Does anyone else find absolute silence difficult to deal with? In particular difficult to sleep in complete silence?
I think it started from a young age, being obsessed with music. Falling asleep with music.
As an adult, I still struggle with this and need some form of audio to drift off, be it music or something else.
More recently, I find stand-up comedy works best - it's light-hearted and doesn't require too much thought.
If silence is the real culprit you should try out a white noise generator, generally speaking it should overload/excite you less then music or human voices and could help you sleep faster.
Where I live silence during the night is not really an option, and I had had problems only when on vacation "away from civilization", but small stuff like white noise, a fan or similar low but continuos sounds helped me out without asking for my attention (which happens with movies, music or similar).
There are even apps that simulate different kind of sound and let you mix them (like rain, birds, wind) but I didn't have enough patience to really dig on this solution.
I think it’s more getting out of my own thoughts. And I feel white noise etc won’t shift my focus from that.