Sleeping Aids – How to actually Sleep Well in the SAME Room Together

Sleeping aids. Lodi and I are not exactly polar opposites when it comes to our needs in our sleep environments but we’re pretty darned close! I am a light and very cranky sleeper (DO NOT WAKE ME UP) though I wake up at the littlest of noises etc. Lodi on the other hand could sleep through a bomb going off. We both have night terrors and nightmares. Me for my entire life… Lodi after returning from his last tour in Iraq. Its not that I’m not a morning person I’m just not a “waking up” person. It takes me a solid hour in the morning with coffee before my brain is capable of any kind of actual functioning. And then there’s Lodi who, as far as I can tell, is functioning at practically 100% the minute he wakes.

We both have years of sleep deprivation behind us.

Its hereditary for me and a constant joke at family gatherings:
“Are you sleeping at all? I’m not.”
“I can’t remember the last time I had a good night’s sleep… You?”
“I dunno… maybe when I was an infant?”
“No. You were a terrible baby.”

And anyone who knows anything about being in the Army knows that Lodi has so much sleep to catch up on its remarkable he’s functioning at all. (He was in for ten years and did three tours.)

I’d be up for hours if I didn’t read myself to sleep every night and no amount of exhaustion has ever changed that in my 36 years on this planet. Sometimes it only takes a few minutes but generally it takes a good hour or two and I almost always wake up with my Kindle on top of me or under my pillow or lost in the covers somewhere.

And its not totally rare for me to fall asleep and bash myself in the face with it – ouch lol.

Sleeping Aids

Our biggest issue is probably the light situation.

I CANNOT sleep in the dark and a night light is not enough for me.

I MUST have a light on.

Lodi put up with it but it made my heart hurt every time I saw he’d had to cover his entire head with a blanket just so he could sleep.

Fortunately, though I do need my lamp on to sleep, I don’t need a very bright bulb because I read on a Kindle which I can adjust the back light on. So I went browsing Amazon starting with “very dim light bulb” searches.

I ran into something I didn’t even know existed: sleep bulbs!

Light bulbs that cast a low warm glow. I also purchased a new lamp that I could aim away from us so its not shining in his face either.

That improved the situation a lot but I knew it still wasn’t ideal for him.

So, on a whim, I ordered him a sleep mask figuring it was a waste of money but at only $10 I felt like it was worth the risk.

(I couldn’t imagine personally wearing a mask… the idea of it kind of freaks me out for some reason that probably relates to the fact that I can’t sleep in the dark at all. In fact I can (and do) sleep in broad daylight much better than I ever sleep at night. Notice how we don’t even have blinds on our windows?)

Sleeping Aids

Lodi had never used a sleep mask before but tried it and absolutely loved it.

To say I was surprised was an understatement!

HE LOVES HIS MASKS!

He’s ordered several!

Something I’ve been doing now for several years that helps us both is incorporating essential oils into our sleep environment. I use a combination of Mugwort essential oil and Lavender essential oil drops on a soft blanket that we keep by our pillows and on top of us. Its a wonderful smell and both are known sleep aids.

Initially we had some issues with his needing a “draft” blowing on us.

When we were first dating he had an oscillating fan in his bedroom. To say that me, a very light sleeper, just about chucked the thing out the window is an understatement lol every 30 seconds, when that breeze hit me, it woke me up.

So, in the beginning, we had a fan in our window that steadily blew on us all the time but we figured out that what we really needed was just a temperature adjustment.

As long as its cool enough in our bedroom (and not stuffy) Lodi is good with no breeze at all so we got rid of the fan.

However, we both liked the noise so I ordered a fan sleep machine.

It works great but a regular little fan stuck in a corner of the room would do the exact same thing for a heck of a lot less money so I don’t know if I can recommend it for that price… not sure what I was expecting… though it is very cute.

Good sheets, a good top blanket, good pillows and a good mattress are all VERY important.

We spend practically half of our lives in bed and getting a good night’s sleep is essential to our health.

Both our pillows and our mattress are memory foam and the bed is on a plywood platform bed frame that I built years ago. We both have countless sports injuries too that would absolutely keep us up if we hadn’t invested in our mattress and pillows.

I replaced our comforter with a quilt a few months ago and noticed an immediate difference there as well. Its got some weight to it that I like but, where the comforter seemed suffocating with how it trapped heat, the quilt doesn’t do that at all.

I also found a set of sheets that we loved so much I ordered a second set!

Fortunately Lodi’s habit of a TV in the bedroom was NOT something he needed as we would absolutely be sleeping in separate bedrooms if that were the case.

(Which is much more common than I realized.)

18 Good Reasons to Get the TV Out of Your Bedroom.

Electronics are destroying our sleep.

One thing I absolutely agree with is that cell phones certainly don’t belong in the bedroom either but that’s not something I think we’ll ever be able to manage.

We both use our cell phones as our alarm clocks though, of course, we could just get actual alarm clocks…

I can say that after my mom’s previous health problems I don’t feel comfortable without it in case there’s an emergency…

But that wouldn’t be me being entirely honest.

The truth is I am not comfortable without my cell phone and though I don’t think its healthy and I don’t like it: It is what it is.

THC is a hot topic right now and, though I’ve tried very little of it personally, I did take the chance and order something to help me sleep and I wanted to share it here.

This is the stuff: DELTA-8 TINCTURE – you have to be over 21 to order it but its completely legal in all states.

I’ve never slept well but even I didn’t know just how poorly I was sleeping until I tried a couple of drops of this stuff one night before I headed to bed.

I fell asleep and was not conscious again until my alarm went off at 7:30…

It kind of freaked me out. I had no idea just how much I was “aware” of the majority of the night and I didn’t know that that was unusual… until it didn’t happen.

Its not cheap at $100 a bottle but a bottle lasts me nearly 6 months.

I would absolutely recommend giving it a try if you’re a poor sleeper!

I consider sleep paramount to our health and our lives. Though it took some experimenting and figuring out what worked for both of us, the effort was absolutely worth it!