Lucky you. Whatever I do, if I'm forced to be out of bed before 8 AM, I'm going to be completely useless for few days. Usually I wake up around 9:30 to get good sleep. And whatever I do, I'm simply unable to go sleep earlier than midnight, even if I lay down, I just can't sleep for hours. It's 0:29 where I live and I'm just turning on Netflix after a failed try at sleeping - even though I'm pretty tired as I didn't sleep enough yesterday.

> It's 0:29 where I live and I'm just turning on Netflix after a failed try at sleeping

I'm sympathetic to your situation -- but with all due respect, this would seem to be a strategy with a vanishingly small likelihood of benefit.

You would be wrong. Just trying to sleep doesn't work for me either, but putting on a distraction for 15 minutes helps a lot.

I am not aware of any mode of watching Netflix that is constrained to 15 minutes.

"Trying" to sleep is also doomed to failure, of course.

Personally, what works best for me is modeling solutions to issues in projects (work or otherwise).

I originally tried this, hoping for the benefit of "sleeping on a problem". I don't think it's been particularly successful for that (though it could be subtly so, I guess), but it has about a 90% success rate for inducing sleep within 15 minutes. :)

My solution and yours might be the same thing (distraction from the goal of sleep), but I'd worry about the stimulation of video, the light from the screen, disturbing partners, etc. And also that I might get interested, and stay up for hours instead (this is my failure mode for reading before sleep).

Different things work for different people.

Thinking about projects prevents me from sleeping. It's the surest way to keep me up with my mind racing for a few more hours. If it works for you, great!

The "mode" for watching Netflix for 15 minutes is turn it on, watch for 15 minutes, turn it off. I won't claim it works for everyone, but it does help settle my mind at night.

I know that any code I write before around 9:45 in the morning will be seen as regrettable and rewritten at some point in the next few days. So the earlier I sit down to write code the more rework there will be. This is somewhat less true if my adrenaline is high from being smacked with production issues first thing in the morning, but adrenaline is not a sustainable strategy.

Unfortunately, not everyone has quite the same natural flexibility you describe. "Shift worker syndrome" has been known for decades, though a fortunate subset of people just seem immune.

You'd think so, and yet apparently it didn't happen - or it's not heritable, in which case we're stuck with it.