Sleeplessness can hit us all at some point or another in our lives. Physical discomfort, anxiety, hormones... they can make it happen. And there are lots more causes some of which you could put in a list yourself. Some people find it hard to fall asleep some nights. Other get off okay, but come awake at some horrible time like 4.13AM or 2.53AM and find it impossible to go back to sleep. The first is insomnia, the second is sometimes called middle of the night insomnia.

There have been books, documentaries, innumerable studies and quite a few hubs written about this condition. It is very common, and you will find a lot of the material written about the subject is not that dissimilar.

When is someone going to give us restless people something new to try?

Let me have a stab at it. It's always worth trying something new to fix something old.

That's the thing! A lot of us think we need more sleep than we are getting. Just because the books say you need eight hours does not mean we should all sleep like tops for the full quota every night. There are many people who can operate and lead a fully active and normal life on an average of six. You might be one of these. If you are, and you are going to bed at about 10PM expecting to sleep until 6AM, you are bound to be disappointed.

You might find yourself waking at 4, night after night, wondering if there is anything wrong with you. You toss and turn, you huff and puff, you look at those big digital numbers alight in the room with you, and think you are an insomniac. You might even disturb the person lying next to you, who happens to be an eight-hour-a-night sleeper!

Try doing with less. Go to sleep at midnight instead and see what happens. Try sleeping alone.

What??!!

It works for a lot of couples - sharing a bed is not always comfortable. Perhaps a break twice a week will work wonders. You never know: the response you get might be a relieved one rather than a hurt and angry one. Sometimes talking over sleep problems in the cold hard light of day solves a big problem that can only boil over at night, when you are both ragged from keeping each other awake.

But this is not the really wonderful way to get sleep I was going to suggest. Let's get down to that one, shall we?

The signs you are missing out on sleep are fatigue, fuzzy-headedness and being unable to stay awake in the early afternoon.

If you are nodding off while driving in a warm car, while listening to lectures, or in the middle of keying in data, and if you are finding it impossible to do anything else but sit down and doze off in an armchair instead of cooking dinner, you are probably not getting the full measure of sleep your body and mind need.

So try the following: do what you found in other hubs, and find some of the things that made you more calm and comfortable, such as not drinking coffee after 3PM, not eating spicy foods, having a warm bath, having a milky drink, not watching scary movies and not playing wild video games.

But also do this: look for a talk station on your radio. Preferably, it should be a talk station with no music. News, features, travelogues, discussions... no, not peppy talk-back. What you are looking for is something yeah, well, on the boring side. Something highbrow and philosophical, or something detailed and rather long.

Turn off the light, get comfortable, but do not try to sleep because you have work to do - you have to try and follow every single word. Understand what is going on, even if it is about PL/SQL programming or how to dye long strands of silk dull yellow. Or all about the plot to killl the king of England way back when. Or a discussion about the finer points of post-feminist deconstructuralism detected in the novels of AS Byatt.

Listen to every word, as if your life depended on it, or as if you had to get up in the morning and write it all down from memory. The volume of the radio should not be high, try to have it at a level where you actually have to listen up without sitting up.

I have found this works almost every night. The radio station I found is actually quite interesting, but I find it hard to listen for longer than about 70 minutes. Inevitably, the next thing I know is that my other radio, the alarm, comes on with the loud music at the right time when the sun is up and I have to hurry for work.

There are a few nights when I wake without reason at 5.03 or some such time. I hit the sleep button on the talk radio, which gives me about 75 minutes of drone, drone, drone (at that time it's usually news in English from Germany, of all places. Rivetting stuff about the economy and their local politics. It takes about 20 minutes to send me off to sleep again.

Try it - you might hate the idea, or it might really work for you.

Good night!