Denial. "My eyes are closed so I must be resting." This lie is not terribly effective, but hope springs eternal.
Stretching exercises just before going to bed release muscle tension, and sometimes that is enough. The Bad Back Book in Ox Bow's self help section has my favorites.
In winter, warming the bed before I get in it helps.
Sense memory acting exercises worked until I realized that the moment I had memorialized was 15 years old and it should have been replaced by something in real life.
Calcium at bedtime worked until for a few months, until I became allergic to the inert oil used to compress the calcium.
Caffeine used to put me to sleep. I don't know if it will keep me awake these days, but everything else has changed in the past 30 years.
Drinking alcoholic stuff is out. At one time, waving the cork from a bottle of wine in front of my nose would put me to sleep. Now when a bottle of wine is opened in my presence I get a bisulfite- related headache.
The difference between being a drug abuser and a visionary is a medical degree. When a doctor prescribes medicine for other than its expected use and writes about it, he's a visionary. Think Minoxodil. When the rest of us discover that Tylenol, aspirin, or even antibiotics will put us to sleep once or twice, we're technically abusing the drug.
Family members can fall asleep on Benadryl. I was up for 5 days and nights on a teaspoon of the stuff. I didn't itch, though. Technically, that was a win.
In my medical guinea pig days I learned that a small amount of codeine was relaxing once, but the next time I used it, it gave me a headache. I can use it once every 13 years. Good to know.
Repeating a mantra worked in good times, but was not strong enough to defeat the adrenaline surge that comes from talking down a jumper.
Self hypnosis Long slow breaths and imagining that I am lying on a beach, that my body is heavy, that it is sinking through the sand. This used to work very well, but I've lost the knack. A You-Tube production on self-hypnosis almost worked but I didn't bookmark it and many look like it.
I guess I could spent a night looking at self-hypnosis videos.
