When you first posted about sleepyti.me here on HN, I was enduring a long phase where I was having a particularly hard time falling asleep at night. I would often lie in bed for two or three hours before I finally drifted off. Compounding the issue was my tendency to constantly measure and analyze how long I'd been trying and how much sleep I would (not) get if I fell asleep "now", always comparing those figures with factoids from articles I'd read about how much sleep we need, sleep cycles, etc. Then I came across this line on sleepyti.me's results page:

"The average adult human takes fourteen minutes to fall asleep, so plan accordingly!"

Now, instead of measuring my sleeplessness by the hour or by the sleep cycle, I started measuring by multiples of fourteen: "Okay, it's only been 28 minutes since I got in bed. That's only two times the average." "Now I'm at ten times the average. This is ridiculous." I started harboring a grudge towards all those "average" people who could fall asleep so quickly. I wondered if I was enough of a statistical outlier to skew the average up to fifteen or even sixteen minutes. I even began to begrudge _you_ for including that seemingly innocent statistic on a website intended to help people sleep better. I had no idea who you were, but I hated you for lodging that figure in my subconscious. These were the racing, irrational thoughts of my addled, sleep-deprived brain.

At the same time, in part because of that bit of trivia on your site, I started realizing that I had a real problem. My lack of sleep was affecting my concentration, my work, my relationships, pointing inevitably towards a long downward spiral that I desperately wanted to avoid. I began to critically examine my sleeping patterns, my sleeping environment, what I did every night and every morning, my diet—my whole life, in fact. Over the course of the next few months, I experimented with every variable I could think of.

I'm proud to say that today, I'm sleeping better than ever. I'm able to fall asleep much more easily, and my overall mood and outlook has improved considerably. It's by no means perfect though—it's very much an ongoing, concerted effort. For those of you enduring a similar struggle for sleep, here are a few of the things that made the biggest difference for me:

- Don't get hung up on numbers. Stop counting the minutes that you're not sleeping. Easier said than done for many of us, I know, but it's huge. Place digital alarm clocks and the like out of sight from your bed, and resist the urge to check the time on your phone.

- If you're on the computer late at night, use f.lux to automatically adjust the color temperature of your screen. The bright light of your LCD screen can mess with your body's natural rhythms, and f.lux helps to counter that. It took me a little while to get used to it, but once I did, I noticed a marked decrease in the "racing mind" syndrome when I used my computer right before bed. Here's the link: http://stereopsis.com/flux/

- Avoid caffeine after lunchtime. (This one will vary widely for different people, but since I'm a caffeine lightweight, it's pretty early in the day. Find your own cutoff.) Also try different caffeinated drinks. For instance, if I drink coffee at any time of the day, I'll likely have trouble sleeping that night, so I drink black tea almost exclusively.

- Don't go to bed on an empty stomach. I can't fall asleep if I'm hungry.

- Read! I started reading in bed every single night about a year and a half ago, and it's my favorite way to shut my brain off at the end of the day. Of course, certain books are better to fall asleep to—the best ones will keep you interested without being so engaging that you can't put it down. (I made the mistake of starting the Hunger Games at about 1:00am a couple of weeks ago, and I ended up reading the entire thing that night. I only got two hours of sleep before work the next morning.) Find what works for you.

- If I'm still having trouble falling asleep after reading, I will often "replay" the last couple chapters of whatever I read in reverse. See if you can remember everything that just happened and work your way back to where you started that night. I read about this trick somewhere on the web (amongst a bunch of other tips that didn't help), and it seems to work wonders for me. If you don't read at night, try recounting your day (even the boring stuff) backwards instead.

- Don't beat yourself up if you still struggle to sleep. It's okay, and it _will_ get better. (On that note, please consider seeing a doctor if your sleeplessness persists!)

Finally, to David: Thank you for building sleepyti.me. It serves a simple but significant purpose, and it does so elegantly. And while it fed my irrational, sleep-deprived hatred of non-insomniacs for a little while, it also became a catalyst for real change in my life.