text: anyone out there have any good remedies for insomnia? i've thought about getting a prescription or something, but people always say it's too easy to get hooked on those. i had a bad problem with insomnia for many years, and did some research on it.  here are the things i’ve found that help the most.  1.  don't take the sleeping pills.  although they are not addictive in the way we tend to think (you won't jones for them if you miss taking them) they are addictive in the sense that once you have taken them for a while, you will have to take them to get to sleep, but they won't have the same effect they used too.   this is because you tend to not get the necessary rem sleep you need to be rested.  if you must take a sleeping pill, take it well before you go to sleep.  for instance, i prefer to take sleeping pills 2 hours before i go to sleep, so that the pill can get into my system and make me drowsy before i get into bed, then get out of my system (hopefully) early enough that i get some normal sleep.  2.  try to go to bed at about the same time every night.  you have some wiggle room on this, but if you stay out on saturday night till 3, it'll be harder to go to sleep at 10pm sunday.  (which somewhat contradicts:)  3.  if possible, don't go to bed if you're not sleepy.  note  - one thing i have read and found to be true is that you have to be awake for 12 hours before you can go back to sleep.  so if you sleep till noon, again, you won't be sleepy at 10pm.    4.  don't spend more than 15-30 minutes trying to get to sleep.  if you notice that you've been in bed more than 15 minutes, get out of bed and do something for a while.  make sure what you do isn't going to make you more hyper; e.g. no exercising or energetic music or writing posts to online debates.   5.  when you go to bed, choose a chore or some other task that you do not want to do and tell yourself that if you are still awake in thirty minutes you will do that task.  then, if you are still awake, get up and do your chosen task.  this is my favorite suggestion, as it has worked nearly every time i've used it. .  those are the most useful suggestions i have.  other things you can try:  before you start getting ready for sleep, turn off high energy music and turn the lights down.  i love r&r music, but i went through a period where i had to turn the radio off every night about an hour before i went to bed, or i would be to wired to sleep. and our bodies react to reduced light by producing melatonin which puts us to sleep.    get plenty of exercise, but not right before bed.  (unless you're weird like me - exercise right before bed just puts me to sleep)  another suggestion that might work is to relax your body, consciously, one area at a time, starting from your feet. you think about the ball of your left foot and relax it, then the ball of your right foot, then the arch of your left foot, etc. you have to concentrate (pretty hard) on what you are doing  sex *grin*  by yourself or with an so, it produces a nice soporific chemical, which does a nice job of putting you to sleep.