(This article may throw some shade)

I think we’ve all been there. You’ve just pulled yourself together from procrastination and finished up your upcoming assignment, and you’re already supposed to be asleep. ‘Just a little bit of Youtube; I need a break anyway,’ you think as you pick up your phone and lay down in bed.

Aaaaaand it’s 1 am.

The next day in class, the 6 hours of sleep is not serving you well. The sleepiness takes over you, the writing on the board looks like a chunk of Egyptian hieroglyphs, and you’re trying your best to not doze off. You miss what the teacher is saying, as well as the fact that you have a test next week about the topics you’ve just started learning a few classes ago. We all know how that story ends.

Sleep is the foundation of being a functional human. Without good sleeping habits, the short term effects are inconvenient, and the long term effects can be damaging to the overall mental and physical health. As Anonymous said, ‘Sleep fixes everything’. I used to have a horrible sleep schedule, and I was often left irritated and tired, and the day was generally much more unpleasant. And I’m not saying sleep fixes everything, but the time when I improved my sleep schedule was oddly around when my mental health started going uphill. So maybe I am saying sleep fixes everything (?).

Disclaimer: This article was written to share my experience, and is in no way trying to offer professional medical information, as I am obviously not a licensed M.D.. This also may not work for everyone, and I recommend finding ways to fall asleep efficiently yourself as well, if these methods don’t work.

One method I found to be really helpful when I just could not get off my phone, was to simply get off my phone. It’s a bit of an oxymoron, but seriously, just try it. The next time when you find yourself mindlessly scrolling on a social media platform and you know you should be asleep, try to find the logical part of your brain, and tell yourself firmly, ‘I will get off my phone when this person in the video finishes talking.’ Or, ‘This is the end of the video, I will put down my phone and sleep.’ Do not negotiate with yourself!! Find the moment when you’re telling yourself you should be asleep, and just turn off your phone. Don’t even think about it. Every time I hesitated, I just ended up spending 30 more minutes on the phone. It may sound confusing, but you’ll know when you have succeeded. (This method actually also works for the mornings, when you don’t feel like getting up. Just get up; do not think about how much you don’t want to.)

In addition, I find it easier to not look at social media at all before bed, instead of trying to break the mindless scrolling and eyes-staring-into-the-phone’s-soul cycle. However, unless I’m extremely exhausted, it feels odd falling sleep without some kind of sound. I like putting on an episode of a boring podcast (no offense to whoever I was listening to), or an old video of my favorite content creator that I feel won’t distract me from falling asleep.

Any music I feel like listening to, is also preferred. I don’t have trouble sleeping with songs that have lyrics, but if that doesn’t apply to you, then non-lyrical music would be much more effective. If that’s you, then I recommend an ambience on Youtube for studying/sleeping, or an ambience of a fandom you’re into at the moment. There is an ocean of content on Youtube for these ambience/playlists. For example, if you’re into K-pop, then searching up something like ‘k-pop ambience’ will give you K-pop related playlists/ambiences of different environments/situations that may be appealing to many, such as this ‘city nights ~ ☾ | an ambient k-pop playlist’ which, in total, took me less than 20 seconds to find. This would work with many other fandoms as well, such as Harry Potter, Hunger Games, Marvel, and more. You can also just search for white noise, such as rain, waves, fireplaces, bird sounds, etc.

Although these tips have worked for me, they won’t for everyone. So, I encourage for you to find ways to fall asleep effectively yourself. Thank you for reading, and happy sleeping.

Featured image by Andrew Guan, from Upsplash / Squarespace free images