How to Fall Asleep in 10 Minutes (Or Less) — 3 Proven Methods

From a person who would often stay awake until 4 a.m.

A “public health epidemic” — this is how the U.S.Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) describes sleep deprivation. It is associated with a multitude of medical issues such as depression, hypertension, obesity, and cancer.

When you have a problem with falling asleep you feel constantly run-down, frustrated, and disoriented.

I know how it feels, too.

So how to stop that?

The Internet is full of generic advice on how to fall asleep. But in the last few years, I learned a few methods that proved to be pretty effective in helping me to relax and finally drift to sleep.

Let me set them out to you.

Soothe Your Body Using the 4–7–8 Breathing Technique

The inventor of this method, Dr.Andrew Weil called it “a natural tranquilizer for the nervous system”.

It is an easy breathing technique, thanks to which your body replenishes oxygen.

According to the proponents of this method, it becomes more powerful when you practice it repeatedly.

I can testify that indeed, it helps to put the body in a state of deep relaxation. And very often it does help me to fall asleep.

Here’s how to do it:

• While lying down, place your tongue behind your front teeth, and rest it on your palate. Your tongue should stay in place throughout the breathing session.
• Part your lips and exhale through your mouth to the max, wooshing. That’s a preparation step.
• Next, quietly inhale through your nose, counting to four in your head.
• Then hold your breath as you count to seven.
• Finally, when counting to eight, exhale through your mouth, making a whooshing sound again.

Unchain Your Brain With Buzzing

People use different kinds of buzzy noises to relax, work, study, and sleep.

Some time ago, I started using brown noise during my writing sessions. While music can be often distracting, brown noise soothes the mind and helps to focus on the task at hand.

And one night while I felt unable to enter the magic realm of sleep I thought about brown noise. I took my smartphone, found a brown noise video on YouTube, and used my earphones to listen. It worked like charm. I woke up in the morning amazed that it had been so easy to drift away with brown noise.

From that moment, I’ve used it on several occasions and most of the time I was astonished at how helpful it was. It’s like switching my brain to a different frequency that makes sleep possible.

I’ve read that different people prefer different color noises. Would you choose white, pink, or brown? For me it’s brown, probably because of the extra-deep sound that it offers.

Use Drumming (With No Drum) to Peacefully Fall Asleep

A few years ago I came across a YouTube video titled “How To Trick Your Mind Into falling asleep”. It’s a viral Ted Talk with over 5 million views. The speaker, Jim Donovan, describes a very effective relaxation technique he discovered by chance.

According to Jim, it is a sure-fire method, helping him to onset sleep every single time.

As he learned, the key to falling asleep is rhythm.

Jim is a professional musician and for over 20 years he’s been leading drumming workshops. Each session starts with a simple exercise: the whole group drums together a steady unison beat. And there is something that happens after the exercise every time, unfailingly: the participants realize they feel more relaxed.

As a sleep-deprived person himself, Jim had once an epiphany: Maybe he could practice the exercise before falling asleep but without a drum. How? Just by putting his hands on his laps and tapping rhythmically.

This is how he invented an exercise that helped him sleep through the night after years and years of fighting insomnia. As he says, since inventing the exercise, he’s been getting the best sleep of his life.

The exercise that he called “brain tapping” is very simple and goes like this:

You put your hands on your laps. Start tapping at the speed of a ticking stopwatch, delicately. Breath in slowly counting to four, then breath out counting to four again. After a few repeats, slow the tapping down, until it becomes veeery slow. When you stop, you’ll feel calmness pouring through your body.

I found this exercise very helpful, most of the time. Judging by the wild popularity of the video, loads of people found it effective, too.

Thanks to these three methods I managed to eliminate sleeplessness almost completely from my life. I hope you will find them helpful too.