I love sleeping. Just give me a place to crash and I will be out in no time. Be it a bed or sofa or even a humble chair, I don’t mind at all. It is probably because I am always so busy, on the move that I am exhausted most of the time.

Every night, after I am done with all my chores and some reading, I find myself drifting off to sleep as soon as my head hits the pillow. I do consider myself lucky in this regard (touch wood).

But has it ever happened to you that whenever you are supposed to wake up early, your sleep vanishes the night before? It always happens that whenever I have to wake up earlier than usual in the morning, my sleep deserts me like Cinderella deserted the prince at midnight.

Add to that the stress of having to wake up early and I find myself even more sleepless. I have tried many things in such a situation; like picking up a book that I had found extremely boring in the past. Somehow, on such nights that book too becomes interesting.

Then, I try counting backwards from 100 to 1. My sister used to swear by this method and although it worked just find when I was younger, it doesn’t anymore. The brain diverts it’s attention from numbers to events and that means over-thinking and over-analysing.

Sleep time is usually when my brain starts forming all the witty replies I could have given in a discussion 20 years ago or how I could have studied harder in school or how I should have learned how to drive at a young age. My brain conducts it’s own parent-teacher conference where it is both the disgruntled parent and the strict teacher and I am the wayward student.

Another method that usually works for me is putting on my earphones and listening to some soothing songs. I put a timer on the music app because I don’t want it to run the whole night.  I have found that this works for me and I start getting drowsy in 10 to 15 minutes.

What methods work for you on a sleepless night?

This post is a part of Blogchatter Half Marathon.