The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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I know non-24-hour sleep disorder is a real thing, but since it's most obviously a real thing for blind people, maybe among the sighted it's often something like 'idiosyncratically weak response to day/night lighting cues' -- have you really maxed out the intensity of your day/night cues? Is it as bright as possible in the day and as dark as possible in the night?
I fixed my delayed sleep phase problem (which tended toward non-24-hour during the winters) by being unreasonably aggressive about darkness in the evening. I bought a pack of rechargeable LED candles and if I use no other light source for three hours before I intend to sleep, I reliably sleep at my chosen hour, which is about 4 hours earlier than I'd tend to otherwise, and my sleep time no longer creeps later and later every day like it used to in the winter. Previous attempts at fixing this with super bright lights in the morning, or avoiding blue light in the evening, or avoiding screens in the evening, or using a 'reasonable' degree of dimming in the evenings, all failed. If my evening darkness procedure hadn't been enough, I'd have tried blackout curtains to maximize intensity of nighttime darkness.
Maybe you've already exhausted all your possible gains here, and if you lived in a tent in the woods for a week or two with no artificial lights at all you'd still not entrain with the sun -- but if you haven't tried something roughly that extreme, maybe push harder in that direction.
Not OP, but as someone struggling with delayed sleep problems, this is an incredibly helpful and inspiring comment.
How do you deal with the desire to do electronic things during your evening hours?
Somewhat poorly. It helps that screens can be dimmed a lot, with third-party tools (Twilight, etc) if necessary, and a screen can be useable (for non-graphics tasks) when extremely dim if the surroundings are dim too. I also have a red-backlit keyboard -- looks a bit like fireplace embers.
I'm not religious about this stuff, and I trade off my sleep timing against other concerns. Sometimes I do stuff out in public at later hours under bright lights, and in recent weeks my sleep time slipped because I liked keeping my Christmas lights on late. But I can be confident now that when I want to sleep earlier, being more religious about the lighting situation is an effective way to do it.
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