I've used it for a long time and it makes the difference between feeling sleepy in front of a computer and falling asleep in front of a computer. Highly recommend it.
Agreed. I've noticed a pretty significant improvement in my sleep patterns since I started using it. I used to have trouble "tearing myself away" from the computer at night, and I'd often stay up way too late just staring at my screen and not really doing much of anything—just sort of spinning my wheels. That rarely seems to happen any more.
It has absolutely changed the way I sleep (combined with not having caffeine with dinner or later). It has to be TV shows that I've either seen before or don't really care about what happens. Only difference is I use the sleep timer and just turn the TV back on if I have trouble falling back asleep.
I'd suspect that it can be helpful because it distracts you from thinking about other things, and if it's a show you're familiar with (or something where you don't need to pay too much attention) then it doesn't require much active effort from you either, hopefully leaving you in a state where you've purged yourself of too many other pressing thoughts and you're relaxed - both of which should help you sleep.
A book might be better though, since blue light is supposed to promote wakefulness and is more prevalent in light coming from screens that from your average light bulb.
(FWIW - I tend to watch cartoons on my iPhone just before I go to sleep, but only ones which I find slightly amusing and wouldn't watch otherwise)
I go through phases of no screens after 10pm. It mostly applies to Code/playing games, but I've found it also applies to HN and reddit. My quality and quantity of sleep improves drastically every time I do it, results visible from day 1.
Struggling to get to sleep? One thing that really helped me was taking care of what I was doing in the hour or two before bedtime. Staying up scrolling through work emails or reddit or news? Your mind's gonna be racing when you get to bed. Now I watch an hour of TV with my phone in another room - a completely passive activity that gives my mind time to settle down.
Gaming's a good outlet for de-stressing, which is important in the evening. Add to that, I find that mentally challenging ones exhaust my mind more and improve my sleep onset latency even further.
While masturbation may help sleep I've found that pornography, particularly anything addicting like fetish varieties, will hurt sleep. Binging it especially. It messes with your dopamine levels. My sleep has immediately improved by cutting it out. Possibly my #1 rec after a) keeping a consistent wake time, and b) diet and exercise. I can only presume it's not often mentioned with regards to insomnia because of shame.
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