How to Fall Asleep Fast

While some lucky people can fall asleep in just 5 minutes or less, for others, it takes much longer. If you’re one of those for who drifting off to sleep in 5, 10, or even 15 minutes feels unachievable, we’ve collated our tips on falling asleep fast. Whether it’s your thoughts, distractions or the feeling of not being tired keeping you up at night, there are many things you can do to improve your sleep efficiency.

The way you breathe can correlate negatively to your ability to sleep. Maybe more than you think. Breathing can control your stress levels, and finding it tough to sleep can aggravate those stress levels and signal to the brain that you are not ready to switch off. However, there are plenty of breathing techniques you can use to relax.

Simply laying down in your ideal sleeping position, inhaling through your nose, filling your lungs to full capacity, and then exhaling slowly out of your mouth is enough to relax and calm yourself. But if that doesn’t work, you can always try some more interesting techniques.

Alternating the nostrils when you breathe through can send signals to your brain that you are ready to relax. This is because breathing through your mouth is often associated with forms of stress, such as when we are unwell or our heart rate has been elevated after exercise. Alternating the nostril you breathe in and out of before falling asleep can give your brain the sign it is time to rest. Double exhalation is another trick to keep your mind away from stressful thinking. Breathing in this way helps to reset the autonomic nervous system by synchronising the neural elements in your brain, heart and lungs. Simply do this by exhaling twice as long as you inhale.

A more researched breathing technique that has been proven to help people fall asleep is Dr Andrew Weil’s 4-7-8 method. This technique may take some practice, but advocates claim that it can help them fall asleep in as little as 60 seconds. To find out how to do this, see our 4-7-8 breathing technique guide.

Equally important is avoiding food and drink that isn’t conducive to sleep. Sugary snacks, high-carb meals, alcohol and caffeine are all considered detrimental, particularly when consumed close to bedtime. Read more in our articles on caffeine and sleep and how alcohol affects sleep quality.

“Mindfulness is the energy that helps us recognise the conditions of happiness that are already present in our lives”

– Thich Nhat Hanh (Buddhist Monk, Poet, Scholar & Human Activist)

These techniques involve a combination of exercises contributing to a calmer state of mind. Concentrating on your thoughts, breathing and body, all help to alleviate tension. These exercises include:

• Breathing techniques – as alluded to earlier, focusing on the breath helps sends signals to your brain that it is time to rest.
• Journaling helps to ensure your mind is clear from worries by noting down your thoughts and feelings from the day prior and preparing yourself for the day ahead. This has even been proven to be effective with a study by the Baylor University Sleep Neuroscience and Cognition Laboratory, suggesting that noting down before bed can help people fall asleep quicker.
• Yoga – participating in stretching exercises before bed can help to fall asleep, even if you have sleep conditions such as insomnia, a study by Halpern et al Or if yoga is not your thing, systematically tensing and relaxing your muscles can release stress and anxiety, a technique which comes under progressive muscle relaxation.

Music has been shown to affect our nervous system directly, allowing our bodies to relax and settle in for a good night’s rest. In fact, around 62% of the population use music as a tool to help them sleep.

Advanced brainwave entertainment combines ambient music, nature sounds, and other audio clips especially programmed for sleep, focus and stress relief. One of the most popular is white noise, but did you know there are other colours of noise too? Learn all about each type in our article on how to sleep better with white, pink and brown noise.

With this in mind, there are a few ways to ensure your room in just right for sleep. Resist the urge to check your phone whilst trying to get to sleep. Studies have shown that the blue light from phones can halt melatonin production, meaning it will take longer for you to produce the right amount for sleeping.

Reading whilst lying in bed often leaves many people drifting off with their books on their faces. This is due to the minute eye movements occurring, combined with the focus you are delivering to read, making you feel increasingly tired until you eventually drift off. Reading before bed is an ideal way to dim the lights and increase your melatonin production to an adequate level to signal your brain that it’s time to sleep.

Reading before bed can help you fall asleep faster, but why does it? Discover what reading before bed does to an adults brain.

Visualisation can expand your ability to focus on calming your mind and help you create restful images that will allow you to unwind and fall asleep. Visualise yourself in a deeply relaxed state surrounded by mountains, oceans, or whatever makes you feel most at peace. This type of sensory meditation has been proven to help people fall asleep in mindfulness techniques such as the 5-4-3-2-1 grounding method.

As melatonin production increases when our body temperature decreases, facilitating this dip in body temperature can be done manually. Taking a warm bath or shower before bed is not only a relaxation remedy but the change in your body temperature when you snuggle into your duvet will stimulate a reduction in your body temperature.

A hot bath may be the answer to your sleeping difficulties. The benefits of hot bath for sleeping

You may wake up to the sound of rumbles from your partner, or maybe you are the perpetrator. Either way, snoring can be annoyingly disruptive, so much so that it affects your sleep quality. There are ways to stop snoring, ranging from lifestyle changes to simple solutions such as changing your sleeping position and snoring aids.

Whether it is you, your partner, or someone else in your household, our guide on how to stop someone from snoring offers lots of short-term fixes. But if you are after a long-term solution, our guide on how to stop snoring naturally provides many answers to the conundrum.

While our sleep survey found an 18% increase in sharing the bed with a pet since 2016, the Mayo Clinic discovered that 53% of those who sleep with their pet are disturbed by them during the night! To solve this, train your pets to sleep in another room– always establish the bedroom as off-limits and stick to it. Also, feed and let pets out earlier in the day to move their routines forward, and don’t respond when they bark or cry.

Caffeine can remain in your system for as much as 12 hours! This means that your blood pressure will be higher, and you will feel more energised when it comes to sleep. But drinking coffee to combat your tiredness throughout the day is not ideal, as it can create a ‘coffee cycle’, making you more susceptible to sleep deprivation.

There is a solution. If you are a coffee drinker, it’s good to know how coffee effects your sleep and how you can ensure it doesn’t keep you up at night. Keep note of the coffee you are drinking and when you are drinking it. That way, you can figure out at what time you should have your last cup of coffee for the day.

See how you can drink coffee without affecting your sleep. The 10-3-2-1-0 method for better sleep.

“If you have quite a high-fat meal before you go to bed it will prevent you having the same amount of time in deep REM sleep that we would want to get that very restful restorative sleep phase. So even though people might have the same sleep duration, their sleep quality may be somewhat impaired.”

While high-carb diets may lead to more REM sleep, and therefore limit deep sleep, carbohydrates are still an important nutrient for sleep. They increase the production of tryptophan, the building block of serotonin and the sleep hormone melatonin. The issue comes when digesting the food.

Carbohydrates take longer to absorb, making it more difficult to get your much-needed shut-eye as your metabolism has to continue working hard. There are solutions though, simply having your evening meal earlier or replacing it with a lighter, protein-filled meal.

There are some obvious signs for when you need a new mattress. Perhaps you struggle to get comfy during the night, can feel springs poking your back, or there’s a dip in the middle of your mattress. All of these can cause pain and discomfort, while signs of mould and bacteria can be common with old mattresses, especially in poorly ventilated rooms.

But it might not just be the age of the mattress. You may need a different type for your sleeping position, are starting to suffer from back pain, now weigh more or less than you used to. Whatever the scenario, our mattress guides can help. Or you can use our online Sleep Match tool which asks a number of questions about your sleeping style before identifying the best mattresses.

1 in 10 people says their children disturb their sleep. This rises to 26% for parents aged 25-34, the age bracket most likely to have young children. Although this may be a bit trickier to fix, it’s best to be consistent, so if they try to hop in your bed, always escort them back to their room. They’ll soon get used to sleeping in their own bed, leaving you to get some well-needed shut-eye!

Sometimes you really can’t drift off, perhaps you are sleeping away from home, or maybe you can’t sleep because you are excited for the day ahead. Either way, you still need to get your sleep. So if you definitely can’t get back to sleep, you mustn’t watch the clock, as this can just increase your anxiety.

Instead of watching the time tick away, you could get up and do something. Light reading, meditating or listening to music are just some activities to reduce your stress levels. Changing your scenery and going to a different quiet space in your home can help you relax and feel sleepy again.

We have lots of tips and tricks you can use to help you fall asleep, from sleeping techniques to understanding what your Dreams mean. Discover the answers to all your sleep problems with the Sleep Matters Club.