Falling-asleep tricks
Aug. 21st, 2003 03:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
flexagonI thought I'd post about falling asleep. I'm not sure if I'm asking for advice or simply sharing my (by now) impressive arsenal of falling-asleep tactics... though I am definitely curious about others. How do you fall asleep? Do you do anything special at all or does tiredness always take you right out?
All these refer, of course, to nights when I'm stressed-out enough that tiredness alone doesn't do it, which I have to confess is most of them these days.
1) Half the job is done by treating it as a project: okay, and now I'm going to put myself to sleep by doing such-and-such. It's better for me not to fuck around by tossing and turning--there's a position that I usually fall asleep in, and I've found that if I really want to fall asleep, I should start out that way.
2) I stretch my hands, the whole hand and then each finger, and then pressing the hands together in a prayer-like position. (Because of my stressy-fist problem, I also make sure to always go to sleep with my hands open, not fisted. This little ritual, while helping me fall asleep because it's a ritual and stretching is relaxing, also helps with that.)
3) Masturbate (duh). This alone usually does the trick, though I don't like to do it too often... it can get mechanical and/or hard on the hands...
4) Visualize tae kwon do forms, slowly, perfectly. Any dance or other complex act of memory will do. Sometimes I mentally recite poems instead, preferably ones I can only half-remember like The Raven, but for some reason I find that dances/forms/skating routines work better, maybe because there's more happening in parallel. I bet mentally playing piano music might work, if I knew any, if I had any memorized.
I've made it through my form before, but never ever make it through all of them when I decide to start at the bottom and work up to my current one.
5) Breathing trick learned from The Forever War: breathe deeply, and on each out-breath pretend you're breathing that air into your extremities, slowly filling up your body from the feet on up. As each part of your body fills with imaginary air, relax it completely. If you have to move, twitch or scratch, just refill that part. I color my imaginary air a nice lavender color, and it's not often I fill up my entire body before going under.
6) Brand new and wickedly effective: a combination of #5-style breathwork and #4. I visualize my form, doing one move slowly and perfectly on the out-breath.
7) Very important: sometimes the brain just races until it switches off, so it's good to be able to tell when your body's about to drag you under so that you can avoid interrupting the process. As you start to fall asleep, you lose feeling in your hands and feet. (The loss of feeling creeps inwards, and out you go.) So, if you're half asleep or you hope you're falling asleep, without moving, see if you can feel your blanket on your feet and hands. If you can't, you're all set... just relax and don't move, and you'll be asleep quite soon.
The trouble with all of these is getting started, of course. The urge is to be lazy and let my mind keep racing madly along... and lie there awake. I've also noticed that I'm not nearly as good about doing any of these if I wake in the middle of the night and for whatever reason don't drop off right away. I just can't get my brain together enough to realize I'm not naturally falling asleep, somehow. It's weird.
So..... what do you do?
All these refer, of course, to nights when I'm stressed-out enough that tiredness alone doesn't do it, which I have to confess is most of them these days.
1) Half the job is done by treating it as a project: okay, and now I'm going to put myself to sleep by doing such-and-such. It's better for me not to fuck around by tossing and turning--there's a position that I usually fall asleep in, and I've found that if I really want to fall asleep, I should start out that way.
2) I stretch my hands, the whole hand and then each finger, and then pressing the hands together in a prayer-like position. (Because of my stressy-fist problem, I also make sure to always go to sleep with my hands open, not fisted. This little ritual, while helping me fall asleep because it's a ritual and stretching is relaxing, also helps with that.)
3) Masturbate (duh). This alone usually does the trick, though I don't like to do it too often... it can get mechanical and/or hard on the hands...
4) Visualize tae kwon do forms, slowly, perfectly. Any dance or other complex act of memory will do. Sometimes I mentally recite poems instead, preferably ones I can only half-remember like The Raven, but for some reason I find that dances/forms/skating routines work better, maybe because there's more happening in parallel. I bet mentally playing piano music might work, if I knew any, if I had any memorized.
I've made it through my form before, but never ever make it through all of them when I decide to start at the bottom and work up to my current one.
5) Breathing trick learned from The Forever War: breathe deeply, and on each out-breath pretend you're breathing that air into your extremities, slowly filling up your body from the feet on up. As each part of your body fills with imaginary air, relax it completely. If you have to move, twitch or scratch, just refill that part. I color my imaginary air a nice lavender color, and it's not often I fill up my entire body before going under.
6) Brand new and wickedly effective: a combination of #5-style breathwork and #4. I visualize my form, doing one move slowly and perfectly on the out-breath.
7) Very important: sometimes the brain just races until it switches off, so it's good to be able to tell when your body's about to drag you under so that you can avoid interrupting the process. As you start to fall asleep, you lose feeling in your hands and feet. (The loss of feeling creeps inwards, and out you go.) So, if you're half asleep or you hope you're falling asleep, without moving, see if you can feel your blanket on your feet and hands. If you can't, you're all set... just relax and don't move, and you'll be asleep quite soon.
The trouble with all of these is getting started, of course. The urge is to be lazy and let my mind keep racing madly along... and lie there awake. I've also noticed that I'm not nearly as good about doing any of these if I wake in the middle of the night and for whatever reason don't drop off right away. I just can't get my brain together enough to realize I'm not naturally falling asleep, somehow. It's weird.
So..... what do you do?
