First thing to try is to get your sleep hygiene straight.
No screens for an hour before bed, get your room dark (no night lights, light-blocking windowshades, and cover the lights on any electronics in your room) and quiet (ear plugs can help in a pinch), quit caffeine, get some sunlight in the morning (optimally before 10:00 AM), get some physical activity during the day, don’t eat for a couple of hours before bed. It also couldn’t hurt to do some meditation before bed during that hour of no-screen time.
That meditation will probably particularly help if the reason for your insomnia is stress.
(And try not to be overwhelmed by the above list. Any one or two items in that list that you do will probably help quite a bit. And try to think of this as a “long game” of incremental improvement.)
If that all doesn’t work, you could try adding CBD maybe an hour or so before bed. Melatonin might be a tempting option, but be careful with it. Melatonin doesn’t stay in the bloodstream all that long, so melatonin supplements tend to be big doses in an effort to try to keep it in your bloodstream longer which… kinda works maybe, but not as well as you might hope. The result tends to be that you fall asleep quickly, wake up in like 4 hours unable to get back to sleep, and then are resistant to your body’s natural melatonin for a night or two. If you’re going to do melatonin, spend the extra money on time-release melatonin. The company “Life Extension” has a 750mcg 6-hour time release melatonin that is a good one to try if you do go that route.
First thing to try is to get your sleep hygiene straight.
No screens for an hour before bed, get your room dark (no night lights, light-blocking windowshades, and cover the lights on any electronics in your room) and quiet (ear plugs can help in a pinch), quit caffeine, get some sunlight in the morning (optimally before 10:00 AM), get some physical activity during the day, don’t eat for a couple of hours before bed. It also couldn’t hurt to do some meditation before bed during that hour of no-screen time.
That meditation will probably particularly help if the reason for your insomnia is stress.
(And try not to be overwhelmed by the above list. Any one or two items in that list that you do will probably help quite a bit. And try to think of this as a “long game” of incremental improvement.)
If that all doesn’t work, you could try adding CBD maybe an hour or so before bed. Melatonin might be a tempting option, but be careful with it. Melatonin doesn’t stay in the bloodstream all that long, so melatonin supplements tend to be big doses in an effort to try to keep it in your bloodstream longer which… kinda works maybe, but not as well as you might hope. The result tends to be that you fall asleep quickly, wake up in like 4 hours unable to get back to sleep, and then are resistant to your body’s natural melatonin for a night or two. If you’re going to do melatonin, spend the extra money on time-release melatonin. The company “Life Extension” has a 750mcg 6-hour time release melatonin that is a good one to try if you do go that route.
Okay, got it! Thanks for the tips. I’ll start working on my sleep hygiene and give some of those ideas a try!