this is mostly a ramble about insomnia

I got sick last week. Properly sick, the way you get sick as a kid: vomiting followed by a day and a half of fever that turned my life into a series of naps separated by brief effortful ventures out of bed just long enough to feed the cats or get more water. I'm finally back to normal, mostly, but the real kick in the teeth was that after my fever broke, I still really had to lie around all day for a few more days while my strength came back and it slingshotted me back into insomnia. So I was sleeping for ten or twelve hours a night, but also lying wide awake for two or three hours around dawn.

I'm a chronic insomniac since childhood, with some days/months/years being worse than others. Never an up-all-night insomniac, more of a lying-there-for-a-couple-hours-feeling-awful, wondering-when-I-might-sleep type. In the past year, unless I'm deluding myself, I think I've gotten an incrementally better handle on it, so it was really disheartening to be back in that cycle. However! As soon as I could, I brought back the various elements of my routine, and the last couple of nights I managed to sleep through the night again (also for a more normal 8-9h). Yay!

The lifestyle modifications I've instituted to get decent sleep are pretty obvious, and most of them are fairly low-effort when they're part of the routine, but it took a lot more effort to incorporate some of them into my life. Some of these I've been doing for years and some of them are new because I quite simply did not want to do them and it took ages to submit to the need. I made a list. Figured I might want to reference it later. And while I'm only an expert on my insomnia, not yours, I do have a LOT of experience and it might help someone else. (I'm open to questions too.)

-Work out in the mornings. This is the hard one but it has lots of additional benefits (heart palpitations: cured. stress: lowered. back pain and other random pain: reduced. bod: hot.) so I keep at it, in a rather less-than-hardcore way.
-Get outside daily.
-Take vitamin D.
-No caffeine within 6 hours of bedtime. Dinner shouldn't be too late either.
-Shower at night.
-No phone in the bedroom. Okay, I read my bedtime fic, and then I get up and take my phone to my desk before sleeping. I bought an actual alarm clock.
-Eye mask, white noise machine, earplugs (available as needed), humidifier. Thermostat down at night.
-Consistent bedtime/wakeup time...I still struggle with this one. Ugh, bedtime.
-Also I have to stay on top of my allergies so I can breathe through my nose comfortably.

I'm probably missing some.

Prevention works better than cure for insomnia. Once I'm awake for more than ten minutes at an hour when I shouldn't be, I'm just going to be awake for as long as I'm awake. Every insomniac knows that trying to make yourself sleep is not only futile but a special exercise in self-torture, not that that fully stymies the urge when you've got stuff to do the next day and you know you're gonna be tired. There's one plus side to it, which I've discussed before, which is that lying in a quiet dark room with nothing to do is a great way to generate ideas and mentally work on writing; I have a physical notebook by the bed for that, since my phone was banished. That's far from surefire, though. Sometimes I just go into a depressive spiral and begin to loathe every aspect of my life. So I don't recommend inducing insomnia for the creative benefits.

One thing I've used for a long time, since college, is the podcast Sleep With Me, which is a quirky little thing unlike most other sleep story podcasts/apps. They're bedtime stories, but they most closely resemble a souped-up one-sided version of the sort of conversation you have with someone when you're both trying to fall asleep. Meandering and pointless, vaguely entertaining but unimportant, mundane rather than meditative. I do like a good sleep meditation, too, if I'm in the right mood.