Salon post: Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care...

[jenett]

Welcome to this week's salon post. I get us started with a couple of questions, but feel free to bring up totally different things if you'd rather.

(This is a public post, feel free to encourage other people to drop by, just note the 'if posting anonymously, include a name people can call you in responses' rule.)

Topic of the week
It feels like everything I'm reading is about sleep recently - okay, and I'm most of the way through Dr. Matthew Walker's Why We Sleep which is being recommended in a lot of those conversations.

So, my question for the week is "What works for you about sleep" and I'm sort of deeply curious about what people's preferences in bedding and making bed comfy are, if there are parts of that you're willing to share.

What I've been up to
Still on "Trial of a Timelord" in the Doctor Who rewatch (I have been dipping into other things, notably QI, which is also on BritBox, which is a weird clever British quiz show. (elisem and her husband introduced me to it last year.)


House rules:
* Consider this a conversation in my living room, only with a lot more seating. I reserve the right to redirect, screen, and otherwise moderate stuff, but would vastly prefer not to have to.

* If you don't have a DW account or want to post anonymously, please include a name we can call you in this particular post. (You can say AnonymousOne or your favourite colour or whatever. Just something to help keep conversations clear.)

* If you've got a question or concern, feel free to PM me.

Comments

[jenett]

So. Sleep. I have been attentive to it since I started getting migraines since lack of sleep is a significant trigger for them. (And migraines do encourage one to consider alternate ways of spending one's time.)

I track mine (I use Sleep Cycle as an app) and am currently averaging around 7:45, which is better but I'm trying to nudge it up a bit (since when I let myself sleep in on weekends, I'm fairly regularly sleeping 9-10 hours, which suggests there is not enough during the week.)

I am very picky about the actual bed. I have a thing where sleeping on white sheets is Weird (hotels are very hard) and have had a set up for about the past decade which involves:

- dark blue and green flannel bedding (fitted sheet, comforter cover, pillow cases)

- a wool mattress pad and the recent addition of a wool comforter (which I adore: if you have heat regulation issues when you sleep, I've found wool helps a lot: it breathes and reduces heat when there's too much in a way synthetics don't.)

- a large U shaped body pillow (the U shape is handy because I am less likely to hurl it off the bed in the middle of the night)

- a memory foam pillow

- and a buckwheat pillow on top of that. (I have very broad shoulders and am a side sleeper, so a lot of this is angling issues.)

And then I try hard to get the bedroom down to a reasonable temp. I'd love 68, but my apartment runs hot in the winter (I have not had the heat on in a month at all, and it hasn't gotten below 70)

Also one cat, usually taking up the bottom centre third of the bed or sometimes the bottom right or left corner. (Very occasionally other locations. When I need Extra Supervision, she comes and curls up near my head.)

[florianschild]

Your bed sounds very cozy!

I used sleep cycle a few years ago when I slept alone, but I don't think the motion sensor works as well when you're co-sleeping. I liked it while I was using it though!

[jenett]

They have a FAQ about that! they recommend using the microphone option.

https://support.sleepcycle.com/hc/en-us/articles/206704569-Does-Sleep-Cycle-work-with-two-people-sharing-bed-

(I use the accelerometer option, because I have a cat who delights in knocking things off tables and flat surfaces and the number of times I have fished my phone out from odd places is very high, and I do not need that to happen when I am trying to wake up.)

[florianschild]

Hmmm... do I want a microphone listening to me while I sleep? I don't know, it kind of creeps me out. Although I guess Siri is probably listening anyway.

[jenett]

That is of course, the complex question. (I seem to remember them saying that the accelerometer will also work, but may be a little less reliable - apparently depends a lot on your bed, since some beds will transmit movements on the other side more than others.)

[rmc28]

Like you, I find Getting Enough Sleep is a key migraine preventative. I have a Fitbit and pay attention to its sleep tracking (recently I switched from a non-waterproof heart-rate-monitoring fitbit to a waterproof but non-HRM fitbit, but as far as I can tell the sleep monitoring is still reasonably convincing.) For a long time I had a goal of 8 hours sleep, and missed it a lot; I recently dropped it to 7 hours, which I hit a lot more often. I seem to have a mode where either I sensibly go to bed around 10-11pm, or I stay up until past 1am and then crash at about 8pm the following night.

I get reliably woken up between 6am and 7am by my children, every day of the week. So to get 8 hours sleep I need to be reliably asleep by 10pm - dropping the target to 7 gives me that bit of leeway to be asleep by 11pm, which means I'm much more likely to avoid the 1am/8pm thrashing sequence.

I'm a side-sleeper by preference, though I *can* sleep on my back. I like two firm foam pillows and a firm mattress. My spouse and I at home have a large duvet each to avoid either of us having it pulled off, and also to accommodate different temperature preferences overnight.

[rmc28]

Oh! And I meant to add that in recent years my favourite way to fall asleep has been listening to audiobooks; something about the sound of someone reading to me is better than music or nothing or even the kind of white-noise or rain-on-car-roof things I've used before. I use the Audible app and the 15-minute sleep timer and usually I fall asleep well before the 15 minutes is up, and have to adjust the position back the next day. I've worked my way in tiny increments through the entire Ancillary trilogy twice and am currently working through All Systems Red the same way.