trying not to get stressed about stuff i have no influence over seems to help.
This is the key to pretty much all non-medical approaches to insomnia (Dr Guy Meadows has a programme that tackles this). The point is that the very act of being concerned about how much sleep you are getting and then trying to do everything you can to enable more sleep are the very things that prevent you sleeping (of course once all the environmental/caffeine/alcohol/exercise factors have been mitigated). Some way of distracting the mind can be useful, maybe some sort of simple approach along the lines of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy can also help.