s a short moment of discomfort compared to hours of insomnia.

There’s a wonderful page describing how to sleep better. I didn’t even need to do all that much to cure my terrible insomnia – just the basic basics helped almost immediately. I wonder, how else can I easily drastically improve my quality of life?