Cannot Fall Asleep Despite Late Nights - Any Tips?
I have lately been working until 3-5am almost every night, but I have trouble falling asleep, due to my brain not being able to shut off (I think). Even as I type this, it is 2:15am on Saturday morning, and I have been trying to get my much-needed sleep but just tossing and turning for the last 2 hours. I don’t understand why I can’t fall asleep; I’ve barely slept at all recently and am exhausted. It is very frustrating.
I know others experience this work schedule and sleep difficulty as well; does anyone have any solutions to help? Preferably without taking melatonin. Thanks
What helped me when I had insomnia was just adopting the attitude of “fuck it.” I was constantly overthinking my sleep, and the consequences of not sleeping, which caused me to not be able to sleep.
I then changed my attitude to: bring it tf on. If my mind doesn’t want to sleep then fuck it let’s ride! I’m a man, I’ll handle it. People went to sleep in the trenches during WWII, I can handle this without a therapist or meditation or whatever other pussified theory is the new fad. I don’t care what anyone else thinks.
This might not be popular, but once I had this mindset shift, I slept like a baby. So I’m just putting this out there to help anyone who has the same problem, because they don’t teach you this in school. Think “fuck it, we’ll do it live!” by Bill O’Reilly.
This is the way to go. Another thing is don’t feel like you have to “utilize this time to get as much sleep in as possible” just think of it as a break. Like just lie there and appreciate that you get 3-4 hours of peace at least.
Yeah, sleep is important, but you are fucked regardless of whether you get 3 hours or 1 hour or 5 hours, point is your health is already fucked, might as well have peace of mind instead of thinking about the number of hours and calculating its correlation to how I’ll fare the next day, ironically that makes work the next day even worse.
Know exactly how this feels… no advice from me unfortunately as I still struggle with this. My mind just replays what I was doing in PowerPoint or emails I wrote over and over again in loop, even if it’s 4:30am. Sometimes this job really gets to you…
When I couldn't sleep, I started going to medical support groups at night. You can find support groups for all kinds of cancers and illnesses.
Of course, it was awkward at first. So I decided to go by "Cornelius" and not give my real name. I would just sit in the back and listen and be shy. But the less I said, the more people assumed the worst and hugged me. It helped me sleep, babies don't sleep as well as I do!
Eventually I started running into other people that were doing the same thing, we showed up at the same meetings. So we decided to split the schedule to avoid running into each other.
I met some interesting people, including this big bodybuilder guy named Bob (at least I think he gave me his real name). I'll see him the next time I'm back from my business trip this week.