Sub-clinical insomnia is endemic among the people I know. And I’ve rarely heard anyone say anything good about it.

We all know how important good sleep is for good health, and about the increase in heart attacks when daylight savings time kicks in, and that getting less than 6hrs rest is equivalent to being over the legal alcohol limit in its impact on reaction time when driving a car, and that basically if we’re lying in bed not sleeping we are literally probabilistically giving ourselves alzheimer’s, cardiovascular disease, and cancer all at once.

For most of my life, I’ve been a night owl (generally considered a character flaw by those around me, and a symptom of laziness), and part of it is because though I sleep soundly, for the most part, once I start, it takes me a long time (0.5–3+ hrs) to fall asleep unless I’m dog-tired. I’ve tried everything the internet has to offer and nothing has helped. (Yet.)

(I suspect growing up in a family of meditators, but finding meditating boring and never really getting into it, even though I know it’s good, incentivized getting up late, so I wouldn’t have to meditate, or disturb the people who were.)

In addition to changing how I think about what counts as sleep, I have found another trick for not getting wigged out about how long it takes me to fall asleep: embracing the benefits of hypnagogia.

Edison, Dali, et al are famous for taking daytime naps in a chair while holding a key over a metal pan, to wake them the moment they lost muscle tension — and then writing down the ideas they had had.

Recently, I realized that probably half of my ideas come to me while I’m failing to fall asleep. (Another quarter in the shower, and the rest when I’m meditating.)

Often, insomnia does feel useless. Fairly reliably, though, there will be one epic night of sleeplessness every week or month, often on the full moon (or, perhaps, I just notice that it’s the full moon when I’m wondering why I have such terrible insomnia), when I fill up a full page with ideas for essays, projects, things to research, and so on.

In general, the worse the insomnia, the more ideas I come up with. For best results, drink coffee late in the day, eat a late dinner, and finish off with a large slab of strong chocolate cake. Half-marathon to ultramarathon length runs also seem to tend to generate the good kind of insomnia for having ideas, the lying awake buzzing kind.

Tips for productive insomnia:

• Always keep a notebook by your bed. Keep the notebook open at all times, with an inked pen sitting on it.

• Keep a dim lamp next to the notebook. My preferred choice is a $5 junk-shop brass lamp, with a 5-10 watt incandescent bulb, on a dimmer. This doubles as a reading lamp that’s nicer on the eyes than an e-reader frontlight. When I’m travelling or camping, I use a Petzl headlamp on night vision mode, which has a handy glow-in-the-dark ring that makes it easy to find and turn on.

• Write it down. When you have an idea, chances are you won’t feel like writing it down, because you’re so comfortable and drowsy, and it feels like you’ll remember it. In my experience, even the most vivid ideas will be gone by morning. If it’s a really good idea, I write it down immediately. If it’s so-so, and I’m willing to risk losing it, I make one of two bargains with myself:

  • I commit to writing it down once I have ~2–3 ideas to write down, which is about how many I can hold in my working memory, and also the max I’m likely to remember in the morning (if I’m lucky, and remember any).
  • Or, I commit to writing it down next time I change position. This means that if I’m actually about to fall asleep, I won’t rouse myself. Either I’ll fall asleep, or I’ll capture the idea.

• Load the raw material for what you want your subconscious to work on into your mind before you go to bed. If I read the news, or watch a movie, or have an argument before going to bed, my brain will tend to theorize about the plot, or rehash the argument. The results don’t tend to be very actionable, or useful. Instead, I like to load my memory with one of three categories of things:

  • The working draft of my top-priority project. This could mean re-reading the draft of an essay, or listening to voice memos of unfinished songs, or thinking about where I’m stuck on a programming project.
  • Good philosophical stuff that will put my brain to work on the big questions, rather than gossip and trivia (this tends to generate ideas about how to improve myself and my life, and psychological insights, rather than project ideas)
  • Concrete facts from diverse fields. In my case, this tends to mean reading the essays I chose on Monday, which are about all kinds of things, and tend to include a mix of tech, science, and philosophy, with an emphasis on people’s blogs where they write about whatever interests them. I find that reading in-depth articles on wildly different niche topics, back to back, and then drawing connections between them, fairly reliably generates interesting essay/business/project/song ideas.

• Review in the morning. Many of the ideas I have during insomnia are really dumb, but don’t seem dumb at the time. (This might be a key to why insomnia generates so many ideas: the censor is on a cigarette break, so bad-seeming ideas don’t get automatically shot down.) In the morning, I look at the page of illegible notes I took, and transfer out of the good ones. Many are crossed off. A few seem worth pursuing further. This essay was one of them.