Can't sleep, the irony is sometimes my situation with girls right now is stressing me out, which makes me lose more sleep which makes me less able to perform properly to get them...

I'd like to put the whole idea out of my head till I get my sleep pattern in order. But I'm lying there and different things I should have done with girls, or could do with girls in the future, start popping into my head. At least if I had something promising going on I wouldn't be stressing so much. I might kinda be going through a mid life crisis, I don't know. I'm 31 and starting to think if there's some essential part of confidence that I haven't learnt how to switch on at will yet and how long it's going to take for me to train myself up.

Any tips on how to put stressful ideas out of your head, or trick yourself into going to sleep regardless, would be good.

Working out is a great way to relieve stress and tire your body to want to sleep. Believe me I know what you are talking about. When I was running my dating coach business I would barely be able to fall asleep trying to figure out a few different clients situaitons not to mention my own. Then of course there was work stress, marketing a business, planning workshops, etc!

I have been there working out or going for long walks or jogs helped me clear my head a lot and gain perspective. For others I hear video games help too!

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Been around the world twice, Talked to everyone once...

Just go find one of those NLP or hypnosis tapes and listen to that as you are trying to fall asleep.. if the trance dosen't put you out.. the montone voice will.

Hell go get one of the confidence ones and kill 2 birds with 1 stone

My strategy with dealing with loss of sleep (which was a big problem for me when I started college) was to work-out or do something academically productive. I figured, "Well, if I'm not sleeping, I might as well get something important done". However, doing this also started to tire me; so much so that my sleep problem was over in no more than a month.

Definitely not endorsing illegal acts, but weed made me sleepy as hell too. Just sayin'.

Try cigarettes, I have couple times went to take an afternoon nap after smoking one when I got home from school. Cigarettes make you comfortable and relaxed -> SLEEP WILL COME IN NO TIME.

Though, I dont recommend you to start smoking because of that, but you can always try once. It wont get ya hooked, for real.

Can't do any of the smoking ones (recovered from being asthmatic cause dad smoked around us when we were kids), but thanks for the response.

Thankyou so much you guys for suggesting working out, doing something productive, video games, and hipnotic tapes. I guess I have tried each of those things in the past but its great to be reminded, and now I have a laundry list of things to do next time it happens.

In fact there are some projects on the computer I'm supposed to be doing, and I'm supposed to be building muscle with my free weights, but I stopped doing both those things recently cause I was too tired and trying to get to bed earlier, haha... I guess I will keep them up.

try running... in your car drive about half a mile from your house, then remember if you run that and back, its a mile.. and try to go to bed earlier and eat a good breakfast. Im 25 and started back to school from being unemployed and staying up late every night worrying what Im gonna do.

make a list (on paper not on ur pc) of things u want to do/read/study which are not really important for yours survival (otherwise uve done them an way) and each time u cant sleep look at it and do something from there, maybe u wont sleep but at least u will learn something, I used to have serious insomnia and build a magician professor out of it

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"StreetLight!! Stop seeing every problem in life like it's a chick you didn't hit on!"

Those are also great ideas, thanks very much.

Work out, About an hour before bed turn the tv/radio/computer off. Read something till its lights out. Always works for me. Avoid taking naps during the day unless its a combat nap(10-20min).

Non-habit forming OTC sleep meds work well too.

try some melatonin, its otc and non-habit forming

Thanks again, all this is useful.