Have you tried sleeping on the bathroom floor for your insomnia?
Cool Sleep Facts I learned and I would tell you without you asking if you got me started talking about sleep.
A few weeks ago, I shared all about my journey with sleep. In particular, the way that the language we use creates or dismantles our relationship with our bodies… and therefore sleep.
How I Started Sleeping Again
"When the cathedrals you build are invisible, made of perspectives and ideas, you forget you are inside them and that the ideas they consist of were, in fact, MADE, constructed by people who analyzed and argued and shifted our assumptions. They are the fruit of labor.”
Part of that journey was watching Taylor Tomlinson’s special and laughing WAY TOO HARD when she talked about lying on the bathroom floor to get to sleep.
Because… it works?
It shouldn’t work but it does. See, we need a thing called “sleep pressure” to build up and tip us into sleep. Waiting in bed can be the worst for this. Waiting on a shitty bathroom floor, cold and uncomfy? Definitely increases sleep pressure.
Which isn’t too funny if you’ve ever HAD to sleep on the bathroom floor… and yet the chronic insomniacs are over here weeping that we will do absolutely anything at all to get some sleep.
Anyway.
I learned all kinds of absurd things about sleep during sleep therapy. So I thought I’d throw some of those random details in a list for you all to enjoy. My sleep process was very specific to me so not everything here will apply to everyone.
And for the love of everything, this isn’t medical advise.
Sleepiness and tiredness are not the same thing.
Building sleep pressure is essential to falling asleep quickly and staying asleep.
When we nap or sleep or drouse or anything, sleep pressure reduces.
Falling asleep quickly means about 20 minutes. If you fall asleep faster, you might not be getting quality sleep.
There are basic interventions: dark room, no cell phone, good bed. But most people have tried everything before they get to sleep therapy. There is an assumption that you’ve done everything you know how to do. That you need to fix your ideas of sleep in order to try in a correct way.
Sleep shorting is getting less sleep than you need for a limited period of time in order to build sleep pressure and start a pattern that will recreate itself regularly.
“Adjusting your sleep edges” feels more accurate than going into “sleep deprivation” or “sleep restriction.” These are not calories. Forever stopping yourself from time in bed is not how good sleep is made. It is a temporary measure to build pressure that works easily, like water in a mill. I came up with that phrase. I like ot think I’ve revolutionized the field lol.
I picked my ultimate wakeup time on what worked fo rmy family and life at the time. There was never a sense that early rising was an unalloyed good that I should pursue. It was trusting my circadian rhythm (rather than my perception of my circadian rhythm), a pattern revealed with the sleep adjustments and how easily I responded to them.
I often though I was being messy with my times. But general adherance worked well enough for me without close nitpicking. I wasn’t accurate within 5minute frames. That still gave accurate eough percentages.
Sleep efficiency is the amount of time spent in bed while also asleep. You take the amount slept divided by time in bed. Over 90% is where most sleep satisfaction lies.
You can have “good sleep” and not feel sleep satisfaction. And feeling good is really nice and helpful.
Sleep is nothing something to be “caught up on”. It’s not something we adapt to by going to be earlier one night to account for insomnia the night before; or taking a nap to catch up.
When I’m getting regular sleep that meets my needs, one or two bad nights do not feel NEARLY AS BAD as they did before. I can handle nighttime interruptions and daytime drowsiness far easier. My mental state? My general baseline of restedness?
Sleep is not this ghost who slips from me when I need her.
The times I try to jump over the fence of sleep is the most likely time I am taking quick drowses. These tiny micro sleeps reduce sleep pressure enough to extend the time to fall into a deep sleep by hours. It is much better, if consciousness lingers, to get out of bed after 20 minutes and do something else. Not a video game or fight about taxes or cook a meal; just a lit room with a smidge of reading or something. An alert activity that is not rousing or stressful. I read until the words start to blur and then I try again. It doesn’t usually take more than another try. So 20 minutes trying, 20 minutes up (max), 20 minutes trying again, 20 minutes up, 20 minutes then sleep. Make then of 1hr 40 minutes of negotiating with my body. Compare to the HOURS I would try to sleep and then fail. Two hours is not a night wrecked by insomnia but a little barrier that is easily recovered from in the next night of sleep.
Wake ups matter. Daylight in the morning really does help.
With enough quality sleep derived from consistent sleep pressure, other issues like stress and caffeine or screen time or reading in bed won’t matter as much.
Sleeping to recover from ill-health is a different beast. Let your body take the rest it needs during those times. When health is relatively steady, sleep doesn’t need to be taken in larger quantities.
I had a sleep wobble because my sleep got extremely long over may. I went from a consisten average of 7.5 hrs to 8.5 or 9 (even a few 10+hr nights). Identified that the change was a new medication that created massive daytime sleepiness even with the lnog nights of sleeps and naps on top of those. Truly wild.
Anxiety and twitchiness can result from too much sleep. I was getting more than I needed because of the false creation of sleepiness and the erratic energy came out in bizarre ways because it couldn’t come out in basic alertness.
An adult takes 3 days for their circadian rhythm to change if the edges of that change are held strong. Aka an insomnia flair due to sleep maintenance weirdness (naps that get longer etc) will take 3 days to fix.
3 days travelling internationally when strong adherence to local time. Commit to local time as strongly as possible.
Kids have a more inflexible circadian rhythm which is why time changes like daylight savings are so difficult. A week or more for full adjustment.
I asked the question about sleep and hormones. What is the relationship to the serotonin or dopamine levels and sleep? Does sleep messiness change them and so contribute to the depression? Does the depression happen first and disrupt sleep patterns? What about perimenopause? It gets murkier here. The dynamic of hormone levels and sleep do change each other in mysterious ways. Strong sleep consistency can help navigate these fluctuations, to help restore sleep to norms that otherwise can get more and more unstable and become years of insomnia and sleep disruption long after the initial cause is over.
Everyone has a different ideal sleep amount. And what I thought was mine was completely wrong. I thought it was 10 hrs because the few times I’ve slept that long have felt amazing. But in trying to give myself that time, I was actually reducing my sleep pressure an unuseful amount. I feel best in 7.5-8hr range. I don’t need to plan anymore time in bed than that amount.
There is a sleepiness that persists for me about 30 minutes into a day. I don’t know until after that point how my sleep actually was. Evaluating it immediately upon waking is not a good account. It also means that a decision to go back to drowsing is not based on accurate information but on lingering sleep state vibes, not that I actually needed more cat napping before getting out of bed. Those don’t typically make me feel better anyway.
Also… anyone else do the trick of flipping your head to the end of the bed when you couldn’t sleep? My sister and I swore by it as kids. Had no idea other people did it until I saw someone on tiktok. It’s a thing!
We’ve all got sleep weirdnesses.
To paraphrase Mary Oliver’s iconic line:
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
…
Please: Tell me sleep weirdness, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Jk already told you here.
Let me know what makes your sleep weird please. I’m obsessed.
I recently had a sleep study done, which was wild. Sleeping with a bunch of wires taped to you is not the ideal environment for high quality sleep 😉. The study seemed to indicate that it took me 2+ hours to fall into a deep sleep, despite being unconscious for most of that time. You’re making me think I have to play around with sleep pressure to fix that! Still awaiting detailed results on the rest of the study.
Mid-30’s are fun! I’m tired 🥱.