The Night I Stopped Taking Everyone’s Advice
By Taking My Own Notes
The Night I Stopped Taking Everyone’s Advice and Started Taking My Own Notes
Two-thirty in the morning, and I’m standing in the bathroom in the dark, and my hand has already found my phone before my brain has caught up to why.
Notifications. Comments. Someone in Australia responding to something I wrote hours ago, someone in the UK just now waking up to read it. Substack reaches every time zone at once, which is part of its magic and, it turns out, part of what was quietly wrecking my sleep.
For months I’d been having an incredibly difficult time getting a night’s rest, and it was costing me more than tired mornings. A lot of the ordinary things I like to do in a normal day, I simply hadn’t had the energy for. I kept up with my writing, because that’s non-negotiable, but the moment it was done, I was done. The whole rest of the day gone to recovering from the night before.
People had opinions, of course. People always have opinions.
Someone suggested a dill pickle before bed, to regulate blood sugar so I wouldn’t wake up needing the bathroom in the middle of the night. I tried it faithfully for a while. Someone else swore by a glass of water with a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar and honey stirred in. I tried that too. Nothing.
And then someone handed me a hot chocolate recipe, guaranteed, practically notarized, to deliver a solid night’s sleep.
That was the worst night’s sleep I’d had in weeks.
So I stopped asking people what worked for them and started asking my own body what was actually happening to it. I removed one thing at a time and watched. Not looking for the miracle fix everyone else seemed so certain about, just paying attention to my own data instead of theirs.
That’s how I found the phone.
Every night, that potty break in the small hours turned into an hour, sometimes two or three, of scrolling to see how my friends on the other side of the world were doing. Not doom-scrolling, nothing dark, just a genuine wish to be present with people I care about, at whatever hour their day happened to be. It felt generous. It felt connected. It was also stealing my sleep one time zone at a time.
The fix, once I found it, was almost embarrassingly simple. I stopped taking the phone to bed. Not a supplement, not a recipe, not something anyone else discovered for their own body and handed to me like it should fit mine too.
Here’s what I keep coming back to. Nobody could have told me that. Not because they weren’t trying, everyone who suggested a remedy meant well, but because none of them were in my body at two-thirty in the morning. They were solving their own sleep, and generously offering me the leftovers.
That’s true of far more than sleep.
We are surrounded by people eager to hand us their own solved problems. Get out more. Travel. Stay busy. Find a hobby. Drink this. Try that. Some of it is even good advice, for the person who lived the situation it was built for. But it was built for their body, their marriage, their loneliness, their energy levels, not yours.
Becoming a student of your own life means something much less glamorous than it sounds. It means paying closer attention to your own patterns than to anyone else’s certainty. It means being willing to try a thing, watch what actually happens, and remove it without embarrassment if it doesn’t fit, no matter how many people swore by it. It means trusting your own data over someone else’s testimony.
So here’s a question worth sitting with tonight, whatever it is that’s not quite working in your life right now. Have you actually tested it against your own experience, or have you just been trying everyone else’s remedy for a problem that’s yours alone?
You don’t need the pickle, or the vinegar, or the hot chocolate someone swore by. You need one week of paying attention to what’s actually true for you, and the willingness to remove what doesn’t fit, even the things you were sure you were supposed to like.
I found my answer standing in a dark bathroom at two-thirty in the morning. Yours is probably closer than you think, too.
It’s hard to be a student of your own life if you don’t trust the voice doing the observing.
I wrote a small booklet on exactly that, on learning to trust your own inner voice again after years of outsourcing it to everyone else’s certainty. It’s yours free the moment you become a paid member of The Daily RE-Wire. And for the whole month of July, paid memberships are ten percent off, in honor of the country’s two hundred fiftieth year of deciding for itself.