The only thing that works for me is to read for an hour.
I have stopped drinking anything with caffeine, even at breakfast. The other thing that seems to help is to have the main meal at lunch time and a light meal at dinner time. I don’t know why, but I discovered this when my wife and I fell into this pattern while on our winter vacations in Barbados and found we were sleeping better.
There is a podcast called Sleep With Me which is basically an hour-long recording of a guy who talks for an hour on boring, rambling tangents.
I just roll with it. Get out of the bed and plop down on the couch and start reading random crap on the internet. Post gibberish on The Straight Dope.
Sunrise is the worst time of day. Especially if you’ve been waiting 3 hours for it show up.
An alternative would be listing to yoga exercises on YouTube. The benefit of yoga is that it has calm music and the moves are essentially random. If you doze in and out, you’re not going to notice the part you missed. When I listened to that boring podcast, I would realize I missed part of the story when I came out of dozing and that would wake me up more as I tried to mentally fill in the blanks. But with yoga exercises, I don’t clue in that I missed part of the routine when I’m dozing.
I had a similar problem when I listened to things like “Counting backwards from 1000”. I would notice the gaps in the numbers when I dozed in and out and start thinking about the numbers I missed. To avoid that issue, I don’t listen to anything that has a noticeable sequence to it.
If you listen to YouTube, do so on a phone with absolutely none of your info on it. You do not want to be tempted to check email, facebook, social media, etc in the middle of the night. Hide the browser down in a sub-sub-sub folder so you won’t be tempted to browse the web. If you do that kind of stuff when you wake up, you’re actually training your brain to wake up more often to get that reward.
OP here. Thanks, folks, for the ideas.
For the record, I drink very little caffeine–occasionally some iced tea, mostly during the day, but no coffee or colas and hardly any hot tea. So that’s probably not what’s going on.
I forgot to mention that I did try the benadryl thing for a couple of nights. I wasn’t sure if it was helping and I had read that it probably wouldn’t be effective for long if overused, so I haven’t done that for a spell, but a good reminder.
I suppose screen time could be an issue–just before going to sleep I’m typically either reading a physical book or looking at my phone–it’s just hard to see how screen time would not interfere with falling asleep, only to rear its ugly head a few hours later. But I’ll definitely think about doing more reading and less internet late evenings.
I will definitely look into some of these things. Thanks again, and keep them coming. Sorry that so many of us seem to have to deal with this waking-up-and-being-anxious crap!
Interesting, my sleep specialist mentions “don’t do rewarding things if you wake up” but she didn’t explain exactly why. Now it makes sense.
Based on reviews, I’ve just ordered one. I have chronic back issues that have gotten worse with age and had little luck in the past with chiroquackers. Perhaps this will help. If not, we can send hate mail to Aspenglow.
It works great for me and I hope it will help you, too! I’ve got one spot just adjacent to my right scapula that gets so painfully knotted it itches. A former masseuse used to refer to it as “the mouse spot.” She said a lot of her clients suffered from it.
I have a rock wall in my den that juts out at just the right height and I used to use that to try and work the mouse spot knot out. Now I just use the Body Back Buddy and it does the trick far better.
It will take you awhile to figure out which protuberances work best with your particular spots, but once you’ve evolved a routine, I think you’ll be pleased with the results.
I carry a lot of tension in the usual shoulders/neck/back areas as well as outer upper arms and the spot where my hairline ends and upper neck begins. My Body Back Buddy experience is one of, “It hurts so good!” as the tension eases. The aftereffect is profound relaxation and pain relief. I usually go back to sleep within minutes.
LOL, just be sure to include your recipes. 
Truly, I hope it helps you as much as it has helped me. The only minor downside I can relate is I store it next to my bed and as it looks slightly rude, it caused a few awkward moments when someone explored my house.
I get up, do some stuff, go back to bed, go to sleep.
This since learning that it’s a normal way for some cultures, and is possibly a normal way for humans – it may be that forcing your self to sleep for eight hours straight is the unnatural thing.
If, as I suggest, forcing yourself to sleep 8 hours straight is the unnatural thing, then no wonder that if you are distressed, or unhappy, or in pain, or too warm, then you have difficulty making it through a night of unbroken sleep.
Would that I could make that work. I don’t often suffer sleep interruptions, but when I do they’re maddening to shake off. Trouble with me is that “I have a whole 3 hrs to nap” ends up causing a chain reaction of math problems in my head, prompting more distraction and inevitable peeks at the clock: “3 hours left…good ---- 2 hours and 40-something minutes ---- almost 2 hours” et-cetera et-cetera. It usually ends up being 45 or 50 minutes of actual sleep.
Best thing that works well for me is this, whether it’s just waking up for whatever reason, or taking a piss, or a swig of water, my 3 rules:
Don’t look at the clock
Don’t ever look at the clock
Don’t ever EVER look at the clock
AM talk radio. I run up and down the dial until I find the most boring talk show possible. That prevents me from ruminating on the minutia of my own life that prevents me from sleeping. Ye gods, other people’s problems are SOOOO boring! So boring that it puts me right to sleep.
Sounds like a selling point to me.
That’s definitely true if you generally set an alarm to get up. Mostly I wake up at 5 to 5:30 just on my own and never set an alarm unless it’s crucial that I be out earlier than usual. When I wake up in the dark, especially in winter, I do have to take a peek at the time to see if it’s worth going back to sleep (if I can) or not.
I also suffer from chronic insomnia and have tried most of the suggestion here.
Podcasts were my cure…although it took me a while to find the right ones. Music, interviews, or documentaries would keep me awake because I was listening too closely or waiting to hear what was coming next. I’ve found that audiobooks/fictional have worked the best for me, I can tune out and sink into another world and I’m asleep in a few minutes.
I have a pair of comfortable wireless bluetooth ear pods so I don’t disturb my wife. They usually just fall out after I’m asleep. I keep the volume low so it won’t wake me back up but loud enough that other noises in the house won’t wake me.
Tip - make sure your device is set to stop after each episode/chapter so it’s not playing all night in your ears and you can find where you left off.
This demonstrates an issue with looking at the clock. It’s easy to mistakenly assume you were awake during the time between checking the clock. If you were dozing in and out, you may have actually been in a light sleep during that time. But then if you look up and notice it’s been 30 minutes since you last looked, you may mistakenly conclude that you were awake for that whole 30 minutes. In addition, it may create anticipation in your brain where you think “should I look… look now… no wait… look now…”
The time I will look at the clock is when I’m making a decision on whether to take benadryl. I don’t want to take it when I only have a short time to sleep since I’ll be groggy when I get up. But also for benadryl, I only do it if I’ve had a couple of bad nights previously. I have already made the decision before I go to bed that if I wake up, I’ll take benadryl. If it’s not a night I’ve decided to take benadryl, I don’t look at the clock.
I have suffered from this for years and I characterize it as “racing thoughts.” Sometimes I can get up and read for an hour or two, then go back to bed. It does not help at all to just lie in bed.
My real solution? Ambien (zolpidem tartrate). I know that many people have had bad experiences with it, but it shuts off my “racing thoughts” like turning out a light.
Wouldn’t work for me. I would lay there and wonder who listens to that stuff. I listen to my usual rock music at a low level and imagine I’m in a band playing the music. Even better for me is to turn on my tablet an play cribbage. Within 5 minutes the tablet is on my chest and I’ve nodded off.
Sometimes the techniques that help you fall asleep initially won’t work at all to help you fall back asleep in the middle of the night. Sometimes they may even keep you up. For example, I can watch stuff on netflix in when going to bed and it puts me right to sleep. However, if I wake up at 3 am and watch netflix, I will get more alert and I could easily watch until it’s time to get up. It’s the same way with reading for me. I guess it’s like how you can read in the morning and it doesn’t put you to sleep. Something in my brain switches to “time to get up” mode and it’s hard to switch back.
This happens to me quite a bit. I’ll wake up around 3am to pee, but then can’t get back to sleep, too many things running through my head. As others have said, the reading till I fall asleep thing doesn’t work for me. I’ll try focusing on my breathing and counting breaths, but I’m distracted before I ever hit 10 and have to start over. Eventually I just fall back to sleep but it feels like five minutes before the alarm goes off and wakes me up again.
My wife has an app on her phone that generates various “colors” of noise (white, pink, etc.) and that really seems to help her. It was 99 cents in the Android store.
I have tried the shorter version of this – “Serenity now!” – but it never seems to work. You know what they say: serenity now, insanity later.
I take one Advil or Tylenol PM every night. When I go to bed I would watch Netflix on my tablet. The problem with that was when my eyes would start to close (usually within 15-30 minutes) I’d force them open to keep watching or I would jolt out of the beginnings of sleep to turn off Netflix. Then I would be too awake to fall asleep and would have to start watching again.:smack: I finally realized that watching a movie or show wasn’t cutting it. So I started reading books on my Kindle instead. II don’t have to have a light on and it doesn’t matter if I fall asleep mid-sentence since I don’t have to turn the Kindle off, it will shut down on its own. I usually don’t through more than a page or 2 before I’m out. If I wake up in the middle of the night with my mind racing I first get up and go to the bathroom then I either count my breaths - both inhale and exhale or I recite prayers. If I miss a line of a prayer because of my mind going on another tangent, I start the prayer over. I can then usually fall back to sleep. If not, I start reading again.
Good luck