The following three strategies, when used consistently, can help to quiet the noise in your mind and help you get to sleep:
1. Disengage from the day long before bedtime. Create a “buffer zone” of at least 15 minutes between the active day and restful night. Put away your technology and work, and prepare for sleep. Most people spend an hour or more preparing for their day - at least a fraction of that should be devoted to preparing for sleep.
2. Allow time to deal with what’s on your mind before you get into bed at night. This is especially important during stressful periods of life. Also, avoid getting into the habit of doing serious thinking in bed. Otherwise, this will become a “conditioned response” that’s hard to change.
3. When your brain is too active for you to fall sleep, get up and do your thinking elsewhere. It’s not necessary to jump out of bed after a specific number of minutes (otherwise, you might start to worry how many minutes have passed). However, if your mind is too active to let you sleep, get up for a while and do your thinking elsewhere until you feel ready to fall asleep. At that point, go back to bed.
Next Steps
Please meet a psychiatrist and a psychologist for further interventions