My bed is exclusively for sleeping and sex. No food. No coffee. No TV. So my body has learned if we’re not doing one thing then we’re doing the other.

My mind does have a tendency to wander/worry/race though so I put on a podcast when I lay down to distract my brain. I’m usually asleep within 5-10 minutes.

It might be weird but it works for me:

I imagine I am doing skeleton in the nude. IE sliding down an ice chute in the buff. It works especially well when I can’t sleep because I’m hot.

the one where I’m unconcious for a couple hours while vividly halucinating

Eyes closed. Preferably without dying.

To combat jet lag, or otherwise reset your sleep schedule if it has drifted…

1. Go 24 hours without eating.

2. Go to bed early enough to make sure you get 8-10 hours before you normally want to wake up.

3. Using an alarm, wake up a bit earlier than you usually want to wake up.

4. Make a big breakfast, eating when you normally want to wake up.

Now your body will have reset its circadian rhythm, and you’ll naturally wake up at that time.

Earplugs, cold room, thick blanked and a pillow under my knees/between my legs depending on wether I’m on my back or side. If on top of all this I don’t fall asleep/wake up in the middle of the night anxious about unfinished tasks that would be great.

The App ‘Calm’ which is good for meditation also has sleep stories. There is a great one by Levar Burton describing the solar system.

Ambien

I smoke a joint around 1h before bed, I lay down, watch some unfathomably long video about something dumb (a bad game, Elon musk, the UK etc.), then I fall asleep, wake up an hour later to my computer playing the weirdest fucking thing, close the lid and go back to sleep. Works wonders.

Concentrating on breathing using my diaphragm.

I stole this actually from sitting meditation. Laying on my back this usually puts me too sleep in a couple of minutes. It’s especially useful when my mind is racing.

I’m a skydiver type if I don’t have a backpack.

20mg of Melatonin 2 hours before bed.

Staying up until I’m sleepy, then closing my eyes until I’m no longer tired.

Imagining something fantastic like living in an asteroid mine and managing things. Or trying to not think anything. Both works for me. And of course working 60h a week and spending my whole free time with my kids leaving me completely exhausted falling in coma in a second. Good night!

Two cats at once. I get the part of the bed not taken by the cats. I’m motivated to lie very still by the cats and the obvious repercussions for moving.

If that fails, the podcast Casefile - gruesome true crime stories recited by a very slow talking Australian fellow. It almost always puts me out. In bed or on planes.

Mine is really weird and hard to describe. I’ll try to be concise. I close my eyes (no shit Sherlock) and I imagine faces of people. It can be someone close, a star of a TV show, anything. Then I change element of their face one by one (e.g. their eyes). And I keep going. And everytime the face changes enough I question myself “I know this person, who is this ?”. And when I answer the question, the face is clearer (because I’ve put a name on the face so it is easier to imagine it and correct it) and I can go on again until I fall asleep.