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I think the biggest one for me was sleep habits. I used to be a confirmed night owl with a wacky sleep schedule. Eventually I realized that this was messing up
by wpietri 5y ago
I think the biggest one for me was sleep habits. I used to be a confirmed night owl with a wacky sleep schedule. Eventually I realized that this was messing up my moods, so I switched to be a morning person with a pretty regular sleep schedule.
It took a lot of small changes, but a key for me was careful regulation of light. I started with a light-based alarm clock, which was useful. These days I have automated lights that dim in the evening and come up in the morning. It turns out I'm just not a responsible lightswitch user; if I leave manual lights on I'll stay up way later and then feel bad the next day. In retrospect, I felt bad a lot, but it was my baseline so I just rolled with it.
These days I'm more even-tempered, more energetic, more productive. I'll still enjoy an occasional very late night, but I'm always careful to return to my usual sleep schedule as soon as possible.
- cpach 5y agoVery interesting! Sounds like a smart change. Out of curiosity, do you ever read books/magazines before bedtime? If so, at what time do you lay down the book?
- wpietri 5y agoI do, but I try to read things I find relatively unexciting. E.g., a novel I've read before. Or the Economist's finance section. In some sense, it's not actually reading, but more a way to pacify my mind until I'm sleepy enough that I won't have time to think of anything too exciting or anxiety-inducing.
- zealsham 5y agoTrying so hard to change this and I can’t . How do I go about it
- wpietri 5y agoWhich part? If you're starting from scratch, I'd say start with the lighting. I put multiple Hue bulbs in my main rooms and then wrote some software to control them: https://github.com/wpietri/sunrise https://github.com/wpietri/sunrise I don't recommend using this software, but it's easy enough to write something similar. Basically make sure the amount of light around you is as if you were camping: bright mornings and days, dim evenings, dark nights. Also helpful to me was looking at other things that might mess with sleep. E.g., gradually weaning off caffeine and other stimulants. Avoiding exciting things (video games, action movies) after 8 pm or so. If at that point you're still struggling, I'd look at why. Look in the same way you'd debug an obscure software problem. Is that helpful?