Finally sleeping better 😴

I have a very light sleep. The first brightness in the morning makes me wake up, noise from the neighbors in the evening does not let me fall asleep. No matter how late or early I go to bed, no matter how little I slept in total.

In the long run, this is not good. I’m tired, less capable of staying focused, and I’m lethargic.

But when problems bug me so much, I have to look for a solution!

The solution concerning brightness so far was that I not only darkened my window with a blind, an indoor roller blind and a curtain, but in addition I stuck such a special darkening foil to the windows every evening.

Against noise I have tried normal foam earplugs, but then preferred to use wax earplugs, because they hold better in the ear and do not fall out immediately.

Now even that was not a perfect solution. The darkening foil sometimes did not hold properly and fell off. In addition, it was quite time-consuming to tape off the window every evening when you are already tired and want to sleep. Also, the earplugs were pressing in the ear and still didn’t block out all the noise.

When I once again woke up at 4am a few weeks ago and couldn’t get back to sleep, I researched a better solution.

And it looks like this:

Instead of darkening the windows, I simply darken my eyes. While I had sometimes used simple sleep masks before, they let light by pretty easily. Now I have a special sleep mask that fits my face better and really blocks 100 percent of the light, even around my nose.

I also now use special earplugs that are meant for sleeping. At first I was planning on having custom earplugs made for sleeping, but they are quite expensive. When I researched further, I came across the Alpine SleepDeep. These are sleep earplugs with a special gel in them that is supposed to shield additional noise. These earplugs are also quite expensive compared to foam or wax earplugs, but they hold well in the ear and shield the noise really well. At least well enough that I don’t focus all my attention on the noise in the evening.

Since I’ve been using the sleep mask and, to some extent, the earplugs, I’ve been sleeping much better. Although the sleep mask sometimes falls off in my sleep and the earplugs are no longer in my ears after waking up, I probably move too much during sleep, but falling asleep now usually happens within a few minutes. I can completely switch off in the evening and am not triggered by lights or noises and then focus on them.

At night I usually wake up once to empty my bladder on the toilet, but after that I can always fall asleep again and continue to sleep, instead of sometimes not being able to fall asleep again when it gets a bit light.

I really wonder why I had struggle with sleep for years, but had tried many other things, but never had the idea to just buy a good sleep mask and earplugs specially designed for sleep. Well, better late than never.

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