Things That Actually Helped Me Sleep
(Written at 5:20am, So Take That As You Will)

It is 5:20 in the morning. Nugget is asleep on his pillow next to my office chair — not in the bed, next to my chair, because he cannot be more than four feet from me at any given moment — and I have been working for hours because I got started and lost track of time, which I do, which is part of why I am perhaps not the most qualified person to be writing a sleep tips post. And yet. Here we are. If you can't sleep either, pull up a chair. I've got some things that helped.

I want to be upfront: this is not the post where I tell you to put your phone down an hour before bed and drink chamomile tea. You know that. I know that. We've all been told that. I'm going to tell you what helped when the problem wasn't too much screen time — when the problem was heavier and the solutions had to match. These are real things that helped a real person during a real stretch of time. That person is me and it is currently the middle of the night and I have lost all track of what's reasonable, which honestly feels on brand.

First, Some Context

I moved to Nashville in March of 2020. The Friday before everything shut down. I want you to sit with that timing for a moment. I had sold my business, packed everything I owned, driven to a new city where I knew almost no one, and arrived to discover that the grocery store had been completely picked clean by people with more foresight than I had. The shelves were bare. The meat section contained exactly one item: a large bulk package of chicken paws. Actual chicken feet. I photographed them. I sent the photos to everyone I knew back home. I googled how to cook them, which was an error, because now I know and I can never unknow it. They were not purchased. They will never be purchased. We don't need to discuss this further.

What I did have, courtesy of a retired stranger at a bar near my apartment who had just left Costco with two bulk packs of toilet paper — one for himself, one for his son — was eight rolls handed to me out of the trunk of his car after knowing me forty minutes. I almost cried. It was a pandemic. Those were the stakes. I think about that man more than you'd expect, especially on the days when people are less generous than that.

The job I moved here for didn't start that Monday. Or the next. Two weeks became a month became three. I was alone, in a new city, in an apartment I was still figuring out, while the whole world went quiet and everything inside my head got extremely loud.

And then — over the years that followed — some things happened that I'm not going to detail today, not all of them, not yet. What I will say is that there was a stretch of time when sleep felt genuinely scary. Not just hard. Scary. There's a difference and I lived in it for a while. I'm not going to elaborate on that right now, partly because this is a sleep tips post and not a memoir, and partly because some things need their own space when the time is right. But I want you to know the tips below were tested under real conditions. Nothing theoretical about any of this.

I also want to say — I still struggle some days. I still blame myself for things that weren't mine to carry. My head says one thing, my heart says something completely different, and figuring out which one to listen to is ongoing work. I'm managing. Some days better than others. Laughing at all of it is genuinely how I get through it — laughter and tears at the same time, because it turns out those are not mutually exclusive and sometimes they both just show up together and you let them.

Tip One: Get a Dog

Specifically: I didn't have Nugget during the worst of it. He came later, a few years in, and I genuinely did not know how much I needed him until he was there and then looking back at the years before him felt like a different life entirely — quieter in the wrong way, emptier in ways I hadn't fully named.

He currently weighs eighty pounds, takes up three quarters of our bed, eats out of a crockpot insert — the six-quart porcelain kind, heavy, untippable, fully his at this point — and his actual meals I cook myself and serve to him with a fork. He drinks only fresh water, which I refill constantly, and will also drink out of the toilet, which is a contradiction I have accepted without understanding. He wakes up every fifteen minutes when he sleeps next to my chair, like he's checking that I'm still here. Which I am. Obviously I am. But I think on some level we are both just glad to have someone to check on.

We don't have a couch yet. It's a bed and an office chair and a dog who considers the entire floor of the house his personal zoomies track and is making his feelings about the furniture situation known through strategic sighing. He appreciates the open space. He does not appreciate the limited seating options. We are working on it.

Tip Two: YouTube Hypnosis — Yes, Really, Stay With Me

Months. I fell asleep to sleep hypnosis recordings on YouTube for months. Long ones — four hours, six hours, eight — because I did not want to wake up at 2am to silence. Every person I have told this to in conversation has given me a look. I understand the look. I also slept, so.

The good ones do something that feels almost physical. You relax in layers. You fall asleep faster than you have in what might be years. And a lot of them — quietly, over and over, through the whole recording — tell you things like: you are safe, you are enough, you can rest now. If you have ever been in a stretch where the voice in your own head right before sleep was not particularly on your side, having something gently repeat the opposite for eight hours straight is not nothing. It really isn't. I would do it again without hesitation. Not all of them are good — some do absolutely nothing and you'll know within ten minutes — but the ones that work are something else entirely. I'll share my favorites in a future post because they are not all created equal and the good ones deserve to be found.

Tip Three: The Cold Head Wrap and I Cannot Stress This Enough

I had headaches for what felt like an eternity. Nothing touched them. Not ibuprofen. Not rest. Not any reasonable intervention. I am confident now they were stress and fear and some other things I'll save for another day, but at the time all I knew was that they were relentless and I was losing the fight.

Then someone mentioned cold therapy head wraps. The kind that are always cold without needing the freezer. You slide them on. They cover your eyes. They wrap around your head. There is exactly the right amount of gentle pressure and cold. The relief was almost immediate. I was skeptical right up until the moment I wasn't, and then I became the person who keeps several, travels with them, and gives them as gifts with the energy of someone who has found something genuinely useful and cannot stop telling people about it. Whoever invented these deserves a parade. A monument. At minimum an extremely sincere card.

Tip Four: Leave Yourself Notes

Around 2009 or 2010 — I genuinely cannot remember exactly, which is its own kind of information — I came to work one day and found a jar on my desk. It said Cheer Up Buttercup. Inside were maybe fifty little notes from a handful of coworkers: funny ones, absurd ones, genuinely kind ones that made me laugh out loud right there at my desk. I still have that jar. It is on my desk at this exact moment, at 5:20 in the morning, and I read those notes when I need them and they still work every single time.

Rachel. Derrick. Betsy. If you ever find this: thank you. More than I ever said. More than you know.

You can do this for yourself and it is less sad than it sounds — I promise. Leave notes around your house. Your bathroom mirror. The fridge. Your nightstand. Not anything profound, just things that are true and kind. Things you'd say to a friend. Because here's what I know: the voice in your head before sleep needs material. Give it something better than whatever it's been running on. When you feel genuinely better about yourself, your nervous system calms. Sleep gets more possible. It sounds too small to work. It kind of works anyway.

A Note for The Friend

If someone in your life is struggling and they reach out to you — please be kind. Be there. Don't be critical. Don't assume you know the full story because you don't, and neither do they yet, and neither does anyone, and that's okay. You don't have to fix it. You don't have to understand it. You just have to show up and not make it worse. That is the whole job. It is both simpler and harder than it sounds and it matters more than you will probably ever know.

One Last Thing

It gets better. I know that is the least original thing anyone has ever said and I also know it is true. Not on a schedule. Not all at once. Not in a way that's visible when you're inside it. But it does. You find the small things. The dog. The recordings. The cold wrap. The little notes. And one day you realize you slept through the night without thinking about it and that's the whole goal and it was always reachable.

Also — if you need someone to talk to and you don't have anyone right now, you can reach me through this site. I'm not a therapist. I'm not a doctor. I am not licensed in anything except having survived some things and finding it funny in retrospect, which is a credential that does not appear on any official registry but I stand behind it. I have been through some things. I know what it feels like to need a person and not have one. If you need a person and you have no one, reach out. I mean it.

Now if you'll excuse me it is nearly 5:30am and Nugget has just woken up for the fourteenth time to confirm I am still in the chair and I feel that I owe him some acknowledgment. He is on his pillow. He is looking at me. He would like me to know that my sleep habits are, in his professional opinion, a problem, and he would like that formally on record.

Noted, buddy. Working on it.