The Pick-Up-Put-Down Method
Pick up your phone and scroll through news apps for one hour. Then slowly put your phone down and leave it there for one minute. Repeat this over and over, gradually increasing the amount of time in which you’re away from your phone. Stop when you’ve consumed enough content that being awake feels indistinguishable from a nightmare.
The Warm-Bottle Method
Shortly before bedtime, give yourself a warm bottle of eight-dollar Moscato. After a little belching, you’ll go right down. Then you’ll go back up at 3 A.M., with violent acid reflux. Spend the next four hours burping yourself to sleep, just in time for your alarm to go off.
The New-Parent Method
Jolt awake at the sound of the baby’s piercing cries and tumble out of bed. After smashing your toe on the doorframe, remember that you don’t have a baby—it’s just your neighbor Jean’s spiteful cat. Spend the next several hours pleading with Gizmo through the wall to go sleep-sleep.
The Graduated-Extinction Method
Toss and turn under the covers while thinking about how humans are destroying the planet, focussing in particular on your own personal failures. Are you sure that you know which plastics can be recycled? And what should you do when you can’t get that last glob of honey out of the bottle—just throw the whole bear out? Google “Recycling how it works,” and realize it’s possible that everything is ending up in a landfill anyway. Pop the last of your melatonin gummies, which never work but taste great, and chuck that empty jar right in the trash.
The Chair Method
Pass out in your favorite armchair while plowing through the new season of “Unsolved Mysteries.” Scream yourself awake at 5 A.M., drenched in sweat and with your head stuck at a forty-five-degree angle.
The Repressed-Mortification Method
Right when you’re about to drift off, think back to your most humiliating moments from the eighth grade. Like that time you tripped and fell in the cafeteria while carrying an open bag of Funyuns, and everyone laughed—even the principal. Counting backward from a hundred, picture all the classmates and lunch aides, who definitely still reminisce about it to this day. Eventually give in and take a ZzzQuil, but only once it’s late enough to guarantee that you’ll sleep right through all four of your alarms in the morning.
Bedtime-Hour Fading
Gradually put yourself to bed later and later each night, until time folds in on itself and you’ve suddenly been awake for three weeks. Around this point, you’ll slip into a REM cycle and remain there for three days. When you finally regain consciousness, you will have been fired from your job, probably, but otherwise you’ll feel refreshed.
Bedtime-Routine Fading
Not to be confused with Bedtime-Hour Fading, this method is one where you simply stay up all night hate-reading the life-style blog of your childhood nemesis, because you don’t feel like getting up to brush your teeth.
The Rock-and-Shush Method
Lie on your back and grind your teeth to the bass beat of your neighbor Troy’s stereo. Intermittently, get up and scream, “SHUT THE HELL UP!,” while banging on the ceiling with the handle of a Swiffer that has only ever been used for this purpose. Repeat this until you tire yourself out or puncture the drywall.
The Cry-It-Out Method
Get into bed and allow yourself to wail uncontrollably. You should figure out how to self-soothe eventually. And, if you don’t, at least all of your neighbors will be equally miserable.
