I, like a lot of people, have been plagued with sleeping issues for a long as I can remember. When I was in college I would take a lot of NyQuil in order to win this battle. Now that I don't have access to that (we have no such product in Thailand or any other sedatives really) I have to rely on other things such as booze, which has its own negative side-effects.
No need to give me any advice. I can assure you that I have tried it all. What works for one person does not work for another. The closest thing I have found that puts me to sleep is to put on my sound-cancelling headphones and listen to death metal of all things (what relaxes me might not relax you :P.) I think this works because it prevents me from thinking about anything else and like many people, my mind goes a bit nuts when I lay down to go to sleep... all my worries and embarrassing bad memories come to the forefront for some reason.
source
Like many people, i turn off the light thinking of nothing, but then a million thoughts immediately come to mind although they are not about my relationship with "John"
Anyway, I want to point on another phenomenon that makes my already pretty bad sleep situation even worse: If I have something important that I need to do the following day, sleep is nigh on impossible.
This happened recently (just a few days ago) when I needed to be at the local immigration office at 7am. Getting there after 7am would create a very big problem for me. At the minimum it would incorporate me spending a very long amount of time in the office because people queue up really early to get a good ticket number. The staff at the school I attend do all the paperwork for me but I physically need to be there in order to claim my own ticket. I ride a bicycle exclusively for transport and the Immigration office is on the other side of town. Therefore, I had to wake up around 5am, which is a VERY early start for me.
Knowing that I had to wake up at this time seems to make it even harder for me to get to sleep possibly because I don't have faith in my alarms even though i set 2 of them (phone and an actual clock,) It is really silly for me to be worried about both of these things failing because there has only been one instance in recent memory where either one of them failed in many years - and at that point the other one didn't fail.
So now I find myself in a situation where I actually need the sleep more than I normally would but am unable to obtain it because of that fact. What a horrible Catch 22 this is.
I do eventually achieve sleep, but then it is also a very restless sleep. I likely, because of my internal worrying mechanism, never achieve the type of sleep that actually regenerates you. I will wake up plenty of times in the night and then the process starts over.
Like most of the times that I have been through this scenario, the following day was just awful. The exercise or riding the 20km to Immigration gave me a brief burst of energy but then the rest of the day was a struggle. I didn't want to nap because I was looking forward to being able to get to sleep easily at a normal go-to-sleep hour. There are times when I really envy my dog because she can be playing wildly one second and then the next be sound asleep, snoring and wiggling her paws in a dream where she finally catches that cat.
Does essentially nothing all day, always exhausted
So what about you? Do you experience this phenomenon? It seems like most of the people I talk to this is just a regular occurrence for them. It is such a common thing for me that on the rare occassion that it doesn't happen, I am genuinely surprised.