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.

  • athos77
    16•10 months ago

    Have you tried a white noise generator, to stop you waking up in the first place? I use TMSoft (apple, Android, pc, web browser). I use a combination of pink noise, rain and thunder - the thunder especially helps with bass notes like garbage trucks and lawn mowers.

    You can import your own sounds, use sounds other people uploaded, make your own mixes, change the relative intensity of different sounds (I usually have the pink noise faded behind the rain), change pitch and speed and variability of individual sounds (the rain is pitched a little too high and fast for me to fall asleep to, so I slowed it down and made it deeper), etc. Very nice little app, but try any white noise generator, really.

    It might also be a combination of other things making you sleep less deeply at that time. So maybe blackout curtains or a sleep mask, pee before you go to bed, etc etc etc.