My trick is to listen (not watch) to old television shows ...all night. I selected a few hundred hours of old television that'd I'd seen many times before, got a pair of very comfortable ear buds to sleep with, and I just listen to the old TV shows for 8 hours straight. It works amazingly.

Now I sleep through the night, every night, despite having even worse life problems than when I started. One interesting side effect is that I don't dream the same at all. If I dream at all - it's actually about the show that I'm listening to. It doesn't seem to have any negative impact though.

And that adult may not even realize it, because that worry is usually covered by layers of coping. “I’m fine” is adults worst enemy.

My trick is to listen (not watch) to old television shows ...all night

Before using a technique described in itt’s root comment, I also used for-sleep hour+ long asmr videos. Cannot compare their effectiveness because I don’t have a tv.

If I dream at all - it's actually about the show that I'm listening to. It doesn't seem to have any negative impact though

Make sure they don’t broadcast red propaganda in the middle of the night! /jk

Being a very anxious person in nature, I will add there is something that positively helps anxiety in repetition of something known.

I can't put my finger on it but, I always feel aliviated when a new episode starts after the previous one. It's one of the things that has helped me most during hard times, and gave me back being able to fall sleep at night.

For the general issue of worries keep me up at night, I have found that after a few years of meditation, this has almost stopped being issue for me. Maybe if there is some big issue I will wake up one morning early and not be able to stop the thoughts from waking me, so then I bring my problem solving techniques to it and resume sleeping well. Granted some types of stress, financial, child well being, relationship, are more destabilizing and force a higher level of practice than others (like a recent car accident where no one was hurt but my pride and my car and maybe my trust of highway 87). But three slow deep breaths, with all my attention I can summon, note the beginning of the pause and plan reflex, and then nicely numbered breaths, connected to many hours of sitting meditation and those basically chill experiences, and I can let sleepiness do its thing without fuss.

It has absolutely changed the way I sleep (combined with not having caffeine with dinner or later). It has to be TV shows that I've either seen before or don't really care about what happens. Only difference is I use the sleep timer and just turn the TV back on if I have trouble falling back asleep.

But I am with you, old tv shows where I already know the ending are distracting enough not to think about tomorrow, but since I've seen them already I don't stay awake to find out what happens

...but it also cannot be the same content every night, so I have a few hundred hours of several old shows hosted on my Plex server that I play each night.

It's novel enough that it keeps my brain occupied, but not so new that I care about missing anything.

It's a nice sweet spot.

My next step is selecting very specific episodes that I think have good stories that I actually want to reinforce. I find I really internalize certain scenes if I happen to be in the correct part of my sleep cycle while it's playing.

Of the latter, I prefer the shows I’ve been listening to for over a decade.

The latest gen don't work as well (for sleep) as their shape is slightly different (more "bulbous" perhaps) and are much more uncomfortable to fall asleep with in my opinion.

As to how wise it is to sleep with tiny bluetooth transmitters inside your skull... that's a different question.

Given that situation or any other possible emergency that may occur in the middle of the night, sleeping with earbuds playing old TV shows seems like a very bad idea...

Be careful.

Last year, at the beginning of the pandemic, our whole family basically went with no alarms or bedtimes. We slept when we were tired, we ate when we were hungry.

We all basically ended up going to bed between 2-4am (including the 3 and 5 year old) and waking around 11am. Sometimes we would take naps too.

The only reason we got away with that of course was because the pandemic had removed all requirements to interact with society. We literally had no where to go and no one to meet with (all my work meetings start after 1pm).

It was amazing and glorious.

Subjectively, i feel like this is really hard to actually get right in practice.

During the pandemic i had decided to only go to sleep when i actually felt tired. Unfortunately, usually that ended up being at around 2 AM, possibly because using a computer in the evenings/nights was pretty bad for me being able to "listen" to the needs of my body. I noticed that i felt much worse when waking up, than i did when i was following a set schedule. Even with solutions like Redshift/f.lux, people probably still shouldn't use computers and possibly not partake in other activities in the late hours of the night, should they want to better gauge when they are actually tired and when it's time to sleep.

In regards to food and nutrition, it was also a similar situation. For a while, i decided to eat as much as i wanted when i felt hungry. Even though i didn't ever order take out, didn't drink things like Cola/Pepsi, kept myself hydrated to the best of my abilities, i still probably ate too much and that resulted in me gaining about 10-20 kg of weight in total, over a number of months (towards the upper end of a healthy BMI, bordering being overweight). It could have been worse, but if you want to consume food freely, it should probably be mostly veggies or nature products, as opposed to many of the comfort foods.

Now i'm mostly back to a set sleep schedule, limiting what i eat so that i feel a little bit hungry when i go to sleep and also doing cardio exercise every day regardless of how i feel when doing it (which has consistently been pretty horrible so far) and overall my wellbeing has gradually increased.

tl;dr - Understanding the needs of your body can be hard. I certainly cannot trust mine in that regard.