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 only minutes before I have to wake for the day.
Does anyone have success with quieting the mind without substances so that they can fall back to sleep?
Edit: I want to thank you all for the helpful comments. I'm reading through them now and wioo be internalizing some of the suggestions.
To provide more context for those who asked:
I do have ADHD and OCD and Anxiety.
I sleep with a fan and a white noise track (10hrs of non-repeating noise I d/l'd with newpipe).
My apartment building has a fire escape that the neighbor uses as their front door. This path means using a heavy steel door on a power hinge. (Slam!) The door is against the wall that my headboard is on. They have every right to use whichever door they like, and I don't know them well enough yet to ask them to change for me. They are trying to be as quiet as they can, other than using the loudest path possible. They seem very nice, and their dog is quiet and well trained.
I'm in the middle of a long period of unemployment and I am beginning to worry about finances, as my savings are about half gone in a year.
Thanks again for all the suggestions! I'll report back with my results in a few days.
Here is what I do, it is a type of visualization meditation.
I have been watching futurama (original seasons) for 20 something years. I have seen each episode literally hundreds of times. I have them burned pretty well into my brain at this point.
I have ripped just the audio track from the DVDs. When I wake up in the middle of the night (2-4 times per night!), I turn on a random episode as audio only.
The goal here is to try to visualize the episode as you only listen to the audio. This forces you to focus on something rather than stress about life. It really helps me stop thinking about anything else. Because I know the episodes so well, it has become quite easy to stay focused on it (like watching with your eyes closed). And since I’ve seen the episodes so many times there is no fear of missing out, so you don’t try to stay awake to finish an episode. I can typically fall back asleep within 5-10 minutes with this technique.
I personally have these on my phone in a playlist and sleep with a single wired ear bud in one ear. I have a sleep timer set for 25 minutes. If I wake up, all I have to do is tap the button on my wired Apple headphones and it’ll continue playing for 25 more minutes. No need to open my eyes or take off my sleep mask.
6133 hours of futurama. That's like 50 minutes or ~2 episodes every day for 20 years. And that's just for 100 times for each episode. Nice.
Well, for a long time the only thing my tv had was a computer hooked up to it that played random futurama 24/7!
He plays it at 10x speed
I do the same thing with FBI files episodes and found the narration puts me right to sleep
Also Bluetooth sleep mask for the win
I'm amazed and so glad to read this. This is basically my exact strategy.
I watch the newer episodes (I'll have seen them enough eventually) and I turn my screen nearly off (almost no backlight plus a filter).
I switch up the shows sometime, but if I need sleep it's Futurama.
This is a great tip that I do as well