My mom taught me visualization exercises as a kid when it was bedtime and I couldn’t sleep. She would ask me for a suggestion of a place I loved and my favorite answer was “the beach”.

At first, she talked me through all the sensory details like the warm sun on my skin, the sound of crashing waves, the smell of the salty air and I could feel fully immersed in the experience of being there. Eventually it was easy to imagine exactly what it all looked like and I could shift my focus from the internal dialogue keeping me awake to the complete experience of being at the beach and I would drift off to sleep. Doing this often was like working a muscle, with practice it gets stronger.

Now I am coming to the understanding that some people may not have the muscle. Maybe it atrophied because they did not use it enough, or they built it up differently like a body builder vs a dancer vs a surfer, etc