I Found the Worst Sleep Hack in the World

Here’s a disturbing confession to make. I’ve developed a terrifying habit that helps me fall asleep. It started by accident, and now I don’t even know what to do about it.

For a while now, I’ve had a ritual to help me fall asleep. I usually listen to a book with one earbud in, and it helps me drift off. I can only do it with books I’ve already read, multiple times. The last couple of years, I’ve cycled between the Harry Potter series, On the Road, and the Dark Tower series, over and over and over again. It’s not necessarily healthy, but it’s what I’m doing. I set my sleep timer to thirty minutes and pick up wherever I left off the night before. Chunk by chunk by chunk, chewing through books I’ve read dozens of times, going for one more cycle. Just randomly cycling through the things I love.

Then, maybe two or three months ago, I opened up YouTube. A thumbnail flashed in front of me, and I couldn’t help but click. It was boring history — how people in medieval times slept, or something like that. I started listening, and it was weird. It was clearly AI slop. You could tell in an instant — the robotic voice, the AI-generated artwork, the weird cycles of AI-generated images flashing with textures overlaid on top of them. And what was even more perplexing was the copy. Long, rambling statements that never went anywhere. Circular, pointless passages — “and then the expert right here” — the kind of thing that makes your brain melt like a scoop of strawberry ice cream on a hot day.

The night before, I’d finished the Dark Tower for probably the nineteenth time. So I figured, huh, I’m curious — let me just listen to this. The prose was boring and meandering, read in a robotic AI British voice. I was asleep in less than ten minutes.

And wouldn’t you know it — the next night I opened the YouTube app, and BAM! There it was. Another one. YouTube knew I wouldn’t be able to resist. I set the sleep timer for fifteen minutes and boom, I’m done. I can’t fall asleep without robots. That’s terrifying. And it turns out there is now an infinite number of these boring history videos for sleep.

Even though these are some of my all-time favorite books, it’s easy to fall asleep to them. Not because they’re boring, or because I’m bored with them. It’s that they’re so comfortable — there’s a peace and serenity that lets me let my mind go and drift off. Those books only got that status because they hold such a happy place in my heart. They’re incredible stories to me, and they take me to a place of such comfort that I can relax and drift off. They let me shut off that constant track of thoughts — the concerns and worries and ideas and impulses and questions that burn through my ADHD brain in a given day. Those comfortable, familiar stories calm me and soothe me. That’s why they’ve always helped me fall asleep.

The AI slop is more terrifying because it’s almost like I become so numb that I drift off and disassociate. I just checked out. It’s not me falling asleep because I’m comfortable and soothed — I just check out, I clock out. I’m like, fuck this, I don’t even care. It’s audio nihilism.

Based on my YouTube watch history, here are a few of the titles I have fallen asleep to in recent weeks:

• How did people sleep during freezing winters in the Middle Ages

• What 18th-century Paris apartments really smelled like

• No fireplaces? How did early american pioneers sleep in deadly blizzards

• What early American pioneers ate to stay warm during deadly winters

• How did medieval peasants survive freezing winters before heating?

• Why medieval people lived underground during brutal winters

• How did pioneers sleep during deadly winter storms in log cabins?
  

What’s shocking is that I think I fall asleep even faster. And maybe that’s just psychological — but even if it is, that doesn’t make it not real. I fall asleep so much worse. There’s no happiness in it, no comfort, no soothing — none of those feelings I get from the well-worn stories I love. I just rattle off to sleep, and I feel hollow. Come to think of it, I don’t think I can remember most of my dreams anymore. And here I am, a walking human meat bag, having my biological sleep function triggered by robots. It doesn’t feel very good. Does this happen to anybody else?

So I know the thumbnail will be waiting for me tomorrow night. Or I could go to my vault of Jim Dale recordings. I have a choice. And I hope I go for the one that offers comfort.

I was traveling this past week, so this week’s installment had to be a short one. I’ll be back with a deep dive next week.