this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2025
73 points (96.2% liked)
Casual Conversation
1881 readers
651 users here now
Share a story, ask a question, or start a conversation about (almost) anything you desire. Maybe you'll make some friends in the process.
RULES
- Be respectful: no harassment, hate speech, bigotry, and/or trolling
- Keep the conversation nice and light hearted
- Encourage conversation in your post
- Avoid controversial topics such as politics or societal debates
- Keep it clean and SFW: No illegal content or anything gross and inappropriate
- No solicitation such as ads, promotional content, spam, surveys etc.
- Respect privacy: Don’t ask for or share any personal information
Casual conversation communities:
Related discussion-focused communities
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Basic sleep hygiene, no large meals in the evening, try to avoid blue light (blue light filters for screens or avoid screens), try to cool bedoom down before going to bed. Earplugs might help as well. Complete darkness. All those nasty power leds, tape on them. I myself have smart lights so I can't make them red and real dim so as to avoid any disturbance through light.
Aside from that, melatonin ~30-60 min before hopping into bed and often an ambien 30-5 min before.
Then again that's even when I do smoke. And I'm understating my medication slightly.
For me the best substitute when I quit weed was genuinely Terry Pratchett novels. They're sort of whimsical and provoking humorous thoughts. Much like weed often does. And the books are exceedingly good natured, even the baddies aren't really that evil. Usually they're more like arbitrary concepts.
So tldr sleep hygiene and reading under a somewhat low light while the room cools down and when it gets too cold and you're getting tired of reading, close the window and hop into a crispy bed.
Should help at least. Some of these things at least. Probably. Maybe.
We've banned anything with yellow, green, or blue LEDs in the bedroom. On top of that:
I've personally enforced this with some very nice eye shades. If I put them on in even broad daylight I can sleep easily if I'm ready for sleep. They're like blackout curtains for your eyes. (My SO doesn't do this; his loss.)
As an extra, I take one shot of liquor an hour before I go to bed. After an hour all the alcohol is metabolized (do not go to sleep with a measurable blood alcohol level!) so I'm relaxed and mellow and ready for sleep.
It might help get to sleep, but it harms the quality of your sleep. So does my ambien of course, but less so than alcohol, as it's actually a pharmaceutical designed for that. But it is a drug to get to sleep, primarily.
https://www.wmchealth.org/blogs/the-truth-about-nightcaps-ditch-the-drink-get-a-go-783
Get some sort of cheap health wristband activity thingy if you want to follow your sleep better. I've liked mine, got it last year for 39€. It shows the amount of REM, deep and light sleeps. It might be that you do sleep better with a single drink, but generally science does tend to agree that it reduces quality of sleep. However a few times when I've been properly drunk, I've actually slept like twice as much and thus gotten more REM sleep, and felt more relaxed when I woke up. But I would say that alcohol does reduce my quality of sleep most of the time, even if it doesn't necessarily feel like that.
But again, not judging I don't know what works for you and I take ambien pretty much every night so that's pretty comparable to one shot imo
It harms the quality of your sleep if it's still in your system. Which is why I warned specifically against that.
You're thinking that when you don't have alcohol in your blood and it's broken down by your body, that "it's not in your system"? The breakdown produces for instance acetaldehyde and then further into acetate. That's why people get hangovers and are still sick a long time after the buzz has worn off and there's no alcohol in their blood.
If you drink alcohol today, the metabolites are still detectable in urine for a few days. No-one just ever tests for those, but actual BAC.
You can detect metabolites of almost anything in urine and/or stool for days. That's not the question here. The question is do these metabolites interfere with sleep?
From personal experience I know it's a REALLY bad idea to sleep with any measurable blood alcohol content. When I've done that, I fall asleep quickly but I wake up feeling more tired than when I fell asleep. When I let it metabolize first, the quality of the sleep improves dramatically. So it sounds like acetaldehyde and acetate don't impact my sleep negatively at all.
And from science I know it affects the quality of your sleep.
You do whatever you like but don't argue against science with some shitty reasoning you made up. That really screams alcohol problem.
Oh yes you just must be immune and the science is wrong, gotcha
The modern version of "it is written in scripture" is "studies say".
The modern equivalent of "I'm a flaming asshole" is to attribute negative characteristics like "alcohol problem" without evidence. (Ironically this is also anti-science, but let's not sprain what passes for your brain too strongly here.)
Ah yes "who cares about your science, this is what I feel like", as if subjective experiences have never fooled anyone?
The plural or anecdote isn't evidence.
It's not "without evidence" and I didn't attribute it to you. Don't you think I take care to take breaks from my meds to see that I don't have a) a physical dependency b) a psychological need (addiction)? It's not always possible, as sleeping is then slightly harder, but I try to test that out with at least a few week break every year, because it's healthy.
You do realise the nature of addiction is such that when you actually suffer from it, you'll make yourself believe you don't?
It reminds me of those people who adamantly demand that caffeine has zero effect on them (as they drink it frequently and still sleep and don't notice effects from it.) While everyone around them is annoyed to fuck by their constant jittering and foot tapping.
I'm not saying you have a problem. But alcohol does reduce your quality of sleep. Your "but I don't feel that way" won't discredit all the science which shows it does. Sorry. I'm not telling what to do or judging you in any way ffs.