Sleepless in Siam

(Disclaimer: Profanity.)

Last month, I visited Thailand with the boys. The trip was amazing in every sense of the word, and it was what it was supposed to be.

Every experience like this teaches a thing or two about yourself, and I am no exception. There are a few elements that got uncovered during that one week in the Southeast Asian paradise.

I discovered that I have a sleep problem. Of all the people, I definitely clocked the least shut-eye time compared to others. My friends slept off wherever they wanted, including taxis and whatnot.

On the other hand, I could only catch some sleep during the night hours in the hotel room. That was a bit scarce due to the hectic trip. We lived in multiple cities and had to catch a couple of internal flights in the interim. 

Towards the end of the trip, the last day in particular, I was completely exhausted out of my mind. It surprised me because I am in the prime of my life (so far), and these things shouldn’t happen. I took a skull note and kept going.

After reaching home, I had a full night’s sleep and ran a 5K the following day. This assured me that the culprit was my inability to sleep in transit.

Now, it’s time to analyze what went wrong and what should be done going forward to solve it.

Default mode and habits

2024 was a fucked up year. For whatever reason, I got cocky with life and threw caution to the wind, overestimating myself. That never works out for anyone. Due to that attitude, I made a bunch of silly and retarded mistakes in life.

Additionally, I’ve been silently taking many L’s in life in the years before. For instance, changing fields after grinding for four years in engineering, not developing my professional skills at a desired rate, and failing to improve my social life significantly were some of them.

All of it kept on piling on. Eventually, around August-September 2024, almost a year ago, shit hit the fan, and I hit rock bottom.

Since then, I’ve been grinding extra hard. Bear in mind that I’ve always been working my butt off since 2015, trying to “make it.” But at the beginning of the last quarter in 2024, it hit me that my best isn’t close to what’s required. 

The only solution was to step my game up.

So, I went into full Goggins mode. Every day, I will do 45 min-1 hour of strength training. Run 6-10 kilometers per week. Produce 4-6 content pieces, which increased to about ten if you count LinkedIn posts. Then, there was office work and life’s responsibilities.

I lived on the edge. As soon as I wake up, an involuntary “fuck” will cross my lips in an agonizing tone. I know that the day is ready to beat me up. However, the pain from the accumulation of losses was far greater than whatever the day had for me, and I kept going.

Therefore, for an entire year, and still counting, I am existing in “attack and fight” mode.

As you can imagine, this is horrible for sleeping. My adrenals were active throughout the night, and I could only gather a couple of hours of slumber each night. In September or October, there came a week when I barely slept.

To fix the issue, I iterated my approach to terminate the “attack and fight” mode in the late evening. This helped me sleep at night and worked perfectly for my life goals.

At the same time, my adrenals and awareness were at their peak during the day. When you optimize each aspect of your lifestyle, you become stronger, faster, and sharper. I had more energy during the day for everything.

Another thing is my sleep surroundings requirements. I need a fucking bed in a not-so-cold dark room. 

In Thailand, we often traveled at night, which meant zero sleep on those days. The only opportunities were at night when we decided to wind things down by 1-2 am. And even then, I can’t sleep past 8 am, except for that one time.

To put it simply, my default “attack and fight” mode during the day, coupled with travel shenanigans at night, prevented me from getting a decent amount of sleep in Siam.

My approach to solving this issue is to isolate the contributing factors and hack them to gain the superpower of sleeping anywhere, anytime.

Biological components that I need to regulate

Keep ‘em high

1. Melatonin: The sleep hormone. It is naturally released during sundown by the body. I have to stay in the dark to maximize its release. No screens after dinner. This will give me about two hours to enjoy the darkness.

2. Adenosine: It is a metabolic byproduct. My Adenosine levels are definitely higher than most, considering I work out like an animal and remain active throughout the day. There’s not much to optimize here.

3. GABA: A critical calming hormone that “switches off” the brain from active cognitive work. Diaphragmatic breathing at a slower rate, yoga (stretching), meditation (done via journaling), and green tea boost GABA production. The flavored electrolyte I take as a supplement contains Zinc, Magnesium, and Taurine, key nutrients that aid GABA’s synthesis.

Keep ‘em low

1. Cortisol: This keeps my mind racing at night. The anxiety makes me go to dark places in my head. It also boosts my heart rate like I am running a marathon. Meditation and journaling are mandatory to tackle this.

2. Orexin: Need to supplement with good sources of carbs after my runs. 

3. Histamine: Late-night heavy meals and fluids. Clear the bladder before going to bed and take only a couple of sips of water.

4. Serotonin: Forward ambulation and sunlight will convert it into melatonin at night. Sunlight can be taken when sweeping the balcony in the morning.

5. Dopamine: I don’t do any externally stimulating activities. However, sometimes, thanks to cortisol, my brain can follow dopamine-spiking trains of thought. I have to forcefully situate it on my breathing or background music.

6. Norepinephrine: It affects me similarly to cortisol. Perhaps they feed off of each other. Meditation, belly breathing, and a mental body scan to calm the locus coeruleus.

Physiological conditions for sleep that I struggle to achieve

This includes physical and mental parameters that lie beyond the desired limits, affecting my ability to reach a restful state.

Body temperature

My core temperature can be lowered only if the surroundings are cooler, while the wind speed is minimal. The coolness has to be achieved via air conditioning. When air-cooled by ceiling fans or whatever, it’s impossible for me to calm myself down.

For whatever reason, a steady stream of air fucks my internal motors up. My body believes it’s a bad thing and keeps me alert by pumping blood harder than ever. This heats and tightens up my core, destroying any chances at achieving a calmer state.

The workaround is to reduce the fan speed to the minimum and let the air conditioning do its thing. On top of that, I need to cover my ears and feet and remain shirtless to ensure my extremities become warm and the core gets cooler.

Breathing

My work habits, lifelong ambition to be a content creator, and general stress around my existence have made me a chest-breather. Inhaling by pulling air through the lungs feels right and comfortable, but is slow poison.

Most of the high-quality oxygenation occurs in the lower lobes of the internal airbags. To facilitate that, one needs to sit upright and breathe through the diaphragm. With time, this becomes the norm, even when you are lying down.

When you are sitting down for many hours a day, especially in front of a computer doing cognitively demanding tasks, you hunch over. The posture compresses your upper belly, preventing you from engaging the diaphragm when breathing.

Do it for several years, and your breathing is genuinely fucked. I resumed belly breathing after running multiple kilometers when chest breathing failed to supply enough oxygen. Now, I have to do it at all times in a conscious manner to undo the damage.

Mind

Many horrible and unforeseen events in my life in the past five years have taken away my mental peace completely. Almost every endeavor I started in life, mercantile and otherwise, has led to underwhelming results.

Naturally, the internal chaos only intensified. Fortunately, things went so badly that I hit rock bottom, at least psychologically, where I was operating as a zombie. It’s a good thing because the only way from there is up.

I went through immeasurable agony, torment, and distress to climb out of that hellhole. The recent days and weeks have been more tolerable. It appears that things will get progressively better. 

There’s not much I can do here apart from keep chipping away. Currently, at times, I still feel that I am stuck while the world has moved forward. However, it’s my own perception that has been quite pessimistic due to many past failures.

Patience, repetition, and some more patience. That’s the only way.

Looking forward: Nap specialization

Each improvement will come with time. None of them is an instant fix. There was a time, back in 2018-19, when I could doze off anywhere, anytime. My ultimate, long-term sleep objective is to regain that psychological state of being.

It will emerge when I truly feel, or rather, realize that my world isn’t falling apart and that I am on the right path in life. That feeling will take some months, if not years, because I’ve lost my own trust by making fucked up mistakes in the past, derailing my progress.

For about 12 months, I’ve been undoing that damage and centering my energy on the correct things, such as my content creation goals, career trajectory, and health objectives. It hasn’t been particularly smooth sailing because of life’s hard responsibilities and the fact that I’ve been dealt a bad hand by the universe.

Either way, it will be a while before the problems start getting visibly fixed. Until then, I must keep grinding.

Game is game.

Until next time,

Tara