Hi @thomelliott
I checked the website listed on your profile: sleepwakers.buzzsprout.com and it gave a warning so you might want to change it to your new site. I listened to your podcast that had to do with CBD oil on your new site. When I was young I had no problem sleeping. I was the one to most likely to commit suspended animation. As I have gotten older, there have been a few things that have contributed to my lack of sleep. You might want to investigate or consider it with your podcast.

Intrusive thoughts

These can be an aspect of depression or from the other direction fixation. If it is depression, aside from sadness due to some personal event, there might be a nutritional component:

In this context several healthy foods such as olive oil, fish, fruits, vegetables, nuts, legumes, poultry, dairy and unprocessed meat have been inversely associated with depression risk and even have been postulated to improve depressive symptoms. In contrast, unhealthy western dietary patterns including the consumption of sweetened beverage, refined food, fried food, processed meat, refined grain, and high-fat dairy, biscuits, snacking and pastries have been shown to be associated with an increased risk of depression in longitudinal studies.
Source

I don't know if you have a turkey dinner at Christmas but if so and you have a successful sleep, it might be associated with L-tryptophan. You might want to look at your B Vitamins specifically B12 which is associated with serotonin production.

Periodically I will get fixated on some line of thought which I cannot shake. Generally, it is some solution to the world's problem which will not wait until morning. When this happens I like to put on this video:

and focus on listening to the waves. After about 5 minutes, the intrusive thoughts go away and I shortly go to sleep.

Light, Technology and Magnetism

When I was a child, my bedroom had blackout curtains. The light from the street would keep me awake. This is still the case as I feel the light interferes with my circadian rhythms. This is also true with blue light from monitors or the tv before going to bed. Here is an article talking about this. There is another aspect that might also be coming into play is how the electrical currents from devices affect our brains. Sleep has a function of repair and electromagnetic forces might be an aspect of this. There are old superstitions which warn about sleeping in certain directions. My grandmother used to sleep in one direction on her bed at night but during the daytime would sleep in the other. I have no idea if there is any validity in this ... but maybe you could give it a try.