u/freshmenotes

Does anyone else ever suddenly wake up in the middle of the night feeling extremely cold — like, cold enough to start shivering uncontrollably?

The most recent episode happened last week. I suddenly woke up in the middle of the night feeling freezing cold. I was literally trembling, my teeth were chattering, and I had to get up and put on my thick winter pajamas. After wrapping myself tightly in the blanket for a few minutes, I gradually warmed up and was able to fall back asleep.

I asked ChatGPT to help analyze it, and one possible explanation was an overly sensitive sympathetic nervous system or hormonal changes. The general idea was: when your body shifts between deep sleep and lighter sleep, your body temperature naturally changes. If your sympathetic nervous system is especially sensitive, it might “notice” that change even while you’re asleep and interpret it as a threat — sending a rapid danger signal to the brain, which then triggers an intense physical response like shivering.

This happens to me maybe 2–3 times a year.

I’ve asked a lot of people around me, but no one seems to have experienced the same thing, so I’m wondering if anyone on Reddit has.

In the Yi language (spoken by an ethnic minority in China), there’s a beautiful tendency to avoid abstract adjectives. Instead of labeling an object with a detached quality like "high," the speaker grounds the description in human effort. To say "the mountain is high," they say: "This mountain takes half a day to climb."

I’m obsessed with this—the idea that language isn’t just a tool for communication, but a lens that dictates our sensitivity to the world.

Whether it’s the multiple Russian words for "blue" that sharpen color perception, or the English past tense that adds a sharp finality to grief, our vocabulary defines the boundaries of our feelings.

This inspired my work on Koan, a prompt-based journal app I built. I realized so much of our emotional life happens in the "gaps" between standard words. Hope you all can love it.

I’m a minimalist at heart, but naming my project pushed me to the edge. I eventually landed on Koan, but it wasn't an easy choice.

To be honest, I’m tired of the "mystical Zen" aesthetic that’s taken over the mindfulness space. Usually, when you see a "Zen" app, it’s wrapped in layers of complex, hyper-religious, or "mysterious" narratives. It feels like a ceremony I didn't sign up for.

I wanted to do the exact opposite.

To me, a Koan isn’t some esoteric riddle that requires a master or a monk to solve. It’s just a tool—a mental crowbar to break the loop of your logical brain. It’s that "hard question" that forces you to stop overthinking and actually start feeling.

I built this app because I realized traditional journaling often fails because it’s too noisy. We’re either writing boring logs about what we ate, or we’re getting lost in the "ritual" of the app itself.

So I stripped everything away. No mystical baggage, no complex rituals, no "Dear Diary" fluff. Just a single, sharp prompt and a space to answer. I wanted to create a direct, sometimes uncomfortable, but always honest encounter with yourself.

It’s been a weird journey building a tool that fights against the very category it’s in (the "mindfulness industry"), but I’m curious if this resonates with anyone else here.

I just launched on the App Store and would love some brutal feedback on the UX or the concept itself. Does "Koan" feel too heavy for a minimalist tool, or does the "anti-mystical" approach make sense?