sleep

7 Things That Help Me Sleep Much Better

Kate Sloan

Sleep has always been important to me, but especially so since I became chronically ill. A good night of sleep can be the difference, for me, between a day wracked with pain all over my body, fatigue, moodiness, and brain fog, and a day with minimal symptoms. Along with overall stress reduction, getting good sleep as much as possible has become a high-level priority for me as I adjust to life in a sicker, more susceptible body.

Recently I’ve added some new elements into my sleep routine that have made it much easier for me sleep deeply and stay asleep for most of the night. Here are some of my favorite “sleep accessories”…

 

A great eye mask

I shout about the benefits of eye masks to anyone who asks. I used to think they were just a silly, frivolous item that rich characters wore in movies to signal their decadent lethargy. But they actually help with sleep issues enormously! Sleep doctors recommend them for decreasing the amount of time it takes for you to fall asleep. I also find that they help me stay asleep for longer; my body and brain seem happiest when I wake up around 10:30–11:00 a.m. each day, but the sun tends to disturb my sleep long before that without an eye mask on.

The Nidra Deep Rest mask is my favorite one I’ve ever tried (and I’ve tried several). It has a Velcro-adjustable strap to account for different head sizes and pressure preferences, it is contoured to prevent light from getting in even if you have a big schnoz like mine, and it has hollow “eye cups” that allow for the natural eye-fluttering movements of REM sleep and put less pressure on your eyes (good for folks who want to avoid wrinkles). They did not pay me in any way to say this; I just genuinely love this product, to the point that I take it with me everywhere I travel so I can ensure I’ll sleep well.

 

Earplugs

I have lived in the downtown core of a major city for several years, and once had a roommate who would have sex at any hour of the day or night and whose sex noises were louder than any I’d ever heard in my life, even in porn… so, of course I’m familiar with the earplugs lifestyle! (Still very glad I left that apartment. Yeesh.)

On the advice of The Wirecutter (a publication that gives good product recommendations but is famously shitty to its employees, so I shan’t link to them), I recently bought a bunch of Mack’s slim-fit soft foam earplugs, and they’re great. You roll ’em up real small between your fingers, stick ’em in your ear, and they puff back up to their original size in there, creating a mild-to-moderate amount of noise reduction. For me, they don’t work well enough on their own (which is why I use a white noise app, below), but when combined with all this other stuff, they’re excellent.

 

White noise app

I think I am too traumatized, and my nervous system is too fucked up, for me to sleep as deeply as I used to 😂 I just find, these days, that even small noises can jostle me from dreamland. When earplugs weren’t doing enough, I decided I should add a white noise app into the mix.

There are dozens, if not hundreds, of these on the App Store, so take your pick! On the advice of my spouse, an app developer with an encyclopedic knowledge of the best apps, I decided to pay the $10 CAD that it cost to get the Dark Noise app. I was finding that a lot of the free white noise apps were cluttered with ads, locked their best stuff behind paywalls, or would crash or pause after several consecutive hours of use; I wanted something that would simply work, and Dark Noise is absolutely doing the trick.

The app has a lot of different sounds at the ready, but the track I play every night when I go to sleep these days is “pink noise,” which is white noise but with its higher frequencies reduced, so that it sounds more like a steady, heavy rainfall. I turn this on at a volume loud enough that I can scarcely hear noises happening elsewhere in the apartment, and keep my phone near my bed while it’s charging all night. The noise is so relaxing and unobtrusive that sometimes I wake up in the morning and go, “Wait, huh? Why did the pink noise get turned off?” and then I realize it’s still on, my ears just got so used to it that they basically filtered it out. Magic.

 

“Smart home” hub and smart bulbs

I’m aware that lots of people have security concerns around anything “smart home”-related, and also that this stuff is too expensive in a lot of cases, which sucks. But I recently decided to treat myself to a HomePod mini and some smart bulbs for all the lights in my room, figuring that it would make my life easier as a chronically fatigued person if I could control the lights and audio in my room with my voice.

It’s been soooo helpful, I can’t even tell you. There are days when my fatigue is so crushingly intense that even picking up my phone from my nightstand feels like too much effort; it’s on those days that I can ask Siri, through the HomePod, to read me my texts, or reply to them, or play my “Energy” playlist to get me moving, or remind me what deadlines are on my calendar, or turn the lights off so I can take a nap, or turn the lights on so I can wake the fuck up. It has revolutionized my life.

I’ve configured many different “scenes” in my Home app – for example, saying “Hey Siri, bisexual” turns the lights pink and blue, while “Hey Siri, I’m doing my makeup” instantly brightens the lamp closest to my makeup area so I can do my face. Some of these have been super helpful in getting to sleep more easily, particularly one called “I’m going to bed.” When I tell Siri that I am indeed going to bed, she turns off all the lights but one, which she makes a rich shade of purple, and then she plays rain sounds on a speaker. This is the perfect setting for those “wind-down” minutes where I’ve gotten into bed and am reading, or taking one last look at my phone, before settling in for the night. At that point I say, “Hey Siri, good night!” and she turns off all the lights and sounds for me.

 

An amazingly soft pillow

Pillow preference is as personal as sex toy preference; I can’t tell you what will work for you, but I can tell you what works for me and how that relates to my preferences and needs, so you can figure out whether my recommendation will work for you.

I’m usually a side-sleeper, occasionally a back-sleeper. My neck and shoulders get depressingly sore if I sleep on a pillow that’s too flat. I sometimes feel too hot when I sleep and sometimes too cold. I spend a lot of time reading or writing in bed, so I prefer pillows that are suitable for sleep and sitting-up activities.

The Nest Easy Breather pillow (another Wirecutter recommendation) is the best pillow I’ve ever owned. It’s stuffed with shredded foam, so you can remove however much you want to get your desired fluffiness level, but I’ve left all of it in. It’s simultaneously supportive and soft. Can’t recommend it highly enough!

 

A fantastic wand vibrator

Okay, this one is kind of a joke… but also kind of not! When I’m feeling too sexually agitated to sleep – or just having trouble sleeping – sometimes a quick orgasm is the best solution. And wands are usually the easiest way for me to achieve that.

My all-time favorite is the Magic Wand Rechargeable; lately I’ve also enjoyed the slightly more petite Zalo Kyro. If you want to lean into the nighttime theme, Bodywand makes a glow-in-the-dark wand for some reason. No idea if it’s any good, but at least you could find it in a hurry if you needed to!

 

What products help you sleep better?

In Praise of the Humble Blindfold

Kate Sloan

Blindfolds are so versatile. I never regret bringing one with me while I travel, even if by “travel” I just mean “take the subway across the city for a sex-date.” Of all the products you can buy at a sex shop, I think blindfolds are right up there with lube in the category of “low price, high impact.”

The three uses of blindfolds that I enjoy most often are sleep, sensory deprivation, and anxiety reduction – let’s talk about ’em.

 

Sleep

For the past couple of months, I’ve been waking up refreshed when my alarm goes off at 9 a.m., and rarely wanting to go back to sleep. This may not sound like a huge deal, but for me it is. I’ve been a chronically sleepy person my entire life, as a side effect of depression, especially seasonal depression. Hell, even when I was in elementary school and had no diagnosed mental illnesses, sometimes teachers would tell my mom and dad in parent-teacher meetings that they worried I wasn’t getting enough sleep at home because I kept dozing off in class. Oops. (Look, I can’t help it that hearing someone read aloud from a novel in French is incredibly soothing… or that fractions are incredibly boring.)

So what’s changed? Why are my mornings suddenly energetic even sans coffee? I attribute this shift to my sleep mask. I’ve worn eye masks to bed sporadically over the years, but usually they didn’t fit right, or didn’t block out light very effectively, or were so uncomfortable that I would take them off in the middle of the night while half-asleep. It wasn’t until I bought this one – which is made of dark-colored, silky satin, padded for comfort, with a nose cut-out that works for my big schnoz – that I would go to sleep wearing a mask and wake up with it still positioned correctly on my face. So I started experiencing the benefits of sleeping with an eye mask on: deeper and more restful sleep, less insomnia, and fewer instances of waking up through the night. Truly astonishing.

If you have sleep troubles and haven’t yet tried an eye mask – or haven’t yet tried one that fits you properly and blocks out all the light within your field of vision – then I would highly recommend it. It’s maybe the best $12 I ever spent.

 

Sensory deprivation

I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that wearing a blindfold during sex can be hot; Cosmopolitan and Fifty Shades have done a good enough job of that already, their various flaws notwithstanding. But it’s often depicted as a novelty, a way to “spice things up,” while for me it’s a regular enough part of my sex life that I’d consider it a staple. Want to have sex like Kate Sloan does?! Get yourself an Eroscillator, an Eleven, and a blindfold. (Oh, and turn on a playlist filled with cheesy R&B and slow-roiling jazz.)

It’s true what they say about how reducing or eliminating one sense can turn up the sensitivity of the others. (Just listen to this recent Off the Cuffs interview with a blind dominatrix if you don’t believe me. God, she’s amazing.) When I’m wearing a blindfold, my nerve endings feel primed for all sensations, my ears perk up, and smells and tastes are more vivid and more erotic.

Blindfolds can also help reinforce a power dynamic, if you’re into that. Sight is, of course, one of the primary tools I use to guide myself through the world, assess situations, and make decisions – and when it’s removed, I’m stripped of most of my usual ways of processing information and figuring out what to do next. In a sexual context, this means that a blindfold can make me feel instantly powerless, even in the absence of other classic submissive props like cuffs or a ballgag. This is also one of the reasons they’re a must-have in the toolkit of any burgeoning or nervous dom – depending on how your sub reacts to them, they can bolster the power dynamic you’re trying to create, and may thereby bolster your confidence as a dominant.

 

Anxiety reduction

I’m no psychology researcher, so I can’t tell you how far-reaching this effect is – but blindfolds are massively helpful for me for treating mid-sex anxiety. Am I feeling shy and embarrassed? Put a blindfold on me. Hating my body that day? Put a blindfold on me. Distracted by the “New Message From Mom” notifications that keep popping up on my phone screen? Put a blindfold on me. (And also put that phone on Do Not Disturb!)

Blindfolds take a lot of pressure off, because you can’t reasonably be expected to do much of anything when you have one on. A blowjob is probably the most dexterous thing I ever do while blindfolded; anything more challenging would be nearly impossible. In this way, wearing a blindfold helps me relax into pleasure, or submission, or just being in the moment.

Blindfolds are also, as I’ve mentioned, potentially helpful for dominants who put ’em on their submissives. Part of my nervousness around taking the reins in bed is related to how I look while I’m doing it; I’ve never felt like a picture-perfect femdom, not least of which because I’m more likely wearing sweaty pajamas than leather and lace. But as soon as I blindfold my partner, I can take control without needing to worry about how I look – including how I look when I accidentally drop the flogger between the bed and the wall, or squirt myself in the face with lube. Whoops.

 

How have blindfolds improved your life, sexually or otherwise?

2 Health Apps That Legitimately Make Life Lovelier

Kate Sloan

I am a Problem Sleeper. I frequently have trouble falling asleep until hours after I should, and then inevitably I sleep way past the time I’m supposed to get up. It’s a quality of mine that’s annoyed parents, teachers, and sleepover hosts, but mostly, it annoys me.

I’ve sought all sorts of help for it – most notably, getting a special lamp for sufferers of Seasonal Affective Disorder (which I also have) and using it for 10 to 15 minutes in the morning when I need some bright light to smack me awake. (It really does help!)

However, there’s another technological marvel that’s been helping with my sleep issues lately, and it – like most of my life – relies on my phone. Oh, iPhone, what would I do without you?!

The wonder of wonders I’m speaking of is the Sleep Cycle app. This post isn’t sponsored in any way; as any IRL friend of mine will tell you, I rave about this app because I really do love it.

Here’s the dealio: at night, when you plug in your phone to charge, you set the alarm in Sleep Cycle and then put the phone face-down on the bed. (I usually put mine above my head and slightly to the left of where I sleep, so I won’t knock it onto the floor if I toss and turn.) The app uses your phone’s built-in motion sensor to track your movements through the night, and – using some kind of high-tech magic I don’t understand – tracks where you are in your sleep cycle at any given time.

It then uses this information to wake you up only at the lightest point of your cycle, so that you’ll feel alert and rested when you wake, instead of groggy and disoriented. Whatever time you set on your alarm, the app will wake you up at your lightest moment of sleep in the half-hour before that time – so you’ll be extra-awake but still on time for whatever you’ve got scheduled that morning.

The wake-up sounds are gentle and gradual, so you never feel blasted awake. You can also set some soothing sounds to play while you fall asleep; I like to listen to rain. Or sometimes I open up the Spotify app and play the Jazz For Sleep playlist. Ah, bliss!

Sleep Cycle also appeals to my inner geek by collecting and displaying statistics (fuck yes!) on how long you sleep and how well you sleep. You can see all the hills and valleys of your restfulness through the night, and the app even keeps track of how many steps you took each day so you can check if there’s any correlation between physical activity and sound sleep. There’s also a place to keep notes, if, say, you want to keep track of how a certain medication, caffeine drink, or exercise regime is affecting your sleep.

This app has genuinely revolutionized my life in that I almost never feel groggy when I get up anymore, even if I went to bed later than I should’ve. Sure, I’ll get sleepy later in the day if I didn’t get enough Z’s, but it’s no longer a struggle to get going in the morning. And that is a damn blessing.

The same company also makes an app called Power Nap which uses the same basic mechanic but is made for naps rather than night-long sleeps. You have the option of three different nap lengths, depending on how much time you have or how deeply you want to nap. You tuck the phone in your pocket (or, if you’re me, in your bra) and it tracks your movements and wakes you up gently when you’re sleeping lightly. This app has saved my ass so many times when I needed a mid-day power-up but didn’t want to risk the grogginess that happens when you nap for too long.

While not strictly related to sex, I think we can all agree that your level of restedness affects not only your sex life but also how you feel about yourself and your life. This blog has basically expanded to cover not only “sex” but “anything and everything that impacts sex,” and lemme tell ya: when I haven’t slept well, any sex I have (even with myself) is gonna suck. So, thank heavens for Sleep Cycle!

Do you use any health apps that rock your world? Do you have sleep struggles comme moi?