• @QualifiedKitten
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    14 months ago

    Have you talked to a doctor about it? Would you be able to get up and just go sit on your couch?

    One of the things that has really helped me get (back) into habits is to break it into tiny, achievable steps, and once I master the first step, I build on it. For example, I was trying to rebuild my early morning gym routine, so my first step was just walking to the gym everyday, but not actually going inside. Once waking up with enough time to walk there and back was easy, I started getting up a little earlier so that I’d have time to go inside for a bit.

    On a slightly separate note, I dug into a bunch of “sleep hacking” stuff a long time ago. A lot of it isn’t really useful to someone trying to live a relatively typical 9-5 type life, but one thing that I did find useful was understanding the basic sleep phases/cycle. One full sleep cycle typically lasts about 90 minutes, although this can vary from person to person, and also from day to day. If your alarm is going off in the middle of a sleep cycle, you’re probably going to feel like crap, but if your alarm is waking you up at the end of a cycle, you’ll probably feel more refreshed.

    There’s apps for your phone (and probably for wearables) that can utilize various sensors to help wake you at the ideal stage. The one I used to use was called “Sleep as Android”. I would tell it what time I needed to be awake, plus a buffer of how much earlier it was allowed to wake me up, then leave the phone on my mattress. It would detect my movements to determine my sleep phase so that it could try to wake me up while in the ideal phase. It also had a variety of options so that you couldn’t accidentally turn off the alarm. For example, it could ask you to solve some math questions, or to scan a particular bar/QR code that you’d set up in advance. At one point, I set it so I’d have to scan my shampoo bottle to turn off the alarm.