Sleep hygiene is the biggest load of bullshit ever conceived.
This horse ain’t dead yet, readers.
If you’ve been following AJnet for a while, you’ll already know about my struggle to get a good night’s sleep. Over the years, I’ve written several articles that have touched on it in various ways. From how useless medical professionals are at treating sleep issues (and pretty much everything else), to the seemingly useless advice that the internet gives for dealing with sleep problems. Most recently, I criticized the oblivious idiots who preach meditation and mindfulness as solutions to sleep problems and everything else.
I’ve been dealing with this shit for over 10 years now. While it’s arguably gotten a bit better (I’m not waking up to random anxiety attacks anymore), I’m still dealing with fractured sleep on a nightly basis. Everyone else seems to be able to just lay down and zonk out for eight hours the moment their head hits the pillow, then wake up feeling fresh as a daisy ready to take on a brand new day. I’m lucky if I don’t wake up to pee after two hours. I’ve genuinely forgotten what a “good night’s sleep” feels like.
Most mornings I’ll have a headache when I wake up. If it’s a good day, the headache goes away after an hour and I’ll spend the rest of my day yawning and dealing with brain fog. On particularly bad days, my brain feels like an enflamed mass of pudding.
Thanks to my Amazfit Bip 6, I have a general idea of what’s going on. My fractured sleep is causing me to not get enough REM sleep. REM is the stage where your brain cleans itself, and not getting enough of it not only causes cognitive issues, it can also lead to all kinds of nasty problems later in life, like dementia or Alzheimer’s.
I’ve been trying to find a solution to this for years. The doctor was completely useless, since I didn’t have sleep apnea and didn’t want to pump myself full of Ambien. Most supplements, like melatonin or valerian root, stop working after a week. So I’m left trawling the internet for advice in the form of “sleep hygiene”.
I talked about some of the basic principles of sleep hygiene in the other articles, and I’ll try not to repeat myself too much in this article. I guess you can consider this a continuation of the “Generic advice for generic idiots with insomnia” article.
Sleep hygiene is completely useless to most people suffering from serious sleep issues, and I’m tired (pun not intended) of seeing everybody and their mother recommend this crap. There’s nothing more patronizing and dismissive than having someone tell you that the reason you’re not sleeping is because you didn’t follow some arbitrary checklist of bullshit that nobody else follows.
The sleep hygiene checklist is long and full of suggestions that are utterly worthless. We have the old classics, like no consuming caffeine or alcohol and getting plenty of exercise. But we’ve also got no screens an hour before bed. Apparently the “blue light” from electronic devices interferes with your circadian rhythms. Apparently my girlfriend didn’t get this memo, because I routinely find her on the couch snoring like a buzz saw while some true crime show yammers away on the TV. Countless other people fall asleep in front of the TV too. “Blue light” has become an overused buzzword.
Another brilliant suggestion from the sleep hygiene checklist is drinking herbal tea before bed, usually chamomile or lavender are recommended. I’ve even seen green tea suggested because of its theanine content. So much for “no caffeine”, huh? Imagine telling someone who’s been having sleep issues for over ten years to just go drink a cup of tea. This is the textbook definition of being dismissive. When I finally invent a device that lets you sucker-punch people over the internet these pricks will be my first targets.
Ever find yourself laying in bed, tossing and turning, unable to sleep? According to sleep hygienists, a good solution is to get out of bed for a bit. The idea behind this is that you’re training your brain to associate the bed with sleep. This sounds good in theory, but in reality all this typically leads to is not sleeping. By making yourself get out of bed if you don’t fall asleep in whatever arbitrary amount of time sleep hygiene dictates (I’ve seen timeframes anywhere between 10 minutes to an hour), you’re creating even more pressure to fall asleep. Every time I’ve ever tried this “strategy” I’ve gotten next to no sleep at all. By staying in bed, I at least have a slight chance of falling asleep.
Maybe my problem is just that I’m a dirtball. Another piece of advice I see parroted is using fresh clean sheets. So I’m supposed to change or wash my bed sheets every single night? I wash my bed sheets once a week and sleep like shit. Meanwhile my scuzzy friend is sleeping on a mattress on the floor with sheets covered in crumbs and stains from God-knows-what and he could sleep through D-Day. Change out my bedding every day? Who the fuck comes up with this shit?
Writing is a great outlet (and after over 20 years of doing it I’d know). I guess that’s why sleep hygienists recommend keeping a sleep journal, where you log everything you did leading up to sleep, how long you slept, the quality of your sleep, and how you feel in the morning. Great, so now I’ve got a marble composition book full of useless information. I have 100 pages of “I slept like shit”. Now what? It’s not like I’m going to read the thing and come to some sudden revelation that something I’ve been doing is causing me to not sleep well.
I’ll have plenty of time to read the sleep journal when I’m struggling to fall asleep. Another turd nugget of sleep hygiene wisdom is to get up and go read a book if you can’t fall asleep. Nevermind the fact that I spent half an hour reading before I turned the lights off to go to bed. Maybe I just didn’t read enough chapters.
Sleep hygiene is utter bullshit, and doctors need to stop peddling this nonsense to patients. It doesn’t work for the majority of people, it’s patronizing as hell, and it can even make sleep problems worse in some cases. I’d rather my doctor just be honest and tell me they have no idea what’s going on instead of telling me to do a bunch of useless crap. When did medicine become about throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks?
So if you’re not one of our regular readers (and that’s okay, nobody’s perfect), you’ve probably stumbled across this article looking for advice, hoping that AJnet Magazine will provide you with that magic bullet that will help you finally sleep.
Unfortunately, I don’t have your answer.
The best I’ve been able to do is very mildly mitigate my sleep problems. Obviously I’m not chugging Monsters an hour before bedtime or doing anything that’s obviously going to screw with my sleep. I work out regularly, so I’m getting plenty of exercise. I’m not whipping myself up into a frenzy before bed. I don’t really know what’s causing my sleep problems, I can only assume it’s stress-related.
I’ve decided to stop worrying about getting over eight hours of sleep every night. During the workweek I go to bed at 9, my alarm goes off at 5 the next morning. If I wake up twenty times throughout the night and feel like shit the next day then so be it. I’ll still go to work, I’ll still exercise, I’ll still carry on carrying on. Business as usual, even if I can barely function doing it. I’m not going to sleep well anyway, so why let sleep control my life?
By coming to accept that this problem is beyond my control and all this sleep hygiene stuff is just grasping at straws, I’ve found that my sleep is marginally better, and I don’t feel like complete shit every morning. Essentially, what I’m doing is deprioritizing sleep, which in turn removes at least some of the stress and pressure that interferes with my sleep. It’s not foolproof, but it seems to kind of work for me.
All I know is, telling someone to meditate or drink a cup of chamomile tea when they’re suffering from long-term insomnia is bullshit, and these sleep hygienists can stick their useless advice up their asses.