I'm planning on moving my wakeup time to some super early hour like 6am so that I'll have more time after work.
The hardest thing when I try to fall asleep is to stop thinking. My SO also falls asleep in 2m where it takes me well over 30m unless I'm listening to an audiobook or music that I know well, then it's closer to 10m.
- 10,000 IU of Vitamin D3 before 10am
- 400-1000 daily milligrams of Magnesium chelate (or magnesium citrate, if you are ok with liquid stool for a while until you adapt)
- Make sure you have sufficient protein in your diet - rule of thumb is 1gr protein for 1kg of body weight (or 0.5gr per 1lb). That's often more than non-athletes are getting.
Do your own research about D3 and Mg - both are way above the RDA, and some people will tell you that D3 in this amount is bad for you (and they'd be wrong unless you spend all day in the sun, but don't trust me on that - do your own research)
I still have the occasional 3-4 day streak of unable-to-fall-a-sleep a month, but this combination has reduced it from 25-30 days a month ...
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/how-much-protein-do-you-...
The 1g/kg is easy to remember, as is 0.5g/lb ; they are 120-140% of recommended for a sedantry lifestyle, but only 60-80% of what’s recommended for an athlete - so I use them as an easy to remember back-of-the-envelope numbers.
RDA is much less precise and scientific than one would think; it basically means “we know there are no serious defincies or overdoses if you keep this forever” - but they are not optimized for anything else; e.g. higher dose vitamin C was shown to shorten common cold recovery, and higher dose vitamin D with generally better everything.
- listen to a (i.e. scientific, technical) podcast
Just go to bed and start a podcast. Turn the volume down, use a sleep timer so that the podcast will not run for 2 hours and close your eyes. Listening to people talking will clear your brain of trying to wander around.
- warm milk
- meditation
- room for sleep only
- go to bed only when sleepy( I am not sleepy anymore once i get into bed)
- melatonin
- counting sheep
- sleep sounds, sleep talking youtube videos
- ambien ( sigh)
- clean sheets
- low room temperature
- body pillows, weighted blankets
- daily excersise / yoga
- Ice cold showers/ hot showers / no shower
- no food after 8 pm, no coffee after 12 pm
- no alarms/alarms
- no screens
None of these had any consistent results, you simply cannot "trick" your brain. Then I observed my (then new) girlfriend how she would fall asleep in < 2 mins. I realised I had strained relationship with sleep at some point in my life and never corrected that relationship. My problems started when I was teenager in residential school where you had to wake up at 5 am.
My girlfriend associated sleep with cozy, warm, relaxing happy space,I associated it with stressful battle. I've had good success trying to mend my relationship with sleep. Ironically the thing that worked the best for me is 'sleep restriction', sleeping less and less everyday till my brain associated sleep with something it needs to chill, not something foisted on it by a strict schedule.