Not sleepy.

My heart is racing to over 100 beats per minute. I've started sweating even though I've been lying down in a cool dark London hotel room for hours.

Now my heart feels like it's beating out of my chest and I feel like death will occur at any moment.

Fortunately I'd been through this before and knew this wasn't the end of life for me but rather a panic attack that would pass.

I ended up spending the rest of that night wide awake and dragged myself to the airport at dawn.

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This is one of the last very rough nights I can remember vividly. I'd been dealing with insomnia for 15 years prior to that hellish night in the beautiful Rookery Hotel in central London. For 15 years I'd chalked it up to something uniquely me, something in my biochemistry, something inescapable, something perhaps sealed at birth with my DNA.

(The first domain I ever registered was notsleepy.com in 1999)

But 10 months later I'd begin to get a glimpse of a better life. A life that included real sleep.

See I accidentally made one change that produced a few nights of good sleep. It caught my attention.

Hang on... I can sleep?

I was hooked. I began experimenting with many variables to see what else I could do to string together more and more nights of uninterrupted sleep.

The following is a guide for what works. It is not a guarantee and is truly a n=1 experiment that produced a life changing outcome. But it is now clear to me this recipe is rooted in science and will likely help others stuck in the rut of insomnia.

I'm going to rate each lifestyle change I made with an estimate of it's influence and degree of confidence. These ratings are my personal experience but from what I've discovered in talking to others it seems these changes have a positive effect on the plurality of those insomniacs that try them.

Let's go.

We will start with the biggest change with the most impact and greatest confidence...