1. Work hard and find time to exercise during the day
2. Relax my mind towards the end of the day, have a beer, watch some TV, etc.
3. Read a little before dozing off
http://www.amazon.com/Sleepfaring-Journey-through-Science-Sl...
Reading it can put you to sleep, but there's interesting stuff there. Some highlights, off the top of my head:
1) 'Coffee naps' are effective - i.e. if you're really tired and have to stay awake, drink a coffee quickly and nap for 15 minutes or so.
2) If you are sleep deprived, you only have to make up a fraction (I think it was something like 1/4) of the lost sleep - not the entire amount. It's easy to sleep too much.
3) If you can't sleep, instead of tossing and turning it might be better to simply get up and do a boring routine activity (e.g. puzzles), until you get tired again.
YMMV etc. - sleep is still not that well understood.
I don't know about you, but when I'm sleeping in a dark room and someone suddenly turns on a bright light, I hate it.
Yeah, you don't get all the benefits of a sunrise alarm clocks, and it might not work for everyone. It's a hack to get some of the benefits at a lower cost, that's all.
I'm sure there's a timer out there combined with a dimer that will replace expensive sunrise alarm clocks. Concerning the nature sounds adapted to your sleepcycle, there's already many apps doing that for free.
Anyone knows of a dimer/timer like this?
Tl;dr: if you want to use these techniques to get a good night's sleep, get used to sleeping alone.
Switch to a bucket of water being dumped on you to wake you up. After she has a nervous breakdown that the bed is soaking wet suggest that you tried temperature changes, sunrise alarm clocks and darker shades. But she was against all of them.
I am trying/have tried other methods of sleep optimisation though. I tried Gnaural (brain entrainment software - placebo or not I found it worked reasonably well) combined with Sleep Phones (http://www.sleepphones.com/). The sleep phones also help with an alarm that I can hear and she can't.
Seem to be forgetting fire. Campfires were surely used by our ancestors, for hundreds of thousands of years, and it is plausible that we evolved to adapt to them.
> Humans have evolved to wake up with the sunrise and fall asleep with the sunset
Evidence? Are we sure that ancient hunter-gatherers did not hunt/gather by the light of the moon? And after the discovery of fire, there would be even more flexibility. Using fire to hunt animals during the night, when they are most vulnerable, sounds pretty useful.
He does lightly touch on the subject of fire:
> The blue wavelengths of light suppress melatonin production so daylight triggers the body to stop producing it (interestingly red, orange, and yellow wavelengths don’t suppress melatonin production and are the same wavelengths produced by fire)
(note, this may work for one night, after which you'll be optimizing on the couch)
*there are many selections on the App Store and Play store. FWIW, I use the one by TMSOFT which provides different kinds of noise. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tmsoft.whi...
http://www.amazon.com/The-ORIGINAL-Bed-Band-Adjustable/dp/B0...
"2. Simulate The Sunrise/Sunset With An Alarm Clock Why: Humans have evolved to wake up with the sunrise and fall asleep with the sunset. It’s only been the last 100 years or so, basically once the light bulb started becoming common in households, that the natural balance of the sleep/wake cycle became decoupled from the sun."
Humans haven't been without fire, candles, lamps, and artificial light for perhaps 400,000 years. We have evolved with artificial light, not without it.
http://examine.com/supplements/Melatonin/
It's important to get the dose right, specially if you're still <50 don't jump in at 3mg.
Or maybe all of these sleep articles give similar advice and seem the same.
Here is the pack-rat/shut in version: If you have any windows in your room the only real solution is some combination of a lightproof sheeting (light proof fabric, aluminum foil etc...) and light proof adhesive (black gaffers tape is the best or aluminum foil tape). Since there are very few window frames that give good clearance around them for affixing things, and don't have wild trim or corners the latter material really makes or breaks your situation.
Congratulations, now you have to work on your door. Door sweeps usually do a good enough job but those pesky door cracks can be a nightmare. The easiest solution to this is a blackout drape hung over your door as though it was another door. Reasonable people can disagree about whether to put this inside the room or outside the room - as long as you have a good "seal" on the sides and top it should be fine. This causes problems for egress if needed however.
The last and simplest thing is to just move all devices that cause light completely out of the room or disable their persistent light sources completely.
The good citizen version: Using your standard draping you will need to sew blackout fabric to the back of your draping with basically no gaps. Stitch Witchery does not work. Hot glue peels away. Sewing is the only reliable option.
You will then need to choose your affixing method. I personally like using neodymium magnets, but in the quantity that you need them, they get pricey. They are also more complicated to line up. The easier version, which is still pricey is to use industrial strength velcro. You will have to measure and line up near perfectly where you affix the velcro on the drape to where your hooks/loops on the window/wall go. This is way more complicated that it sounds in practice - again because windows rarely are simple flat squares with no trim. Affixing to the wall/window is always a tradeoff. Anything that "sticks" will peel off eventually and take any paint with it. If you nail/staple it on, now you have holes in your wall. So pick your poison. Even after all this work, you will still likely have some leakage. That is where the extra fabric comes in handy to drape over the velcro sides. In general it will cover you night or day, but this one is really hard to get perfectly.
Treat the door the same - generally you can have the drape roll up during the day without issue.
This option lets you open the windows and drapes with minimal amount of tell to your mole-like behavior. It ends up being cumulatively a lot more work however.
I have tried to think up simple consumer solutions (I see lots of aluminum foil in windows -- watch you'll see it too now)to this, but windows are so damn variable that it is near impossible and the only major consumer solutions right now are not worth the price.
http://www.persianas-ruiz.com/Contenidos/NotaA1.jpg
These blinds don't go behind the window frames, but in the window, fitting in grooves carved in the window itself. With that, absolutely zero light will enter through your windows at night.
I have seen that most other countries don't use this kind of blinds, and I wonder why that is. They seem like a win-win to me. If you want an absolutely dark room you get it, and if you don't, you only need to not lower them 100% and then little rays of light will get through the horizontal grooves that you see (which close if you fully lower the blind).
When I travel abroad I always have to do all kinds of involved stuff (like you describe) to get my room reasonably dark, and it's so incredibly easy if you have the right kind of blinds...
I think it may be the only thing where Spain can give the rest of the world a lesson :)
Yes, your bedroom will look like a schizophrenic's sex dungeon after you do this. Yes, that's fine, because you may be able to get much better sleep, which is more important than the aesthetics of your bedroom.
My bedroom is so dark that I can't use LED light bulbs in the ceiling fixtures. It turns out that they use an incredibly efficient fluorescent coating that glows brightly for hours, enough to let me make out objects on the floor. That's how I knew the room was finally dark enough.
I've slept outside in remote places many times, far away from city lights. It's not even near 100% black. So I would not kill yourself to get every little stray bit of light.
I don't prefer to wake up when the sun comes up mostly because I don't prefer to sleep when it goes down. So it is a guarantee that I will want to be asleep when there is a significant light source outside my house. Eliminating that will optimize my sleep. End of story.
