How to fall asleep fast, and what to do when you can't

How to fall asleep fast: a cool dark room, the same bedtime, slow breathing, a body scan, the military method, and getting up when you can't sleep.

28 October 20266 min read

To fall asleep fast, go to bed at the same time each night, keep the bedroom cool and dark, and put the laptop away an hour before bed. Once the light is off, use slow breathing or a body scan to relax, and if you are still wide awake after what feels like 20 minutes, get up and do something calm in dim light until you feel sleepy.

Most of what makes sleep come quickly happens before you lie down, so start there.

How to fall asleep fast: start before bed

Make the room cool, dark and quiet

Your body temperature drops as you fall asleep, and a cool room helps it along. Many sleep experts suggest a bedroom somewhere around 65 degrees Fahrenheit (about 18 Celsius), cooler than most people keep the rest of the house. If you can't control the heating, lighter covers or a window open a crack can do the same job.

Dark matters too. Even a small light, a streetlamp through a gap in the curtains or a charging light across the room, can bother a light sleeper. Blackout curtains or an eye mask fix that. For noise, earplugs help some people, and a steady sound such as a fan suits others because it covers sudden noises.

Charge your phone outside the bedroom if you can. Alarm clocks still exist.

Go to bed at the same time

A regular bedtime and wake time train your body clock to get sleepy on cue. If your bedtime moves around by an hour or two every night, sleep keeps arriving at the wrong moment, and you lie there waiting for it. Fix your wake time first, weekends included, and bedtime becomes much easier. Why a consistent bedtime matters explains the body clock behind this.

Put the laptop away an hour earlier

The light from a screen at night gets most of the blame, but what you are doing on it probably matters more. A tense email, a work problem left half solved or one more episode keep your mind running long after the lid closes. Stop work about an hour before bed, write down tomorrow's first task so it is out of your head, and spend the last hour on something calmer. Screens before bed goes into what actually keeps you awake.

On a Mac, two settings help the last hour along:

Night Shift. In System Settings > Displays, click Night Shift (the button sits near the bottom of the pane in recent versions of macOS) and set a schedule, so the screen warms up on its own in the evening.
Downtime. In System Settings > Screen Time > Downtime, set a nightly schedule after which only the apps you choose are available. It makes "just one more thing" a little harder.

Caffeine late in the day works against all of this. It stays in your system for hours, so a mid-afternoon coffee can still be working at bedtime. If sleep is slow to come, move your last cup earlier and see whether it helps.

How to fall asleep fast once the light is off

It is normal not to drop off the moment your head touches the pillow. These techniques give your mind something quiet to do while your body gets there.

Slow your breathing

Breathe in gently through your nose, then breathe out slowly, letting the out-breath run longer than the in-breath. A count of four in and six out is a comfortable start. Long, slow out-breaths are widely thought to calm the nervous system, and counting gives your mind something dull to hold on to. One well-known version, 4-7-8 breathing, is usually credited to the American doctor Andrew Weil: in for four, hold for seven, out for eight. If the hold makes you feel short of air, skip it and just breathe out slowly. 4-7-8 breathing for sleep has the full steps.

Do a body scan

Start at your feet and move slowly upward: feet, calves, knees, thighs, hips, belly, chest, hands, arms, shoulders, neck, jaw, face. At each part, notice how it feels and let it soften. If you prefer something more active, tense each part gently for a few seconds, then let it go. That version is called progressive muscle relaxation. Many people are asleep before they reach their shoulders.

Give your mind something boring

A racing mind is the usual reason sleep won't come. Replace the racing thoughts with something that has no stakes: count backward from 300 in threes, or picture walking slowly through a house you know well, room by room. It works best when it is boring enough to drift away from.

Does the military method work?

The so-called military method is usually traced to a 1981 book on relaxation for athletes by the American track coach Bud Winter, who described teaching a version of it to US Navy pilots during the Second World War. It goes like this:

Relax the muscles of your face, including your forehead, jaw, tongue and the muscles around your eyes.
Drop your shoulders as low as they will go, then let your arms go loose, one side at a time.
Breathe out and let your chest relax.
Let your legs go heavy, thighs first, then calves and feet.
Clear your mind for about ten seconds by picturing a calm scene, such as lying in a canoe on a still lake under a clear sky.
If thoughts keep coming, repeat "don't think, don't think" to yourself for ten seconds or so.

Does it work? It is really a fast body scan with a calming image at the end, and both of those parts are reasonable ways to relax. The dramatic claims you will see online about how quickly it puts people to sleep come from that book's own account, not from careful studies, so take them lightly. Like most relaxation techniques it seems to get easier with practice, so give it a couple of weeks before you judge it.

What should you do if you can't fall asleep?

Get up. It sounds backward, but lying in bed awake and frustrated teaches your brain that bed is a place for being awake. Sleep specialists often suggest this instead:

If you have been awake for what feels like 20 minutes or so, get out of bed. Don't check the clock to measure it; a rough feeling is enough.
Go to another room, or at least another chair, and keep the lights low.
Do something quiet and slightly dull: read a paper book, fold laundry, listen to something calm.
Go back to bed only when you feel sleepy, not just tired.
Get up at your usual time in the morning, even after a bad night.

Avoid the things that wake you up further: checking your phone, opening the laptop "for a minute", eating a big snack, or watching the clock. A drink may help you drop off, but alcohol tends to break up sleep later in the night, so it is a poor sleep aid.

Help with the last hour before bed

Notchpals is no use once you are in bed, and it doesn't track sleep. It works earlier, in the stretch of evening when the laptop is still open and the last hour before bed is slipping away, and as the first section showed, that hour is where falling asleep fast mostly starts. Put a Sleep character such as Snooze, a sloth who does everything slowly, in your crew, set your bedtime, and Snooze comes down from your Mac's notch at the start of that last hour.

Snooze, Sleep: **Wind down**, about an hour before your bedtime

Work on past your bedtime and Snooze comes back once. If you are still there in the small hours, there is one last visit:

Snooze, Sleep: **Very late**, 1:00 to 4:30 AM

None of these come once you have left the Mac.

When it is more than a bad night

Everyone has nights when sleep won't come, especially before a big day. If it happens most nights for weeks, if you wake in the small hours and can't get back to sleep, or if you feel exhausted during the day despite enough time in bed, talk to a doctor. Long-running trouble sleeping is common, and a doctor can talk you through the options. One that sleep specialists often recommend is a structured program called cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I), which includes the "get up if you can't sleep" idea above.

Also see a doctor if someone has noticed you snore loudly or stop breathing in your sleep, or if your legs feel restless and uncomfortable when you lie down. Those are worth checking whatever time you go to bed.