Sunday 9 April 2017

#188 Magic cookies

For as long as I can remember, I've viewed 11pm as the perfect bedtime. In spite, or perhaps because of my adoption of such an uncompromising personal standard, I've never quite managed to stick to it.

That is, until recently.

The distractions, temptations and complications that can cause an ideal bedtime to be exceeded are, for most people, familiar. For the rest, it's no stretch of the imagination.
To credit one or two solutions alone, would be to oversimplify the world we inhabit but sanity, ego and attention spans require a limit on detail. I'll therefore attribute my achievement to two things. Both of them are brown.

I didn't realise this until recently but it's not only white noise that can be used to help people sleep. There are all kinds of colours of noise. I read that no particular kind is best but after listening to a few, I picked brown. The sound doesn't just drown out background noise. It also settles my thoughts.

To incentivise myself to get into bed in the first place, I've started using cookies. It's like training a dog. At 10pm I'm allowed a cookie. Then I have to go to bed soon afterwards. There have to be other factors at work here but things are going well so far.

Over time I hope to reduce the size of the cookies until eventually, the behaviour has become a habit and I don't need them at all.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have a cookie to eat.

4 comments

Running on empty said...

What kinds of sounds are brown noise?

I have no willpower. There are no guarantees there will be any cookies left at bedtime, lol.
Still, some good tips there!

Profound Familiarity said...

Brown noise is like low pitch static.Sounds like a tumble dryer to me.

You might have no willpower over cookies but is there anything you like that you have will power over?

Running on empty said...

Well I could run the tumble dryer. Chewing gum, I could try.
To be honest, since I took up decaf I can sleep. It's putting away the iPad that's harder.

Profound Familiarity said...

True dat.