It’s actually like the title asks; What does everyone here do when you can’t sleep and are wide awake besides being on phone?
So let’s say it’s in the middle of the night and you are unable to sleep. You have to keep things soundless due to family or partner.
Trying to get the phone usage significantly lower when being in bed but it feels like nothing can replace the ‘easiness of mindlessly scrolling’.
Dreaming awake. Idk how to call it otherwise.
I invent to myself the most ridiculous stories of things of my imagination and i play them in my head, like a sort of head game.
When i do a sufficiently long story, i often fall asleep on it and i continue it the next evening, and it can last months. Plus you get better at mental visualisation the more you do it. I remember dreams almost every night since i did that for a long time.
Reading books or playing video games. If I have the energy then also working on projects.
I live walking distance to the best queer bar in the south, you can find me there many nights after midnight. Plenty of clubs, dancing, house music. I just be roaming the night looking for pretty lights and thumping music. Perks of living in a major city
- YouTube (radio drama channels) - there are some fantastic plays.
- podcasts using antennapod on F-Droid.
Read or take a dose of melatonin.
I listen to audiobooks I’ve already listened to so that they don’t take much effort to keep up with while still being more interesting than laying there motionless with nothing to do.
I do this with low key youtube videos, downloaded to mp3.
Also, take another clonodine after a couple of hours.
Hell yeah sister love that long form content
A doctor told me that if you aren’t asleep after 20 mins, you should get out of bed and do something quiet til you are tired. So you learn to associate being in bed with sleep.
Or as someone else told me: beds are for sleeping, sex and dying.
I would always struggle with falling asleep while trying to read dense scientific literature and journal articles. I’ve now learned to weaponize that to induce sleep.
Not exactly quiet but works for me because of the layout of my house.
I go to the laundry room which is on the other side of the house from the bedrooms, turn the kitchen light on, laundry room like off (so it’s light enough to see but pretty dim), sit on the washer and play sad songs on my guitar.
It’s therapuetic and after about 20 minutes I’m just exhausted.
I play some music (thru earbuds unless my wife happens to be away). My go to is the Goldberg Variations. I think the reason it works, even though it can be quite busy and fast in some parts is that there is enough complexity to occupy the mind, but enough sameness to lull, and I know it really well.
Sometimes I’ll take 1mg of melatonin, and a cup of warm milk with honey.
I leave my dark, warm place of sleep, walk into a room with a light & cool air, stay for a few minutes, maybe have a drink of water, then lay a heating pad across my stomach and go back to sleep.
Ambien.
Throw on an eye mask and headphones and turn on an audiobook.
Call it quits and get started on work, play a video game, run or workout.
Ambien can be crazy though, my mother used to go out and eat an entire cake (or cook something and eat it all) in the middle of the night. More anecdotes than can be counted.
As an alternative (because, being her child I would probably do the same and would rather not) I made mini brownies with 3MG THC and threw them in the freezer …30 seconds in the microwave and in an hour I’m sound asleep.
Supposedly the best thing to do is to lay perfectly motionless in bed despite being wide awake, because that’s still a form of rest and “better than nothing”. This isn’t always what I do myself, though: sometimes I will take an extra melatonin tablet or use the bathroom, and I always wear my trusty eye mask in any case; but if you absolutely have to fidget with something in bed, I think the most recommendable thing is physical paper books. Either books for reading, including comic books; or a notebook into which you can jot down ideas, journal, doodle, whatever it may be.
Look at the stars for a while.
Read until I fall asleep again
