https://kristiandupont.medium.com/cant-sleep-ask-yourself-wh...
Keeping my feet flat on the ground, continually checking my shoulder tension, adjusting my ergo so that I don't continually feel an urge to lean forward, and having a chair with fantastic lumbar support have made a huge difference.
But it's also really frustrating when you have an itch or if your in an awkward position where breathing is more difficult.
From this, I very much doubt you had an experience of waking up in a sleep paralysis of a meaningful degree. I'm talking about when you realize that you're only awake because you can control your thoughts and receive sensorial inputs (feeling, hearing, etc.) but don't have any movement control whatsoever, not over your breath, not even over your eyelids to open and look around. That in itself, as bad as it sounds, may not be a problem if the awakened mind won't feel the need for more oxygen, yet the breathing stays suffocatingly short and slow for way too long. There's just no out, there's only a wait for some change that will give you back a first bit of motor control.
I prefer to listen to a soft-spoken guide (guided meditation) when doing this technique. Plenty of resources online for that.
Body scan: Lying still in bed, you are relaxed, right? Not so much, actually. Start mentally checking individual body parts and you'll find a bunch of muscles tensed up for no reason at all. Let each one go loose one by one. Then check again and you'll find they can still go looser. It can take several passes to get to the point where your muscles are actually hanging loose.
Meditation: Yep. We're going to do the "Clear your mind and don't think about anything" routine. Never works, right? That's OK. The point is not to succeed in thinking about nothing. All you need to do is notice you're thinking about stuff and go back to thinking about nothing. Over and over. You don't need to "win". Just fail and restart again and again and again. You can repeatedly fail, can't you? ;) As long as you keep restarting, you're good.
But for me, those techniques never worked and I had to adapt my workflow to be really "done" in the evening so I can get my mind away from code.
Last year my girlfriend discovered a random tiktok, where lots of ADHD folks responded to. Apparently there's ongoing research related to lack of melatonin and therefore the heart and the whole body cannot get really into a resting state.
The ironic thing is that I always thought that drinking a chocolate milk in the evening helped me in the past, and most of my meditation techniques from the martial arts world focussed on pulse control. But, as I got older I got lactose intolerant...and also skipped my evening chocolate milk (obviously).
Now I'm taking 1mg of melatonin in the evening and I've never fallen asleep so easily. I was kinda mind blown when I discovered it, because I've long accepted that nobody can help me and this is just how my "condition" is like.
Note this is not medical advice, but my personal experience. Please check with your doctor whether it's okay to take melatonin safely (and whether your heart is okay, too).
As an alternative to body scanning, I've found placing attention on 2 separates points in the body, i.e., palm of hand and chest will quiet the thinking mind. This is particular helpful if there is a feeling I want to avoid since the thinking mind is trying to avoid feeling unpleasant feelings (the mind likes to control and regulate things). Yet by placing attention on those 2 points the the mind will alternate between those 2 sensations instead. It may be a bit of a balancing act to do and if that's the case body scan may be easier to do.
I found guided meditation apps like (headspace in particular) nice to get the setup.
My issue is more of an 'unquiet and overactive mind' as well as this irrational (but very unshakable) sense that there simply aren't enough hours in the day to accomplish my goals, and that sleeping would be admitting failure in some regard.
- lay still - no really, lay still - I'm not kidding. Lay still. - don't move at all - obviously don't make noises and don't open your eyes
I discovered this when trying to make my daughter go to sleep. Disciple and the silent-closed eyes-still rule is sufficient.
This is just a common side effect while people are learning the meditation - I guess it is so common this kind of body scanning is now recommended as a sleep aid.
focus on your body, focus on your breath, try not to "pay attention" to anything.
it totally helped me, and i can now fall asleep much easier than before.
> Try not to "pay attention" to anything
At the first time using this technique I spent a couple of hours semi-dreaming and turning in the bed, but in a couple of days, after waking up I could only remember the first two steps. Falling asleep in just 5-10 minutes seemed completely unreal to me, but that’s what I’m doing every day now. As a bonus, I recalled the thing my doctor wanted me to recall right at the first at-home experiment.
The theory behind that is that if your insomnia is related to an unstoppable thinking process (a form of an anxiety psychosis, I guess), then there is a hack: you cannot think when you’re focusing on what you feel in your body. You either scan yourself or think (even subconsciously), like a single core multitasking. By burning 100% cpu on sensations, you basically extinguish the fires in your mind, deoxygenating them.
Hope this helps at least some of you, guys! (And sorry if you already tried)