Day 708: Sleeping Poorly

personal

So it wouldn’t be Road to Ramen without two things:

  1. Me pushing off writing until the very end of the day before I sleep
  2. Me talking about my sleep

I want to properly take the time to write out my thoughts on where I want to take Browserflow for the little “The Ideal Lifestyle” series I’ve been writing, so today’s post will be about sleep.

I’ve been in my new LA apartment for a month and a half now, and I’m getting the worst sleep of my life. I have no idea why.

On a given night, I’ll wake up somewhere between 2-5 times throughout the night, which leads to me feeling absolutely exhausted when I get in the morning. It’s not clear why this is happening: I go to sleep at reasonable hours, I’m not on any medications, I don’t drink alcohol, I don’t take my devices to bed, I don’t have trouble falling asleep — but staying asleep has been impossible.

As a result of these interruptions, I’ve also been having very vivid dreams because I’m spending much more time in REM sleep. They’ve frequently been horrific nightmares, which causes me to wake up even more because they’re so unpleasant.

I normally don’t have issues staying asleep and have thought of myself as a deep sleeper, but this past month and a half has been an exercise in learning that things could change quite drastically.

I thought that maybe this might be due to stress, but I don’t feel particularly more stressed than normal. Sure, it feels like there’s more going on with Browserflow than before, but I’m not worried or freaking out about it. During the day, I generally feel pretty happy.

Thankfully, once I get up and go about my day, I don’t feel that affected by the poor sleep I’ve been getting, but I know that it’s likely taking a toll that’ll slowly wear away at my ability to function well. I’m not worried yet, but this is definitely on my radar.

I’m in the process of running a bunch of A/B tests to see whether I can isolate the cause of my poor sleep, but I haven’t come across anything that’s helped yet. Things I’ve tried:

  • Using a humidifier (because friends have told me that my apartment is very dry)

  • Measuring CO2 levels

  • Sleeping on my bed rather than on my futon on the floor

  • Sleeping in different parts of my room

  • Sleeping with ear plugs on

    • Sometimes I wake up due to noise, but it’s more frequently happens randomly than due to some noise outside

Hope I can figure this one out because I love and value sleep and it’s been a bummer sleeping so poorly on a consistent basis. Maybe this is my subconscious telling me that it doesn’t want me to settle down in LA… who knows.

Okay, bed time! Tonight I’m sleeping in the common room rather than the bedroom and I’ll see if anything changes.