Here’s an obscure life hack.
If (like me) you:
Don’t like going to bed, due to it conflicting with keeping on doing things
When in bed, wish you had something more engaging and enjoyable to do instead of just lying there waiting—for instance, playing a very compelling computer game until you get tired
Do not in fact reliably get tired from playing a very compelling computer game
Like puzzles
..then a solution that has worked surprisingly well for me before (and I wrote about previously) is having hard math puzzles handy to think about as I go to sleep. Somehow thinking about math at the bounds of my limited ability to imagine does make me sleepy. And is also quite compelling.
I haven’t done this for a while, I think due to disorganization and losing track of the puzzles I had, and not having a great source of new ones. But I have recently reinstated this in a nice format.
I think ideally you want this to involve no preparation at all at bed time, and no going on your computer. So you want a nice supply of the right kind of puzzles in a physical place near your bed. So I sorted through puzzles and found a bunch of good-looking ones, printed them out, cut them up, folded them into pleasing parcels, and put them in my ex-housemate’s ex-teapot. Now if I’m ready for bed, I can draw a tiny package, and open something actually fun and helpful to think about in bed.
As an n=1 counterexample, some of my worst sleeps have been when I start thinking about a math problem in bed and cannot let it go. I will fixate on it for hours, often looping over the same thoughts while trying to find a new angle to solve the problem. I will usually have to start listening to a really boring podcast to switch my brain into passive mode and stop generating thoughts about the problem.
Yes. Instead, I listen to videos that are over my capacity to understand without visuals, usually math, physics, or engineering. They will be on an interesting but niche and unimportant topic so I don’t feel bad not finishing them after I wake up. I like listening to Mathologer or Technology Connections
n++
Didn’t happen too often, but I’ve had at least three occasions where a math problem captured my attention to a degree where I spent many hours ruminating about it in bed instead of sleeping. On the plus side, these nights were very productive and I ended up with a full solution for all three problems. Still, I would usually prefer to avoid triggering this on purpose.
Thinking about math is counterproductive for me, but I’ve found word puzzles to be good for this. For example: pick two four-letter words and try to find a word ladder that connects them (ie, a sequence of words that only differ by one letter).
Lewis Carroll did this as well. Have you heard of his “Pillow Problems”?
Don’t much in the way of math skills but this checks out in my experience from having mentally exhausted myself trying to think through some math a few times on the edge of sleep.
I used to do this with sudoku puzzles. They require enough cognitive horsepower that I would get tired quickly, but they’re not so interesting that I keep thinking about them when I finally decide to go to sleep.