Two things: When you are not in bed you maintain tension (muscle tone) on thousands of muscles that maintain your position. Learn to think about relaxing them a small group at a time. Also, a routine is very helpful -- in my case, drink a can of beer while reading for 15 or 20 minutes, then upstairs, undress, a bit of ablution, and into bed in exactly the same position every night. The position should be both comfortable and one in which you're aware of any muscle tension. I'm gone shortly after the light is turned off.

Actually you do have to concentrate on sleeping
 

I think we skipped past this point a bit to quickly. I think this is a key to it, and to prove it let me use a quick example.

I have ADHD, quite severely actually. About a year ago I started taking an herbal remedy that (thankfully) actually works for me. One of the upsides (and downsides) of the remedy is that it's non-addictive, so I sometimes forget to take it, which leads me back into being my normal ADHD self, which means I forget to take it, which creates a cycle, etc etc.... Anyway, let's just go with "sometimes I'm taking it consistently, sometimes I'm not."

How does this relate? Well, when I'm on the medication it is a very simple thing for me to stop myself from thinking about the day when I'm about to go to bed (provided I'm not super stressed out for other reasons). This allows me to go to sleep at a decent time on a regular basis. When I'm not on the remedy, that's when my schedule starts pushing itself back. If I let it, it will go at about an hour per day. (More on this phenomena a bit down the page).

Reason being: When I'm not on the remedy, I need to be "dead tired" before my mind will allow me to "concentrate" on sleeping. Where as with the remedy I just need to be "tired".

Now, to answer the question of whether or not this can be learned (and to clarify what I mean by "concentrate").

One of the great things about being off and on the remedy is that I start to notice the difference between the two states, my ADHD self and my "remedied" self. I started to notice that concentrating on sleeping actually is part of the process for me to go to sleep, and that it is much easier for my body to do naturally when I'm on the remedy.

What I mean by "concentrating" is this. When I go to sleep naturally my body says to me, "start daydreaming". So I start thinking about flying airplanes or fighting dragons and before you know it I'm asleep. To some of you this might sound like, "well he's just stopped thinking that's all." I disagree, starting to daydream is an active state, you daydream you aren't daydreamed at. It's a choice most of us take for granted because we generally do it naturally.

Anyway, I found that if I could get my mind to head in that direction, I would go to sleep without fail. The hard thing is getting my mind to "concentrate on sleeping" by daydreaming. So far I've found one possible solution, and here it is:

I've been studying meditation for a few years now, and one of the major skills I've picked up along the way is deep-breathing. I've found that if I use deep breathing to become aware of myself that I can lock out most of my minds whirlwind of thoughts (for more info, see this). From there I can start daydreaming about flying or saving the world from Microsoft or what have you. If I do this for a couple of minutes my body will notice it, and take over from there. Pretty soon I'm asleep.

Of course, the hard part for me is to convince my ADHD addled mind that it really wants to meditate because cruising the internet for another hour isn't as fun as it actually sounds... One step at a time, eh?

As a side note, the eventual goal with all this meditation stuff is to be able to use it to replace using my herbal remedy. It's nice to have a remedy, but I'd like to think I can get to a point of being functional without it. I'm sure I'll always have some weird kinks to my personality, but that's fine, so long as I feel like I'm in control.

Ya know what I hate even worse than not being able to get to sleep? I hate getting a frantic phonecall from a Windows Vista using relative, two and a half hours after FINALLY falling asleep, asking for help before I've even thought about coffee or a morning smoke, or honestly, of even being awake.

What makes this problem worse yet is when I ask what's wrong with the computer. What is it doing, not doing, etc? This is a direct quote of the answer I got. "It keeps rebooting!!! Windows has ecountered a problem blah blah blah blah."

Now, don't get me wrong, I used Microsoft products for two decades, and still use Windows when I have to, so this isn't my first time troubleshooting a problem, and this is NOT an anti microsoft rant. Far from it, its more of an anti relativescallingforfreetechsupportsotheydon'thavetopayforit rant. Just because I enjoy tinkering with my own computers does not mean I enjoy getting woken up to fix yours, know what I mean?

LOL. First the parallel rant, then the suggestion.

I'm not a techie, but have nevertheless been asked to troubleshoot people's Windows from time to time. However, never in the middle of the night. On the gripping hand, I have a certain other skill, with public licence, and what I really-to-the-100th power hate is when long-lost-touch-with-friends, old neighbours or even nodding acquaintances call me up out of nowhere and pretend to care how I am before asking me for a freebie from my own particular competency. I can tell from the voice when this is going to happen, just as you can tell from the voice whether "Is that Mr. John Smith?" is a customer, the police or a telemarketer. Loyal friends get freebies, people who've forgotten my existence until they need my skill, don't.

Marlboro Man, do these relatives have anything you want? If so, how about calling them up at the same hour to ask for it?

Unfortunately no. However if she ever needs someone to perform a wedding on no notice, she can ask someone else. Heh.

You could be onto something there. Between work and the family I have pretty much zero time to myself. And working from home as a programmer I have limited contact with anyone outside of work emails. My kids certainly give me things to laugh about but they also give me equal amounts of frustration. Ah the joys...

I went to bed with a headache at around 10pm tonight, took some tylenol and woke up around 2am. It's now 5am and I feel wide away but will probably go back to sleep after 6am.

I haven't had a headache in a long time but I know it can keep you awake if not treated. I tried avoiding taking the tylenol by going to a hot tub. While I was in the hot tub, the headache went away but shortly after I got out of the hot tub, it reappear again. So I took the tylenol to get rid of the headache.

Speaking of insomnia, what do you do if you have pain prior to sleeping? This pain could be a headache, toothache, or anything that is painful. We haven't touch on pain as being a source of insomnia and I'm wondering if people here think of this as the source of their insomnia. If so, what is your practice for dealing with such pain prior to attempting to go to sleep?

I was wondering when someone would touch on that issue. I've personally been dealing with second and third degree burns, and the multiple skin grafts required to get them to heal for the last couple of years, and I have found that simply taking an ibuprofen is sufficient to quell the pain so I can fall asleep. My biggest problem, however, is that after this long I am almost used to being in pain all the time, like its a normal part of existence, so I forget to take the pill, toss and turn for a few hours, and finally remember to take the pill at 3am. It then takes an hour for it to do anything, so I'm still up till 4.

I try to avoid taking them any more than absolutely necessary, as they don't do anything kind to my stomach but now that the burn is almost completely closed, I have found one tablet twice a day does the job quite well. It beats the brain fogging meds my old doctor prescribed when I first got hurt and after the grafts.

On a related note, skin graft donor sites hurt worse than anything I have ever experienced, kidney stones included. The graft site didn't hurt at all due to the nerves basically being toast by that point, but having something like a cheese grater used to take off several layers of skin is NOT something I would recommend that anyone do for fun. All this talk of cheese graters and toast has made me hungry.</bad joke>

That is a bad joke, but I laughed not the less.:eek:

You gentlemen still have old age to look forward too -- that time of life in which some part of your body is in pain virtually all the time. You do get used to it, surprisingly, or I least I have -- it doesn't interfere with my life or sleep.

That's good to know. However, I personally don't like pain. Mild pain I can deal with but anymore than that I will have to alleviate it with medications. But I'm wondering if some pain relievers are prone to keeping you awake more than others.

Folks have very different pain thresholds; the point at which they rate a pain as "serious" as opposed to "ignorable". What you might classify as "mild pain", I might classify as "discomfort". In addition to pain threshold, however, there's pain tolerance; the level of pain an individual can withstand without impairment of mental faculties, i.e. without the pain dominating their thoughts. When pain is fear-inducing it has a profound effect on an individual's performance, but if the source is clearly understood (i.e., you banged your funny bone, barked your shin, or hit your thumb with a hammer) you can shrug it off after a few gasps.

Funny, the exact opposite is what puts me to sleep.

Couple beers in the evening, and I get real sleepy.

If I can't sleep for whatever reason, I'll jump on the elliptical machine and run 2-3 miles. After that, I pretty much konk out from pure exhaustion.

5-HTP is most commonly taken by people that use MDMA. They believe that taking a large dose before and after using the drug helps prevent or lessen the crash the next day when their body has no seratonin left. I don't know if anyone has ever actually tried to clinically prove this hypothesis.

I'll second that -- a few beers while I watch the late news is exactly what I need (both to survive the news and to make me sleepy).

I'm weird. In this as well, I mean. :) If I go for a seven-hour hike, I don't sleep. Not having been in the army, I have never discovered a level of exercise that gives me a good night sleep. After coming home and taking my boots off, I might conk out on the sofa etc., but when bedtime comes, I am even less likely to sleep than normal, because the exertion has made my legs kind of twitchy in bed, and my feet have become intolerably hot, I have to get up several times to run a bowl of cold water to soak them. Or if in a foreign hotel, go stand in the bidet. ;)

I used to drink red wine like this too and would fall asleep only to wake up in the middle of the night. I am told that the alcohol is breaking down into sugar or glucose and that is what's causing me to wake up in the middle of the night. So I has to stop this practice before going to bed. I'm sure there are certain sensitivities or thresholds to all of this but I appear to be more sensitive to alcohol in this regards. The same things goes for caffeine I guess. If I drink caffeine past noon, I will have problems sleeping.

I am told that most of these sensitivities and thresholds may be genetic and it will be interesting when we find out what genetic code is responsible for such sensitivities and threshold to insomnia.

Anyone care to start the research?:)

So that’s what those are for! :cool:

.

.
To paraphrase something I read once:

"Insomnia comes to visit me.
She says nothing.
I say nothing.
We communicate
in this way."

.

We could open up a whole new comment thread on exercise practices (no, I'm not suggesting that, it's hyperbole with a point :).) Of course excercise, like sleep, is different for everyone. I, for example, usually do better to jog very first thing in the morning and follow that up with some meditation. I'll sleep better that way.

Exercising in the evening is weird. If I do that, I have to go to bed almost immediately, and then I'll conk out. If I wait a bit (say, take a shower or something), then I'll be up for hours.

That being said, it also depends on the exercise. If I've been hiking all day, I'll go straight to sleep as soon as I hit the sack...