My experience with sleep patterns and insomnia

I have an unusual job where I don't have to wake up at any particular time. There is a certain amount of work that I have to get done on the projects I am assigned and whether I start work at 8 am, 8pm, or 2:27 in the afternoon is entirely up to me. This sounds like a dream come true but it does have some negative effects as well. When you don't have to wake up at any particular time, there is no real incentive to go to sleep at any particular time and this became a real problem for me.

I have suffered from some level of insomnia since I was a child and it was very common even when I lived with my parents and siblings, I would very often be the last person awake in the house. On days that I didn't have to wake up for school or something similar, I would normally stay in bed far past the other people in my household. Now college is a different story and if your college experience was anything like my own you intentionally positioned your classes in the afternoon in order to accommodate a late night partying schedule. A lot of the people I hung out with did exactly that and because of this my sleep schedule was all over the place even as someone in my late teens and early 20's.

This irregular sleeping pattern of mine extended into my working life after college and even though I had to wake up very early for a lot of the projects that I was working on I still experienced great difficulty in getting to sleep with any regularity. Sleep aids such as sleeping tablets or just abusing some sort of cough syrup that had a sleeping ingredient in it were a regular part of my existence.

Now I am in my 40's and recently I finally decided to address this in a proactive way.

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As I have gotten older I have found like many people in their midlife, that I no longer enjoy staying up super late at night. However, even though I would go to bed at a really early hour like 9pm, I would still toss and turn in my bed and not get any real quality sleep and normally, I would end up staying in bed for a really long time in the morning after. For the most part, when someone sleeps until nearly noon, it is because they have a drinking problem or because they work the night shift. While I was borderline on the drinking at many points in my life that is not the situation now. Because I wanted to sleep but my body simply wouldn't allow it, I suffered with tossing and turning almost every night and I would wake up at some sort of random time of day normally approaching lunchtime.

In Vietnam, this is the worst time of day to wake up because the sun is already high in the sky, it is brutally hot, and the city is alive with noise. For the most part you don't want to even leave your house.

So even though I didn't have to, I decided to try to nip this problem in the bud and try to form some sort of sleep schedule despite the fact that it is not at all necessary for me. I also wanted to step away from the sleep aid tablets that I regularly was taking which was mostly Valium and Ambien. In Vietnam it is not necessary to have a prescription for these pills so the opportunity to abuse them is pretty widespread.

A friend of mine who lives a very healthy life suggested a supplement that I have heard of, but never really knew the use for.

Whenever you buy a tablet in this part of the world, especially a supplement, you run the risk of them being fake but I rolled the dice and thought that there wouldn't be any financial incentive for the manufacturers to attempt to package fake magnesium. Are they the real thing? Well, there is no way to know because my science lab in my 1-bedroom apartment is quite lacking but since they were not expensive I just decided to take their word for it. I take one of these tablets every night about an hour before I am choosing to go to sleep and thus far, they appear to help as far as my insomnia is concerned. This could be a placebo effect of me in an entirely psychosomatic way, but for whatever reason they do seem to help.

This is not the most important part of the process though. The same friend of mine suggested that even though there is no reason for me to wake up at any particular time, to select a reasonable wake up time in the morning and set an alarm for it. Even if you are really tired when that alarm goes off, to get out of bed, even if that means you feel really tired and want to go back to bed. He suggested to do whatever it takes to stay awake even if that means putting tons of caffeine in your system which is something I would have done by default anyway. Coffee is just a regular part of my morning even if by "morning" I mean close to noon.

I set my alarm for 8am for no particular reason other than the fact that this seems like a good time to be awake. Other than the middle of the night, this is the quietest time of day because the people that do go to work for regular jobs are en route to the jobs and the commotion of the day have yet to begin. Therefore, other than lunch when everyone has a bit of a siesta, this is the quietest part of the day. I have, outside of a few after-the-party mornings stuck to this alarm ever since.

I have found that after just a week or so that my body was waking up within 10 minutes of the alarm going off and to me this is just remarkable. Like, how does my body know in my blackout curtain bedroom that it is almost 8am without me even having a clock in there at all? This is one of the great mysteries of the human body to me and is one of those things that makes me think that our brains are a lot more powerful than we think they are. There are times that I think that my "autopilot" is smarter than me actively being at the controls when it comes to my brain.

Last night I was a little concerned because I found a TV show that I really enjoyed and did the thing that I believe all of us with streaming services have been guilty of at one time or another: I just kept watching "one more episode" until the next thing I knew it was 330 in the morning. I was a bit afraid of my 8am wake up call at that point but I set it anyway. Lo' and behold i woke up on my own at 7:53am naturally, without the assistance of the alarm. I expected to be groggy as hell but I am actually feeling more energetic after just 4.5 hours of sleep than I have felt after a 10 hour of sleep night. I am sure there is some research out there that shows that we don't actually need 8 hours of sleep like they recommend, and the way I feel right now would add some credibility to that notion.

I think that even if you don't have to wake up at a particular time, that if you establish a wake up time in your life that it is a good thing for your overall well-being. Ever since I adopted this approach to the bedroom I have become a lot more productive and here comes the best part: Unless I actually do encounter an amazing series that I just have to watch one more of into the wee hours, I am normally quite tired come 10pm or so every night. So for me anyway, this has been a wonderful addition to my life. I can't say for sure if it is the magnesium or the alarm, but the combination of the two have really been working out for me. There are other factors such as me cutting back on drinking in my life but whatever the reason is, I am really enjoying not having difficulty getting to sleep.

If you find yourself in a similar type of situation I would recommend getting the magnesium and also setting an alarm, even on your days off. At the start you might need the assistance of some sleeping pills for the first couple of nights like I did, but in the end if you manage to transition to this method I think what worked for me, could also work for you!