My Body Won't Listen to Me!!

College Life
1

<p>I am extremely frustrated right now and it is 3:30 a.m. and I have a bunch of stuff to do in the morning and I was wanting to wake up early with enough sleep and I put off a bunch of stuff to do tonight because I was tired and I was wanting to do it this morning. When I go to bed I take hours to fall asleep and this is troublesome because I am disadvantaged in needing 8 hours of sleep per night. My mind however, conveniently likes to turn off during the day and save my thinking for when I'm wanting to go to sleep. This results in too little sleep and tiredness and stupidness during the day. I have tried using sleeping medicine but that just adds on more hours of sleep. I have tried to stupid conventional methods which I will not list but if you want to know are on the first ten pages of google when you type in "how to fall asleep faster" or "i can't fall asleep." I cannot do this anymore. I just hate how I feel like I can't control myself. It's getting to the point where I'm scared of falling asleep because I know I will feel extremely bad when I wake up without enough sleep.</p>

<p>Inb4 people talking about how they feel the same way but can't help. This topic is so totally about you.</p>

2

<p>Alright, I haven’t gone through the first 10 pages of Google, so sorry if I’m just being repetitive, but this is my experience with taking hours to fall asleep.</p>

<p>First of all, I find that there are two reasons this happens to me. The first is just thinking too much when its time to go to bed, and fixing that just requires willpower. Stop thinking so much when you go to bed. The second is just not tiring myself out enough during the day. This means you have to do more during the day (both mental and physical exercise counts, but I find the physical part to be more effective).</p>

<p>I’m guessing that you’re dealing with a combination of the two, leaning towards the 2nd reason. You say that your mind turns on when its time to go to bed, but if this was just a willpower things you should have conquered it already given how much it’s bothering you. But DO just force yourself to shut off when you go to bed.
Recently I’ve sometimes been able to make myself “free think.” It’s sort of in between dreaming and thinking like you do when you’re awake. Let your mind go where it wants to mostly. If you find a thought that particularly seems to require less thought and effort on your part, follow it. If a thought seems to be stimulating you, switch to another. It’s a bit difficult to explain, and I don’t really know how much this will help you though.</p>

<p>Now the second reason. What’s your day like? How busy are you? How active are you? Do you feel tired during the day, or exhausted at any point near or around the end of the day? Even if you answered yes to all of these, you might want to try adding some more physical activity (although not right before bed- that will just make it harder to fall asleep). If you keep adding physical activity to your day, eventually your body is going to be able sleep when you hit the bed (maybe not right away, but it certainly won’t take hours anymore). How much activity depends on your body.</p>

<p>A few last things. Try not to be stressed out. You’re not going to be able to sleep unless you’re relaxed. If everything’s not okay, trick yourself into believing it is, just until morning. Maybe try to avoid work for a certain amount of time before sleeping so its not on your mind when you go to bed.Try and stay on top of your stuff and do things when you’re supposed to. Anxiety and stress aren’t going to help this problem. Stay off the computer, TV, and electronic devices before you go to sleep (how much before depends on your body- I’ld start with an hour or half an hour). Also try to sleep when you feel sleepy. Sometimes this happens at unreasonable times, but if its past 8 PM, best just to go with it. If its around 4 or 5 to 8 PM than you’re just going to wake up in the middle of the night. If I stay awake too long after feeling sleepy, I find the sleepiness goes away, and it takes forever to come back.</p>

<p>That was longer than I was planning… Hopefully something in there will be useful. :)</p>

3

<p>Don’t put off things until the morning. You KNOW that you have trouble falling asleep at night, and that it will only make it harder to do in the morning. So stay up and do it. Even if you’re tired. Everyone’s tired. It’s college. But if you have to get it done and you know you won’t do it in the morning, do it now and don’t put it off. It’s really easy to think that you can get up early in the morning and do it, but that’s a really hard thing to do for most people. I know that I won’t get up early in the morning to do something, so I either have to suck it up and do it the night before or I assume that it won’t get done. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking you can just get up and do it tomorrow morning.</p>

<p>With regards to falling asleep, everyone has different tricks to help themselves, and what works for other people might not work for you. Stressedoutt gave some good suggestions, some of which I’m sure you’ve heard before, and it’s good to keep working at it, even if you feel like nothing works. It’s a process and it’ll take a while, but keep trying until you find something that works. Sometimes, you might have to make up something that works for you, even if other people don’t think it works for them. I will do random things like sleep the other way in the bed or sleep on the couch, and sometimes that change in environment helps me fall asleep. It all just depends on what you think the issue is that’s keeping you from falling asleep. </p>

<p>If the problem is that your brain seems to “turn off” during the day and get more active at night, maybe you can try to do more during the day. Force yourself to stay active, both physically and mentally. Do things with other people, get really involved in clubs (things like planning activities or something), get a job and/or an internship, go to all of your classes and actively think about the material, talk to the professor or other students, etc. Physical activity might also have the double benefit of waking you up during the day and helping you feel more worn out at night. Even just constantly moving around during the day (things like going to class, then running errands, then getting to your job, etc), might help make you more tired at night. I’ve found that if I’m constantly doing things, then I don’t really get tired unless I stop doing things. If you schedule it so that you’re downtime is towards the end of the day or at night, you might find yourself more tired and willing to go to sleep.</p>

4

<p>Baktrax: staying up and struggling to do homework is really dumb if you know you’re going to be tired and your efficiency will be off. I cannot work when I’m dead tired but then hyper while in my bed. My major involves a lot of problem-solving and conceptual knowledge and so I cannot do it the night before when I’ve had more than 10 hours of class that day.</p>

5

<p>The do it before the night before. If you wait until the night before, then you have no choice but to just do it. If you can’t sleep at night and can’t get up in the morning to do it, then you have to do it that night (assuming it needs to be done by the morning), or it doesn’t get done. If you know this is a continual problem, then don’t wait until the night before. If you have to wait until the night before it’s do, then that’s all you can do.</p>

<p>If you aren’t actually waiting until the night before, but this is several days before the assignment is due, why can’t you work on it on a day when you haven’t had 10 hours of class that day? If you have ten hours of class everyday, then why can’t you work on it the weekend before?</p>

<p>The sleeping issue is a problem, yes, but it’s a long term one and there’s no telling when you’re going to figure out a solution to it, since you’ve presumably been working on this your whole life. But the immediate issue is that you have a lot of stuff you need to do. I get that. We all have a lot of stuff we need to do. Since you know that sleep is an issue, then you need to figure out a system to work when you are functioning. If you’re mind is active when you try to go to sleep, why don’t you get up again and start to work again? There has to be a time of the day when you can get work done, and if it’s not in the morning and it’s not during the day and it’s not at night, then when is it?</p>

6

<p>“If you have to wait until the night before it’s do, then that’s all you can do.”</p>

<p>I absolutely do study on weekends and after and before my classes but it is never enough, no matter how well I plan things out because things never go as planned because my mind needs so much more time to digest materials than given. </p>

<p>My mind is active when I go to sleep and so I get frustrated and when I try to do work, my emotions get in the way of all logical thought. And because I can’t think logically, my frustration perpetuates and I try to go back to sleep again, failing to do so, and the cycle repeats itself. </p>

<p>My mind currently is unstable and only works at random parts of the day and I don’t know when it is able to work well and when it just will not do anything. I’ve almost lost control of my mind.</p>

7

<p>

If that’s the case, besides your body not letting you sleep, frustration is another related issue that you can try to tackle. It won’t be a direct attack, but it might help.</p>

<p>I know this is cliche advice, but have you tried yoga? Before I did it I never really believed that it would actually help much. Doing some poses and instantly having less stress just seemed to good to be true. But its been around for centuries and is quite effective at both calming you and giving you some exercise. I didn’t even consciously notice that it was helping me relax until my mom pointed out that I seemed relaxed for the last couple of weeks. My shoulders were a bit more relaxed than they used to be, and I was less tense when it came to problems I had. They made me less stressful, and I was able to deal with them with a clearer head. And unlike other physical activities, I felt like I could control how much I pushed myself.
Don’t get me wrong, yoga isn’t instantly going to make you completely free of frustration. But it certainly helps. If you can’t go to a class, try looking up videos and poses online. I would personally recommend the sun salutations.</p>

<p>Try out some other tricks to help you relax as well.</p>

8

<p>If any of the time trying to fall asleep is used looking at a device’s screen, it doesn’t count. Really, you shouldn’t be watching TV or on the computer even right before you’re trying to fall asleep.</p>

<p>What I would say is get on a rigid schedule and refuse to break it. If you wake up at 9am (for instance) every day, then if you can’t fall asleep until 5 one night, you will suffer the next day. Keep yourself awake for the whole day and you should be tired enough to fall asleep by midnight the next night. Naps and irregular schedules throw people off a lot</p>