How You Put Yourself To Sleep

I think we all have nights where sleep won't come -- despite flipping the pillow and persistent rolling over, it just doesn't happen. What do you do when this happens?

Personally, I've developed only one good way to get to sleep: audiobooks. Now, I love audiobooks during the daytime, but sometimes I'll buy a book that's super-boring. For example, take the audiobook of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire -- immensely difficult to focus on during the day...but PERFECT for snooze inducement in the middle of the night! (If you don't believe me, check out the free preview of the 41-hour Volume 1, available on iTunes.)

The best part of the audiobook cure is that, even if you don't fall asleep, you might get some decent "reading" in. But aside from my own method, there are lots of great sleep aids suggested on the web. In fact, the Mental_Floss Blog has covered sleep medications, sleeping with pets, sleep disorders, why snooze buttons work for nine minutes, famous narcoleptics, and much more.

Blogger Mary Wheeler has suggested a series of cures for insomnia, including:

Sexing the alphabet: this involves going through the alphabet and assigning a gender to each letter. This was really interesting, yet sleep-inducing, to me the first 20 times I did it. [Note from Higgins: I think A is male and B is female. You?] Sexing the numbers: Assigning a gender to each number. This is hard -- each number, for me, anyway, can easily be male or female. Categorizing things by color: thinking of all the things I can that are one color or another. This is a lot like a kid's book, but is still harder than it sounds. I end up cheating and it will go like this: "trees, peas, pistacio ice cream, green tea, green book, green socks, green car ..." Saying a fruit or vegetable for every letter of the alphabet. This has been my latest game and honestly, I don't think I've made it past "G" -- this is how well I've been sleeping lately!

So let's have it: what do you do to get to sleep?