I wake up at 3am to 4am daily as a neighbor makes noise walking their dog. This cannot be helped. Once I am awake, my mind won’t stop going over details about everything from the mundane to the critical. Often, I am able to fall asleep again after three or more hours of wakefulness, but onlyinutes before I have tonwake for the day.
Does anyone have success with quieting the mind without substances so that they can fall back to sleep?
Have you tried a white noise generator, to stop you waking up in the first place? I use TMSoft (apple, Android, pc, web browser). I use a combination of pink noise, rain and thunder - the thunder especially helps with bass notes like garbage trucks and lawn mowers.
You can import your own sounds, use sounds other people uploaded, make your own mixes, change the relative intensity of different sounds (I usually have the pink noise faded behind the rain), change pitch and speed and variability of individual sounds (the rain is pitched a little too high and fast for me to fall asleep to, so I slowed it down and made it deeper), etc. Very nice little app, but try any white noise generator, really.
It might also be a combination of other things making you sleep less deeply at that time. So maybe blackout curtains or a sleep mask, pee before you go to bed, etc etc etc.