Interesting. I wonder how useful journaling would be to help combat insomnia. I will give it a go next time I am lying in bed at 2am with my head buzzing..
I've been successfully using journaling to fight insomnia for a few months now. What I do is try to simply capture every thought that comes into my head as fast as I can write.
At first, my hand can barely keep up with the torrent of thoughts being produced by my mind, but after maybe 5-10 min it slows right down. At some point I feel like I'm actually waiting for thoughts to come up so I can write.
Eventually, my mind goes quiet. It's much easier to fall asleep then.
You may be interested in http://www.themostdangerouswritingapp.com After 5 seconds of inactivity your text goes away. This encourages you to continue typing. It's helped a lot with my fledging journaling habit.
This helped me, too, when I was suffering from insomnia. 700 to 1,000 words was the "sleep like a baby" target range for me. Also, the sooner I could bring myself to write about the really difficult topics, the better.
I too find writing a helpful way to stop thoughts tumbling round in my head so I can sleep. I think it has something to do with silencing the rehearsal loop.
Do you work on the computer until late? You should consider trying this app that removes the blue hues from your monitor after 9pm: https://justgetflux.com/ (Apparently, blue coloured light is a cue our brain uses to know when to wake up—morning light has more blue than evening light)
If you are a linux user gtk-redshift does the same thing, I've also found it be very reliable with ATI's binary drivers (though these days I use the open source drivers anyway).
It may not work for all of course but my insomnia (undiagnosed, so whatever the sleeplessness actually was if not insomnia) has almost completely gone after I started meditating.
Now I don't mean sitting cross legged while chanting "ahhhh" or anything like that, just give your brain an hour or so daily to start but you can probably drop to less after a while (I do it every 2-3 days now).
My best guess it's like freeing up some CPU time for garbage collection. With having podcasts, videos, films, computering, etc going almost every waking hour the brain never really gets a chance to filter through all of this stuff so attempts to do so the only quiet moment it gets - right when you're trying to fall asleep.
Most people with a lot on their minds do find it easier to have pen and paper bed side. This why they can quickly jot down what's on their mind and leave the burden of remembering and figuring stuff out to tomorrow. I can't find the article about it, but it has helped me in the past.
Now I just throw on a nature documentary and a timer to shut the tv off after 30 min. I'm usually fast asleep in 10 minutes. :)
I have used this successfully this very week, with my worst insomnia yet.
A trick i learned is that writing mainly helps me to clarify my thoughts, so i realized i can do that without turning on the light and getting a pen: i can use a voice recorder (on my phone) and whisper into it, like journaling out loud.
I use sleep cycle as an alarm clock. A few years of sleep data says that (for me) going to bed after working late leads to bad sleep, and going to bed after reading leads to better sleep.
Based on this single data point, perhaps try picking up a book when you call it a night?
Nothing beats curling up in a warm (well, now that it's winter in the Northern hemisphere anyway) bed with a book when you're calling it a day. It's relaxing. This habit also helps you actually get around to reading for leisure.
So I moved to paper note taking a month and a half ago, and it's helped with work-anxiety. It's not a cure-all either, the hardest part is changing your habits so that you still open the book to look at what you wrote down.
hugely :) you don't even have to use the structure of a journal. i've found it helpful, when my head is too full, to simply write down single words reverberating in my head impairing sleep. I did it just last night!
At first, my hand can barely keep up with the torrent of thoughts being produced by my mind, but after maybe 5-10 min it slows right down. At some point I feel like I'm actually waiting for thoughts to come up so I can write.
Eventually, my mind goes quiet. It's much easier to fall asleep then.