My biggest bedtime struggle is when I’m too tired to make the decision to stop what I’m doint and go to bed. It takes some discipline but setting a sleep alarm has worked well for me.

10pm, watch goes bzzz -> lie down in bed with lights off. Even if you don’t feel like it, even if you don’t wanna sleep yet, even if it seems dumb. Invariably within 20min at most I’m asleep.

The hard part is accepting the boredom of it all. It’s sleep, you’re supposed to be bored.

I just want to note that reading your last sentence, “It’s sleep, you’re supposed to be bored.“, just felt like a revelation to me.

Idk, sleep has never been boring for me. It's something I consciously look forward to/anticipate(?).

Yeah, that is certainly part of it. Another part is that right after I get the kids to bed, I don’t want to do the dishes and clean up things to get ready for bed, so I take a break. But then I get more tired and want to clean up even less, so I stay up longer. Until I am so tired I sleep clean and go to bed.

If I had to guess, I would say you are not allocating enough personal time during your day so you are claiming it back in the night. And the lack of sleep is tomorrow’s problem.

I keep telling the kids I need more personal time, but they don’t seem to be listening.

Exactly. I feel for you. I am in the same boat. With young kids around I was forced to wake up 2 hours earlier than my circadian rhytm would dictate and it's been a nightmare so far.

I need to compensate each day with even more coffee than normally and my head's just spinning by the end of the day because I am too exhausted.

Since my rhytm cannot be forced to the early waking, on average I only sleep 5 hours each night.

It's a constant torture.

May I suggest: avoid first-thing caffeine; wait until your body has naturally woken up to drink caffiene (or other stimulants). The natural process for waking up (cortisol!) stops when you feel awake. Using caffeine can hasten that moment, but then it doesn't get you any more awake than you would have gotten naturally, and can disrupt your sleep cycle in various ways (for me personally, early caffeine actually makes it harder for me to fall asleep at night; I always thought I was really sensitive to caffeine, but it turns out "...even if I have it first thing in the morning" was more accurately "...only if...").

Idk if this will work for a regular coffee drinker. Part of the coffee first thing in the morning is dealing with the withdrawal from over night.

Caffeine also takes 30-60 minutes to really kick in anyway, meaning your body has to do the waking up on its own either way. The immediate pick-me-up a regular drinker gets from it is a psychological response to the initial low concentration that can start to be felt after 10 or 15 minutes.

Right. For a regular coffee drinker, coffee has stopped being a boost and is merely a requirement to get back to normal energy.

When stuck in a similar rut I had to quit caffeine cold turkey for over a month to get my body to settle down and start to acclimate.

Definitely cutting out caffeine at noon helps.

Yeah this is me. I think I averaged 5 hours per night this last week.