I’ve run into this before and here are some things that have worked for me.

1) Don’t have a clock visible in your room. This way you won’t freak out about the time and not getting enough sleep in the middle of the night because you won’t know what time it is (and how much/little sleep you’ve gotten so far in the night).

2) Exercise. Running, lifting, etc. makes you drink a lot of water and wears you out which are both good things for getting better sleep.

3) Rub one out. Source: “The Contest” episode of Seinfeld.

4) This one has been mentioned a few times but if you can’t go back to sleep within 20 or so minutes, get out of bed and go to a different location in your house to do some monotonous task in low light. Just laying in your bed is one of the worst things you can do because your brain will associate your bed with a place you don’t sleep and you’ll have more difficulties going back to sleep (very real thing). Only go in your bed when you’re sleepy or just doze off in that different location in your house for rest of the night.

5) Understand that you will have some bad nights in terms of sleep and that this is a pretty common phenomenon (as seen by the number of responses so far). Tonight might not be your night, and that’s alright.

6) This one is the most important of the six but understandably difficult to execute. You need to prove that you can survive without a full night of sleep. There’s no doubt that sleep is important, but part of sleep anxiety comes from putting too much stake in the hours of sleep you’re getting, your ability to go back to sleep, etc. I know it sucks having to operate on inadequate sleep, but for me, proving that I was still effective after those bad nights of sleep of 2-4 hours removed a lot of that obsessing over getting enough sleep and helped eliminate a lot of that sleep anxiety. After a few times, I was able to start getting full nights of sleep again.

Hope these can help and best of luck baw.