The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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It's occurred to me (more than once over the past few months) that, ever since I've gotten a smartphone about 9 years ago, my smartphone has been more or less the last thing I look at before I go to sleep at night and the first thing I look at when I wake up in the morning. I use my phone as an alarm clock, so when I reach over in the morning to turn it off, the temptation to look at Instagram for a few minutes before getting out of bed is almost impossible to resist. I often wake up briefly during the night, and sometimes I even look at my phone during these brief intervals as well. I don't know precisely how exposing myself to Reddit and Instagram junk food during my hypnagogic and hypnopompic states has impacted upon my mental and physical health, but I'd hazard a guess that it hasn't been a postive impact.
I'm now making a concerted effort to break this habit and practise better sleep hygiene. I've bought an old-fashioned analogue alarm clock and put my phone on the far side of my bedroom so it's out of reach while I'm in bed (I still set an alarm on my phone to go off fifteen minutes after the alarm clock itself, as a failsafe in case I sleep through the alarm clock). Roughly 30 minutes before I go to bed, I make the conscious decision to place my phone in its designated spot on the far side of the bedroom, then read a book (an actual printed book, no eBooks or Kindles for me) for half an hour before falling asleep. I do not permit myself to look at my phone until after I've gotten out of bed, taken my retainer out of my mouth etc. To keep myself honest, I've created a spreadsheet* to track how well I'm adhering to my goal. Every day that I succeed in reading at least a few pages of a book before falling asleep, and/or not looking at my phone before getting out of bed, I mark a check against that day. The goal is to get to 21 consecutive days doing at least one (preferably both), after which I'm hoping they'll come as second nature.
*Which I access on my phone; yes, I appreciate the irony.
I'm jealous of your progress. I would recommend to anyone looking to repair their sleep patterns to do what you've roughly done (I cheat and use a Kindle Paperwhite with no blue light). My only other recommendation is to cut down on caffeine intake. Exercise during the day (not too late or too strenuous) can also help regulate sleep.
I gave up caffeine for a month and slept like a baby.
I'm a hard-core caffeine addict. Headaches, irritability, general inability to focus without a cup of ambrosia of the gods (or "coffee" as some call it) in the morning. But I cut off around 11am or so. So I sleep well and don't generally feel tired, except for feeling tired due to exhausting sleep disrupting parenthood issues.
Were you an afternoon drinker? Or did cutting off morning coffee help resting?
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