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Sleeping on the Floor

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    Name
    Stefan Aleksic
    Twitter

I’ve been sleeping on the floor for the past 3 months, it has been nothing short of amazing.

Floor setup

When I moved to my new room in San Francisco, I found out the previous tenant never took their mattress with them. They left it there for some reason. I needed a bed so I bought some queen sized bed sheets and a pillow that I put on the mattress lying on my floor. I started noticing problems with the mattress early on. My entire body would sink into it and that lead to discomfort in the morning.

Sleeping on the floor happened completely by accident. I talked to my friend Tejas about the wonders of sleeping on the floor at a conference in San Francisco. He talked to me about the health benefits of sleeping on the floor. I was a bit hesitant at first but after researching a bit online, I started to learn more about the benefits provided. I didn’t have any space to sleep on the floor since the queen sized mattress was taking up a lot of room and throwing it out was too risky. A month into living in the new space, I learned of amazing news from my roommate. He told me that the previous tenant wanted their mattress back. It was a bit weird to me at first but I just went with it. Movers came in the next day and took the mattress from my house.

I now had three options.

I could use an air mattress my roommates had, for the next three months I would stay in San Francisco.

I could buy a new mattress on Amazon for a relatively low price of $100.

I could sleep on the floor.

I thought about these options for a bit, but decided that the coolest experience would be to sleep on the floor.

I have recently developed a mental model of how to assess situations and how to decide what to do. I am viewing life as a really awesome and fun game. What are the things I could do to level up? It seems a bit arbitrary on the outside but it’s meaningful to me. I figured out that sleeping on the floor would be a totally new, awesome experience, whereas the other two options sounded really boring.

I put a thin blanket I bought, on the floor so that I could sleep on something more smooth than my carpet, put my pillow on it, and lied down.

The first three days of sleeping on the floor were the worst nights of sleep I’ve ever had while sleeping in my own room. I would wake up in the middle of the night, my hips hurting, feeling awful. I couldn’t wait for the morning to come so I could escape the floor.

Something weird happened on the fourth day. I felt completely fine. It was the first night that I slept without waking up in the middle of the night.

After three months, I can confidently say that I haven’t had this good of sleep in a long time. Every morning, I wake up feeling refreshed and ready to tackle the day in front of me.

:wq