How I corrected my sleeping patterns

I've had some level of insomnia almost all of my life. It is extremely rare that I am tired when you "are supposed to be tired" and on the flip side I spend a great deal of time feeling exhausted throughout the day. I mostly never nap unless it is absolutely essential.

Because of this, most of my life I have been really tired to the point of looking and feeling ill most of the time during the day and then it got to a point where I felt like I had some sort of psychological block that didn't allow me to sleep at night like a normal person.

The trick I used to get back on a regular sleeping schedule might not apply to most people and some of the tactics I used could be seen as "bad" by some, but it ended up working for me in the end.

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Fight Club is an excellent movie by the way and I recently found out that it was attacked by critics at the time and didn't do very well in the box office as a consequence.

Some of what is in the quote is true though: My experience was that because sleep was so elusive to me that I often had difficulty figuring out what was real in my life and what was part of a dream I had. I would every now and then, tell my friends about some shared experience only to later discover that it was a dream hallucination that I had and they weren't actually there for it.

I required vast amounts of caffeine just to function at work and I think at least in part, my alcoholism that exists to this day began because that was one of the solutions I found that worked like a charm to make me sleep. It of course has some rather ill effects on the back end though, one of which is a hangover and those have gotten worse the older I have gotten. Societies entertainment availability hasn't helped, and that is part of the reason why insomnia reared its ugly head in my midlife portion of my life as well. I have an unusual job that doesn't necessarily have a schedule, so there were never any real consequences to me staying up all night. The only thing I ever really have a schedule for is my weekly bowling outings and those don't start until 11am.

My sleep patters were all over the place and for some people this might seem manageable. I know it kind of did for most of my adult life once I started working remotely without a start/finish time and I kind of took pride in it at some point in my life, but later I just felt like not having a sleep schedule was negatively affecting my health. So I made a few adjustments that changed everything for me and have been working to this day.

So what did I do?

Well for starters, I needed a little bit of help when I began: I'm sure there are some yoga masters out there or people who are really into meditation that would tell you that you just have to "mind over matter" your way through this, but I wanted to bring in the big guns at least to start.

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Step 1: Drugs

This is Zopistad, or as it is commonly known in the west, Ambien. Zolpidem tartrate is the primary active ingredient and it increases the activity of something called GABA which is a chemical produced in the brain that encourages sleep. If you are new to this product it will work as a tranquilizer of sorts meaning that after you take one, in an hour or so, you WILL go to sleep.

They claim it is not habit-forming but I am here to tell you that this is not true. Imagine that huh? Pharmaceutical companies lying to you in order to sell more products. That never happens now does it?

Well anyway, I chose a normal time of night to take the Ambien in the first week. This was always 9 or 10 pm. Then the next step I took is probably the most important.

Step 2: Get devices away from you in bed

How many of us have sat in bed "doom-scrolling" on a phone or just as bad, having the entire history of the world's cinema collection connected to a 50 inch TV on the other side of the room. It should come as no surprise that having these things around would engage my brain and keep me awake. I would say this is more true with the phone because it is a 2-way street if you want it to be, but it was just as bad with the TV. Falling asleep in front of the TV is fine and dandy in the afternoon on the sofa, but using it as a rock-a-bye-baby in the bedroom, I believe is a terrible idea.

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So in order to disengage my brain from the screens that were keeping me awake, I don't use the TV at night and I don't even keep the phone in the room with me. I read a book and there have only been a handful of books that have ever been capable of keeping me awake. With the drug and the book combined, I found my eyes getting heavy within 30 minutes. I also now had something to "calm my mind" because I would just think about what I had just read in the book to keep the intrusive voices about things like what I have coming up in the future at bay

Step 3: Wake up time, even when you don't have to

This part was a bit more annoying and is probably more specific to me because I don't have a traditional job. I would set an alarm for 6am for every single day even if I had no reason to be up at that time. For me this is almost every day since I can start and finish my work whenever I feel like it.

However, what I have experienced as far as my job is concerned is that if I was waking up at 6, I was finished with the work I could do that day a lot earlier Sometimes before breakfast.

There were days that getting up at 6 seemed a bit painful, such as days that I had alcohol the night before, but I did it anyway, without breaks. I've been doing this for a while now

Step 4: Exercise in the evening

This might be tough for some people but for me it really did the trick. It is a lot more easy to coax yourself in a sleep state if you did something rather exhausting just a few hours before you hit the sheets. It didn't have to be anything major and it could be something as simple as going for a walk on the beach for me or just taking Nadi for a longer-than-average walk on the crazy streets of Da Nang.

With these things combined I now experience very little difficulty in getting to sleep and I no longer fear the alarm going off in the morning either. I do not regularly take any medication anymore, that was only necessary in the first week but I will admit that I keep them in my bedside table should I ever have one of those nights where I am tossing and turning for more than say 30-40 minutes at night.

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The end result of all of this is that the entirety of my overall life has improved. I am more productive, happier, and find things like getting regular exercise a lot easier. It also helps that I am kind of devoted to not drinking very much very often these days as well but it was really tough for me at the start and while I do believe that we should have as few pharmaceuticals in our life as possible, they do serve a purpose if you are strong enough to not get addicted to them.

In some of your countries I would imagine that there are strict controls on certain medications but here in Vietnam if I want to purchase enough Ambien to kill everyone in my neighborhood, the pharmacy has no issue with selling it to me. Just be careful with the stuff and follow the instruction on the box. Also, don't develop a habit because if you do that can just make your previous problem even worse.

I think the main thing is probably getting the screens away from you at night because they are such a ubiquitous part of our lives these days.