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).
Jump in the discussion.
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@ fellow sleepyheads
"I have a healthy sleep cycle. I sleep for 8 hours each night, at the end of which my body wakes me up naturally in the morning. I get up and do not feel tired through the day."
"To feel no tiredness upon waking up in the morning, regardless of whether I am woken up naturally, by an alarm, by someone else (etc.), I must sleep at least 10-11 hours a night."
Both of these claims can be true at the same time. They're both true for me. But online advice about sleep cycles has zero real advice for this issue. I don't really care about whether I'm getting the correct amount of sleep. OK, I do, but it's secondary.
My problem is that I don't want to feel tired in the morning for my first 10 minutes of awake-ness. I want to get up after 8 hours and feel awake, not groggy, not sleepy, not 'I want to go back to bed'. To get this feeling, I must sleep at least 10-11 hours a night. There are all kinds of guides on 'how to feel more awake' once you're already awake, taking cold showers, going for a jog, going outside, opening the curtains immediately etc etc.. But by the time I'm doing this, I'm already awake; I may as well just have a coffee.
Is there any way I can change this? I want to eliminate the 10 minutes of morning misery after I wake up after 'only' 8 hours of sleep.
You could delay caffeine 1-2 hours so that it's not the first thing you do when you wake up. I'm not sure of the efficacy here, I've heard that this helps restore your natural cortisol response in the morning.
Maybe also keep a window cracked and your bedroom doors open while sleeping. Anecdata, but my air quality monitor reports fairly significant CO2 spikes at night if we don't do this.
I usually wake up extremely energetic, and I mostly attribute that to years of practicing free-running sleep (https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Formula_for_good_sleep:_free_running_sleep). I haven't woken up to an alarm in years, thanks to lifestyle changes from COVID, and I almost exclusively wake up around 7-7:30 am every day naturally. I'd argue that any unnatural wake-up like an alarm will often leave you groggy no matter what other changes you make.
Other ideas: you could try "artificial zeitgebers" like Nobiletin for a month, which will help normalize your circadian rhythm. In fact, the more zeitgebers (social activity, movement, sunshine, exercise, water) you can incorporate into your morning routine the better, as they'll potentially make an alarm-less or light lifestyle viable.
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