> Getting really tired of these posts telling me how to sleep.

Haha -- if you meant it as a joke! And if you didn't... nobody is telling you how to sleep. It's just someone with an opinion.

> Turns out if I go to bed later and sleep 6-7 hours, I feel much better, even if my "sleep scores" are much worse.

Sleep cycles are generally between three-and-a-half and four-and-a-half hours long, I think, but maybe yours are slightly on the shorter side.

Either way, if you're getting two cycles in and you wake up cleanly after the second one, that is a great place to be. If you're sleeping such that you're being woken by your alarm in the middle of a sleep cycle, that is hell after a while.

Before the industrial revolution really settled in, before the electric light, many people used to routinely have "first sleep" and "second sleep", splitting up two cycles, and they would have meaningful time to do stuff in between. There are references to it in stories and it's seemingly where the whole "midnight adventure" trope in children's stories comes from.

Sometimes I am like this, depending on my stress levels. That time in between sleeps can be lovely if you know you have time for it.

> nobody is telling you how to sleep

You're right. I am a terrible sleeper, and these articles with advice on sleeping just grind my gears.

When you spend so much time exhausted, wondering what you do wrong and trying to improve, "just lie down and close your eyes" sounds like a parody.

It's like telling someone that you do math by reading the problem, thinking about it, and writing down the answer. Obviously it works for some people, but this advice will not help anyone do math.

I have been there, when I was younger. Indeed I think maybe age alone is to some extent a moderating influence. Usually I don't have an issue now -- I have learned to breathe and sort of "find" restfulness somehow I can't really explain.

I don't personally believe that the idea in the blog post -- exerting willpower to lie still in bed -- is actually a strategy, anyway.

But when I am super-anxious, which does happen, I instead take a completely different approach, which is that sleep is less important than being rested.

I decouple the two. That is, I focus not on going to bed, but resting in some comfortable place, because I think there are fewer sort of "back of the mind" objections to that. It's far less commitment.

When I was staying in my father's large, by-then-empty house 18 months back I could not settle at all to go to sleep.

After only one night I got a sense of why: the size of the place and the location of the bedroom was unsettling and felt insecure.

But there's a room near the front door, not very warm, but it had the comfiest chair in the house, for some reason. I sat in that chair with the heaviest blankets I could find, in the dark. In my clothes, still -- no "getting ready for bed" ritual to speak of. Just rest, knowing that I wasn't trying to sleep.

And then at three or four in the morning, after some snoozing, with the alarm set, I would go up to the bedroom with as few lights on as possible, and get more conventionally ready for bed before the nagging thoughts could raise any objections, and I would swiftly fall asleep knowing that the sun would come p in a couple of hours.

It was enough sleep to survive, and completely enough rest, for the two or three months I was there.

Turns out my Dad used to do exactly the same thing, in exactly the same chair.

So if you'll forgive some more advice, in your shoes this is what I would try: give up on sleep. Focus only on low-stakes, low-effort rest. Perhaps sleep will sort itself out in that context.

This isn't an article about how to sleep. It's an article about how one person approaches practice.

Out if curiosity did you ever test for sleep apnea?