… I just wanna sleep
Relax all the muscles in your face.
Specifically the jaw.
I found that I was unconsciously clenching my jaw and would lie awake for hours. Once I started consciously unclenching I would fall asleep really quickly.
Work out. It helps reduce stress and just makes you more tired
Yellow zzzquil. The regular one works too but the yellow one is better.
No.
By which I mean… I’ve tried many tips/tricks and none have consistently worked.
5mg melatonin and 200mg L-Theanine works for me. I order from Thorne. I believe they are reputable.
According to my SO’s sleep doctor, most people don’t need that high of a dose. He recommends 1mg.
For a free white noise generator, put a small drop of hydrogen peroxide solution in your ear.
Where do you get your free hydrogen peroxide?
I like to think of nostalgic memories.
Turn on some video without commercials and something at a more or less constant volume, like Ancient Aliens or How It’s Made. Set the sleep timer for 30 min. Turn the screen off if your TV supports it. Set the volume low/moderate. Get comfortable in bed in your favorite position, close your eyes, and listen to the video. I usually don’t ever hear the sleep timer turn it off.
I did this back when I had insomnia. It worked great. I would usually do it while some movie that I am very familiar with was playing, even if it had a lot of sound variation. For me, that involved a lot of Jaws and Alien movies.
YMMV but when I’ve listened to videos with action and peril, the sudden shouting/explosions/whatever would wake me up.
If you have ad-free YouTube, James May The Reassembler, Astrum, and John Michael Godier are excellent to fall asleep to.
It probably largely came down to the fact that those are comfort movies for me. I’ve seen them all dozens of times.
Don’t use blue lights. That includes most lights. Use red or orange lights after dark. Blue light wakes you up. (I mean do this in addition to some of the other suggestions.)
Don’t use your phone at night. If you absolutely have to, enable adaptive warm light (if there’s such a feature on your phone), which gradually turns the white balance to warm in the evening. This is because staring at the screen will send the signals to your brain to wake up, especially the blue-ish spectrum of light, plus whatever content you’re engaging with (news, social media, texts from friends) will make your mind occupied.
But again, best is to not use your phone at all.
Read a book. Pick a topic you’re interested in, buy a book and just read before you sleep. Yes, I see the contradiction - an interesting book will make your mind occupied too. Yet I find that a book relaxes me in my own world, while on your phone you’ll meet many different topics, lots of quick stimuli, maybe that’s why. I don’t know.
These strategies work for me.
wear yourself out during the day. easier to fall asleep if you’re exhausted
I turn the brightness on my phone as low as it goes, turn on night shift to get rid of blues, and read (white text on black background / dark mode).
Don’t read in continuous scroll; find a way to turn the page with minimum animation.
Read something you don’t find so compelling as to keep turning pages but enough that you’re happy to read.
I find history books most successful at the moment since there is often no desire by the author to build tension, suspense, etc that keeps you alert.
When I had trouble sleeping, I would have even more trouble sleeping because I was upset I wasn’t sleeping. Then I read somewhere that just lying there with your eyes closed and not moving was like 80-90% as effective as actual sleep.
I didn’t bother to check if that was true, but it did allow me to leg go of worrying whether I was sleeping. And that allowed me to actually fall asleep.
Stop thinking about falling asleep. With your inner voice tell yourself you’re going to stay up all night. Close your eyes, relax, lie still, and tell yourself that you’re going to stay up all night; you’ll pass out after a while.
Also invest in a high quality white noise generator or weighted blanket.
I’m gonna chime in here. My wife asks me this a lot because she too has trouble going to and staying asleep. I however have some kind of sleep superpower. I can be asleep within 2 minutes after going horizontal.
I’ve always done this: start building a scene in your head. Any scene. Action, nature, whatever. Now picture yourself there in first person. Focus on the details. Make sure the trees have leaves. The pavement has lines and cracks and texture. Imagine feeling the wind on your body. From grass to cars to sky paint as detailed a picture as you can. Begin to form a story. Walk around and interact with things, people, animals. Maybe you have a storyline. As a boy I had an action sequence I would play out every night. Cuz you know. Boys. But as I got older those turned into hikes in fun places. Or keeping company with my current crush. Or a fun road trip…You get the idea.
I promise not long after you begin you will naturally begin to drift off. At least this is what has always come naturally to me.
Good luck and sweet dreams!!!
This is going to be really hard for those of us who are aphantasic.
I’d never heard of this. So do you dream at all?
Very vividly and every night. I just can’t really call up pictures in my mind. I can call them up for maybe a fraction of a second with poor detail, but I can’t hold on to them.
