If you’re lying in bed unable to sleep, the worst thing you can do is keep trying harder. Effort is the enemy of sleep. The techniques that actually work share a common thread: they shift your brain away from the frustration of being awake and toward the relaxed, unfocused state that lets sleep arrive on its own. Here’s what to do tonight, and what to change if this keeps happening.
Stop Trying to Fall Asleep
This sounds counterintuitive, but one of the most effective approaches for people who can’t sleep is to deliberately give up trying. It’s called paradoxical intention, and it works by removing the performance anxiety that builds up when you’re lying there thinking “I need to fall asleep.” The instructions are simple: lie comfortably in bed with the lights off, but keep your eyes open. Don’t make any effort to sleep. When your eyelids feel heavy, gently tell yourself “just stay awake for another couple of minutes.” Don’t do anything stimulating to keep yourself awake. Just stop trying to sleep and let it happen naturally.
The reason this works is that anxiety about not sleeping is itself one of the biggest barriers to falling asleep. The moment you stop caring whether you fall asleep, your body’s natural drive toward sleep can take over without interference.
Use Your Breathing to Flip a Switch
Your nervous system has two competing modes: the stress response that keeps you alert and the relaxation response that calms everything down. Controlled breathing is one of the fastest ways to activate the calming side. The 4-7-8 technique is a good place to start: inhale through your nose for four counts, hold for seven counts, then exhale slowly through your mouth for eight counts. Repeat this three or four times.
The long exhale is the key part. It slows your heart rate, lowers your blood pressure, and signals your body that it’s safe to wind down. If the 7-count hold feels uncomfortable, you can shorten the counts proportionally. The ratio matters more than the exact numbers.
Relax Your Body From Head to Toe
Physical tension you don’t even notice can keep you awake. Progressive muscle relaxation works by deliberately tensing each muscle group, then releasing it, so your body registers the contrast and lets go more completely than it would on its own. Start with your toes and feet: curl your toes, hold briefly, then release. Move slowly up through your calves, thighs, buttocks, lower back, abdomen, upper back, shoulders, arms, hands, neck, jaw, and forehead. Breathe softly throughout.
A variation of this is the military sleep method, developed at the U.S. Navy Pre-Flight School to help pilots fall asleep in two minutes. You lie on your back, close your eyes, and mentally give each body part permission to relax, starting at your forehead and working down to your toes. Once your body feels heavy and loose, you add a visualization: imagine yourself floating in a canoe on a calm river, or lying in a hammock in a dark room. The combination of systematic physical relaxation, deep breathing, and immersive imagery covers all the bases at once.
Give Your Brain Something Boring to Do
Racing thoughts are one of the most common reasons people can’t fall asleep. The trick isn’t to stop thinking. It’s to redirect your thoughts toward something so bland and random that your brain loses interest and drifts off. This is exactly what cognitive shuffling does.
Pick a simple word, like “table.” Take the first letter, T, and picture random things that start with it: tree, train, towel. Move to the next letter, A: apple, arrow, ant. Continue through B, L, E, visualizing each object briefly before moving on. If you run out of words for a letter, skip to the next one. The reason this works is that right before you fall asleep naturally, your thoughts become scattered and nonsensical. Cognitive shuffling mimics that transition. It gives your brain something low-stakes to chew on, redirecting it away from stress without the pressure of “clearing your mind,” which rarely works anyway.
Most people don’t make it through their second word.
If You’ve Been Awake 20 Minutes, Get Up
Lying in bed awake for long stretches trains your brain to associate the bed with wakefulness and frustration. If you’ve been awake for roughly 20 minutes, or if you start feeling frustrated, get out of bed and go to another room. Do something calm and low-stimulation: read a physical book, listen to quiet music, fold laundry, write in a journal, or do gentle stretches.
What you don’t do during this time matters just as much. Avoid screens, eating, exercise, work, or anything mentally stimulating. Don’t watch the clock. When you start feeling drowsy again, go back to bed. If you don’t fall asleep within another 20 minutes, repeat the process. This feels tedious, but it’s one of the core techniques in cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, and it retrains the connection between your bed and actual sleep over time.
Check Your Room Temperature
Your body needs to drop its core temperature slightly to fall asleep, and a warm room works against that process. The ideal bedroom temperature for sleep is between 60 and 65 degrees Fahrenheit (15.5 to 18.3 Celsius). If your room is in the 70 to 75 degree range, that alone can promote insomnia, according to Alon Avidan, director of the UCLA Sleep Disorders Center. If you can’t control your thermostat, a fan, lighter bedding, or wearing less to bed can help your body shed heat.
Melatonin: What It Can and Can’t Do
Melatonin is a hormone your body produces naturally as it gets dark, and supplemental melatonin can help nudge your sleep timing in the right direction. For short-term sleep problems, a 2mg slow-release dose taken one to two hours before bedtime is standard. It’s not a sedative. It won’t knock you out. What it does is signal to your brain that it’s nighttime, which can be helpful if your natural rhythm is off due to travel, shift work, or too much evening screen time.
Melatonin works best for occasional use. For ongoing sleep difficulties, it’s generally recommended for no more than 13 weeks without specialist guidance. It’s also not a fix for the racing thoughts or physical tension that keep most people awake on a given night. The breathing and relaxation techniques above will do more for you in the moment.
When Sleepless Nights Become a Pattern
Everyone has occasional bad nights. That’s normal and not a sign of a sleep disorder. Clinical insomnia, as defined in diagnostic criteria, means difficulty falling or staying asleep at least three nights per week for three months or longer, with noticeable effects on how you function during the day. If your sleep problems have reached that frequency and duration, the techniques in this article still help, but they work best as part of a structured program called cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I), which a sleep specialist can guide you through. CBT-I is more effective than sleeping pills for long-term insomnia and doesn’t carry the same risks of dependence.