Train yourself to fall asleep in 2 minutes with this viral sleep hack
Far too many of us have trouble falling asleep frequently. But good sleep has so many benefits for our physical and mental health that it's important to keep trying to get quality rest. And a viral technique may help you fall asleep in just two minutes.
If you're not getting enough quality sleep, you'll feel it in the short- and long-term. One in three of us is dealing with a sleep problem, according to the Cleveland Clinic, and we may not even be aware of it. Heavy snoring, unexplained morning headaches and feeling sleepy during the day might indicate an untreated sleep issue.
And, if you do have a sleep disorder, you’ll likely pay dearly for it. Americans spend almost $95 billion a year dealing with sleep disorders, according to recent research. So simple at-home tricks, like this two-minute hack to fall asleep fast, are certainly welcome.
Originally described in the book “Relax and Win: Championship Performance” by Lloyd Bud Winter, first published in 1981, the simple technique promises to help you get to sleep quickly. It recently came back into the limelight thanks to a 2018 viral TikTok video from Justin Agustin, a fitness coach with over 1.9 million TikTok followers.
To spare your health and your wallet, we talked to a sleep expert and the fitness coach who went viral for sharing the two-minute technique on social media — and they both say it could be effective.
What is the military sleep method?
The trick was developed in the military to help soldiers to fall asleep anywhere, anytime, Agustin said in his TikTok. The tactic allows you “to calm your body and systematically relax and shut down each part of your body from head to toe, literally,” he said.
To perform the technique, follow these steps:
Relax: Begin by relaxing every muscle in the body, starting with the forehead and working your way down to your toes. “Start by relaxing the muscles in your forehead. Relax your eyes, your cheeks, your jaws and focus on your breathing. Now, go down to your neck and your shoulders,” Agustin says in the video. “Make sure your shoulders are not tensed up. Drop them as low as you can and keep your arms loose to your sides, including your hands and fingers.” Then, he instructs us to imagine a warm sensation going from the top of your head to your fingertips. Take deep breaths, relaxing the muscles from your chest down to your feet, and then reimagine that warm sensation, but this time going from your heart all the way down to your toes.
Breathe: Take deep breaths, exhaling slowly. And make sure your shoulder and hands stay relaxed while you breathe.
Clear your mind: “Now, while you’re doing this, it’s really important to clear your mind of any stresses,” adds Agustin. Try imagining two scenarios: lying in a canoe surrounded by only clear lake water or lying in a black velvet hammock in a pitch black room. “At any time when you start thinking of anything else or you start getting distracted, repeat these words for 10 seconds: ‘Don’t think. Don’t think. Don’t think,’” he said.
According to Agustin, if you practice this every night for six weeks, you should be able to fall asleep within two minutes of closing your eyes.
You can train yourself to fall asleep
This technique may sound too good to be true. But according to Dr. Sanjiv Kothare, sleep specialist and head of pediatric neurology at Cohen Children’s Medical Center in New York, it is possible to train yourself to fall asleep faster using this technique.
Training your brain to fall asleep faster is “cognitive behavioral therapy and what’s being shown in that video is exactly what I do with my patients,” Kothare tells TODAY.com.
There are two important principles to keep in mind when training your brain to fall asleep, Kothare says.
These include:
Don’t try to fall asleep when you’re not tired. Make sure you are actually “physically tired or feeling sleepy,” he says. Of course, this doesn’t apply to armed forces trying to sleep at times under stress. But for those of trying to get sleep at home, we shouldn't try to force it.
Practice sleep restriction. Kothare frequently tells patients with insomnia not to go to bed early — and to only to go to bed when you're ready to fall asleep. “Don’t do other activities (in bed), like reading a book or watching TV," he adds. "The bed should be associated only with sleep.”
“Once you’re ready to fall asleep, dim the lights so that melatonin starts surging, close your eyes, breathe with your mouth, focus on your abdomen and do exactly what is shown in that video," Kothare says. That means relaxing your entire body, focusing on positive thoughts and imagining dark, comforting environments.
Kothare also agrees that repeating a phrase such as, "Don’t think, don’t think," is a way to replace or quiet competing, racing thoughts when you're falling asleep.
“Eventually, you learn to welcome that and, hopefully, fall asleep,” Kothare says. “You need to program your brain to relax and over a period of time, it will learn to relax.”
When using these tricks, you may start to fall asleep more easily within six weeks — or even sooner, Kothare says. “Six weeks may be generous … Within two weeks you’ll start seeing the effect,” said Kothare. But the most important element is staying motivated to keep up with the technique to fall asleep, he says. “If you do it without motivation, it’s not going to work.”
Other tips to help you fall asleep
The best technique to fall asleep is to “go to bed only when tired and do it at a consistent basis every night ... and no nap during the daytime,” Kothare says.
Other factors that might be impacting your ability to sleep:
Check your sleep environment. “Try to maintain a dark environment,” said Kothare. “Not too hot; it should be cool and noise-free as much as possible.”
Rule out medical conditions. “Medical conditions need to be ruled out before you treat the primary insomnia,” Kothare says. Conditions such as anxiety, depression, sleep apnea and restless leg syndrome can all impact your sleep and need to be addressed if you want to get better rest, he adds.
Consider melatonin. To help jumpstart your sleep training, Kothare suggests looking into melatonin supplements. He recommends taking just one milligram of melatonin (a hormone known to help with sleep) within an hour of bedtime, while practicing your cognitive behavioral therapy techniques. Later on, you can likely stop taking the melatonin "once your brain is programmed,” Kothare says. And he cautions against taking large doses of melatoning: “People think they need 10, 20 milligrams, (but) you don’t need it," he says. One milligram plus a practiced sleep technique is plenty effective, Kothare says.
What to do if you can't sleep
If you're having trouble sleeping, try using the techniques described above. But try not to let your sleep strategies create too much pressure or anxiety around the ritual of sleeping, Kothare advises, which can actually make sleep problems worse.
This can also cause you to fixate on the amount of sleep you're missing out on if you wake up in the middle of the night and get a look at the clock, he says. We’ve all experienced this kind of anxious spiral at some point. To avoid it, Kothare recommends creating a clock-free zone in your bedroom. “Put an alarm on your phone and turn it around so that you don’t assess time,” he says.
Kothare also encourages people to not lie in bed for hours trying to force sleep. “Let’s say you go to bed at 10 o’clock and you do all this cognitive therapy and you don’t manage to fall sleep in 20 minutes,” he said. When it's clear that your in-bed sleep strategies aren't actually helping you fall asleep, and it's time to try other tactics.
What should you do? “Get out of bed, go to a different area, read a book in dim light — do something boring, come back to bed. In 20 minutes, do it again and keep doing it back and forth until you fall asleep," Kothare said.
But, even if you're struggling to find something boring to do, stay away from the electronics. "Don’t do anything stimulating, don’t go in front of the TV, because the bright light tells your brain to stay awake and suppresses melatonin,” Kothare added.
Shifting your perspective on sleep — or lack thereof — can also help assuage some of the sleep anxiety that might be keeping you awake. “Train your brain and say, 'Even if I don’t fall asleep, I’ll be OK the next day. I won’t die,'" said Kothare. "Slowly your brain will relax and you will be able to fall asleep.”
This article was originally published on TODAY.com