Trying to entice myself to get out of bed earlier

26 Feb, 2025

I am really bad at sleeping. It takes me on average 2 hours to fall asleep and it's been this way since I was a teen.

Part of this is because I have mild sleep apnea, inherited from my dad who has severe sleep apnea. I stop breathing sometimes if I sleep on my back. Sleeping on my sides doesn't do this, or so the at-home test said anyway (less reliable than in clinic). I've changed my sleep setup to encourage sleeping on my sides by putting a pillow pet on each side to hug and also rest my arms as I previously had an issue where the inside of my elbow would hurt without elevation. It works ok but sometimes I still roll over onto my back to alleviate lower back / hip pain. Which could be solved by physical therapy but I hate exercise and try to do the bare minimum.

I'm kind of afraid of CPAP machines ever since I read that Propublica article about how one of the most prominent companies purposefully gave people machines that basically sent a bunch of particles into their lungs and caused stuff like cancer. And of course the company doesn't give a shit. And of course, because America hates people, if you get a CPAP you're also monitored for how long you're using it and if you don't use it enough the insurance won't pay for it. Truly evil. And most people don't even tolerate CPAP well because they find it uncomfortable, and prefer BiPAP if anything. But you're forced to try CPAP first.

There's also the option of getting a specialized mouthguard, but I have poor people's state insurance because I don't earn money due to social anxiety so dental coverage is pretty bad for someone who can't drive (also due to anxiety). I once found someone in the list that was a registered sex offender or something. But ultimately the hardest thing is that dental offices are absolutely not transparent about what they do and don't do and they don't read their intake forms and their receptionists don't know what procedures they do. I once bothered my sister to drive me to a place just for them to say they don't make those (after forcing me to take x-rays). Dental practitioners are the scariest of doctors and the most likely to tell you you need to get shit done that you absolutely do not. So I'm kind of at an impasse here because the search is scary and I would also have to pay more than $1k out of pocket? I don't think my insurance covers it. Though I've also developed a jaw clenching problem so I might end up paying money out of pocket to get a normal mouthguard through my current dentist whom I'm paying for because he's not scary.

Anyway, I tried following CBT-Insomnia which requires a lot of sleep deprivation and sleep hygiene but my body rebelled and increased the instances of debilitating migraines so I gave up. It looks like I need a certain amount of sleep on average or my body breaks down. My sleep hygiene also is just bad again because house cold and getting out of bed not fun, whether it's morning or evening. We turn off all heat at night to save energy.

So, I sleep bad. The main reason why I can't fall asleep, though, is that I think too much. Nighttime thoughts include imagining scenes in my head from comics or original characters or otherwise, planning my future and imagining what I would do if XYZ happened, thinking of all the things I need to do on a project, thinking of all the things I need to do tomorrow specifically, and otherwise bad emo thoughts about the world and my existence and trauma yada da da dee doo.

In my desperation I have picked up a mindfulness mediation book and I am doing like one breathing exercise that seems to be helping. Though something else that might be helping is that I saw a post lately written by someone with ADHD that talked about how a lot of the behavioral rules we grow up with are actually inverse of what actually works. Like good sleep doesn't give you a good day, a good day gives you good sleep. Similarly, some play before work helps in a lot of cases. This has made my brain grow 3 sizes and I am now trying to actively enjoy my days so I sleep better.

So I'm trying to spend the hour after I wake up on something fun, on any one of the things that keep me up because I can't stop thinking about them in bed. Like how they say you're supposed to "schedule" your worry (guess who isn't doing that!!), I'm right now trying to "schedule" my fun so my fun literally stops bothering me at night. This was after some reflection where I realized that I developed this habit of doing things like reading comics until 4 AM because my home life was so stressful as a teenager that night was the only time I could definitely have to myself without any impending doom (other than knowing that I was setting myself up to be tired the next day but...). So I'd spend 4+ hours reading comics a day, and especially at night, because those were the times that I actually could forget how much I hated being alive.

Something that I've been thinking about is how people will naturally do things that are pleasurable to them, so if you want to increase any sort of behavior you should actually increase its fun factor, aka actively decrease the barriers to actually doing the damn thing. So I'm no longer allowed to read comics at night.¹ If I want to read comics, it has to be in the morning.

My days right now are basically me scheduling in time to draw, time to study, volunteer stuff,² and therapy as well as friend watch sessions that happen once a week. Also I'm doing this book club once a month, which is this week (e__e);;_{[drags myself to my exposure therapy jury duty...]}³ So I'm trying to make myself more at peace to make my sleepiness come better. Also, learning from my mistakes like 7 years ago where I tried to schedule every hour of the day, I'm basically treating myself like I'm a college student with 2 or 3 classes and literally nothing else going on, with weekends wide open. And no homework. But well, we'll see about how the other stuff I want to do / am stuck doing pans out.

Oh yeah, I also switched my computer and my phone to do the red light night shift thing. I should've done that ages ago but then I forgor because I used to draw or do editing on the computer and then the hue shift would fuck with the colors so I was like, "I'm not gonna do that anymore!" And well. How much of my recent improved sleep is due to the actions above and how much of it is due to no longer blasting myself with blue light? (An unanswerable question. Or one that requires experiments I don't want to conduct.)

Observations so far after like a week:

• I think I need like 9 hours of sleep. Right now it's still taking me like 1~1.5 hours to fall asleep, but that's better than like 2~2.5. Though I haven't bothered to really port my sleep data over the past few months (I still use the CBT-I app just to write down my approximations of when I sleep / when I wake up), judging from my last terrible migraines that were near each other I think I am in the danger zone when I dip below an average of 8 hours in the last 7 days. In general when I see it getting below 8 I sleep extra, and guess what. I'm now two full months since my last scream-in-bed-level migraine. #hacked
• Getting up in the morning is still extremely hard for me and I keep sleeping through my alarms for an extra 30 minutes. But I think the idea of "doing something fun" in the morning is getting me out of bed like at least 10 minutes earlier (while in the past I'd developed a habit of just looking at things on my phone for 30+ minutes because bed so comfy, world outside Full of Evil Things). So that's a win.
• In reality since I'm not exactly waking up when I planned and I'm still spending like 15 minutes in bed on my phone I'm kind of running late with my "doing fun" thing. It's also quite hard to do something fun in the morning because I'm like groggy and don't really care that much about having fun nor do I feel very creative but it's baby steps?
• Given the above I have now ordered a hundred-dollary-doo sunrise alarm. If this does not work in 2 weeks I'm returning the thing because why the hell is it so expensive :scream emoji:
• If I can actually fall asleep within 30 minutes (what the average person does, apparently ← HOW?!?!?) and get 9 hours of sleep, I will wake up within my target time. Me being humble and knowing I am prone to failure in this area of my life especially (I think I'm biologically a night owl...), I will gladly accept a 10 AM wakeup time or even a 9 AM. That sounds great. People who wake up before 9 AM are aliens to me.

But anyway, I should get ready for bed.⁴

Footnotes

#life-logging