My dad used to suffer from insomnia, holding imaginary meetings in his head late into the night. I'm the same way.
One stress-relief technique from Johns Hopkins is a breathing + mantra exercise. I find their mantra recommendation cringey:
Breathing in I am calm, breathing out I am coping.
Mantras, guided imagery, and autogenic training are generally hard for me, because I feel pressure to "stay focused on the mantra."
BREATHING IN I AM CALM, BREATHING OUT I AM COPING
My weird trick is to replace the mantra with free-form inner-monologue nonsense syllables. Here's an example:
Nimbla doobla deeble dee... simba dimba lima nooble doo...
I let the pacing and "mental voice" vary, but mainly aim for a sleepy-sounding tone.
At the same time, I let myself visualize nonsense images. My visual imagination isn't very vivid, and I don't try to create any specific images. It's nothing more than a patchy and low-res mental screensaver. Not even this exciting:
This puts me right to sleep.
If you have refinements of anti-insomnia tricks that aren't on bog-standard lists like this one, go ahead and add them in the comments!
The trick that works for me when I have too many things in my head and it’s keeping me from sleeping is to pull out my phone/laptop, and write them all down. Just stream-of-consciousness. Write everything you can think of, until you run out of things to write. Pause for a second looking for more things to write and if nothing comes to you, then turn off the phone and go to sleep.
My dad used to suffer from insomnia, holding imaginary meetings in his head late into the night. I'm the same way.
One stress-relief technique from Johns Hopkins is a breathing + mantra exercise. I find their mantra recommendation cringey:
Mantras, guided imagery, and autogenic training are generally hard for me, because I feel pressure to "stay focused on the mantra."
My weird trick is to replace the mantra with free-form inner-monologue nonsense syllables. Here's an example:
I let the pacing and "mental voice" vary, but mainly aim for a sleepy-sounding tone.
At the same time, I let myself visualize nonsense images. My visual imagination isn't very vivid, and I don't try to create any specific images. It's nothing more than a patchy and low-res mental screensaver. Not even this exciting:
This puts me right to sleep.
If you have refinements of anti-insomnia tricks that aren't on bog-standard lists like this one, go ahead and add them in the comments!