For many people, their nights are filled with tossing and turning, and they can never seem to get comfortable and find the rest they so desperately need. Getting good sleep is essential to having a healthy and happy life and is an integral part of your body’s fundamental functions.
Being well-rested can give you a ton of health benefits, including but not limited to healthy clear skin, clarity of thought, alertness and feelings of high energy, positivity, and happiness, as well as a strengthened immune system and increased ability to fight off illnesses. A good night’s sleep is especially essential for your mental health, as insufficient nightly rest can cause a wide array of negative effects, including depression, anxiety, difficulty focusing, or irritability.
If you find yourself in this tough spot, you’ve come to the right place for help. In this article, we’re going to provide you with 25 key tips and tricks to help you all asleep fast. Keep reading to learn everything you need to know about how you can fall asleep fast and get the deep rest your body deserves.
1. Make Your Room Cooler
One of the reasons you may not be able to fall asleep fast is that your room is too hot. When we are trying to fall asleep, we’re often covered by blankets and like to snuggle up in our beds with plenty of cozy covers and pillows. If your room is kept at too high of a temperature, your body can easily overheat and there’s nothing worse than being too hot when trying to fall asleep.
Getting your body temperature right is key to being able to fall asleep fast, as if your room is too hot, you’ll want to take off your covers. This could cause you to get cold and you won’t feel as cozy, and soon you’ll be pulling your covers back up, and repeat. Doing this over and over is frustrating, and it will keep you from falling asleep or staying asleep once you have started sleeping.
2. Wear Cozy Pajamas
You should always wear something comfortable and cozy to bed, as that will help you feel comfortable and at ease while falling asleep. If you’re wearing stiff, scratchy, or itchy clothing, it can make falling asleep that much more difficult. You also want to make sure your pajamas are breathable, because as we mentioned in the last tip, you don’t want to overheat.
Or alternatively, if you’re one of those people who don’t like to wear clothing to bed, you can always try to sleep without pajamas or just in a pair of comfortable underwear. If you go this route, make sure your sheets and blankets are comfortable and soft on your skin, as you’ll run into the same problems falling asleep if they’re scratchy or rough.
3. Set a Sleep Schedule
Setting a sleep schedule is essential to getting consistent, deep sleep. It will also help you to be able to fall asleep faster because your body will be subconsciously expecting to fall asleep at around the same time every night. If you have a varied and sporadic sleep schedule, then your body may not be ready to fall asleep some nights.
For example, if you tend to go to bed at around midnight sometimes, but then want to go to bed earlier because you have to get up early for work, your body will not be expecting to go to sleep until around midnight and it will be harder to fall asleep.
4. Make Sure Your Body is Exposed to Both Daylight and Darkness
Our bodies’ internal clocks operate partly on the sun’s cycles, so when the sun is up and it is bright outside, our bodies know it’s time to be awake. Conversely, when it’s dark outside, our bodies are expecting to be asleep.
If you spend all day inside, for example, and your body is never exposed to the daylight, it may not have ever gotten the signal to wake up, which will make it more difficult to find sleep quickly and to rest deeply. Catering to your body’s internal clock is important to being able to fall asleep quickly.
5. Do Yoga Before Bed
One of the greatest ways to relax your body and mind is by doing yoga. Many people who have trouble with relaxing and staying stress free do yoga daily to relieve their anxiety and to relax. Try to do some basic (or advanced) yoga stretches before you go to sleep every night, and this should help your body relax as you try to fall asleep.
Yoga is great at helping you clear your mind also, and a busy mind full of the day’s worries is not one that will help you fall asleep fast. Try to breathe and empty your mind of all your cares as you do these yoga stretches, and you’ll be falling asleep in no time.
6. Stop Checking the Time
We’ve all been in that situation where you know you have to get up in the morning early for work or school, maybe an exam or a job interview, and you also know you need to fall asleep fast in order to get the sleep you need. Inevitably, with your mind racing, you can’t fall asleep, and you check the time to see how much sleep you could still get if you feel asleep right at that moment.
Despite this seeming like a good idea in the moment, this will actively work against your ability to fall asleep fast. Checking the time will cause your mind to continue to run as you count the minutes and think about how much sleep you’re missing. Try to just relax and fall asleep naturally, without checking what time it is. That won’t help anything at all.
7. Don’t Take Naps During the Day
Sometimes just after you’ve eaten a big lunch or dinner, you simply want to lay down and take a nice long nap. It just feels right. However, even though this seems like the most wonderful thing you could do in the moment, napping carries with it some consequences.
Frequent napping during the day can throw off your sleep schedule and make you feel more rested at night when you need to fall asleep. If you took an hour-long nap at noon, for example, your body may not feel tired enough to fall asleep right away when you’re ready for bed. Best to skip the nap and just wait for bedtime to get your rest.
8. Watch What You Eat
What you eat before bed is just as important as when you eat. To ensure you have the easiest time falling asleep quickly at night, make sure not to eat heavy foods before you try to go to sleep. These foods can cause bloating and gas, which can make it difficult to fall asleep quickly.
Also avoid eating food right before bed, as this may cause your body to think it’s time to be awake a little while longer. You should never eat high energy foods or substances before trying to fall asleep, either. Drinking caffeinated soda before bed, for example, will keep you wired and prevent your from falling asleep easily.
9. Put on Some Relaxing Music
Relaxing music can be a great asset when trying to fall asleep quickly. This type of music has calming and relaxing effects on the body, and it gives your mind something to focus on so that it’s not running loose thinking about your day. Relaxing music can also become comforting when your mind gets used to it, instilling a sense of calm and familiarity in you as you fall asleep.
On top of all those benefits, it’ll tell your mind that it’s time to sleep when you hear the same kind of relaxing music every night. This is one trick that is sure to help, especially if you have an overactive mind when trying to fall asleep.
Another sound that can help put your mind at ease when trying to fall asleep is white noise. White noise is any background noise that drowns out other noises and that your mind can get used to without noticing it constantly. Some examples of white noise people often like to have when sleeping is a running fan, a sleep sound machine, or a multi sound machine.
You can get sound machines specially designed for helping you sleep from YogaSleep. They make top of the line sound machines with night lights, sound machines for travel, a natural fan sound machine, and multi sound machines that can play a wide selection of different white noise sounds. They even make white sound machines for infants and small children, who often benefit from having white noise running while they’re sleeping.
10. Exercise During the Day
Getting a regular amount of exercise every day is a good idea for your general health, but it’s also great for helping you to fall asleep fast at night. If you set aside a few minutes of rigorous exercise per day, your body will feel more tired at night, and you’ll have an easier time falling asleep.
Besides helping you fall asleep quicker, exercise can also have positive impacts on your mental and physical health. You’ll feel more energized, for one, while also strengthening your body and getting out some aggression. It depends on what kind of exercise you choose to do but exercising at least a few minutes a day will help all facets of your health.
11. Get Comfortable
It’s going to be very difficult to fall asleep if you’re not comfortable. There are a few main contributing factors to your level of comfort when trying to sleep, which include your mattress, pillows, and blankets.
For a great comfortable mattress that’s sure to help you fall asleep fast, try the Puffy Mattress. With unique material composition and technology, you’ll never sleep better. Their catchphrase is “Like sleeping on a cloud,” and we can definitely agree!
A Spine Align pillow is another great addition to your sleep set up, offering back and side sleepers a perfectly ergonomic pillow that is specifically designed to support your head and neck in its most natural position.
And finally, top it all off with the Chilisleep Weighted Blanket. Weighted blankets are great for giving you a cozy, safe feeling when you’re falling asleep, and this one comes with body temp regulation too!
12. Turn Off All Electronics
It’s been proven by researchers that using electronics just before you fall asleep can wire your brain to stay awake, making it harder to fall asleep fast. Many people in the modern age may be using their smart phones, watching TV, or playing video games just before bed, which will make it harder for them to fall asleep.
Besides simply turning off all electronics a few minutes before you sleep, you can also use blue light glasses to reduce the effects of screens on your eyes and your brain. Blue light soothes and relaxes, as opposed to typical white light which often has the opposite effect.
13. Give Aromatherapy a Try
Aromatherapy is another technique proven to help with insomnia in some cases. Certain smells introduced to the body through aromatherapy have the potential to instill a sense of calm and relaxation, which will help ease your body into a state of restful sleep. Besides this, having a bedroom that smells good will help you be at ease when trying to sleep. It’s true that cluttered, messy, or smelly spaces often cause anxiety in those that live in them.
Try searching for aromatherapy products and programs to see which may be right for you and your needs. This is another great way to help ease your body into restful sleep quickly when you go to bed.
14. Do Some Writing Before You Sleep
One of the main reasons people may find it difficult to fall asleep at night is because of all the cares, worries, and thoughts bouncing around in their heads. We’ve all been in the situation where our minds simply won’t turn off, constantly thinking of everything that happened that day or of everything we’ll have to do the next day.
Spending some time writing before you go to bed can help relieve these anxious thoughts, and you can get your thoughts out and down on paper. This means that your brain will spend less time fixating on these things while you try to sleep. If you’re not sure where to start, try starting a journal that your write in before bedtime. Simply write down your thoughts and feelings from everything that has happened that day, freeing up your mind in the process.
15. Avoid Caffeine Up to Six Hours Prior
As we mentioned earlier, you should avoid ingesting all forms of caffeine prior to going to bed. You should avoid caffeine altogether for up to six hours before you sleep, as the effects of caffeine will keep your body from being able to relax and wind down.
If you’d like some alternatives to caffeinated drinks such as coffee, soda, or teas, here are a few different options you can try that will help you sleep instead of preventing you from sleeping. You can try drinking herbal teas made of any of the following herbs or flowers: chamomile, valerian root, lavender, lemon balm, passionflower, or magnolia bark.
Each of these types of herbal tea have been proven to help relax the body and mind and may even cause drowsiness. This will help immensely with being able to fall asleep quickly, so try drinking one of these kinds of tea before bed and experience the effects for yourself.
16. Find a Better Sleeping Position
The sleeping position that you’re used to may not always be the best one to help you fall asleep quickly, despite being the one that may feel most natural to you. There are a lot of different positions you can put your body in to try to get comfortable, so try looking up some proven positions that can help you fall asleep quick.
Which position works best may vary from person to person, but generally sleeping on your side or back will be the best positions for sleep. Positions where your body is contorted at an odd angle may not be the best, even if they feel comfortable in the moment. Stomach sleeping can also make it more difficult to sleep and may cause you to feel short of breath or to overheat easier.
17. Do Some Reading
Studies have shown that doing some reading before bed can help make you more tired, while also engaging your mind in a way that causes it to be still. Instead of activating the distracted parts of your brain as seen by using electronics before bed, reading a book, newspaper, article, or other material before bed will engage a pensive part of your brain and put a leach on any loose thoughts.
If you’re not sure what to read, it’s really up to you. If you really want to be able to fall asleep fast, reading about a dry and uninteresting subject will often do the trick. Reading a piece of fast-paced, action-packed fiction, for example, may not have the same effect. Also, if possible, try to do this reading from a book, magazine, or other physical source, as screens tend to activate your brain in ways you don’t want when trying to sleep.
18. Use Sleep Apps on Your Phone
There are multiple sleeping and meditation apps you can try using on your phone before going to sleep that are designed to instill a sense of peace and calm at bedtime. There are so many to choose from that it may be difficult to decide which one to use, but we’ll give you a couple of recommendations of apps that we like to use.
The first is Expectful, a sleep and meditation app for expectant mothers. Expectful offers a unique platform with custom designed meditations for its users that are put together by world leading experts in parental care and meditation. Enhancing a sense of calm in your body will help your pregnancy continue smoothly and will help you get comfortable when your baby bump is making it difficult to do so.
For those who aren’t expectant mothers, we recommend Synctuition. This app is a platform that assists users in a meditation program using 3D sounds and rhythmic entrainment. Synctuition’s meditation programs will help to stimulate the brain by using natural neuroplasticity to build thousands of new synapses, which will give you greater clarity of thought, improved creativity, and will also help your mind turn off when it needs to. Meditation may seem like an extreme measure to take, but studies have shown that it can help put your mind at ease and help you sleep much more soundly.
19. Focus on Keeping Yourself Awake
This one may seem counterintuitive. You’re trying to fall asleep, so naturally you should focus on falling asleep, not staying awake, right? Well, as logical as this sounds, it’s actually wrong. In instances where you know you need to stay awake, such as in the middle of a boring class or seminar, it’s always more difficult to stay awake, right?
Well, the same goes for sleeping at night. If you tell your brain that you need to stay awake, it will make it easier to fall asleep in some cases. This technique may not always work, but it doesn’t hurt to try! Imagine you’re in the most boring class you can think of, listening to a professor drone on and on, and try to stay awake. Sleep may set in faster than you’d think!
20. Think Happy Thoughts
It’s incredibly difficult to feel relaxed and calm if you’re upset, sad, or angry about something, right? Well, this means that it’s easier to feel relaxed when you’re happy, and this will help you fall asleep faster. To help achieve this happy state, you can try thinking happy thoughts.
Try thinking of things that make you happy, and this will almost always bring a smile to your face and peace to your mind. For many, thinking of their family, a beloved pet, a significant other, or something that they love to do will bring them feelings of happiness and joy. This will in turn help to instill feelings of calm and peace in you.
21. Look Into Sleep Enhancing Supplements
There are a number of sleep-enhancing supplements that can help with being able to fall asleep fast. Some of these supplements include PM+ Sleep Vitamins, Life Extension’s Herbal Sleep Pills, Recharge’s Natural Sleep Aid Sleeping Pills, and OLLY’s Restful Gummies.
These are just a few examples of possible supplements you could try and are some of the most popular and well-reviewed products that we found with a quick search. Sleeping supplements such as those listed above often include compounds that help to induce sleep when ingested.
Tryptophan is one such essential amino acid that is often in sleeping supplements, and studies have shown that as little as 1 gram per day can help improve quality of sleep. Ginkgo biloba is another compound in the form of a natural herb that is used in supplements, acting to help reduce stress and anxiety when taken 30 to 60 minutes before bed. It has been proven to enhance relaxation and promote sleep. Finally, L-theanine is an amino acid that helps to improve sleep and relaxation in the body.
22. Try Breathing Exercises
One of the core pillars of relaxation in the body is breathe. There’s a reason why it’s best practice to take deep breaths when you get upset or angry in order to calm back down. Proper breathing can instill a deep relaxation and calm in you if done right, and luckily there are specific breathing exercises specifically to help you calm down and relax.
The first breathing exercise you can try is the Military Method. Used by highly trained military personnel to master their senses and their bodies, this method has been proven to be extremely effective. It is used tactically to change how one feels physically and emotionally, helping to focus one’s attention and improve physical performance.
To use this method, practice steady breathing by inhaling for four seconds and then exhaling for 6 seconds. By doing this, your heart rate will rhythmically fluctuate up and down, syncing with your inhales and exhales. This physiological change will hep relieve stress, anxiety, and even feelings of depression, making it easier to fall asleep.
The next breathing exercise you can try, the 4-7-8 method, was developed by Dr. Andrew Weil. He based it on an ancient yoga technique known as pranayama. This technique is primarily used to help the users gain control of their breathing and can be effective in helping you to fall asleep.
To do this method, first let your lips open and make a “whooshing” sound as you exhale through your open mouth. Next, close your lips and inhale through your nose for four counts. You’ll then hold your breath for 7 seconds and let the air escape in another “whooshing” exhale that last for 8 seconds. This technique can put the practitioner into a state of deep relaxation and make cause them to fall asleep very quickly.
23. Meditate Before Bed
Similar to other tips we’ve listed earlier, you can practice meditation before you go to sleep. Typically, meditating involves sitting in a certain position while controlling your breathing and focusing completely on that. You’ll be emptying your mind of thought and emotion and letting your body relax.
There are a ton of meditation apps out there for you to use if you’re not sure where to start by yourself. Many of these will take you through beginner’s programs for meditating and will explain in detail what you should be doing every step of the way. Such apps may also play calming noises, keep track of the time you’ve been meditating, and instruct you on how best to breathe to induce the highest level of relaxation.
On top of sleep benefits, meditation can also help to improve your overall mental health. By practicing meditation on a regular basis, many have found they’re able to handle and even neutralize their stress, anxiety, feelings of depression, or anger. One of the key tenets of most meditation programs is to let go of all the things that are weighing you down and causing you worry, which will also help you be able to sleep better.
24. Practice Reducing Your Stress
As you may have guessed by now, stress is one of the biggest factors that can make it difficult for people to fall asleep quickly and to have a restful sleep. So naturally, neutralizing stress is one way to increase your ability to sleep better. It takes some practice, but there are a bunch of ways you can work to reduce your stress. We’ve already mentioned a few of them, such as doing yoga, performing breathing exercises, meditating, or exercising every day.
Besides these various stress-reducing techniques, there are also apps specifically designed to target and reduce stress in the body and mind. One of these is NuCalm, The NuCalm app has been designed over the course of 20 years of neuroscience research and is a lead neuroscience technology that is proven to allow users to change their mental state on demand. This app is clinical-grade neuroscience technology that reduces stress and helps you to find an enhanced and deep sleep.
You can also use the other two apps we mentioned earlier in this article, SyncTuition and Expectful (for those who are expectant mothers). These are some other great options for helping to reduce stress in the user’s life, and there are even more apps out there so don’t be afraid to do your own research to find one that best fits you and your needs.
25. Make Use of Smart Sleep Assistants
Going deeper than just using an app on your phone, you can even try a smart sleep assistant to help you fall asleep fast and stay deep asleep. Smart sleep assistants are devices that integrate multiple key technologies to help the user fall asleep fast and wake up gently, all while getting the best sleep they can. They typically make use of smart lights, sound machines, sunrise alarms, wind-down meditations, and alarm clocks to shape your sleeping experience.
Hatch is one of the most popular smart sleeping assistants, combining a suite of smart technology in one sleek device to help its user achieve their best sleep. With Hatch’s smart sleep assistant technology, you can create a personalized routine to help you fall asleep and stay asleep.
You can also set a wake-up routine so you can awaken feeling well rested and peaceful. It even comes with features like soft-glow reading lights to keep from straining your eyes, or the ability to set any mood you’d like with a selection of soothing sounds and lights.
Hatch offers its customers an optional in-app subscription that will give you access to an expansive library of sleep content for your assistant. They even have different sleep assistants for all different ages, offering sleep options to help infants and young children keep a healthy sleep schedule.
Dodow offers another highly effective and popular smart sleep assistant. Dodow was created by a team of determined insomniacs who were seeking to remedy their own sleep problems, so you can be sure their device will help you to sleep better. It functions by projecting a soothing light onto your ceiling.
As you fall asleep, you simply mimic the light with your breathing, inhaling as the light expands and exhaling as the light contracts. This eases your body into a more restful state and guides you to sleep. The best part is, it’s a one time purchase that has the potential to help you sleep better for the rest of your life!
In Summary
Some nights, getting a deep night’s sleep can feel nearly impossible. There are plenty of reasons you may find it difficult to sleep, such as you may be about to start a new job and can’t get over the feeling of first day butterflies in your stomach. Or maybe you’re a new parent wondering how you ever took your blissful nights of uninterrupted sleep for granted before you had children. You may even be lying awake wondering why you thought it would be a good idea to have yet another cup of coffee at 3 in the afternoon.
Whatever your reason for struggling with sleep, the benefits you’re missing out on by catching those quality “zzz’s” are undeniable. When we can get a full 7 or 8 hours of restful sleep, our days seem to go by so much easier. Our stress levels are also lowered, and we experience increased energy levels.
But we’ve all been through those nights when we are laying on our mattresses for those hours at a time and simply cannot fall asleep no matter what we try. More important than the number of hours of sleep you get each night is the quality of those hours, as deep sleep is one of the most important factors of our overall health and energcy.
Deep sleep is the part of sleep that sometimes can be the most elusive. When we do not get enough deep sleep at night, we will not be able to enjoy the effects of that sleep, even if you got a full 8 hours. When sleeping in deep sleep, your body undergoes a sort of system reset. This is the best way for you to feel more awake and refreshed during the day.
A good night’s sleep will help to prep your body for a new day, and deep sleep is where you’ll get this. While deep sleeping, your brain will be experiencing the lowest frequency of brain waves, called the delta wave phase. You should be getting around 90 to 120 minutes in this phase per night. By following the tips and tricks we’ve outlined above for you, you should be able to not only fall asleep faster, but also achieve that deep level of sleep that your body so desperately needs to function well.
We hope we’ve given you a starting point and a lot to think about to help you solve your sleeping issues, whatever they may be. Make sure to try each of these tips and tricks, as some may work better than others for some people. Give special consideration to sleeping apps and smart sleeping assistants, as they’ve been proven to do wonders for those who suffer from insomnia and other sleep issues. Thanks for reading and remember to check back at this article from time to time for updated information.