If you can't sleep, get out of bed.

[00:00:00] You are listening to the Daily Five, an experimental podcast by Aurooba, where I talk about something for five minutes. So let's get to it, shall we? I'm not recording this episode in the morning. It is currently past midnight when I'm recording this and I am finally starting to feel a little bit tired because before, I was literally lying in bed, staring up in the darkness, trying to sleep, and sleep was not coming, and that reminded me of something I read somewhere a while ago.

[00:00:50] I'll see if I can find it for the show notes. It's really important to have dedicated spaces, if you're able, [00:01:00] for the different kinds of activities that you do because your mind starts to associate them with those things, with those activities, and it helps you get into the flow of things better. It helps you fall into that activity better.

[00:01:20] But on the flip side, if the activity you find yourself doing in a particular space is not the kind you want to be doing there, it can actually make it way worse for you to do the activity you wanted to do. That sounds kind of convoluted. What I mean is your bed is where you're supposed to rest and sleep, but if you find yourself constantly lying awake in bed, by staying in bed when you're not sleeping, you're actually making it harder for yourself to be able to easily sleep [00:02:00] in bed, because a part of your mind starts to associate being awake with being in bed, which means when you try to sleep, you just stay even more awake.

[00:02:15] So I've been trying to practice just getting out of bed if I'm not falling asleep, and it's actually working. Usually I will get outta bed and I'll decide, okay, I'm gonna do this one thing that's on my mind, or whatever it was that I wanna do. Sometimes I just sit on my sofa and read, and usually in about half an hour or maybe 45 minutes, I start to feel sleepy, and then when I go to bed, I fall asleep and it's so easy, and I'm finding in doing that, I'm starting to slowly

[00:02:50] stop associating my bed with like random insomnia and feel more comfortable [00:03:00] sleeping and falling asleep more easily in bed. Which sounds crazy, I know, but it's totally a thing. Just like, you know, going to the gym, you associate a gym with a workout, so it's easy to fall into a workout or if you have an office space ,going into your office space,

[00:03:19] helps you work better. But if you use your office space for more than just work, sometimes that makes it harder to actually get real work done in your office. So, you know, you should try not to do things outside of work in your office. Do them elsewhere. Like we've talked about in an episode way in the beginning of this podcast, um, your environment matters and what you do in that environment matters as well.

[00:03:47] So not only should we make our environment work for us, and help us achieve the things we want to achieve, when we find ourselves doing something else in that environment that we [00:04:00] ultimately don't wanna do, we should remove ourselves from there if we can and go somewhere else that is more conducive to what's happening.

[00:04:09] So in my case, when I can't sleep, I get up, I get outta bed, and I read somewhere in my living room, or I come to my computer and I record a podcast episode like I'm doing right now, and I'm starting to get tired. So it's working, and I know that in about 20 minutes or so when I go to bed, I will probably be able to fall asleep and be far more rested than if I had laid there and been awake the whole time,

[00:04:42] trying to sleep. Thanks for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.