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It's no secret that sleeping well not only helps us function better at work and life but is also a critical requirement to be alive.
Our bodies can't operate without adequate sleep, regardless of how many cups of coffee or cans of energy drinks we gulp during the day.
The plethora of pumped-up videos and articles on why you don't need to sleep or you can sleep while you're dead make catchy titles, but they aren't practical.
You have to pay off your compounding sleep debt sooner or later.
In this article, I'll share my story of having sleep troubles, what I did to change that, and leave tips for you to take home and apply in your life.
But before we get into the how, let's go through:
The backstory and ground rules
Around 2022–2023, I was suddenly having trouble sleeping.
I haven't had trouble falling asleep before, but during this phase, sleep seemed to elude me. I would stay up late, hooked to my phone and thoughts, in what you could call revenge bedtime procrastination.
And when I did sleep, I would randomly wake up in the middle of the night, or wake up terrified at the call of the alarm clock in the morning.
This lack of good sleep resulted in a domino effect.
I woke up stressed, groggy and lacking proper sleep, which in turn affected my energy levels and mood during the day, making me more stressed, and then hampering further sleep.
After a while of operating this way, I realised I had to make serious lifestyle changes if I wanted to get out of this sleep deprivation cycle.
But the challenge I had in front of me was that the popular advice available on the Internet was quite generic, glossed over or out of my scope of implementation.
For example, some of the top sleep advice articles suggested taking melatonin supplements, which was not an option for me.
I'm wary of unnecessarily putting pills in my body, and taking supplements to induce sleep seemed an overkill when a natural alternative could work just as well, if not better.
Other articles suggested I create a sleep sanctuary by adjusting the room temperature, putting on blinds, or playing soothing sounds while sleeping.
The problem was that normally I could sleep soundly on a beach bed, in broad daylight, with a swarm of tourists passing by.
This is not a hypothetical scenario.
I've slept like this in the afternoon on a beach in Goa a few years prior to this phase. I had even slept through a thunderstorm that had brought down a tree near my house one night.
Therefore, light, sound and temperature were not a problem for me, unless maybe I was sleeping next to a kiln, which I wasn't.
I don't drink much coffee or alcohol, so those weren't a problem for me, either.
Now, I understand that creating a sleep sanctuary is not fairytale advice. It can indeed help others, as some people are more sensitive to these factors. But I was not in the target demographic for this sort of advice.
The problem had to be something else, and I was determined to find what it was.
One of the first things I identified after a few introspective sessions was that:
