I’ve recently come across a suggestion for help in falling asleep called the cognitive shuffle. The technique is to think of a word and then think of as many words for each letter in this word. A refinement is called serial diverse imagining where for each word one imagines oneself in different locations and interacting with the objects imagined.

This technique has been developed by Luc P Beaudoin and is described in his post on SubStack.

References

Luc P Beaudoin on LinkedIn

Luc Beaudoin video on somnolent information-processing on YouTube

MySleepButton app

New York Times article on cognitive shuffling