Well, I find the best way to stop a racing mind is to just let it run its course. The more one tries to stop it, the worse it gets. Far from trying to stop my mind, I’ve learned to relax and roll with it, and the time at night while I’m in bed simply relaxing has become one of the most creative and epiphany-laden parts of my day.
All this is assuming of course that you are not engaging in stressful, circular-thinking type worrying. If that’s the case then I’d recommend meditation coupled with muscle relaxion techniques and perhaps some chamomile tea.
Reading works for me. Perhaps you’re putting your book down too soon?
I have the opposite problem: I “read myself to sleep” so often that I sometimes have trouble staying awake while reading when I’m not in bed! I keep telling myself that I need to read on the couch, etc., more, but bedtime is often my only reading opportunity.
Sometimes I exercise really hard; sometimes I read books I know really well; sometimes I listen my little man-made waterfall. The easiest and least-likely-to-fail way is having sex, but I try not to do that.
Seconding this, emphatically. I used to have “racing mind” syndrome, but I would read in bed, watch TV, and do other stuff. Then I read somewhere that what I had done, essentially, was train my body that the bed was an “active place,” so no wonder I wasn’t falling asleep.
So I stopped reading in bed, and I reorganized the house to put the TV elsewhere. It took a few months to retrain myself, but now my body-slash-subconscious-mind recognizes the bed as “place where I sleep and/or fuck, and nothing else.” The upshot is, I typically fall asleep within minutes. My bed partners have remarked on it more than once.
I’d say this is definitely worth a try, but you’ll have to be patient with it if you go this way. It can take a while to rewire yourself once you’ve fallen into a pattern.
Well I try to read a book, that usually works against me because I don’t want to put it down, but it still makes me sleepy.
I have an overactive imagination, my mind just races though after thought. If I can catch myself, I think about what made me think about what I was just thinking, then what lead me to that thought, the thought before that, so on and so forth. By the time I get back to the beginning of my train of thought, I am very relaxed and sometimes even almost asleep. I guess the act of concentrating on the thought process as opposed to just letting them wander helps me to put my mind at rest. YMMV of course.
Ambien and Benadryl do work nicely, and I do tend to put soothing music on my ipod until I can doze off. I also put a sleep mask on. I used to be able to sleep with light, but not anymore. Warmth helps for me now that it’s cold outside – lots of snuggly blankies.
I’ve picked up a bunch of techniques from years of crummy sleep. First off, I make sure I have a winding down to bed ritual that I do every night - that gets my body and mind in sleep mode almost before I hit the bed. Secondly, I don’t sleep in on weekends - that screws up the entire week and my sleep rhythm. And finally, to answer your particular question about racing brain, I try several things:
Do sudoku puzzles in bed. It’s something about numbers and the logic required by the puzzle, that shuts up my crazy brain.
Flip through tv in the dark in bed. Another thing to focus your brain on and it eventually lulls you to sleep.
Get up and actually do whatever your brain is whirring about. If you are making a list of things you need to do the next day, I bet half the stuff you can do the night before. I’ve gotten up to pack a bag, move furniture, and balance my checkbook.
Seconded! I’m doing modern physics at the moment. Also, yeah, masturbation.
The only problem now is that because of this nightcap combo, The Teaching Company and masturbation are getting intertwined in my mind, and now professor Richard Wolfson’s voice is becoming a sort of weird turn-on for me. Well, he *does *have a nice voice, very soothing. Not crazy about the mustache, though, me being a decidedly heterosexual male and all.
Work out like a crazed wombat in early to mid day. Your body stockpiles energy and you have to burn it off to avoid the jitters. If I am physically tired I can sleep on a pile of rocks.
Avoid caffeine after lunch, and sugar after dinner.
Keep a pad and pen by the bed. Whenever something pops into my head that I absolutely must remember, I write it down and let it drift away.
Never, ever watch the news before bed. Nightmares R Us.
A snort of whiskey while watching my favorite stupid comedy. Or if there’s a storm on the way, there’s nothing like a few minutes of the weather channel viewed from under a pile of warmies.
Keep the house cool at night in winter. In summer I just suffer because it’s not worth the planetary damage.
Hot sweaty monkey sex.
Spend my days constructively dealing with whatever is keeping me awake at night.
No napping after early afternoon.
PS - Sleeping pills suck ass. While they do knock me out, I wake up just as tired as before only with a bonus helping of stumbling zombie.
Damn! Missed a bet. I shoulda said, “Usually by drafting another mind too close, getting loose, and drifting into the wall, resulting in a spectacular crash.”
When I get into the late-night-thinking-about-things-that-seem-important-but-aren’t pattern and have three or more trains of thought going at the same time, I just kind of stop thinking all at once. I simply tell my mind that it’s late already, dammit, and we (meaning my body and mind) both have to get up in the morning. It usually listens when it knows I mean business.