My sleep has never been good for as long as I can remember. Three years ago I was prescribed Ativan to deal with my bouts of insomnia, that was a disaster. Yes, it put me to sleep but I very quickly became addicted to it over the course of a few weeks of travel and had to go through a period of weird symptoms that turned out to be withdrawal. Luckily an urgent care doctor figured it out, my MD was prescribing more Ativan thinking that I was just dealing with anxiety. I had to go through a gradual two month withdrawal process to safely get off the stuff. After that I actually slept pretty well for the first time in years.
Then came SIBO and nightly gut attacks that left me unable to sleep at all. I finally got around my sleep problems by using a strong Indica medical marijuana that killed my pain and put me out for 8+ hours a night. That too had side effects, it made my SIBO worse since it slows the gut motility so much.
So what to do? I needed to get 8 hours of sleep a night to help heal all the way and it was clear I couldn’t use drugs or weed to do it. This led me to looking at alternatives. Self-hypnosis was my first non-drug approach. Using audio from Lynda Hudson I was able to fall asleep most nights quickly for a few weeks and then it started wearing off. I then switched to audio books which did help me sleep, like having someone read you a story before bed. I found I had to get semi-boring science or history books so that they wouldn’t keep me involved, I made the mistake of using a Bill Bryson book once and spent too much time laughing instead of sleeping.
Finally I read up on sleep hacking, techniques used in the Paleo and bio-hacking world to help with sleep. I had my FitBit on so I’d been tracking my sleep already for months. I knew at my worse I was sleeping about 5 hours max and waking up 35-45x a night, not too peaceful. I decided I was going to try different techniques to deal with my sleep and see what worked based on the data.
Supplement wise I do magnesium at night along with my prokinetic agents which has a calming effect on the nervous system and can help with sleep. I tried Integrative Therapeutics Cortisol Manager but didn’t really notice much of a difference with it.
The biggest thing I found was managing light better. Blue light is often cited as an issue for people who have trouble going to sleep so the main hacks were to deal with that. I bought goofy amber glasses which I now put on after dinner every night. These block the blue light from our normal light bulbs and screens. Daylight bulbs are great for waking up but really suck for helping you get tired, they mess with your natural circadian rhythms by tricking you into thinking it is always daylight. The amber glasses block out the blue portion of the spectrum and thus fool you into at least thinking it is dusk instead of mid-day. I also replaced the lights in our bedroom with blue-blocking bulbs – the Good Night bulb from Definitely Digital. On top of that I put f.lux on my Mac so it turns “orange” at sundown every day and the brightness on my iPhone and iPad go down to minimum at sunset too, as well as going into Do Not Disturb mode after dinner. I almost never touch the computer after dinner but do read on my iPad at night (in night mode) and will use my phone for audio at night.
These few hacks made a huge difference, I now fall asleep in an average of 6 minutes from the time I stop reading and activate sleep mode on my FitBit. This is in comparison to my average of about 25 minutes to fall asleep last spring. I now only wake up or am restless an average of 12x a night instead of 35x. I do wake up almost every night around 2-3 a.m. and read for 10-20 minutes then fall back asleep usually pretty easily. I’ve learned to just embrace this bi-phasic sleep and not fight it plus I get a lot of reading done. I sometimes turn on audio in the early mornings but lately listen maybe 2 minutes and am out cold again. Now I’m averaging above normal in sleep and, according to FitBit users, am getting more sleep than 75% of people my age out there.