Sleeping Problems?

hugo_pt asks: "I have had sleep problems for some years, but it always get worse in the Summer. Yesterday I slept one hour, so when I got home at 8PM I thought I'd sleep till 9AM or so. Wrong. It's 1.36AM, and I can't sleep anymore. Instead, I'm reading The Complete FreeBSD, and the urge to sleep is gone. I was wondering how many Slashdot readers suffer from this problem, and what they do to combat it ?"

Re:What I'm trying to do....

[TheBunk]

I second that. Since I've given up caffeen almost entriely (used to down massive ammounts of mountain dew), I've had very little problem going to sleep at night. The upside is your body dosen't have the tolerance to the stuff, and when you really need it, it works great. Just don't get hooked on the feeling awake feeling.

Whitenoise

[schnits0r]

I like white noise, I have a aquarium bubbling in my room, a computer that is always on, 4 pet rats that scurry around at night and now wiht the heat, I have a 20 inch fan that is in use during the night. I find the whitenoise helps me sleep. When my computer was in for repairs I couldn't get any sleep at all, every little noise woke up up and it did't feel normal.

Get Some Exercise

[BortQ]

Sometimes I have trouble sleeping. However, I never have any trouble sleeping if I got some good exercise that day.

Why should your body rest itself when it hasn't been worked? At the very least you can run around the block once or twice an hour before your bedtime.

Caffeine

[Skalizar]

Several people have posted about caffeine, I'll add to that. I didn't think I had a problem with it either, never drank coffee, but did drink soda during the day and I like my chocolate. I decided to eliminate it due to some odd headaches I seemed to have whenever I didn't have any caffiene for a while. The headaches were horrible for about 3 days and I went from 5-6 hours of uneasy sleep to about 11-12 hours of dead-to-the-world deep sleep for several weeks. After that I eased into a normal, restful 7-8 hours a night and the headaches were gone unless I happend to drink a soda with caffeine. The slightest amount brought the headaches back, so I finally just gave it up for good. After months of avoiding it, I can now drink the occasional caffeine drink without any problems. So, even if you don't think you have a problem, clean out your system and you may be in for a surprise (and lots of quality sleep).

Re:Some Obvious Suggestions

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe that the actual controversy referred to is that some research seems to suggest that sleeping two(or more) times a day is just as, or more, effective than sleeping once a day. This is referred to as biphasic or polyphasic sleep. google should be able to find you plenty of info on this.