Good day!<p>These days we all have a lot on our mind. Therefor I was wondering, what is your mental trick to fall asleep?<p>To start with mine:
With closed eyes I imagine myself walking on a beach, only seeing the lower part on my legs. I focus myself on a natural rhythm of moving my legs. The better I'm able to keep a smooth pace, the more relaxed I become.
I notice that sometimes my legs are moving too fast, too slow or in a strange way. A better focus helps me to find this smooth pace again and become relaxed.
One day I realized I found it easy to doze when people were talking around me (not <i>to</i> me!). I further realized that because I think verbally (as in my thoughts are just me "talking" to myself) all inner monologue stops when I'm <i>listening</i> to speech. So for the past several years I've listened to podcasts and audiobooks while falling asleep and my typical time to sleep is down from probably 30-40 minutes to 5-10 - one of the best things I ever figured out. Is this going to be a universal thing? No. It's just how <i>my</i> brain works :-)
I posted this here 8 months ago:<p>After decades of trouble falling asleep, I've found a simple technique that works for me. The goal of this technique is to replace words/monologue with images in your stream of consciousness. I do this by picturing three shapes, each engulfing the previous one. Start with a sphere. Just imagine a sphere and nothing else. Then picture a 5 sided pyramid that perfectly engulfs the sphere so that the sides are tangential. As this happens the sphere shrinks so the pyramid takes up the space of the sphere. Then repeat, but with a cube. So the cube encompasses the pyramid, with the bottom planes the same and the 4 upper edges intersecting with the 4 upper corners of the cube. Then shrink that and put it in a sphere, starting the process over.<p>I've found that when I'm really tired I have no trouble conjuring this imagery and sometimes within just a few cycles, vivid explosions of color will flood in and I go to sleep. Other times, I struggle to picture a sphere and start off with the 2d equivalents - circle, square, triangle. The whole thing is a bit like counting sheep, but that never worked for me.
Something I recently heard on reddit, and my wife and I have been trying, is to go through the alphabet, and for each letter think of 3 unrelated words. About half the time it quiets my mind enough to fall asleep. I usually give up if I make it all the way through, my wife has reported that sometimes she's had to go through it twice to fall asleep.<p>Another thing that'll often put me to sleep is listening to an audio book, but I stopped doing that when my phone USB-C port broke, I only have plug-in earbuds, my wireless headphones are big cans, not really suitable for falling asleep in.