What Do You Do When You Have Insomnia?

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I watch Law & Order, have about 90 episodes saved on my DVR. I could watch it all day, every day.

I get furious, thrash around and usually yell obscenities.

Go on the Internet, watch vids of things I'm interested in, play with things and run my fingers along things that are fun to touch.

Read, daydream or play relaxing games (like Solitaire, Mahjong or Puzzler World). Listening to relaxing videos might make me sleepy, but then I'll have to turn the PC off again and go to bed, which may be enough to make more awake again.

Take melatonin and watch ASMR videos on youtube. I have insomnia more often then not, so those are pretty routine things for me.

I'm generally not an Insomnia sufferer, but if I've slept in too late and had a lazy day and know that I'm going to have problems sleeping that night, I take an Avomine pill. It's a motion sickness pill, but has a common side effect of tiredness, and it always makes me have a good night's sleep no matter what. I only take these if I know I'm not going to sleep one night. It takes about 2 hours to kick in. Not to be taken every night.

But if I am unexpectedly having a sleepless night, I just toss and turn, plump my pillows up, playing counting or rhyming games with the tick-tocks of the clock, and just hope I fall asleep soon. It's harder to fall asleep on hot summer nights.

People say to get up and do something if you can't sleep, but it doesn't feel right doing that, and it doesn't always work either.

Take modern medicine, half the week I still have bad insomnia anyway but actually being knocked out for half a week is a superior proposition to going days without sleep and roaming around the forest at 6am and then being in a drifting daze sleepwalking through the rest until I crash like how my life used to be. I am a chronic insomniac since I was very young, I'd be up reading at 4am as a child. I tried everything under the sun you can think of but perpetually had 2-7 hours of sleep, when I worked and studied I ended up staying up all night and napping in the day or not at all. It seriously affected my attempt at university so much that I couldn't even attend classes regularly, I had a lot of other stuff which profoundly affected me then but sleeping was a massive issue.

I would take tons of inadvisable things just to get some form of dimness in the past, my docs never took me seriously until I got a different doctors by then it was a new section of my life. Sleep problems had affected the last section along with longstanding mental health issues and autism enough for me to consider myself supremely experienced in insomnia and delayed sleep phase syndrome and how they interact with mental terrain, sleep is not as bad because I don't have anywhere I need to get to for the foreseeable future and I actually get knocked out half a week, I've been advised to look for night shifts in the future but I'd love to volunteer and want to try to study again eventually so I might have to have naps like I used to.

Ambien and cookbooks, the lack of plot helps me not get too caught up in them, and occasionally I find something useful for work.

Insomnia might be thought of as being a bit like writers block, or any other kind of creativity a person can get blocked in.
The harder you try to sleep, the more effort your brain makes, and the more thinking you do, the more you censor yourself.
I think sleeping is actually a creative act. The more a person thinks about it, the less it will happen.
If you are worried and think you really must sleep, the pressure, and the unnecessary thinking, prevents the natural 'childlike' flow of sleep creativity happening.

I have always worked best on creative things during insomnia canopies too, sometimes in the past I would complete weeks worth of idea pursuits in a matter of days, my sleeping meds often give me some whacked out dreamscapes to explore which fuel a lot of projects so it's a neat trade off I guess.

^^^My dreams are always bizarrely creative.