What do you do when you can’t sleep?
There are all the standard suggestions, of course. Count sheep. Drink a glass of warm milk, which sounds awful. Change positions in bed. Read a book. We’ve all been there, and we’ve probably all tried at least one or two of those tricks.
I go through occasional bouts of sleeplessness where I’ll wake up in the middle of the night and just stay awake. Falling asleep in the first place usually isn’t my problem. But if I wake up, typically around 3 a.m., getting back to sleep can be a challenge.
I’ll admit I’ve taken the occasional melatonin, but I don’t like relying on it too often. So over the years I’ve experimented with other methods.
One of my first solutions was music. Enya, the well known Irish new age artist, became one of my go to choices. Pop in one earbud so I don’t bother my husband, hit play and drift off. At least, that was the plan.
Eventually I realized Enya’s soothing music couldn’t compete with the hamster wheel spinning in my brain. I needed something that would drown out my thoughts with actual talking, but not something interesting enough to keep me awake.
Naturally, I tried audiobooks. That was just ok. Either I’d get completely wrapped up in the story and refuse to go back to sleep, or I’d actually fall asleep and wake up annoyed because I’d missed some crucial plot twist. It wasn’t exactly a winning strategy.
So I moved on to long YouTube videos with content that was, well, intentionally dull.
For a while I listened to videos about the history of Middle Earth, the fictional world of The Lord of the Rings. I’m a pretty big LOTR fan and even studied Tolkien in college, which turned out to be part of the problem. Before long I was fully invested in the early history of Sauron, the forging of the One Ring and all sorts of ancient elven politics. Instead of getting sleepy, I was wide awake wondering how Morgoth had managed to ruin everything yet again.
Clearly, I needed something even more generic. That’s when I searched “boring history to fall asleep.” Jackpot.
Apparently there’s an entire corner of YouTube dedicated to three hour videos designed specifically to put people to sleep.
Here are just a few of the titles I’ve stumbled across. “How Did Frontier Families Sleep Through the Coldest Nights Without Freezing?” “How Did Medieval Pirates Sleep on Ships Without Freezing?” “What Was It Really Like to Sleep in a Medieval Inn?” and “How Did Vikings Sleep in Shelters Without Freezing?”
You might notice a theme.
For some reason, nearly all of these videos revolve around sleeping and freezing.
When I first started listening to them, just listening, not watching, I assumed they were narrated by actual historians. That illusion didn’t last long. It quickly became obvious they were AI generated, complete with an AI voice sporting a surprisingly soothing British accent.
After listening to several of them, another pattern emerged. Every single one seemed to contain lengthy discussions about building fires, trying not to choke on smoke from those fires and the best materials for constructing shelters, which apparently always include mud, wattle and some sort of animal hair.
Without fail, every few minutes the narrator would solemnly announce that “historians disagree” or “researchers debate” whatever point had just been made. Sure they do.
It became pretty clear that whoever was creating these videos probably did about 20 minutes of research before asking AI to stretch it into a three hour documentary.
To be fair, they often do help me fall asleep.
On the other hand, some of them are put together so poorly that they have the opposite effect. Occasionally the AI voice glitches, suddenly talking at double speed before slowing down into what sounds like a very intoxicated British man trying to remember how sentences work. It’s less than relaxing.
Over the past few months I’ve discovered a few creators who actually produce well researched history with real narrators and real facts. The problem is those videos are actually interesting.
Once again, I’m lying there at 3:45 in the morning completely invested in some obscure historical event instead of sleeping.
So have I found the perfect cure for middle of the night insomnia? Not exactly.
But if you’ve already tried everything else, don’t care whether your history is especially accurate and find a slightly garbled AI British accent oddly comforting, I have a whole list of recommendations.
You’re welcome
