Ask Lemmy

Podcast recommendations:

1. The Drowsy Historian
2. History of English Podcast (Kevin Stroud)

Both have no ads at all, and uniform volume.

As a teenager in the '70s I used to fall asleep to albums and the radio on headphones. These days, I need silence!

Yeah, tinnitus.

I live in a city, of course there's noise, mostly road noise from cars going past tbh

Oh man no. Not like that. White noise or nature sounds is great. One thing is I run a fan often in the summers and it is a bit annoying to adjust to not having it but its not so big a deal I feel I have to use it. Its like a treat for myself to put on some nature sounds but I rarely do it. I love having a fire with ocean rains and a light storm combined. Im actually sorta the opposite of you. Sounds that actually have engaging audio drive me nuts and its kina worse the lower it gets. The most annoying thing is to have this sound of a show or voices that is just barely loud enough that I can hear them and its keeping me from actually sleeping. Have had to remind my wife a bunch to put on her headphones as she always thinks she can just lower the volume and it will be fine. But the lower volume is as I said. Worse.

I have sleep with me podcast

I’ve had some success with binaural beats. It’s two pure sin wave tones - one in each ear. The tones are out of tune with each other so it has a bit of a wavy or pulsing sound. But they’re close enough to sound like one note and not two. Apparently the difference between these two waves gets entrained into your brain waves even though you can’t hear it. My favorites are 94 hz carrying a 3 hz differential, 96 hz carrying a 4hz differential, and 115 hz carrying a 5 hz differential. I’m using an app called Binaural Beat Gen by TMSOFT. Anyway the very low brain waves are delta waves associated with deep sleep. In a way, it’s hacking your brain to sleep.

I'd prefer to sleep in total silence, but since that's not an option where I currently live, I have a white noise machine.

I have the TV on in the other room while falling asleep. I live alone, so nobody is bothered by it

I used a fan for almost three decades. About a year ago, I fell asleep without my fan accidentally and I have not slept with one since. #JustTinnitusThings

Yes.

There's a retirement village nearby, and EVERY MORNING around 4 o'clock, some motherfucker with a huge rubbish truck goes in.

The driver parks.

The driver walks over to the large industrial bin.

The driver opens the lid to see if it's worth putting the contents in the truck. If it is, he lets the lid SLAM down, then pushes the rusty metal bin over the bitumen road towards his truck GRRRRNNNNNNNTTTT (because the wheels on those things never work).

He then gets back in his truck, does the little garbo magic with the mechanical arm thing, the truck lifts the bin, and he bangs it against the top of the truck receptacle a few times for shiggles BANG BANG BANGGGG, then moves the mechanical arms to place it back down on the bitumen with a gentle kiss BANG!

He then gets out of his truck, and pushes the now empty industrial bin over to where it was GGNNNNNNKKKKTTTTTT and positions it gently against the brick wall there BANG!

He then gets back in his truck, and reverses out the driveway DOOT DOOT DOOT DOOT DOOT DOOT DOOT DOOT DOOT DOOT DOOT DOOT, and finally fucks off.

Dozens, if not hundreds, of people live there. If I can hear that truck as a neighbour, how much worse must it be for the oldies trying to sleep there?

It takes practice, like anything else. Doing something makes you better at something and not doing something will make you worse at it. In this case you have been conditioning your brain to need ambient noise. There is a line between it being a small help on some days and it being a crutch you've built your life around. Sounds lile you are in the latter camp.

Give me the sound of rain or white noise or give me death!

Before I got married, I always put some snoozefest video to fall asleep to. Now I fall asleep by itself. Frankly, I am not even close to my wife who falls asleep in 5 minutes if she leaves her phone alone. But 10 to 15 mins is guaranteed for me.

It took practice too. After I stopped doing it, sometimes it would take me more than half an hour to fall asleep. Especially if something is bothering me. Overtime I have developed ways to take my mind off these thoughs by focusing on music or sounds around me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMfPqeZjc2c

For the past two years. Without it, I have intrusive thoughts and anxiety. The sound makes me able to dream and to remember my dreams. I feel protected. Like I was in a bubble, sheltered from reality.

My fiancée sleeps with a fan. I sleep with my finacée snoring.

I had insomnia for about the first 45 years of my life. At its worst, I would miss at least one night of sleep per week. By "miss" I mean I would go to bed at a reasonable hour, lay there with the lights off and my eyes closed until about 4:00am, when I'd get out of bed, get dressed, and go to work.

I tried drinking myself into a stupor. I tried white noise CDs. I even got a prescription for Ambien from my doctor. That scared me because I thought meds would do the trick, but I took it and still didn't sleep.

One day I saw a post about the Sleep With Me Podcast. It's described as bedtime stories for adults. I followed the link, started listening, and thought, "this guy may be the most boring person I've ever heard".

I started playing it when I went to bed, and it worked for me from the very first night. I fell asleep within minutes of starting the episode, but then I woke up after it ended.

The next night I loaded my phone with all the episodes. I slept through the night, but then I couldn't wake up in the morning. My alarm would go off, I'd hit snooze, then I'd hear the podcast playing and fall asleep again.

What I finally settled on was setting a sleep timer to stop the podcast a few minutes before my alarm would go off.

I've been listening to that podcast every night for the last 11 years. It's been the best sleep of my life. I've actually had the experience of being consciously aware of losing consciousness. It's a weird and wonderful thing.

The thing about the stories he tells is that it seems like there might be a point, and you start listening to the story, but he goes on so many tangents and diversions that it never actually goes anywhere. After a while, my brain just shuts down.

The first episode I listened to was telling a story about a group of people about to enter a pyramid. It ran for over an hour, but I didn't hear more than a few minutes.

The next episode continued the same story, and when I started it the next night, the people were still outside the pyramid. In over an hour of telling the story the night before, absolutely nothing happened.

Yes I use a fan.

A lot of comments in here about white noise and no one talking about brown noise! Brown noise is elite iykyk

No

Yes, I have a fan always going through the night and I always have something playing like an old podcast as well. I just can't simply sink into sleep with nothing alone, I've tried that, with limited success and there's people around me, whose noises tend to wake me up.

I have tinnitus, I can't sleep without it.

No, I cant sleep with anything with vocals in it. My brain strains too hard trying to interpret or ignore it. Non-vocal music can work very well at low volume as long as its repetitive and thus predictable enough that my brain doesn't have to pay attention or react to a lot of changes in composition.

I prefer to sleep in the quiet, but if the neighbours are being loud I'll use a fan to drown them out

I always put on one of Vinny Vinesauce's vods from his Fullsauce channel when I go to sleep. He just relaxes me so much I'm normally out within less than 5 minutes whereas in complete silence I could end up taking half an hour or multiple hours to fall asleep.

Yes. Generally with Would I Lie to You or the Unbelievable Truth.

Never, but I like conversing with my internal monologue in my head. I'm not quite neurotypical, but I have been pretty good (trained?) to rein in any out of control thoughts if they ever wander by using bait I know my brain can chill with.

When I was a teen, it was sexy stuff. Young adult, plot points for a novel setting I'll probably never write. Lately, it's just plans for the day (I sleep so much faster now than I used to, though, since I changed my sleep habits after having kids).

Plus, my own monologue makes sense of how I'm feeling and gives me pep talks! That's probably a product of coping with abuse, but it's nice none the less.

Been falling asleep to music recently, using Finamp and set a timer for 90 minutes because sometimes it takes me 30+ min to fall asleep. Wear one ear piece, so it's not to drown out noise, just something to fall asleep to

White noise machine

White noise (usually a fan) has been greatly beneficial to my quality of sleep. I wish I had started doing so many years sooner.

I do not do well with TV or anything that has speech though.

not intentionally, white noise from the ac or a fan is fine on summer nights though! and the sounds from my girlfriends headphones when she stays up a bit later than me, but only because I get to be next to her lol

a speaker/TV show/movie? absolutely the fuck not I can't sleep with that my brain wants to pay attention so bad

ADHD adult with chronic insomnia here. I usually sleep with "electronic ambient music for sleeping with delta waves", which is the prompt I give my bedside google home before bed. I do not sleep more, but the delta waves thing seems to help me sleep deeper.

Podcasts can help me fall asleep when I can't, but that happens rarely and does not feel like a good thing to me, as it's usually being stuck in bad thoughts.