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How can I break the habit of sleeping too much and too late?

How can I break my sleeping pill habit and better treat my insomnia?

  • Since high school, I have had a terrible time maintaining a normal sleep schedule. It's gotten to the point where I simply can't sleep on a regular basis without the help of sleeping aids; mostly over the counter sleeping pills. I'm no doctor, but I it seems pretty obvious that my reliance on sleeping pills is unhealthy, perhaps causing health problems later down the line. What can/should I do deal with this issue?

  • Answer:

    I used to suffer from severe insomnia 12-13 years ago. Medication didn't help. What did the trick for me was voluntarily quitting the pills, adopting much better "sleep hygiene" and slowly making lifestyle changes. It is the only real long-term solution I think. There are physical hygiene behaviors and mental hygiene behaviors, as well as cognitive reframing steps you need to take. These all take time to work (like 4-6 months minimum) but do work. Physical: Don't read or watch TV in bed. Definitely never eat or drink in bed. Beds are only for sleep and sex. Don't go to your bed (or even bedroom) until you are actually sleepy. Even if that translates to 5:30 AM. If you live in a studio, put up a wooden screen. No matter how late you go to sleep, try to wake up at roughly the same time. Use an alarm to train your brain initially if you need to. Yes, this means even if you go to sleep at 5:30, you still wake up at 7 or 8 or whatever time you pick. When you do get up, make it a habit to open the blinds or step out and get at least 20 minutes of sunlight. This is biologically key: our main 24-hour body clocks are entrained to sunlight, and morning light resets and tunes the clock. Artificial light won't do until it is specifically designed for the purpose, because the wavelengths that affect your chronobiological sensors in your eyes aren't the same ones that you use for vision. Sunlight has these wavelengths, most artificial light sources don't. Don't eat too close to bedtime. Ideally stop 3 hours before. Try and get some light exercise a couple of hours before you go to bed, like taking a walk. Regular heavier exercise earlier in the day is much better, but that can be hard to keep up. Develop a sleep ritual: brushing teeth, pajamas, making the bed a bit if it is too messed up. Make the ritual more pleasantly elaborate and slow if necessary. Try to do this ritual at the same time, even if you actually go to bed at different times. If you go to bed but still toss and turn for an hour or more, get out. If the problem isn't mental, certain snacks will help: cereal with milk or plain bread for instance. Turn down the heat. A few degrees of chill can do wonders. If all else fails, try moving to the couch. Last resort measure. If you like gadgetry, there's some good stuff out there. I am personally considering buying this one: http://www.myzeo.com/ Mental: If you can't let go runaway thoughts, try these things to shut them off: Write them down on a pad near your bed if they are only minor close-ended niggles about to-do stuff. Learn GTD if you want to take it to the next level. Get out of bed and go to your desk and think them through on paper if they are complicated and you are alert enough to actually process them usefully. A pre-emptive way of doing this is to notice mind-grabbing thought trains coming on earlier in the evening, and going for a walk to help process them and calm them. No later than around 8-9 PM though. Really late walks, even if safe, can reinforce your awareness of your insomnia and its socially exceptional nature If they won't let go and you aren't alert enough to process, simply sit down somewhere else in the dark, like a comfortable armchair, and let the thoughts run wild until they run out of steam and exhaust themselves. I call this "giving my thoughts enough rope to hang themselves." Don't attempt to stop them. This move goes well with a midnight snack. Runaway thoughts have an inside-head locus. A good way to shut them down if all else fails is to get online and catch up on the news for about an hour or so. It shifts your cognitive center of gravity to an external bitstream from an internal bitstream. Be very wary of TV at night. It's a wildcard in mental sleep hygiene. It can help sometimes, make things worse sometimes, and tends to be very situation dependent. Develop a hobby that requires delicate work with your hands, like building model ships. Many serious insomniacs are way too cerebral. For me, it is photorealistic drawing. I am planning to get into model ships too. I'll throw in social hygiene here as well: if you are a poor sleeper, either live alone or with apartment-mates whose lifestyles are compatible. Good sleepers can ruin bad sleeper's lives. I lived with a guy who had awful sleep hygiene, who worked random schedules and was very loud when he was at home. It didn't matter to him because he could fall asleep in 5 minutes anytime, but it did a number on my routine. He's still a good friend, but I got out of that living situation as quickly as possible. If you are married or have a live-in significant other (or planning to get into that situation), take care to make adequate arrangements to protect your sleeping routine. All this only works if your runaway thoughts are all over the place and not particularly depressive. During my worst insomnia, anything could keep me up, from wondering about life on other planets to an idea for a startup, a tricky math problem, or a speculative theory about something. If your runaway thoughts are always about your personal life, relationships, how your life sucks, turn to suicide on occasion, and seem to go in circles rather than in wildly branching explorations that get somewhere, you may have chronic clinical depression rather than simpler personality-driven/thinking style conditions.  Seek professional help. But be a very alert patient. The medical profession sucks at dealing with this, so you have to compensate for their incompetence and apathy. They want to treat McInsomniacs or McDepressives as cheaply as possible, and this often means temporary band-aids. You want to improve your actual well-being. Make sure your doctor isn't rushing to valium or prozac. Track the meds prescribed and check to see if they actually work. Some of these drugs can make insomnia worse in a minority of patients. Even if it IS genuine depression, try to get away from pills as soon as possible. Don't be afraid to quit the medical approach if it isn't working for you. The profession's hit rate is lousy. Cognitive Reframing Unless your lack of sleep is severely interfering with your waking life, understand that it is okay to have a different sleep profile. It is in fact often a sign of a strength -- the ability to think deeply. Too many people rush to diagnose things like depression, including doctors. In my (non-professional) opinion, there's a far wider range of normal variation due to simple personality type effects. I speculate that Myers-Briggs intuitives are much more prone to this than sensory types for example. Even if this is untrue, I do believe there are simply certain types of personalities who are not very prone to long, deep thoughts, who can fall asleep within 5 minutes. For them, insomnia is an exceptional condition when they are undergoing mental trauma around relationships or something. But for the other type, this is normal, everyday stuff. If you like deep thinking, your brain-flywheel simply has a lot more inertia than that of people who don't. You should expect it to take longer to slow down to a halt for exactly the same reason that light motorcycles can stop in 10 feet, but big semi-trucks can take 100 yards. For me, I consider 30-90 minutes normal. Makes me an outlier but I am fine with it. At a broader level, recognize that our environment is seriously messed up. Our bodies are designed for sunrise-to-sunset lighting, and around behaviors like napping. Today we have 24 hour electric lighting and work schedules that prevent napping. This affects some people a lot more drastically than others. So if you want to life-hack your schedule to allow you to nap etc., go right ahead. A recommended book: Russel Foster, Rhythms of Life. A somewhat demanding pop-science book on chronobiology. Well worth the read. It will give you a much better appreciation of the complex clocks your body runs on, 100x more complex than the most intricate swiss watch. http://www.amazon.com/Rhythms-Life-Russell-Foster/dp/1861972350

Venkatesh Rao at Quora Visit the source

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I find that a combination of melatonin and valerian works best.Here is the solution of what to do: because we mostly have a lack of melatonin, the first step is to take 3 mg to 5 mg of melatonin at bedtime. But it should be taken between 10 PM and 11 PM. It takes 20 to 30 minutes for melatonin to take effect. If you do not fall asleep within that time frame you are likely thinking too much. If that is the case, I would recommend to take 1 or 2 capsules of valerian (500 mg strength) from the health food store. This combined with the melatonin should help in more than 80%-90% of insomnia cases. If you cannot sleep, see your physician. You may need sleep studies done or you may have problems of the thyroid (hypo- or hyperthyroidism), which may need to be checked. Other medical problems including depression have to be checked out as well. Melatonin and valerian are safe. Other sleeping pills have multiple side-effects including memory problems.For more info go to this link:

Ray Schilling

Simple, Work, work and work. Work more than you can, exhaust yourself, exhaust all your energy. Work can be anything, physical or mental. Unspent energy causes Insomnia.

Karthik Eyan

I have to tell you I am the unlucky guy. I couldn't sleep well for about a year.If you have watched the Machinist acted by Christian Bale，you will understand my situation. I was skinny just like him. 1.I couldn't sleep well at the very first. But that's still a good thing for me. At least I could sleep . 2.Then I couldn't sleep almost all the time. If I was lucky enough. I might can sleep for half an hour the whole night. I could just sleep a while before the dawn came. 3.Here is the worst part. I had to take pills to calm down myself. Cuz I couldn't sleep even on daytime.I almost wanted to kill myself then. I had Eszonlon every night. I could feel that impact on me. The more I took，the worse it became. 4.I decided to quit pills. I found a girl who couldn't sleep at night to help me.That made me feel much better. Since that I didn't worry about insomnia no more. Cuz I knew I was not alone. My suggestion is：1.Don't be afraid of it. 2.Find a friend to help you. http://3.Be strong and don't take pills. If you really have to take it，you should choose right. 4. Relax and don't worry about anything. Anything！ 5.Don't have sex too often.Cuz it excites you make you can't sleep.

Pan Zhoujun

vibroacoustic therapy - reduces insomnia http://www.olavskillevibroacoustictherapy.com

Avigail Berg-Panitz

meditation (being mindful). Most of the answers are a variation of being mindful. Ultimately, we need to meditate to the level of mind and body in one. When our mind wander all the time, just bring it back to the present. When our mind dwell, bring it back to the present too. Don't dwell.

Jek Bao Choo

I have also had good results with melatonin. This year I decided to become a "morning person" so I could get exercise done in the morning. (I've been a "night owl" my whole life.) But I really struggled settling down to sleep before midnight. Now I take 12-15 mg melatonin about 3 hours before I want to go to sleep. Sure enough, at 9:00-9:30, I am feeling the desire to sleep without that grogginess you get from a sleep aid (at night, or in the morning). I find it also improves sleep quality, and pleasantly stimulates dreams that I can remember.   I like the "sleep ritual" Trey suggests. Nothing fancy (mine is defined by a cup of herbal tea at a certain time), but it does send a mental signal to the body to relax.

Michelle Godfrey

You could try melatonin, it is something your body produces on it's own, so it is more natural than sleeping pills. There is one called Super Sleep which has Tryptophan in it as well (same thing in turkey that makes you sleepy). Just watch you don't get sores in your mouth, if you do, discontinue use.

Corine Poirier

I started having issues falling asleep when I was around 15 years old. It got worse every year until the point I couldn't concentrate or do any physical exercise. In my case I don't have a special disease that prevents me to sleep, it's just bad sleeping hygiene and stress of not falling asleep. The most important for me, what really made a big difference, was this: 1. Always wake up at the same time, every single day. Even if I slept only 1 hour the previous night. 2. Don't spend too much time on the bed. If I want 7 hours of sleep, I count 7h15 on the bed. Too much time and you're going to fragment your sleep. 3. If I can't fall asleep in half an hour, I get up calmly and go do something mellow (book, audiobook). 4. Having a routine before going to bed (and in the morning). 5. Exercise during the day, or early evening (strangely for me it works well if I finish exercise 2 to 3 hours before bedtime) Some other things helped too like: 1. Use blue blockers (sun)glasses at night, if using screen or TV. 2. Eat a banana and drinking chamomile 1 hour before going to bed. 3. Stop any strong mental work after 6pm, except writing thoughts to get them out of my head. 4. Take a quick nap after lunch. It helped me get confidence in the fact of being able to fall sleep. Good luck!

Guillaume Leclerc

The first question to ask is this:  Have you had a blood test to discern if all of your levels are normal?  Deficits in various things (like calcium), can inhibit sleep. Second, as you are asking this question on some.sort of "blue screen,"  do you turn off all blue screens prior to trying to sleep?  I am specifically talking about: tv, cell phone, tablet, computer....  anything that uses blue scren technology, as that has been documented to interrupt the sleep cycles. Third, are you limiting water/ food intake for at least an hour prior to bed?  While drinking water is a good habit, drinking a liter of water prior to bed will interrupt sleep, as the kidneys will process and feel the need to elimintate.  On that note, kidneys do a magnificent nob of pulling the toxic elements from our bodies and eliminating, so staying hydrated with water (un-carbonated), from rising until about an hour or two before bed is a worthy habit. Fourth, are there issues in your life  that are unresolved?  If you find that you are waking and yiur mind is in gear over the issues, that merits some daytime work. Try this:    Establish a routine:       Hydrate all day, until about an hour before bed.       Spend time with meditation at some point during your day. (MedItation actually regenerates brain cells)      Do not eat within an hour of bed.      Darken your room and turn off all blue screen devices.     Close your eyes and focus only on breathing.  Deep breathe, through your nose slowly, counting  to five,  as you breathe.  Hold the breath for a slow  count of five and then exhale  slowly for a count of five, through your nose or mouth.  Refuse to open your eyes, should you awaken, and again focus only on breathing.  Try this for a few nights.  You may wish to initially supplement with a melatonin / L-tryptophan supplement initially, but training your body to produce them naturally is better than taking a pill.

Nancy Orr

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