As a night shift Psych nurse basically my entire job is re-tuning people’s circadian rhythms. For this specific situation I recommend getting used to sleeping to a loud white noise with a fair amount of variation in pitches / “texture” I guess? The more different noises it has the better it covers random environmental noises.

My go-to is usually a raging thunderstorm with lots of lightning cracks and rumbling thunder. There’s very few things that doesn’t drown out and it should only take a week or two to get used to sleeping to whatever soundtrack you pick (think about how long it takes to get used to sleeping somewhere new when you move).

For extra oomph it can help to bring in your other senses as well. Essential oils may not cure cancer but they make excellent Pavlovian conditioning cues.

Remember kids, the biggest difference between you and Pavlov’s dogs is that you get to choose what you get trained to do!

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So one of the things that’s super relevant to the self-soothe skill is pavlovian / classical conditioning. Basically your body gets used to drinking tea when you’re calm, so if you occasionally drink it when you’re not calm your body will be like “wait we’re doing the thing we do when we’re calm though? I’m probably supposed to be calm then.”

It could also have an ingredient that’s mildly sedating or if you have ADHD it’s caffeinated sometimes it can help you focus, which can reduce agitation. Some people will even say caffeine helps them sleep and while it can help you focus on falling asleep it will still reduce overall sleep quality (there’s other, better ADHD meds that can be used around bedtime for that reason).

So there are other reasons it might be helping you, but classical pavlovian conditioning is a common mechanism and a lot of behavioral therapies include teaching on how to exploit for your own benefit. I’m super excited to talk about this because spreading info on these specific sort of topics is exactly why I made this community!

Oh and here’s my weeks’ mood log:

🟨🟩🟨🟥🟥⬜🟨

Those last couple worknights suuucked and I’m really trying to double down on my PLEASE and self-soothe this week (good timing!)

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Fun fact! PLEASE is an actual skill in Dialectal Behavior Therapy and we’ll probably be covering it within the next couple months over on !DIYMentalHealth@lemmy.dbzer0.com. Please subscribe and get active if you’re looking to improve your mental health lately! The main page of our wiki has a quickstart guide if you’re looking for something you could even do today to help stabilize yourself a little.

!DIYMentalHealth@lemmy.dbzer0.com

I’m trying to start a mental health support community that’s skills based to hopefully help people who can’t afford or otherwise access professional therapy.

Here’s the wiki (the main page has a quickstart guide if you’re looking for some things you can do today even just to maybe help stabilize yourself a little)

Here’s a specific list of ways you can get involved with growing this community

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!DIYMentalHealth@lemmy.dbzer0.com

Just getting started! 🎉

ty!

😊

oh idk if this is what you meant but when I try to change the url of the post to that it says it’s invalid.

if I just put that in the URL box will it work?