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What the day actually asks
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Get up when you were going to get up. The morning is the anchor, and moving it to claim back an hour is how one bad night turns into a bad fortnight.
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Go to bed at the usual time as well, not earlier. If you want to sit down for a short rest in the early afternoon then do, though keep it well away from the evening, where it borrows against the night to come.
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Eat and move about as you otherwise would. Coffee is fine, and it is worth noticing that the second and third cups are usually about the story rather than the tiredness.
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And say less about it. Not to be stoical, but because describing yourself as wrecked all morning is a way of practising it. The version of you who slept badly and has mentioned it to nine people is worse company than the version who has not, and the difference between them is not the sleep.
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The thing you will want to buy
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Somewhere around eleven, the urge turns up to fix this with a purchase, and magnesium is usually the first candidate. So here is the honest picture.
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A meta analysis pooled three randomised trials covering a hundred and fifty one older adults with insomnia and found people fell asleep about seventeen minutes faster on magnesium than on placebo. Total sleep time went up by roughly sixteen minutes, though that second result was not statistically significant.
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The part that rarely travels alongside those numbers is this: all three trials carried a moderate to high risk of bias, the evidence came out graded low to very low, and the authors’ own conclusion was that the literature is not good enough for a doctor to make a well informed recommendation from it.
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Wider reviews point the same mixed way. One counted five of eight sleep studies showing improvement, two showing none and one mixed, across trials using different doses, different forms and different durations. Where reviewers do find something, they tend to attach a condition to it, since the benefit looks likeliest in people whose magnesium was low to begin with.
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So it probably will not hurt you, and it might do a little. The catch is not pharmacological. Buying something is an act of management, and management is what this whole piece is arguing against. If the tablet becomes one more item you must get right or the night is ruined, it has cost you more than seventeen minutes.
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When it is not an ordinary bad night
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Everything above is written for the occasional bad night, which is a normal event in a normal life.
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If the bad nights are most nights, and have been for a month or more, that is persistent insomnia, and it is a different thing with a different answer. There is a specific structured treatment for it, usually a course of sessions rather than tablets, and a doctor is the route to it. It is worth asking for, and worth asking sooner than most people do.
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Tonight
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You will probably sleep deeply without doing anything at all, because the pressure to sleep builds through a day spent awake and it does not need your help.
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That is the part nobody mentions, and it is the part that makes today survivable.
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