Read hundreds of sleep advice for night shift and what works
There’s lots of tips/advice on this subreddit and many have been helpful, but I’ve tried a lot of these advice over the years. As much as I’d like to follow the generic advice like "don't look at your phone", it’s useless for me because it doesn’t stick beyond couple of days. I’m just not built for that level of discipline. I started looking for things that don't require me to change my personality, and most of it came down to just lowering the pressure on myself.
The biggest shift for me was when someone on this subreddit wrote about the Mythbusters episode where they found that even if you don't sleep, just laying there with your eyes closed still regains more energy than if you didn't rest at all. It’s not real sleep, but you're still recharging slowly. This takes the pressure off that I need to fall asleep immediately, and usually, because I stop trying so hard, I actually drift off.
Next helpful tip is the cognitive shuffle method. If my brain is looping on a work mistake or something stupid I said years ago, I use a "cognitive shuffle" to glitch my brain into sleep mode.
It works like this:
• Pick a word like "Bedtime."
• Visualize random, unrelated things for the first letter. For "B," I’ll imagine a Bear, then a Boat, then a Balloon.
• Move to the next letter, "E," and imagine an Eagle, then an Egg, then an Elephant.
• Keep going until your brain gets the hint and switches to that "random image" state you get in dreams.
I used to use YouTube for guided audio to help with this but eventually switched to Just Sleep. Both help, I just needed to download the audio. I recommend some form of guided audio for like first few days until you get hang of the techniques.
For the physical side, I stopped using melatonin because the nightmares were too vivid and switched to magnesium glycinate. It's more about relaxing my jaw and shoulders than knocking me out. I also realized I'm hyper-sensitive to light, so I covered the tiny LEDs on my TV and chargers with blackout stickers. It’s a small thing, but making the room a total cave helps my brain stop hunting for stimuli. Lastly, I started using mouth tape because I'm a mouth breather. It felt weird at first, but it forces my nervous system to stay in a rest state and I stopped waking up feeling like a zombie. None of this is a miracle, but it’s what worked for me when the generic advice failed.
Any other sleep advice for night shifts?