How well do you guys sleep? My current sleep schedule is the worst it has ever been and I’m not sure how I should go about fixing it.
How well do you guys sleep? My current sleep schedule is the worst it has ever been and I’m not sure how I should go about fixing it.
Around 10-6 (2200-0600)
I have two young kids, so it’s a little skewed to keep them functioning. I’ve always been an early top bed person, but as I’ve gotten older, my wake-up’s have gotten consistently earlier.
The problem I have nowadays is staying asleep. A life in the military has made it easy to get up even when I’m exhausted, but tough to settle down and go back to sleep. I find that consistent exercise is critical to my sleep schedule. As long as I exercise, I can stay asleep through the night. If my workout schedule gets off, I have a lot of 0400 wakeups.
When I’m stressed I can have really bad middle-of-night insomnia. A few months ago it was terrible. I came across an article about some guy who said to only go to bed when tired and to get up at the same time every morning no matter what. It was hellish while I did it, but after a week or so it started to work. Then after about two weeks, I set a bedtime schedule for myself while still keeping the same wake-up time. Since then, if I do wake in the middle of the night, I treat it like meditation (with the idea that meditation counts as rest) and just lay there focusing on my breathing. I haven’t had a three-hour awake time since, and usually it’s not more than 20-30 minutes.
This is actually really helpful. I have frequent nighttime awakenings, and it’s getting so bad that I want to sleep a lot during the day. Maybe I’ll give exercise a go, I haven’t tried it as a solution for insomnia yet.