I was going to say similar. If you can make your peace with the fact that lying on your bed is still “rest” and you don’t necessarily need to sleep, stick a podcast on and try to enjoy it rather than fight being awake, then it is weirdly easier to actually drop off. It’s the resistance to “being awake” that makes it so hard to go to sleep. You won’t sleep when you’re resisting.Some good advice above.
I had a sleeping problem last summer which got to the point where I was dreading the approach of the evening knowing it would soon be bedtime and I wouldn’t be able to sleep.
The wife bought me a good book The Sleep Book by Guy Meadows which basically teaches you how to get rid of the spiral of anxiety caused by not being able to sleep.
You can’t make your body fall asleep you have to create the conditions which encourage it to just happen.
The more you worry about sleeping the less you sleep. Once you just accept you can’t sleep, face up to it and stop worrying about it then you find you start to fall asleep. The book teaches a few good techniques to stop worrying about it.
Takes a little bit of time with a bit of reading and re-reading the techniques each night to drive the anxiety away but it definitely worked for me.
I'm not quite as bad as that but I can survive on way less than the recommended 8 hours. I never go to bed until I'm fighting it and falling asleep on the sofa, which can occasionally be as early as 11pm or sometimes as late as 1.30am (very rarely even later). But when I do go up I am asleep when my head hits the pillow. If I tried to turn over a new leaf and go to bed at 10pm every night "to get more sleep" I reckon I'd be lying for 2-3 hours wide awake and then complaining about insomnia. So it does depend on your whole approach to it, and as you say, being 'at peace' with whatever happens. One thing that will most definitely stop you sleeping is stress/resistance ie getting stressed about not getting enough sleep.Sorry I can’t add to anything above, but can share. I’ve fought sleep all my life, it‘s like I’m fighting the executioner every night, when I worked, which I’ve recently stopped, four hours was a good night - lads I worked with used to laugh at my Fitbit sleep log, one guy even told me it was a lie as no one could survive on that amount of sleep.
I‘m more relaxed since I gave up work, but still fight sleep, randomly I stayed up till 3.30 this morning, but because I’m chilled I’ll have a good day today. The sad thing is I cope with my sleep issue with wine, rather than podcasts or a good book as described above. But I figure other than probable long term health issues I’m not doing anyone any harm. I otherwise keep fit and healthy and left my real black dog days behind in my 20’s and 30’s the only advice I can give is to try and find peace with it. Which is rubbish advice I know.
I watched the Michael Mosely "The Truth About Sleep" documentary on iplayer and ended up ordering the pre-biotics that he found helped.The perpetual battle with my own brain appears more and more futile with each arduous day. Sorry for being doom and gloom but I'm tired, in every sense.