I had insomnia for about the first 45 years of my life. At its worst, I would miss at least one night of sleep per week. By “miss” I mean I would go to bed at a reasonable hour, lay there with the lights off and my eyes closed until about 4:00am, when I’d get out of bed, get dressed, and go to work.

I tried drinking myself into a stupor. I tried white noise CDs. I even got a prescription for Ambien from my doctor. That scared me because I thought meds would do the trick, but I took it and still didn’t sleep.

One day I saw a post about the Sleep With Me Podcast. It’s described as bedtime stories for adults. I followed the link, started listening, and thought, “this guy may be the most boring person I’ve ever heard”.

I started playing it when I went to bed, and it worked for me from the very first night. I fell asleep within minutes of starting the episode, but then I woke up after it ended.

The next night I loaded my phone with all the episodes. I slept through the night, but then I couldn’t wake up in the morning. My alarm would go off, I’d hit snooze, then I’d hear the podcast playing and fall asleep again.

What I finally settled on was setting a sleep timer to stop the podcast a few minutes before my alarm would go off.

I’ve been listening to that podcast every night for the last 11 years. It’s been the best sleep of my life. I’ve actually had the experience of being consciously aware of losing consciousness. It’s a weird and wonderful thing.

The thing about the stories he tells is that it seems like there might be a point, and you start listening to the story, but he goes on so many tangents and diversions that it never actually goes anywhere. After a while, my brain just shuts down.

The first episode I listened to was telling a story about a group of people about to enter a pyramid. It ran for over an hour, but I didn’t hear more than a few minutes.

The next episode continued the same story, and when I started it the next night, the people were still outside the pyramid. In over an hour of telling the story the night before, absolutely nothing happened.

Yes.

There’s a retirement village nearby, and EVERY MORNING around 4 o’clock, some motherfucker with a huge rubbish truck goes in.

The driver parks.

The driver walks over to the large industrial bin.

The driver opens the lid to see if it’s worth putting the contents in the truck. If it is, he lets the lid SLAM down, then pushes the rusty metal bin over the bitumen road towards his truck GRRRRNNNNNNNTTTT (because the wheels on those things never work).

He then gets back in his truck, does the little garbo magic with the mechanical arm thing, the truck lifts the bin, and he bangs it against the top of the truck receptacle a few times for shiggles BANG BANG BANGGGG, then moves the mechanical arms to place it back down on the bitumen with a gentle kiss BANG!

He then gets out of his truck, and pushes the now empty industrial bin over to where it was GGNNNNNNKKKKTTTTTT and positions it gently against the brick wall there BANG!

He then gets back in his truck, and reverses out the driveway DOOT DOOT DOOT DOOT DOOT DOOT DOOT DOOT DOOT DOOT DOOT DOOT, and finally fucks off.

Dozens, if not hundreds, of people live there. If I can hear that truck as a neighbour, how much worse must it be for the oldies trying to sleep there?

Yeah, tinnitus.

not intentionally, white noise from the ac or a fan is fine on summer nights though! and the sounds from my girlfriends headphones when she stays up a bit later than me, but only because I get to be next to her lol

a speaker/TV show/movie? absolutely the fuck not I can’t sleep with that my brain wants to pay attention so bad

White noise machine

Podcast recommendations:

1. The Drowsy Historian
2. History of English Podcast (Kevin Stroud)

Both have no ads at all, and uniform volume.

Go and get that ADHD assessment

ADHD adult with chronic insomnia here. I usually sleep with “electronic ambient music for sleeping with delta waves”, which is the prompt I give my bedside google home before bed. I do not sleep more, but the delta waves thing seems to help me sleep deeper.

Usually a story-telling or audio play podcast.

Never, but I like conversing with my internal monologue in my head. I’m not quite neurotypical, but I have been pretty good (trained?) to rein in any out of control thoughts if they ever wander by using bait I know my brain can chill with.

When I was a teen, it was sexy stuff. Young adult, plot points for a novel setting I’ll probably never write. Lately, it’s just plans for the day (I sleep so much faster now than I used to, though, since I changed my sleep habits after having kids).

Plus, my own monologue makes sense of how I’m feeling and gives me pep talks! That’s probably a product of coping with abuse, but it’s nice none the less.

Sleep music . changed my life . i used to lay awake for an hour . i created a world in my head and would continue the story every night . now with sleep music I’m out in minutes , the people of my world prolly miss me.

I absolutely have to have white noise of some sort. My stupid ass brain is ALWAYS on alert for any noise whatsoever. A pin drops on the opposite side of my apartment and my brain freaks out “omg wake up and pay attention!!” it’s so fucking frustrating. Any typical creaks or whatever that a house makes, well time to focus the entirety of my attention on it whether I want to or not. A knocking heater? It’s the most dangerous thing in the universe and apparently my brain feels that it deserves all of my focus…

I swear sleeping is the most difficult thing for me to do. I’m so tired of being tired lol

No

I live in a city, of course there’s noise, mostly road noise from cars going past tbh

I’m so goddamn hyper alert that I need complete silence and pitch black darkness to fall asleep.

Except for thunderstorms. Those are oddly soothing. But that’s it.