I’ve officially reached a stage of middle age where my spouse and I stopped sharing a bed. I do sleep with my dog though, who is very snuggly.
Idk man, I’m 35 and I just go to bed
I’m 36 and I wear a CPAP because my body tries to stop breathing otherwise.
I’m 39 and I need standard bed setup, or a couch with the tv blaring.
I feel like my body wants to stay up for 30 hours followed by 14 hours of sleep.
I need a different planet.At this point I’m considering a colostomy bag so I don’t have to go to the bathroom 5 times during the night
you will have to deal with the potential smell and dumping the poop. you dont want that thing fermenting and festering in your bag.
Ooh boy just you wait til you realize you’re just napping in between having to wake up to piss 3 times in the night.
I stopped drinking fluids three hours before sleep and that’s helped. Just have to hydrate well early in the day.
Doesn’t work if i drink any alcoholic or sugary beverages.
Just sleep on that futon again for a month. You will sleep like a baby when you sleep in bed again.
I sleep well as long as my wife is there. She can roll us from one side of the bed to the other or off it even and I’ll continue sleeping like a rock. The moment she’s sick or has trouble sleeping is when I also have trouble sleeping, which is fine with me.
I do sometimes miss being younger and sleeping any where, any time though.
That’s actually really sweet. Take good care of each other.
40+ here and the only reason why I don’t sometimes sleep well is because I chose to play games until 2am.
At some point in my 40s I started doing that medieval “first sleep” and “second sleep” thing where my eyes just blast wide awake at 2am. I don’t have to pee, I’m not uncomfortable, I just wake up. I read, take the dog out, brush my teeth again… After awhile I go back to sleep and wake up at the normal time.
I guess it is kind of nice to do a patrol around and make sure everything is cool, and the dog loves it. It’s just kind of weird.
Long ago, when humans lived by daylight, we likely lived this way, with a “hole” in the middle of sleep, where people would wake up, putter around, chat and tell stories, have something to eat, and then go back to sleep. There was a lot less going on back then, people didn’t have access even to books and candles were costly anyway so there was no reason to stay up late. I’ve had the same issue myself although these days, it’s just the 2 times to pee.
Strange to imagine not having much to do.
Same. I’m over 50, and my wake up time is about 3:30am. I will read, or catchup on email, or play an hour or two of a PC game. Then go back to bed tired and get snuggled, and wake up at 8 for work.
I think my neighbours are like this
I recently learned (while staying up late trying to shoot a rat in my backyard) that they go to bed around 8-10 pm, then are up for an hour or so sometime around 1-2am, and it is fairly consistent
I don’t have to pee,
I don’t need water.
that vodka will turn to urine eventually
I started taking a tiny dose of trazodone at bedtime to help me with that. It’s not nearly as habit forming as all the “real” sleep drugs.
I’ve been doing that as well, there is periods where I’m just awake in the middle of the night.
I think a lot of us do that and after awhile I started taking note of the amount of time I was asleep before waking so alert and ready to go. Now I set my alarms to coincide with that. For me it’s about 3.5 hours so I have one alarm that wakes me at 2:30am than another for 7am. Seems to work for me though my wife and friends say I’m crazy for waking myself up in the middle of the night. But for me there’s that calming realization I have nearly 4 more hours of sleep before waking up for good. Makes those last few hours even more precious.
Amateur! Wait till you hit 65. I’m slowly becoming Darth Vader. Machines to make me breathe, eyes that can’t see, ears that can’t hear and teeth that shatter on the softest food. Luckily they haven’t started replacing any of the inside bits… yet.
PS: this is just the short list of stuff.
I describe adulthood as an ever-increasing amount of rituals to maintain normal.
Oh god yes!!! it takes an hour of smearing gels and snorting powders just to go to bed. Then I have to do it again next morning.
i think someone snorting white powder would have trouble sleeping for days.
Cpap? Among other things?
yup
My CPAP was literally life changing, was insane how much better I felt when I actually had real sleep! Hahaha
Getting old ain’t for wussies!
I am at the stage where I either sleep 4 hours or sleep 12 hours
Yea my sleep schedule is destroyed
And the best part is you don’t know which one you’ll get when you go to bed.
Barely standing awake at 10 fighting to keep your eyes open when you finally go to bed? Wide awake at 1 in the morning.
Browsing the internet at midnight because you are clearly not tired? You open your eyes and it’s mid afternoon.
Doesn’t help that I live too far north that it’s just always dark or cloudy
I wake up and it could be any time of the day until I check my clock
I actually pine for that type of environment though I suspect it gets dreary after awhile.
A touch more than dreary if you ask me. We’re just mobile plants, turns out, after months without the sun, your body just like… doesn’t do as well. You get more easily depressed, sleep changes, and even diet problems tend to creep in.
Winter can be if the weather stays warm and wet. For me if there’s snow on the ground it’s fine. With a full moon it almost feels like daytime.
The summers are incredible though! You do need to invest in blackout shades.
I live in California where it’s almost always sunny except recently. It gets hard for me because I love grey weather and snow and stuff. I can always go up the mountain for the snow but I want to be trapped in my home for a week or something due to snow I just romanticize that sort of thing.
I think i understand you’re making hyperbole but i can say 5ft of snow in two weeks was pretty easy to manage and i was never stuck. Just had to clear the walkway/driveway on the daily for a bit. That and i was being a cheap-ass and doing it myself with a hand-held electric blower instead of paying for a plow like the rest of the neighborhood.
It was definitely a lot of work back before when i just had a shovel. 125m(400ft) is a lot of ground to cover.
After 40? Lmfao. People, just take the time to care for yourself. Eat balanced meals, don’t over eat, stop watching TV all the time and go for a walk.
Take it from someone nearing 50 who took gluttony to the max by 35. I feel better today, than I ever did in my younger adult years because I stopped being a typical american.
I’m sixty, and I agree. The best time to start taking better care of yourself is when you hit 18. The second-best time is right now.
For the past 16 years, I’ve steadily improved my diet and exercise habits. I feel pretty good, compared to what I hear others complain about. I sleep about seven solid hours per night, typically waking up once around 3AM. I’d like to get more, but I’ve accepted that ~seven is all I need, because I can’t sleep longer.
I think when you hit 45, you need to make a choice. You can choose to put in the effort or not. No one can do it for you, and no one else really cares whether you do. In fact, some people will actively discourage you, sadly enough.
Yeah well,
I exercise, eat healthy and am not American.
My sleep is still fuck.
Take your high horse and ride it into the sunset.
Same. I’m more healthy than everyone I know my age, and at 40 something my sleep is getting increasingly horrible. While people a lot less healthy sleep 8h every day. I’m so jealous…
I think it’s because they are happy. I hate happy people.
The reason this post connects with people is that it validates a very well understood connection between aging and difficulty sleeping
Turning around and invalidating people in response and telling people its their own fault is frankly silly. Just because you resolved your sleep/health issues by taking better care of yourself doesn’t mean everyone else struggling with sleep is just an unhealthy bum who should do better
Aging tends to bring with it sleep problems that aren’t caused by lifestyle factors associated with poorer health, and even in cases where someones health issues are because theyre not taking good enough care of themselves, telling those people its their own fault generally overlooks socioeconomic factors- it usually amounts to blaming people for being poor, or mentally unwell
Source: I have a severe sleep disorder and at 27, I’ve seen a multitude of sleep doctors (and am still searching for a Dr who is knowlegable enough about my condition to try and help me beyond what I’m already doing) and spent a fair chunk of my life at this point sitting across from one discussing sleep issues
Above 40 and get roughly 3-4 hours after being in bed 9. Exercise daily (and have been since age 20), am at a healthy weight, eat (relatively) right. Been seeing specialists and trying a dizzying array of things for 9 years, but I’m pretty sure this is just me now. Sometimes you just get dealt a bad hand.
🫂
Sleep issues suck ass, I’m sorry my friend. Sleep maintenance insomnia seems so much more challenging to treat than sleep onset insomnia
Thank you, sorry for you as well. I have no trouble getting to sleep, it’s staying asleep that’s the issue. Seems to ultimately stump everyone.
What wakes you?
My partner has an issue, where she is tired and falls asleep. But because something is worrying her, she wakes with thoughts ruminanting in her mind. This will go on night after night until she deals with the thing she is worrying about.
If this is happening to you, see what you can do to deal with the worrying situation.
I had severe insomnia (10-15hrs/week) in my teens and early 20’s, I couldn’t get to sleep, so maybe not applicable. But what finally cracked it for me was rock climbing, I’d go after work and climb until physical exhaustion, climbing is good because it forces you to think about the climb as well as exercise. I’d go home after and have a cool shower and a very light meal. I ate my big meals early in the day.
I am still a short sleeper, I only get 4-6hours (average 5:15) per night.
It’s thinking through and planning random things for the most part. It could be a work-related issue, or a random thing I just realized I had an idea about how to do better than I had planned, or a specifically-worded challenging google search I need to do to troubleshoot something.
The thoughts themselves aren’t usually high-stress, but my brain starts working on them regardless. Strategies to take my attention off of them might work for a time (counting, imagining a journey, etc), but even if I fall asleep I wake right back up soon enough. I suspect right now the main mental issue is symptoms of burnout, but I have physical eye dryness issues layered on it (all being separately worked on with different specialists - tried all the drops, treatments, strategies…).
I could go on and on, but thanks, exhausting myself during the day is not a bad idea all things considered. At least it may reduce my physical capacity to wake up.
I can feel myself dying
