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]

Interesting topic! I've been having a lot of back pain in the last few months that was particularly bad when I woke up in the morning. So a month ago I tried sleeping on a futon mattress on the floor. I read that some people get great relief from it, and I was so excited to try. I managed to do it for one week and it was pretty awful; I woke up with even more intense back pain than before. But I think it might have reset my back or something, because since then my bed has felt much more comfortable and I don't wake up in pain at all!

Have you ever heard of lucid dreaming in your sleep-related reading? That's something I've dabbled in before and thought was pretty neat.

[hobbitbabe]

Sleep. I'm not very fussy nowadays because I don't need to be; I fall asleep easily and stay asleep all night and wake up before or at the alarm, and I also nap easily.

But my preferences include: multiple-layer futon mattress or good hotel mattress, feather pillow that I can nudge into my neck so my shoulder or shoulders aren't on the pillow, duvet-with-cover on top of me and another one underneath me. Alone or non-entwined co-sleeping. A light beside the bed that I can turn off when I'm done reading without getting up and ideally without lifting my head.

I went for years being unable to calm into sleep without reading, but that switched in 2006 into "reading or listening to music" and then again around 2012 into "reading or find the book, put it beside me on the bed, take off my glasses, daydream" and has stayed that way ever since.

[evandar]

Oooh, sleep. Something I definitely don’t get enough of! That said, I seem to be able to get by on very little sleep, so...

I’m with you on the fitted sheets and dark bedding. There’s something very disquieting about hotel beds and loose sheets. Getting used to non-fitted sheets on hostel beds was one of the hardest parts about backpacking for me.

I sleep on my front, with two standard pillows. I’ve been thinking about getting one of the u-shaped ones, but I’m not sure how it would work with my sleeping position.

I require medication to be able to sleep. I’ve been on it, on and off, since I was in my mid-teens. Dosed up, I get about six hours of heavy sleep a night. Unmedicated, I sleep somewhere between three and four hours of very light, restless sleep.

I have to listen to human voices to be able to get to sleep, even with medication. Not singing or music because I find it too distracting, but stories. Weirdly, I find listening to ghost stories to be the most relaxing, and I tend to listen to podcasts or YouTube videos that include those. White noise, like recordings of rain or wind, will make the nightmares worse, but recordings of trains I can just about cope with.

Nightmares! I’ve had chronic nightmares and night terrors since I was a kid. I also occasionally suffer from sleep paralysis, which white noise seems to make worse for some reason. My sleep medication also tends to bring it on, so I’ve been trying to reduce the dose as much as I can without coming off it completely. Even so, it sometimes ends up being a catch-22 situation where the mess prevent me from waking up out of a nightmare.

[rosefox]

I have delayed sleep phase syndrome, so for a long time I slept very little and very badly. Then I fixed my schedule to accommodate my body clock, and now I sleep extremely well.

I like a fairly firm mattress, a side-sleeper foam pillow (a recent change from two regular firm pillows), and crisp sheets in jewel tones (though I don't mind white ones). I use two king-size pillows for body pillows, to replace the giant stuffed bear and giant stuffed lizard I used to rely on for comfort when I was in LDRs and lonely at night. It's been so long since I slept next to an actual other person that I don't think I'd be able to do it easily. I like the theory of having a cat sleep on my bed but the practice has never worked well; they always wake me up.

I sleep under two quilts and a blanket no matter the weather, and am considering getting a weighted blanket for the summer; that's not urgent, though, because I'm always cold and glad to snuggle under lots of blankets.

I used to hate white noise. Then I developed tinnitus. Now I sleep with a custom mix of brown noise and ambient sounds playing from my phone or tablet, plus my air conditioner fan on to block noise from the rest of the apartment. Since everyone else in the house—including the cats and the toddler—gets up much earlier than I do, that's very important.

[solitarywalker]

The thing i have that particularly works for me is a heavy wool blanket. Just one, which is all that is needed. Warmth and weight without bulk. In the past i've had layers of various things, or a thick down duvet, which provided warmth just fine but lacked the satisfaction of simple wool.

What does not work for me very well is the bed itself, which is too soft; i'd rather a firmer mattress.

Another thing that works for me is sleeping when i'm tired, as opposed to at any particular time. Getting up in the morning for work of course doesn't work for me, but if i have a good stretch without that restriction, so i can just do my own thing, i sleep better when i sleep and feel better when i'm awake.

[wohali]

I had bad, bad insomnia for years. I got allergy screened and found that I had bad allergies to dust mites, which explained why things were always worse for me in the winter. When that didn't fix things, I later got screened for sleep apnea (which runs in the family) and was found to be borderline. I slept with a CPAP for about a year before I gave up on it. I then got checked for nasal issues again and got both a "cryoshrink" of my nasal turbinates as well as surgery for my deviated septum. This last thing made all the difference. I no longer have trouble breathing when I get a cold. I can sleep and breathe mostly normally all night, according to my partner(s). And best of all, I wake up mostly refreshed from sleep.

So my current sleep regimen is: go to bed when I'm tired (which is usually around 2AM), and get up about 8 hours later, sometimes 8.5h. I keep the room as dark as possible (this is an issue for me, light will wake me up very quickly). I allow no screens/Internet in bed, but I do allow myself to fall asleep to music/podcasts. (I've been doing this since my first Walkman in the 80s.)

--

QI is fantastic. I am starting to love Sandi Toksvig more than I liked Stephen Fry, which is saying a lot. They've been decidedly...bluer this season, though, and I wish they wouldn't. They can do better. My favourite ep of all time is still probably Series E, Episode 4.

--

Trial of a Timelord has moments I really like, mostly towards the end where they tie it all together. Terror of the Vervoids is one of the better eps of Colin Baker's run, even if the aliens look like romaine-wrapped phalluses.

[jazzyjj]

Well let's see. I would prefer not to have to sleep in a sleeping bag, but if I really have no other choice I'll take it. I've never had sleep apnea or anything like that, I just don't like sleeping bags much. Maybe it's size. Often times when I'm staying over at my parents' place, the upstairs room I normally use is being occupied so I have to sleep on one of those inflatable mattresses which I must admit are kinda cool. But speaking of that upstairs bedroom, my mother's brother's old bed from his childhood is up there and it reminds me of a spaceship. It is a bit higher up off the floor, and has 2 guardrails. It's a king-size bed and is very comfortable. I was in that bedroom this weekend, when I was celebrating my birthday with the family. One thing I absolutely cannot stand is loud snoring. I know some people who do this, including some members of my family. A sister of mine, for example, does it but she was diagnosed with sleep apnea a few years ago. She has one of those CPAP machines though, and it has really helped her out.





As for my birthday, it was nice. I actually kinda celebrated all last week, some with the neighbors in my apartment complex and friends, and some with my immediate family. I got some cool presents as well. One of my neighbors got me a card that shows the Chicago skyline and has audio, and everyone here plus the 2 support staffers who work with me signed it.