u/Front-Bag-8585

A friend of mine has been helping me search the web for various sleep remedies. The most recent one: clove water!

Although I am skeptical, I am a bit desperate to sleep well and normal at night, so I will try nearly anything.

I was curious has anyone ever done this method of soaking or boiling cloves to aid with sleep and digestion? If so, how did you feel? Did it help with frequent wakeups? Does it take weeks to actually see a measurable difference?

MY CURRENT STATE: I have every possible issue at times or most nights. Take last night, I went to bed at 10PM and couldn't fall asleep until about 12AM or 12:30AM. Even for me, that is very slow. I'm usually asleep after 35-45 minutes, not good but acceptable. Then there was the 3:40AM wakeup. And the inability to fall back asleep. Iv'e got issues with, onset, duration and wakeups. So yeah, I am doing something wrong for sure. Yet, I don't know what it is yet. I shower 90 minutes before bed, and let my body cool off for 1 min. before drying off. My sleep hygiene is on par I believe, I physically shut off my phone at 1-1.5 Hrs. before bed. So no blue light at all after 8or9. I use less intense light as the evening progresses. No flood lights for brushing teeth etc. Before my reading, I do a 15 min. Session with a heated massaging eye mask. Helps with dry eyes and eye strain. Then, I do light reading until I am sleepy enough to hopefully zone out. Which I have been doing I a chair bc my doctor said "no reading in bed!" Why? In the middle off the night, I do my best no to watch the clock. During the day I exercise 3 times and I wake up nearly everyday to watch the sunrise. Despite all this, I find it still hard to sleep. Anyways, I hope to kick this insomnia one day...

I appreciate your time and effort in my sleep saga. I hope to one day be normal again... 😉

Well, I am a complete noob at Italki. I just finished my first class on there, and I was very disappointed. The teacher Maggie (won't give her last name) was less than helpful.

After a super brief intro, what's your name where do you come from? We dove right into bland textbook hsk vocabulary lists. I told her before hand my focus was intermediate conversation... She had me making sentences, which is fine. But there was little to no positive reinforcement. Hardly an indication of if the word was used correctly. She simply repeated what I had said.

It was very awkward and felt so forced. Like it was her first time teaching, yet she claims 16 years of experience.

Although her pronunciation was good (she's a native speaker) there was hardly any enthusiasm there. I thought the trial lesson was supposed to "sell" you. Maybe I am wrong.

Not everyone is skilled at humor and it is more of an art form, but the air was thick. A little brevity could have gone a long way. 30 minutes felt like a couple hours.

Without any positive reinforcement and little to no engagement, I saw hardly any enjoyment to be found. I know not all teachers are this way. I pray they are not. It's just difficult to understand where the teacher was coming from...

I even asked at one point, how will you teach conversation. She simply said, "I will give you a vocabulary word and you make a sentence." Okay. So in this case, the fundamental idea of two-way communication is totally flawed. Why even have a teacher? Why not just do AI slop drills??? What did I sign up for?

Side note: In her profile, she stated very clearly she taught speaking as well, not just vocabulary. So I feel like I took the wrong bus to some random stop, in random ville. ;)