I make deals with myself when I can’t sleep.
The problem isn’t that I can’t fall asleep; I have no trouble with that at all, for some reason. If I’m in bed and it’s anywhere after 11pm, it’s really only a matter of time before my eyes start closing no matter how much I’m trying to stay awake. No, the problem is that I wake up very, very early. I think it’s a stress thing; if I fall asleep thinking anything along the lines of “I have a lot of work to do tomorrow,” then I’m almost certainly guaranteed to wake up around 5am. That’s when the deal-making comes in.
I make deals with myself like you can’t get up until 5:30, so you might as well fall back asleep until then, or if I count backwards from 100 to 1 in threes, then I’ll go back to sleep. They almost definitely don’t work, but I find that doing that distracts me from realizing just how early in the morning it is and feeling as if I’m stuck in some kind of early morning insomniac hell. (I woke up today at 4:34, promised myself that I wouldn’t get up until 5:30, and then realized at 5:30 or so that I actually wanted to stay in bed until 6.)