I've thoroughly enjoyed my Kindle Paperwhite. I've had it for six years now. I've occasionally cursed it when it forgets the WiFi, but that hasn't really happened a lot.
The phone app has a lot more features, but it hurts to read on something that small and heavy for very long.
I did cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia years ago, and at the time had the same issue with waking up and then laying in bed for hours trying to get back to sleep. It led to a horrible cycle of anxiety about whether I’d be able to sleep, which of course made it harder to sleep. The most important rules are to try to go to bed and get up at the same time every day. If you’re awake in the middle of the night and can’t fall back asleep after ten minutes, get out of bed and do something quiet with no screens. I recommend hand washing dishes, dusting, or folding laundry. This is productive, calm and quiet, and boring enough that you will be happy to go back to bed when your body says you’re ready. When you start doing this, you’re going to be even more tired during the day. Just suffer through it, don’t take a nap and don’t try to counteract it with caffeine or other stimulants! That will only exacerbate the cycle of insomnia. I also recommend keeping a journal of when you go to bed, every time you wake up, and when you’re finally up for the day. You might find that you naturally wake up less if you give yourself a different bed time window.
Fascinating medication that I have found to annihilate anxiety (excellent anxiolytic) and promote social cohesion/sociabillity/oversharing beware. Takes the edge of stimulants as well
Almost like a pharmaceutical slightly sedative-leaning version of ecstasy but obviously quite distinct pharmacologically and not a replacement for same.
had a 1st gen paperwhite for years and eventually it just became too slow to use. go a fire8 tablet recently, does all the same things + other options.
Youth group wanted to split out group into boys and girls, also by age, and start charging. I also actually read the damn book (I had 2 bibles ) found it dismal and hypocritical. That was the final nail in the coffin.
I grew up in the Christian church. I even went to Bible college and graduated.
There’s plenty of internal inconsistencies in the Bible that people point to. Honestly, while I was always intrigued by those, I didn’t (and still don’t) think those are deal breakers. What did it for me was twofold.
First, the people and their inconsistencies in belief/behavior. There’s plenty of beliefs, practices, and policies that you can argue, but being kind and compassionate are pretty clear callings without room for debate. The most hateful, spiteful, discriminatory people I know can all be found in a church on Sunday, or at least claiming to be Christian. Not to say that all Christians are like this - some of the kindest people I know are Christians. But as a group, they are appalling.
Second is results. I’ve prayed for plenty of stupid stuff I’m sure. If a god is real, I don’t hold it against them for ignoring my dumb asks. But when I look at the serious stuff - prayers for lost people to come home, for severe illness to be healed, for provision for the impoverished, I can’t see any difference at a macro level between praying and not praying.
I questioned what good religion was if it didn’t seem to improve people or the world, and came to the conclusion that it was a wash, so I quietly walked away nearly a decade ago.
It honestly kinda sucks. It was a huge portion of my life. Most of my friends are people I met through church and college. My family is still heavily religious. I met my spouse through church, and they are not in the same position as me. Barring 2 friends, I have never told anyone I know that I’ve even questioned. Even as I’ve moved through jobs, there’s always been someone who already knew me, so the expectations that come with a religious history and degree have always preceded me. I’m effectively in the closet. Anyone who says leaving is the easy route is ignorant and wrong. It’s hard.
Leaving church life behind is very hard indeed. For me most of my social circles were built around church. Home group, Sunday services, university CU. It took a long time to get into new ways of meeting people socially and I’m still certainly not as close to as many people as in my church days.
I have no real advice to pass on here, just saying you’re certainly not alone in finding it tough to leave that side of life behind.
I have a Kobo Aura H2O that I have had for ages that I love. It replaced another kobo without water resistance. Had kindles before that and I like the integration with overdrive too much to move on to anything else. Plus the store if you want to use it is nice and also has some DRM free options available last time I looked.
I have a kobo libra 2, but have had kindle paperwhites in the past. The kobo is the better experience IMO, for 3 big reasons. 1, physical buttons. The buttons on the side also mean there’s a good place to hold the device, where on my old paperwhite I would accidentally skip to the next page constantly. Someone with smaller hands probably won’t mind as much though. 2, easier to get library books. Overdrive is built in, so I don’t have to go find my phone to search for books. 3, more customizable with the fonts and layouts and I can load in custom fonts really easy. That being said, my partner has the newest Kindle, and she adores that thing and hates how big the kobo is.
Last I checked, Kobo will be better specs (screen, water proofness and connectivity) for the money, and if you’re technical it can be modified very heavily, including pretty easily user expandable storage.
Kindle will have a more seamless Amazon experience and maybe better support.
I have a Kobo Clara HD, and I love it to bits. Warm temperature backlight, and I have installed custom firmware on it which lets me use a different reader app, and run an SSH server on it so I can remotely transfer files etc.
While that’s annoying, it’s worth mentioning that it’s a 1 time fee. Basically it’s just more expensive to purchase the one without ads. It was $20 more when I got mine, but idk what it costs now.
I know everybody hates Amazon and they want an alternative to the Kindle, but my Kindle is waterproof and I almost exclusively want to use it in the bathtub. I also want one that doesn't have a strong backlight and feels natural to look at. The Kindle is damn near perfect.
I’ve taken my Kobo into a stream that people cliff jump into. I felt off about it because it doesn’t look waterproof even though it is advertised as such. Maybe I’m just too old for waterproof electronics.
Derived from chamomile flowers (and other plant sources), I’ve found this to be more successful in treating my chronic insomnia than any of the pharmaceutical options. (And believe me, I’ve tried them all.)
It’s really safe even in absolutely large doses. (There are studies performed using doses in the multiple GRAM range.) I highly recommend trying it. Personally I take 400mg/night, which is twice the dosage you’ll see advertised. I only mention because I think the standard advertised range is probably too low for people like me.
Would you recommend it for other seniors particularly? My grandmother might like something like this? She liked Calm Magnesium Sleep except for the GI effect of magnesium citrate and I wonder it this might be easier on the system to the extent she’d be into it
I actually WOULD recommend this for seniors. It does not have any anticholinergic side effects like a lot of pharmaceutical sedatives do, and it doesn’t interact with the most common blood pressure or cardiac meds that older folks often take.
I have the same problem with magnesium supplements. Mag glycinate has less of that laxative effect than mag citrate, so she could try that as well.
The only two caveats I would add are: she should definitely tell her doctors she’s taking it, as with any OTC supplement. And if she’s specifically on a drug called warfarin (Coumadin), she should be very cautious. (Even Tylenol can cause warfarin to build up in the body. Warfarin sucks, so we don’t use it as much anymore, but it’s not unheard of.)
Hope that helps! (I’m a cardiac nurse. I work with older folks a lot.)
Literally the only thing that gives me refreshing sleep. (See also: mitochondrial dysfunction that I mentioned in my other comment about CQ10.) Apigenin seems to improve what’s called “sleep architecture” in a way that none of the pharmaceuticals I’ve ever tried do.
I gotta sleep soon aha but I’ll leave you with a last question for tonight: what do you think mediates Apigenin’s efficacy for sleep? Like what is the mechanism behind its efficacy, what systems does it modulate?
Thanks and no rush, I’ll listen to that article tomorrow :)
So, it’s interesting, because it’s well-known to have effects on the same GABA receptors as benzodiazepines (like Xanax), but none of the addictive, physical dependence problems, and apigenin doesn’t respond consistently to the drug we use to reverse benzos (called flumazenil).
So… we’re not entirely sure? It could still be the GABA effects that help with sleep. But there’s also a host of antiinflammatory neurological effects that probably better explain its efficacy against Alzheimer’s, for example.
Now, if you really want to put yourself to sleep, feel free to crawl through this alphabet soup of a research article lol:
I just had to look that shit up haha. I’ve never thought to check into it beyond just “you’re not breathing, so I’m about to make you very angry by reversing your high, sorry bro” lol
It seems as if _B ligands are both way less ubiquitous and also variably less-reinforcing than traditional alcohol-type sedatives like benzos/barbs/sleeps, although I say that very conjecturally (is that a word? Aha). And less likely to be overdone to the point the therapeutic window is being dangerously exceeded or a polypharmacy situation that leads to medical emergency like that
From my own experience with baclofen which I used to wean off drinking and help with the induced anxiety, I didn’t really find it super pleasent or enjoyable and there were enough annoying sides like tearing up and a crappy fuzziness that was super offputting. Alcohol and sedatives (especially sleeping pills), totes different story (I find them as a class GABA_A way more dangerous and mindlessly compulsive.
Ok you and I both have to go to sleep, but now you’ve got me wondering about the eternal debate amongst our medical residents about benzos vs. barbiturates for acute alcohol withdrawal. I’ll have to read up on this some more
Yeah, ask about baclofen, its famously advocated by a French dr who struggled to find a proper treatment for his alcoholism until he arrived on baclofen. End of My Addiction is the title.
I used it as an adjuvant treatment along with naltrexone and careful timing in terms of the actual drinking that was required to make the naltrexone effective in addressing the neurochemical basis for much of the compulsion from alcohol.
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