Checking In

[twistedchick]

This is your check-in post for today. The poll will be open from midnight Universal or Zulu Time (8pm Eastern Time on Wednesday) now to midnight UT (8pm Thursday Eastern Time).

Poll #23956 Daily poll

This poll is closed.
Open to: Access List, detailed results viewable to: Access List, participants: 69

How are you doing?

I am OK
57 (82.6%)

I am not OK but I don't need help right now
12 (17.4%)

I could use some help
0 (0.0%)

How many other humans live with you?

I am living single
29 (42.6%)

One other person
19 (27.9%)

More than one other person
20 (29.4%)

Please, talk about how things are going for you in the comments, ask for advice or help if you need it, or just discuss whatever you feel like.

Comments

[lilysea]

My phone charger arrived yesterday [contactless home delivery] so now I have a working phone again, which is a huge relief.

[adafrog]

Yay!

[rose_griffes]

Tips for sleeping better? Ugh. I was doing fine at first but lately, not so much.

[adafrog]

Meditation, melatonin, exercise, stretching.

[melannen]

Dunno if any of this will help, but here are my standards:

- Avoid blue light near bedtime (there are apps for this on your screens, and I have red light bulbs in my bedtime lamps.)
- Pay attention to what you're eating/drinking late in the day (I have to avoid caffiene and refined sugars, but be fully hydrated, to sleep well.)
- Give yourself a reason to want to get up in the morning, even if it's just the promise of a yummy breakfast.
- Get exercise during the day, even if it's just five minutes with your heart rate up. Get sunlight, or as close as you can, during the day. Do something at least a bit novel to exercise your mind.
- Try to stick to a schedule, but also, don't force it if you're not feeling it.
- Give yourself a before-bed routine to settle the mind and tell your body it's bedtime, whether that's reading or listening to a particular podcast or doing a puzzle or whatever. Avoid doing this routine at other times.
- If you're cold, get a heating pad for the bed. If you're warm, get a fan. If there's too much light to sleep, get rid of the light (blackout curtains? finding and taping over all the LEDs in the room?) If the mattress is not comfortable, get a mattress pad. If you can't arrange your limbs well, get some pillows to experiment with. If it's too quiet or too loud, play music or white noise. If you wake up thirsty or hungry or whatever, put what you need right next to the bed so you can fix that without getting up. (If it hurts, take a painkiller if you have one that works! Reminder to myself, who is bad about this.) Etc.
- Avoid things that upset you or alert you (like, say, the news.) If there's part of your bedtime routine that wakes you up, stop doing it (I had to stop brushing my teeth before bed because the mint flavor wakes me up.)
- If you find yourself with racing thoughts that won't stop when you lie down, keep a paper journal next to your bed and eject them from your brain onto the paper.

...and finally, if you're at all like me, this may be the longest you've gone in your whole life without ever having to get up and go somewhere the next morning. Your body may just be resetting itself to a new, less forced way of sleeping - there's increasing evidence that sleeping 8 hours straight through year-round is actually super unnatural for humans. If you're waking up partway through the night, for example, but you can get back to sleep in an hour or so, that might just mean that your body is settling into a biphasic sleep pattern which is perfectly healthy, and let yourself have that liminal time to exist in instead of trying to force sleep.

Sleep tips

[kathmandu]

Things I've experienced:

* If you're starting to drift off to sleep, then wake up with a jerk! ...drift almost to sleep, wake up with a jerk! ...repeat, that's calcium deficiency.

* If you lie in bed and you're tired, and your muscles are relaxed, but your mind will not slow down or drowse, it just runs and runs... that's often magnesium deficiency.

For both of those, I take supplements. You could try milk for the calcium, or dark green vegetables for the magnesium, if you don't have supplements.

Relevant to current conditions: both calcium and magnesium are used in the nervous system, and people tend to need more than usual when under stressful conditions.

* Sometimes I'm topped up on both of those, and still have trouble relaxing into sleep. Those times, getting more omega-3 fatty acids helps. Fish oil works, or nuts like cashews, almonds, walnuts.

* My brother at one point was waking up in the middle of each night, and not falling back asleep. He eventually realized he'd gone vegan without noticing, for convenience reasons, and his body needed animal fats to make enough sleep hormones. Getting even a little animal fat, even butter, helped.

That's everything I know, sorry it's not more.

Re: Sleep tips

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

I've heard potassium lack can make muscle pain worse. That's bananas and plantains, though I'm sure other sources work too.

A variety of foods if possible is key. I, might, be a touch bad at that myself. =)

Re: Sleep tips

[rose_griffes]

AHA, thanks so much for this. Accidental semi-veganism recently + more stress recently (due to... everything) sound like possible culprits for me.

[mecurtin]

In the past couple of months I've been using the 4-7-8 method. It doesn't *always* get me to sleep, but it really helps.

[rose_griffes]

Interesting, thank you!

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

I have found having a water filled tiny bottle (like juice concentrate or smaller electrolyte/etc comes in) works well. Won't spill as long as the cap is screwed tight.

If you wake, give yourself permission to get up and do whatever is worrying you.

[daegaer]

I had my language class tonight and an informal zoom meeting yesterday with colleagues, bit of which helped to lessen the feeling of isolation. It's much easier to do work when it comes leavened with silly jokes and views of other people's pets.

[waterscroll]

My six year old son didn't like the lunch I cooked for him today, which as it happens was the same food that he liked yesterday. Instead of eating he decided to insult it, over and over:
This tastes like rats!
This tastes like windows with windex still on them!
This tastes like poop straight from the toilet!

I probably should have done some sort of parent-discipline-thing but I just put my head down and started laughing. Because seriously after two months of this, having to cook three meals a day, every day, out of whatever food I can procure in this postapocalyptic dystopia is getting pretty damned old and I'm sick of this food too.

(He's getting the same food for dinner, rats or not, because I don't have the strength to cook anything else.)