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.
Coffee might be the problem, at least in my experience if you cut out caffeine completely getting out of bed goes much more smoothly.
To hazard a guess I'd say it's because 8 hours (or longer since you're not going to have a coffee right before bed) is long enough to cause mild withdrawals, but really I'm just going off experience here.
I've also noticed (much milder) benefits from just leaving the curtains open at night. Sunlight causes a much less abrupt awakening than an alarm, though depending on where you live there are issues with privacy, bright streetlights and very early sunrises that make this less practical. Some type of timer that opens the curtains say 20 minutes before your waking time would be ideal here.
I've also greatly improved waking by buying a couple of color changing LED bulbs for my bedroom lamps, which Alexa is programmed to gradually color shift people to my wakeup time, starting with deep blue and getting increasingly white over about 45 minutes. As a bonus, I can make the light brown in the evening before bed.
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