It can be tough to find peace in bed when your mind is racing with anxious thoughts, troubling memories, and worries about the future. What are the methods of 15/15/15 or 4/7/8, and what other life hacks can replace sleeping pills? Experts have shared tips on what to do if you can’t fall asleep.
From Chaos to Clarity
The biggest barrier to falling asleep is often your own , which is busy processing current tasks, events, plans, and future possibilities. You can’t simply “turn off” your brain—it will keep working even while you sleep. However, there is an effective way to calm your mind: distraction. To rid yourself of intrusive thoughts, focus on detailed visualization. A powerful remedy for is to visualize an object (or space) that evokes a sense of safety.
Specifically, psychologists suggest recalling a familiar interior where you felt comfortable. After taking a few deep breaths to help your body relax, imagine, for example, your grandmother’s house, visualizing every detail—the gate, flowerbed, windows, yard, doors, furniture, and so on. The more vividly you can concentrate on these images, the more effectively you can distract yourself from troubling thoughts.
This method shifts a person from chaotic feelings to a specific task. Distraction accelerates the brain’s transition into sleep mode: relaxation is facilitated by the concentration required for visualization. Guided visualization is a popular relaxation exercise, and the American Medical Association recommends it as an effective remedy for insomnia. You should lie down, turn off the lights, and imagine pleasant scenes in detail that relax and soothe you.
How to Fall Asleep Quickly at Night?
Dr. Neil Stanley believes that self-hypnosis is an effective way to calm your thoughts and recommends using an autogenic training technique, where the body responds to affirmations. Mentally repeat phrases like: “I am completely relaxed… My body is becoming heavy… My eyelids are closing… I am drifting into sleep…”. Then start counting backward from 100 to 1, telling yourself: “When I reach one, I will fall asleep.”
It’s been proven that sleep usually comes long before you finish counting. Additionally, to combat insomnia, you can count your exhales. An effective way to fall asleep quickly at night is to close your eyes and take a few slow (natural) inhales and exhales, counting only the exhales. Take 5 exhales and start counting them again. If you lose track, simply start over: without counting the inhales, focus on counting 5 exhales each time. Sleep will come soon enough.
In some ways, this technique resembles “counting sheep” (focusing on a sequence of numbers). You can also think through texts or come up with rhymes. Research shows that this yields faster results for falling asleep than reading or meditating. When nothing else works, you might try convincing yourself that you don’t want to sleep. It turns out that this psychological trick paradoxically encourages the body to fall asleep.
Controlled Breathing
The method of shifting attention to a task for the brain can be used when you need to calm down. A technique for falling asleep in one minute is informally called the “4/7/8 method”: inhale slowly through your nose for 4 seconds, hold your breath for 7 seconds, and then exhale slowly through your mouth for 8 seconds. Repeat these actions at least three times. This exercise quickly helps a person fall asleep, as it acts as a natural sedative.
Dr. Andrew Weil, the creator of this unique relaxation technique, assures that deep diaphragmatic breathing reduces tension. To develop it, inhale through your nose for 2 seconds and slowly exhale through your mouth. This technique trains you to breathe deeper and relax your chest. Place one hand on your chest and the other on your stomach: this way, you can ensure that your stomach rises with each inhale through your nose, not your chest.
At the same time, to fall asleep quickly, you should slowly relax all your muscles. Start by tensing the muscles in your face, then relax them. Next, tense and relax the muscles in your shoulders and neck. Continue this process with the other muscles in your body, moving from top to bottom, all the way down to your toes. Combining muscle relaxation with deep breathing is a method for falling asleep in one minute, as it allows you to focus on the sensations in your body.
The Military Lullaby
It’s normal to take 15–20 minutes to fall asleep. If sleep doesn’t come after that, it’s time to take action. Instead of a sleeping pill, you can use a popular military method developed for training pilots at the U.S. Navy School. As noted by sociologist Dr. Sharon Ackerman in her book “Relax and Win: Championship Performance,” the military method for relieving tension allows you to fall asleep quickly, even while sitting.
How to Fall Asleep in 5 Minutes:
- relax your facial muscles;
- let your arms rest alongside your body;
- exhale and relax your chest;
- gradually relax your legs, from your calves to your thighs;
- imagine a pleasant and calm scene in detail and think of nothing else for 10 seconds;
- for the next 10 seconds, simply mentally repeat the command “Don’t think.”
Reports indicate that after six months of practice, this method helps eliminate insomnia in 96% of cases. In addition to relaxing your body’s muscles, to improve results, it’s important to eliminate stimuli that keep you awake and remove potential irritants before sleep. A key condition for methods on how to fall asleep quickly at night is complete darkness in the sleeping room. You should tightly close the curtains, turn off the lights, and avoid gadgets.
Impulse Control
Experts at the Cleveland Clinic see the problem of insomnia as a disrupted connection between sleep and the bed. When the bed is used solely for sleep, a person should be able to fall asleep as soon as they hit the pillow. To form such a reflex, you need to restore the bed’s primary function—only make it when you plan to sleep.
Measures to Combat Insomnia:
- wake up at the same time every day, regardless of what time you fell asleep;
- do not use the bed for eating, watching TV, or using gadgets;
- go to bed when you feel tired, and get up if you haven’t fallen asleep within 15–20 minutes.
Sleep disorder expert Michelle Drerup advises against looking at the clock at night and stressing if you wake up in the middle of the night. To relax and calm down, avoid moving around, as this will increase your heart rate (if you sit up, even without getting out of bed, your pulse can jump from 60 to 80 beats per minute). There’s no point in panicking about not getting enough sleep: don’t force yourself to sleep, just rest in bed.
Circadian Rhythm Programming
Sleep specialist Dr. Michael Breus assures that you won’t need sleeping pills if you use his “15/15/15 method” every morning. It turns out that the quality of your nighttime sleep is influenced by your morning routine, so the key to success is programming your own circadian rhythm. The psychologist recommends conducting a 15-minute ritual of deep breathing right after waking up, which will oxygenate your sleepy body and quickly energize you.
Next, drink 15 ounces of water (that’s about 450 ml or 2 cups)—this also stimulates activity. The final step is to get 15 minutes of sunlight. Stand by a window or go outside to ensure your body gets the necessary dose of vitamin D, which will help you fall asleep faster in the evening and strengthen your sleep. If there’s no sunlight (dark, short days worsen sleep for many people), vitamin D can be found in egg yolks, , fish, , or synthetic supplements.
Eating bananas, cherries, , almonds, warm milk, and in the evening can help you fall asleep faster. On the other hand, people with insomnia should avoid coffee and other caffeinated products in the afternoon, as they have a stimulating effect. Among the factors contributing to insomnia are vitamin deficiencies, stress, and blue light from gadget screens, which disrupt the biological clock, so it’s essential to restore it.
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