How do you deal with sleep.

After any evening of activity (party, poker game) .Sure enough I put my head on the pillow and the chatting starts.

Does that include physical activity?

Sometimes.. a good walk in the fresh air... will calm the chatter.

Another thing to try .. is journaling. JMO

I feel for you. I have had the same struggle. Falling asleep and then two hours later, being awake because the brain is trying to solve some problem or can't stop thinking about something.

I do several things: First, it really helps me to do 20 minutes of mindfulness meditation. I don't know how much you know about meditation, but basically there are many techniques. The technique I use is to just follow my breathing and to notice when my mind wanders ... then come back and just pay attention to my breathing. It's challenging to do this, but the key is that meditation is not about how successful you are at maintaining focus on breathing .... Just the attempt slows the mind and relaxes the body.

Second, I take a tiny bit of melatonin at around 7 p.m.--about .3 mg, which is much smaller than most people take but is the dose I read that is effective for a lot of people. Melatonin seems to help me get sleepy a few hours later ...

Finally, I sometimes use ambien, a sleeping pill. I have a Monday night class and it's an intense discussion and it becomes quite animated and fun and yes, after I leave, my brain is on fire ... Class ends at 10 p.m. ... on its own my brain won't slow down until 2 or 3 a.m. .... So I have accepted that for those nights, I will take the ambien.

By the way, I think people who are natural "night owls" particularly have this problem. Other people actually get sleepy after intense interaction. Night owls like myself, seem to wake up after late interaction.

Hope something in here helps. I am interested in taking up dancing classes soon, and I'm worried about this very problem. How the heck am I gonna get to sleep at a reasonable hour after leaving a dance at 12 midnight or so? ... I'm determined to figure it out somehow.