Yeah 20 minutes to fall asleep sounds like a dream come true. If I just get into bed and immediately try to sleep, it can easily take 2 hours, and I'll wake up several times and never feel like I slept deeply. Unless I take etizolam/a benzo, or am just super tired. I eventually discovered a way to sleep pretty consistently, which is to put an app on my phone and PC called f.lux that slowly removes all of the blue spectrum of the light from the screen as it turns into night, and, more importantly, I read in bed until my eyelids feel droopy and I can barely stay awake, then lean over and turn off the light without getting up. When I do this, I will fall asleep almost instantly and stay asleep, generally. Although it can take 30 minutes to 2 hours of reading to get tired, but that's cool because I love reading, so it's just a nice part of my day, sometimes the best part.
Anyway, Lyrica loses its magic extraordinarily fast, if you use it too often. Even 2 days in a row, the second day will require twice as much as the first day to get anywhere near as strong as the first day. Leaving a few days to a week between doses, you can keep your dose low and get the amazing effects that it has with no tolerance, every time. Actually even a few days isn't enough if you plan to make a pattern out of it. If you take it daily or even near-daily, it will basically entirely stop working before long. I guess, from what I understand, the pain-killing effects can continue after the other effects stop, so some people are on a fairly low dose daily for stuff like fibromyalgia. But generally, it is an unsuitable drug for regular use.
My strategy for sleeping is what I described above, and when I need an extra boost, I take 25mg of doxylamine (Unisom), or even 50mg. I find it works for sleep much better than diphenhydramine or any other OTC sleep aid. I occasionally use a benzo, which works like a light switch, far better than anything else, but obviously you need to be extremely careful with that. Another thing that works pretty well is clonidine, 0.2mg (2 of the 0.1mg pills). It doesn't actually make me feel tired, but it calms my body down and if I am trying to sleep, it will make it way easier to fall asleep. During periods of time when I have had a lot of trouble falling asleep (more than usual), I will do a rotation of the 3 (benzo, next night doxylamine, next night clonidine, repeat - and all with reading in bed until I get sleepy).
