When I can’t sleep, I turn around and sleep “upside down” - moving my pillows to where my feet were beforehand, and my feet to where my head was beforehand - and I stick with that for a week or so. It gives me a week or so without insomnia and then wears off, so I have to turn myself back around for the next 7-12 day period.
Admittedly this could just be a me thing, but let’s put our faith in this method and let the power of placebo effect take hold. Boom, minor bouts of sleeplessness are cured.
What are your own examples of this?
If you can’t sleep. Get up. Get out of your bed for a while.
Staying awake while laying in bed often changes the association of sleep with the bed. Removing sleep conditioning effects.
Also as someone who has had insomnia since I was a child. I can tell you if I lay in bed. Unable to sleep. And Stay there. Rolling around. I won’t ever fall asleep.
But if I force myself to get up. Maybe have something to drink. Walk around a bit. Stare out the window for a bit. Then go back , I’m more likely to fall asleep.
And if I’m having really bad insomnia. I go for a walk. At this point I’m my life I can tell if it’s going to require a walk or just getting up and moving around the apartment/house for a bit.
Even a 15-20 min walk can do wonders. But I typically do 30 to 1 hour walk. It depends on how I’m feeling.
You would think exercising in the middle of the night would wake you up more. But nope.
9/10 times I go for a short walk. I get back and fall to sleep almost immediately.
It’s hard to force yourself to get up when you are exhausted and just want to sleep. But it’s do the walk or not sleep at all.
Also. Going out at 2 or 3 am on a week day is kinda of an interesting experience. Depending where you live, you might be the only person around.
It’s eirie and surreal. Subliminal spaces.
I quite like it. That also helps motivate me to do the insomnia walk. (Sometimes I ride my bike instead which is really nice as there are minimum cars. -make sure you are in light clothes and have lights and reflectors on your bike).
Staying warm actually does ward off illness. Specifically, you need to keep your nose warm or else its local immune response becomes surprisingly ineffective.
I wanna make a nose-hat now to keep warm
If you’re clumsy, do a grappling martial art like wrestling or Jiu-Jitsu. After 6 months even if you still suck at that martial art (e.g., me) your nerves and muscles will know how to move shockingly efficiently.
When you sprain your ankle, DON’T MOVE. I used to try and walk it off because that’s what everyone does and even coaches recommend it, but that’s when the actual damage is done.
Spraining is usually just your tendons/ligaments going into emergency mode (getting very short/tight). So if you try to walk while they are still tight, they will actually tear, doing damage that takes weeks to heal. If you instead just keep that ankle perfectly still for like 30 seconds to 2 min, the ankle will be completely fine.
Trick is, you have to overcome the social pressure to hurry it along (i.e. on a hike at work, or on a sport field).
I sprained my ankle once trying to dodge out of the way of a classmate I was trying to avoid when i saw them at a park 😂 What you say is correct. Kind pf wish I’d gotten it checked at the time but it could’ve been worse and I rested soon after hobbling out of view
I flip around when I can’t sleep as well. It only works sometimes for me.
This probably isn’t very useful to most but you’d be surprised how much info you can get from paying attention to the smells around you. I use odor for navigating places like malls.
I think that’s good advice! We should all try and be a bit more attuned to our senses.
Helps with personal hygiene, too 🤫😅. But - at least for me - a disconnect with our sense of smell largrly comes from living in a city, spending too much time indoors, and spending too much time in our own space which smells like us. So having bad hygiene makes it harder to smell which makes it harder to identify that we have bad hygiene!!
But yeah, I follow my nose a lot more than other people and it makes the world a much more interesting place. People who’ve been to a lot of food markets, perhaps at christmas, understand this.
I have insomnia and I’m just here posting this shit.
If you have a song stuck in your head, and it’s driving you a bit mad: listen to it. Something about your mind trying to fill things in (it’s been many years since I’ve read this bit of advice, and unsure entirely on why).
Or try to rememberr how the song ends.
Basically songs stick in our head when we can’t finish them, so songs with really subtle endings or heavily repeated phrases will stick the most.
If you’re stuck on a creative project or out of ideas on how to approach a problem, and you feel a little fatigued mentally, have a cup of coffee or something with caffeine and lie down for a short nap.
It’ll take some time for the caffeine to kick in, so you might even drift off, and this way it seems to stimulate the mind in a way that produces insights and ideas more than just keeping you from feeling tired.
Nappucino! Works every time
In your head, change the name of a food you wish to avoid. I’ve done this with McD’s.
In my head, it’s been called McDicks since high school. I, personally, don’t enjoy eating dicks. So, when I see the sign, and I feel like a Big Mac would go down easy, I say to myself, “I don’t eat dicks.”
It works.
For those who enjoy eating dicks, well, you’ll have to choose another association. Also, I didn’t think the phrase “feel like a Big Mac would go down easy” would be so overtly sexual.
I honestly hate mcdonalds anyway, but the range of stuff I’ve tried there is very limited - maybe if i had a big mac I’d succumb to the MiccyD.
For me it just feels like food designed to make you sick, either because you’re compelled to eat too much or because it’s sooooo unnatural.
There was this movie on Netflix called Spiderhead where they’re testing drugs including one that makes people overeat until they hurl, and watching it reminded me exactly how i felt whenever I went there as a kid. I steer clear now. Trauma!
Seeing a horizon can fix short-term balance issues, or temporarily relieve long-term issues like labyrinthitis/vertigo, because it feeds the secondary ocular-vestibulo brain bit and gets you back settled and leveled. Unless you’re drunk or damaged, it’s a neat trick.
I’ve heard this before - I thought it was just looking into the distance. You’ve reminded me to try it though. I went from perfect vision to rather short sighted throughout my life so far 🫣
I have another one: use coconut oil (thick one) as a mouthwash to improve gum health and whiten your teeth more. It also is great for neutralising any acidity or any bad taste in your mouth, if you’re not yet ready to brush your teeth.
Drink more water. Eat more fiber.
Yeah if you like poop and pee
“if”
If your clothes have an odor, you can spray a cheap vodka over them to neutralize the smell.
On a similar vein, quit using fabric softeners and dryer sheets.
Fabric softeners use a mild acid to burn off loosening fibers which speeds up the wear of your clothes.
Dryer sheets work by transferring wax from the sheet to your clothing. This smooths those fibers down and waxes them in place. Wax is incredibly good at holding odors, that’s why we use it for candles and why dryer sheets leave a lasting smell. Unfortunately, it’s not picky so any smell can get trapped in that wax and linger for ages.
As it turns out, most modern textiles are made out of finely processed material, you’re going to be hard pressed to find any clothes that actually need that kind of treatment. It’s wholly pointless on synthetic fabrics.
The worst offenders will begin to pill after a while, you simply shave the pills off with a razor or a depiller tool, which is fully affordable with the money you save on not buying dryer sheets.
To DJ Khalid this, here’s another one.
You can purchase wool dryer balls and use a lower setting in your dryer to keep you clothing fibers to reduce the amount of wear.
Wool dryer balls are great. If you go way down the rabbit hole you start making your own soap. I put together a 5 gallon bucket of powders back in April, it cost less than a month worth of Tide, it takes care of anything short of ink stains all on it’s own, you can use it as all purpose cleaner, and I’m not even halfway through the bucket.
Don’t they smell of vodka then?
Apparently it’ll kill off the bacteria that causes odors. Martha Stewart uses it.
Switch to linux
I really want to and was mostly Windows free for most of 2025 but I can’t get my new graphics card to perform well in either kubuntu or mint. Games that will run on ultra at over 100fps in Windows will get 60-80fps on medium-high settings on kubuntu. A tear runs down my cheek every time I see people say they got performance increases from switching. Even my old hardware performed slightly worse.
Linux performance improvements are most noticeable on lower end hardware, at the higher end performance VS windows is usually pretty random from what I’ve seen.
Ubuntu and its derivatives are very slow with updates because they’re more focussed on stability. Because of this, your graphics drivers are likely wildly out of date. And if you’re using an Nvidia GPU, you’re better off going with a distro that has the graphics drivers built in.
I recommended going for a distro based on Fedora like Bazzite or Nobara. Fedora only lags a couple weeks behind updates for testing and QA, unlike the months/years you get on Ubuntu. Plus the 2 distros I mentioned have built-in Nvidia graphics drivers
I’m running an AMD GPU (9070XT) specifically because I knew it was meant to work nicer with Linux than my 1080 did.
I might give some other distros a try when I’ve got the time. It’s a shame, I really liked kubuntu. (I know I can configure most distros to do the things I liked about kubuntu but I’m not the most knowledgeable when it comes to that kind of thing.)
One weird trick! Terminal still scares me as well as installing from GitHub, but I have win11 required at work and mint at home and the speed and ease of use are like night and day
Switched to codeberg as well. Microsoft owns github
Switched to codeberg as well
I’m using gitlab-on-prem for now, until their slow code decay and creeping featurism destroys it completely. It’s only barely usable now because of the really dumb CI/runner changes, for example, but forgejo uses a yaml CI setup so that’s never happening.
Rapid eye movement and looking at things, mentally noting them, acknowledge sounds and smells can help regulate moments of anxiety.
Standard practice for interrupting an anxiety attack is to name 5 things you can see, 4things you can hear, 3 things you can smell, 2 things you can touch and 1 thing you can taste. I’ve never used it myself but I’ve used it to de-escalate people who are having a flipout
Yeah this one was weird to hear about, but if i think about it it’s something I do myself, so i guess it really does work.
If you have black coffee either because you’re out of creamer or doing a non-diary thing, sprinkling a tiny bit of salt into the coffee will take the bitterness out of it without tasting salty.
Or try coconut oil. The thick stuff in a jar, nothing added. I had my doubts but it’s surprisingly good, really helps to have a jar when your stuck with really bad coffee.
