004 Sleep Hacks

Tricks for getting to sleep easier. No digital after 8pm, no caffeine after 2pm, no alcohol ever. Magnesium. Exercise.
Sleep Buds II (discontinued) or Anker A20 (amzn.to/4eodQqr)
Meditate to fall asleep. Count sheep or breaths, body scan. Alternatively: read. Kindle (amzn.to/3wrqALP) or Onyx Boox (amzn.to/3UXWVDy)

[@yunggolem4687]

Tried meditation for a while, but I found it akin to "drowning" my worries in mundane sensory observations. It did help with getting to sleep, but I found I had a bit more difficulty getting up in the morning. Switched to journaling which I found worked faster for clearing the "worries" out of my head than meditation, not quite as good for sleep but still effective. Then switched to doing a small To Do list for the next day, no more than 5 items. Just having things slightly thought out and lined up for the morning seemed to dispel >80% of my worries and takes only 1-2 minutes.
While this worked quite well, it also has a negative in that I tended to focus on small concrete "task units" more in the morning which would put me more in that mode all day... it basically shoved metacognition into the shadows in the back of my mind & made me behave more like a task completion robot. This was great when I had a backlog of tasks to complete, but wasn't so great for figuring out what to do when I was done with everything that mattered... I sometimes found myself making up bs tasks to complete to fill out the remainder of my day rather than engaging with any deep work.
To solve for this, I started taking a 25 minute rest in the middle of the day where I'd get as comfortable as possible, block out sound with headphones and put a dark cloth over my eyes to block out light, then just allow myself to ruminate on whatever came up. I find I fairly often get great insights during this & make big strides on solving complex problems. And I found I didn't "need" to do anything at night to make it easier to sleep anymore, although I still do give myself a short 3-5 item task list for the morning typically bc it gets me started right away rather than meandering aimlessly for a while. I like to order the list from shortest to longest task and ramp up into the workday, then use this rumination state to switch modes to deep work around halfway through the day.
Working great for me for the last 4 months or so.