Sleep
I’ve always had issues falling asleep. My wife conks out in minutes, while I proceed to flop around for an hour or more. And then I wake up to pee around 3-4 a.m., usually leading to more flopping and lost sleep. It can be frustrating.
I slept especially poorly a week ago. I woke up at 2:45 a.m. and never fell back asleep. After that, I decided to try Sleep.io (pronounced "sleepy-oh"). My employer offers it as a paid-for benefit, and I’ve been curious about it for a while.
Sleep.io uses a variety of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy techniques to help you fall and stay asleep. One of them is a sleep restriction exercise. I’m a few days into it.
The idea is that you figure out how much time you’re actually asleep in bed, excluding all the flop time, and then stay in bed for only that amount of time. So if I’m in bed for 8 hours but only sleep 6, then I allow myself to be in bed for only 6 hours. That means I don’t get in bed until 11 a.m., and I get out of bed at 5 a.m. This is meant to cause “mild” sleep deprivation initially, helping you retrain your brain to associate bed with sleeping instead of sleeplessness. Once that's working, you slowly add back more time in bed.
It went well for the first couple nights, but last night it took me around 2 hours to fall asleep. And I still woke up to pee. By my napkin math, I got less than 4 hours of sleep.
I hope this thing pays off. It’s still early, so I’ll stay optimistic.