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.
When I was in high school, I found I could do this by jumping out of bed immediately upon waking up either naturally or via alarm clock and moving, suppressing any reflection on how I felt or temptation to look at a clock. I stopped doing this after leaving college and felt groggy on waking up no matter what for the next decade or so. I have recently resumed something like this, as I have tried to shift myself into an early riser, and it has worked well.
For me, the 10+ minute loop of grogginess is somewhat re-enforced by a cycle of thoughtful awareness about how I feel, and my body trying to react by going back to sleep. If within 30 seconds of waking up, I am in the bathroom brushing my teeth, and within 2 minutes I am already beginning my day with activity, I don't have time to feel groggy (assuming I am overall well rested). The negative is I now get much tired-er at night right after dinner, but this could be a function of having small kids.
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