I have also travelled around the world with my past profession, which was also for Nokia, however, I was a field based engineer, planning new mobile phone networks, from surveys, to installation, and commissioning. Im not trying to get into the social media field, the very field you are in now. Wish me luck!

Thanks for this post as my partner suffers from near insomnia like symptoms and these tips from you may help her, besides she doesn’t like listening to me.

Cheers

If basically involves you ‘self inducing’ a steadily increasing rush of endorphins, which inevitably relax you to the point of falling calmly and serenely into a nice sleep. This is simply done by running over and over in your head the most pleasurable thoughts you can think of. whether it’s a walk down by the river on a warm summer evening with an old lover, or it’s a day out at a theme park that had you in hysterics all day, or something completely imagined you think would bring you pleasure. then imagining them in such detail that your brain releases its endorphins associated with having fun.

i’ve been doing this for years and works every time, i’ve also described the technique to numerous friends throughout the years and they have always come back to me saying that it works. so that’s a freebie for you there

Many, many, many moons ago before the internet existed I set up a little mail order catalogue with products on getting people to sleep which my ex husband thought was ridiculously ironic as I can fall asleep at the drop of a hat and rarely have problems sleeping. It actually did quite well and was featured in the Daily Mail’s YOU magazine & other women’s mags. Lavender pillows and oils and anything with Lavender in it sold like hot cakes.

You also missed a really good preso at Interesting08 on how listening to bad BBC Radio audio books or talking books cured one guy of really bad insomnia

http://www.flickr.com/photos/anniemole/2599085115/

They had to be not too exciting or interesting but also not too dull

Yeah man, I check your blog. Whats the RSS reader you speak of though?…I could do with one of them maybe. To keep me more up-to-date on things rather than manual checks.

Anyway, Whatley I’m an insomniac too. Have been for as long as I know, but I can date it back to about year 10 (14-15 years old). There are billions of things in my life that could cause it.
However I’ve somehow got used to it and learned from it. Like those times I’d lay in bed for hours worrying etc, I’d always wish I’d stayed up and played on the N64 or something. Then when I did a stint at college, I was on about 4-5 hours then…I kinda looked like a smackhead then cause of the tired baggy eyes etc, heh :p

Now…me and body kind of high five each other and get along. In high school I used to hate not being able to sleep, I couldn’t sleep, and then from there my mind would wander and bring up loads of worries (making things worse).

Nowadays…I come home from work…and I try to counter-attack the hours of the day I spent working with getting in time to do the stuff I like to do. Friends, Video games, films, just havin a laugh, whatever.

I tend to stay up to about 2am most nights because I feel like I’m wasting hours of the day I could be doing stuff in.
I get on average about 5-6 hours a night (sometimes 4, sometimes 7 if I’ve worn myself out from being out somewhere or skating etc).
Every now and then I’ll hit 0 energy and give in to an early night to recharge, but mostly the weekends sort me out (with about 8-10 hours).

Going on about 5-6 hours in the week, then staying up late the next day and repeating mon-fri seems impossible to some of the people I talk too, but for me it’s the norm.

I couldn’t offer people tips to get to sleep…usually now if I was to force myself to sleep at a normal amount of time I could probably get to sleep because it’d seem like what I was doing with my time was boring compared to the entertainment possibilities in the lounge…so I’d bore myself to sleep so to speak.

I think they recommend you have no less than 6 or 7 hours each night, and the ideal amount is 8.5 hours I think.

Sleeping is one thing that many just take for granted, and it really shouldn’t be. Only those who have experienced ‘not’ getting to sleep, are maybe the ones who have any appreciation for it.

When I returned to the UK after doing my bit in the Gulf War in 2003 I had a real bad sleep problem. I would maybe get an hour per 24 hour period. If I was lucky.

I tried as hard as I could to find a reason for my problem. Actually laying there trying to sleep, but also trying to work out in my head why I wasn’t sleeping was actually making the problem a lot worse.

Was it ‘shellshock’? We had come under indirect (mortar) fire for weeks before my return. Indirect fire is much worse than direct fire for your brain. You constantly ask yourself “Is the next one going to get me?”.

Was it guilt? I felt bad knowing that some of my mates were still out there, and I was now sat at home with my feet up?

Was it fear? Way back in 2003 when we first went over the border, we all still thought Saddam had chemical weapons. Sleeping with your respirator and chemical suit within arms reach was a necessity. It kind of became like a comfort blanket. Think of it like a child’s teddy. If you take the kids teddy away, it’s unlikely they’ll go to sleep.

Whatever it was, my brain was constantly racing trying to work out what was wrong with me.

I turned to sleeping pills in the end. Bad idea. They work, but I became reliant. They masked the problem, but didn’t fix it. It took me many more months to get myself off the reliance of the pills. That is something that I never want to experience in my life again.

Whatever my problem was, it just sort of eventually went away as the months passed by. Maybe it was all just me being weak.