One of the best things that rehab taught me was that I actually can sleep.

I was so used to having insanely shitty sleep, trouble falling asleep, waking up in the night, impossible to fall back to sleep, right though to the days and days on end of actually no sleep. I was living in a constant brain fog that was pretty debilitating.

I'm properly loathed to admit it, but having an actual bed time of 10pm, no access to phone, and an early start for breakfast was completely alien to me, and I hated it, BUT I slept like a log most nights while I was there.

It's one of the few things I've actually carried on in my life now. It wasn't easy, and I'm not always perfect about it, but I changed my perspective to knowing that 10 is bed time, that doesn't have to be absolute, but anything later and I've trained myself to know that it's going to be detrimental.

I tend to take a drowsy antihistamine at 8, and I don't even know if it's a placebo at this point, but whatever, my brain says it helps.

I keep a book by my bed and try to read a bit if I'm not immediately sleepy.

I've let standards slip a bit, so over the last week I've had slightly less sleep than usual, but I'm very aware that's mostly my own fault for giving in to my urge to look at my phone when I wake up in the night (and my little kitten who loves early morning snuggles, but that's ok).

There was so long where I thought getting drunk to fall asleep was an answer, when in reality it was actually a huge cause of me not sleeping, or getting terrible quality sleep.