Do you struggle to fall asleep or fall back to sleep in the middle of the night?
If you just lay there, struggling to fall asleep, then this video is for you.
In this video, you’ll discover a totally different approach for falling asleep that no one’s talking about, and 5 methods you can use to test it out tonight.
Or, if you’d prefer to read, just continue reading below.
So, it’s counter-intuitive, but the BEST way to fall asleep is to TRY to stay awake, but to do it in an exhausting way that makes it nearly impossible not to fall asleep.
Before I explain how to do this in a way that actually works, let me explain why it works — 3 Reasons why this is the best sleep advice, and how to think about it differently.
1. The REASON just trying to fall asleep doesn’t work is that falling asleep isn’t a choice. The more you try to fall asleep, the worse it gets.
2. You ONLY fall asleep when your brain SLOWS down. However, whenever you try to achieve anything, your brain speeds up to help you out. So if you try to fall asleep, your brain actually speeds up, which is why you feel more awake the harder you try. The science of how brain speed and sleep work is something you can research for yourself, but that’s the jist of it.
3. It counteracts the pressure you feel when you know that you need sleep to happen. The fact is, the more important sleep is to you, the harder it is to get… and thats because theres more pressure to fall asleep, especially if there’s a time clock associated with it. And that pressure is going to keep you awake.
As you can probably tell, you have to approach falling asleep very differently then you have been.
The way to put yourself to sleep is to set your mind to a task that’s very difficult to maintain without falling asleep… and you undertake this task with the goal of staying awake.
There are certain activities and exercises that you can do that are interesting, yet tiring… and when your goal is to stay awake, they make it very hard to keep your eyes open.
To illustrate the concept, think of a time when you wanted to stay awake to finish something you were doing, but you found it extremely difficult. Maybe you were trying to finish a TV show, maybe it was a chapter of a book, or maybe you were studying, or working on a project… and you couldn’t finish without dozing off.
That’s the type of activity that will put you to sleep – one that’s hard to finish while forcing yourself to stay awake. The key is to maintain the goal of not falling asleep.
This is where the old adage “counting sheep” comes from. And hopefully this video explains why it doesn’t work – it’s because people count sheep with the goal of falling asleep. I’m telling you to count sheep with the goal of staying awake. I’d say pick a # as a goal and really try to get there.
Of course, I’m just using sheep as an example – I’m not actually suggesting you should count sheep, unless that’s what you really want to do.
So what kind of activities actually work?
Any activity that has the following 3 elements will work:
1. Has to be something that MUS
2. Has to be engaging, but not too exciting – just enough to hold your interest.
3. Has to be tedious, but not too boring – just enough to be kind of a challenge to do without falling asleep.
So let’s walk through 5 examples right now that you can use to put yourself to sleep tonight, and if your insomnia is very bad, I’ll have a follow up video really getting into the nitty gritty details of the 3 elements above so you can really become a master of this technique.
No. 1: The Point
- “The Point” – this was coined by a friend of my named Kevin.
The point is the easiest activity and has the most widespread, first time use effectiveness.
The technique is so simple, you can try it out right now. All you have to do is find a point to look at anywhere in the room. If you sleep with the lights off, this might be a small point of light… if you want to try it out right now for fun, just find any small “point” or fixed spot that you can hold your focus on.
Maybe it’s the logo on a book… maybe it’s the very corner of your dresser… maybe it’s a speck on the ceiling.
Now, all you do is play a game called “how long can I stare at this for without falling asleep or losing focus”. The key here is to make it a game by setting goals. Maybe the first time you make it 30 seconds… and then lose focus… so the next time you try to stay focused on it for a minute, and then 2, then 3, then 5.
If you’re watching this in the middle of the day, there’s not going to be a lot that happens… but when you’re tired and can’t sleep, you’re going to find that you can’t stare at a point very long without your eyes drooping.
Once you feel your eyes drooping, you need to increase your effort to keep your eyes open and stay focused. When you do this, it should start becoming harder and harder to keep your eyes open. Just keep it up and try to stay awake – the important part is to stay engaged and just keep trying to stay awake.
While this technique works for many people the first time, it has a tendency to be less reliable and isn’t a great long term solution. You’ll see why this is loses effectiveness once I start explaining the principle of engagement, but in short, it’s just really hard to stay engaged on this one.
No. 2: The Video Method
- So, onto activity 2: the video method. Unlike “the point”, this one is easy to stay engaged with, however the trick is to watch something that is boring enough to put you to sleep. If you’re kept awake by endless mental chatter, this is a little more effective because the video should be distracting enough to take you out of your mental chatter.
The key is to find something that will distract you, yet still be boring enough to be hard to stay awake. For me, it’s documentaries and interviews – particularly ones I’ve already seen before. I’m very interested in deep topics, but since I’ve already seen the video, it’s kind of boring, which makes it hard to focus, but when I force myself to focus on the video it distracts me from my mental chatter.
The goal is to stay awake, but the trick is that you should be making it as difficult as possible. The point works because it is a very tedious task – so you need a similar tedium with the video or show. If you put on a show that you’re fascinated with, it’s not going to be very tedious, and that means it’s going to be very easy to stay awake. The way to know if you’re watching the right thing is if you’re having a hard time staying awake.
The video method isn’t for everyone, and there are downfalls to using this activity. For one, the flickering bright lights of a TV are proven to be damaging to sleep, so it’s advised to turn the brightness all the way down when using this activity. Most shows will have too much stimuli and unpredictability to get the kind of tedium you need for this to work as well. Like “the point”, it’s not the easiest long term solution, but instead of “engagement” being an issue, the problem with this one lies with the principal of “tedium” that we’ll discuss next… but in short, it’s usually just not tedious enough.
It’s generally not good to watch anything that’s unpredictable. This is why I recommend watch video content you’ve already seen – because if you’re trying something new, it might be too interesting to you, which will make it too engaging and not tedious enough, which is a balancing act we’ll have a look at shortly.
But if you like the idea of this activity, I would strongly recommend the next activity, because it is very similar and yet it solves most of these problems…
No. 3: The Audiobook Method
- The Audiobook method. Similar to the video method, but the advantage is you don’t have to deal with the light from the TV. Unlike reading a book, you don’t have to keep the light on or deal with holding a book, which can make it very difficult to end up actually falling asleep. Personally, this is my favorite method and any time I am having trouble falling asleep it is my “go to”.
Like picking a TV show, the book you choose is important. Don’t pick your favorite author’s new book – it’s going to be too hooking. Like I was told as a kid – no ghost stories before bed. You need to choose something tedious to force yourself to focus on, so it’s hard to stay awake… but at the same time, it should be distracting (so it’s got to be sort of interesting.)
For instance, I’m not going to put on an audio-textbook teaching me calculus – I’d have no idea what they’re talking about and it wouldn’t distract me from my own mental chatter at all. But it’d probably work pretty good if I put on something something like “Charlie and the Chocolate factory”, because honestly, I’m just not all that into it… but I’m sure I’ll find kind of interesting, at least enough to distract me if I was forcing myself to stay awake listening to it.
No. 4: The Meditation Method
- The meditation method. This is a little more advanced and takes time to master, since meditation is a skill that is acquired with practice.
The advantage with meditation is that you can almost directly slow down your brainwaves. When you’re trying to stay awake and you’re meditating to slow down your mind, you can pretty much put yourself to sleep on command. I’ve done it successfully many times, even falling asleep in under a minute once or twice… but I have to admit, it does take a lot of discipline, which can be almost impossible when you’re really tired. When I was really curing my own insomnia, I was practiced enough to do it a lot, but these days I’ve fallen out of practice so I usually just use an audiobook if I’m having trouble.
Once you learn how to slow down your brainwaves, you get to a point eventually where you don’t even need an activity any more. These days, if I’m being lazy, 99% of the time I can just lay down and I’ll be asleep within a few minutes. But that’s after years of knowing this stuff.
Anyway, back to meditation – the idea here is to set an end goal of completing the meditation without falling asleep. Since there needs to be a goal of completion, it’s best to have a way of achieving the goal.
Let’s take one of the most basic meditations – focusing on the breath. In this practice, your goal is to get as focused as possible on the sensation of your breathing, and when you get distracted you simply refocus your attention on your breath.
For this to put you to sleep, you might have a goal of how many breaths you can count in a row without losing track. Once you achieve the number, you can then set a higher number to achieve and start over.
There’s a lot of mediations and I cover this a lot more in follow up material, but if you’re skilled at meditation already or want to learn it, it’s a great way to fall asleep using this technique.
No. 5: The Medical Hypnosis Method
- The Medical Hypnosis Method. Hypnosis is very similar to meditation, and contains the same benefits of directly slowing down your brainwaves.
The difference with medical hypnosis is that you’re listening to an audio track done by a medical professional that is skilled at putting people to sleep.
From my many years of helping insomniacs, my observation is that this is the single most effective activity of them all. No method works for everyone, but this one seems to work in the majority of cases. Most serious insomniacs find that it stops working if they don’t know the rest of the technique that we’re about to get into… and it is very important to pick the right professional, as half the products out there have a tendency not to work.
I’ll probably do a review on some medical hypnosis products in a future video, but for tonight you might want to just start with “The point” or “The audio book” methods – they’re the easier to try out, and both work good the first time around.
That being said, NONE of these techniques will work if you end up trying to fall asleep, and there’s a lot more to be said about how to get the principles of engagement and tedium right. Without understanding the principles under-pinning this method, it’d be kind of like trying to cook while following a recipe that is missing the amounts of each ingredient. If you’ve ever cooked something with way too much salt, you know how easily it can be to mess up a recipe.
So, I will be coming out with a follow-up article/video in a week to get more into the nuts and bolts of this one if enough people are interested in that. If that’s something you’d like to see, please subscribe and let me know in the comments below.
Thanks for reading!