You know, that Mythbusters post legitimately changed my life. Before seeing it, I had exponentially more guilt and stress about not being able to sleep, which of course, further exacerbated my inability to sleep.
Now, every time I wake up about three am, knowing I have to get up at 6.45, instead of stressing and panicking about how my day is going to be sleep deprived and miserable, I just tell myself 'Time to activate Mythbusters Protocol' and lie there with my eyes closed safe in the knowledge that I am measurably reducing later feelings of exhaustion.
And when this happens, about 70% of the time the reduction of guilt and stress means I actually do fall back asleep, so all in all instead of getting only three or four hours sleep, I get five to six and a half.
Which y'know, major improvement in health and energy.
On a related note, that post also opened up the world of naps for me. I used to think that napping was mostly pointless for me, because I'm pretty much incapable of falling fully asleep in the middle of the day. But when I redefined naps to include "lying down with my eyes shut for an hour," even if I just spent the whole time brainstorming fanfiction, that was often enough to get me from "exhausted and running on 4 hours of sleep" to energized and refreshed
The post (?) as found on Reddit with bonus explanatory Reddit comment.
THIS! THIS IS SUPER IMPORTANT!
This is absolutely me. I lie down on my lunch break for 20-30 minutes. Do I sleep? Hell no. But do I feel way better in the afternoon because of it? Absolutely.
