#1339 the sleep experiment

For the past six months or so, I have had trouble sleeping. It's hard for me to fall asleep. When I am asleep, I wake up and then I can't get back to sleep. Some of my sleep trouble was because of work, I'm sure. Work was very stressful in the late summer and fall and there were some Sunday nights when I didn't sleep well and woke up around 2AM. I would toss and turn and fret until I finally fell back to sleep around 3:30. That's not good when the alarm goes off at 5:15. I tried taking a sleeping pill, but I was worried that I would become dependent on them, so kept that practice to a minimum.

Over the holiday break I slept pretty well, although sometimes I would still have a hard time falling to sleep and I would wake up in the night.

One of the things I promised myself is that I would get to bed earlier and at the same time each night. It's only been a couple of days, but I have had the lights out at 10PM on Sunday and Monday. I've still struggled to fall asleep. I can't get comfortable. My knee hurts. My face itches. My hair is up my nose. My feet are cold. You get the idea.

I've been reading a little bit on different sites about how using an eReader makes it more difficult to fall asleep. (Here's one of the articles I read.) I don't have an iPad, but I have a Nook Color and I read from it every night in bed before I shut it off to go to sleep. MT has a Kindle Fire. Both devices are back-lit, so we can have the lights off and continue to read. If he's already asleep, the light from my Nook doesn't bother him and vice versa (although his is really bright.) I use the night mode on my device, so the screen is black with white words.

After I read the article, I got to thinking...what if my Nook is part of the reason I have a hard time falling asleep. I also have to admit that I have been guilty of looking at stuff on my phone before I go to sleep or even when I wake up in the middle of the night. I look at Pinterest for an hour before I'm finally so exhausted I can't even hold my phone up anymore. Clearly the phone-in-the-middle-of-the-night has to stop.

I've been thinking about an experiment. The first step is to condition myself to getting in bed early for lights out at 10. Around 9:30 I drink a glass of milk (it's supposed to help you sleep.) I get in bed and read on my Nook for a few minutes, then set my sleep sounds app with some white noise, turn off the reader and close my eyes. In my experiment, I'm still going to drink the milk, but for a couple of nights I am going to read a real book. I'll keep track of how quickly I thought I fell asleep and how I feel in the morning. Then for a couple of days I will read the same book on my Nook and keep track of the same things. Finally, I will skip reading in bed altogether (reading in bed) and see how that goes. What do you think?

I've been reading in bed before I go to sleep forever. I don't know if I can give it up. If it helps me sleep better, though, it will be worth it.

The thing that bugs me is that this sleep problem is a new development. I was always the person who could just fall asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow and I would sleep soundly until the alarm went off in the morning. Is it just that I'm getting old? Do you think the eReader has something to do with it? I can't use MT as any type of guideline; he has always had insomniac tendencies. His mom has it too.

Well, I'm going to sign off this screen for the night. It's time for my glass of milk :)