If you’re lying in bed reading this on your phone, you can realistically fall asleep in the next few minutes using a handful of physical and mental techniques. The fastest approaches work by activating your body’s built-in relaxation response, which lowers your heart rate, slows your breathing, and signals your brain that it’s safe to drift off. Here’s what to do right now, starting with the quickest options.
Try the Military Sleep Method
This technique was developed at the U.S. Navy Pre-Flight School to help pilots fall asleep in two minutes under stressful conditions. It reportedly works for about 96% of people after six weeks of practice, but many people notice results the first night. Start by lying on your back and systematically releasing every point of tension in your body.
Begin with your face. Unclench your jaw and let it go slack. Relax your tongue. Smooth your forehead. Let your cheeks feel heavy. Close your eyes and let the muscles around them go soft. Then drop your shoulders as low as they’ll go, one side at a time. Let your arms fall limp at your sides. Take a deep breath and release your chest, then your belly. Let your stomach rise and fall naturally. Finally, relax your thighs, calves, and feet. Once your whole body feels heavy, spend about 10 seconds clearing your mind by imagining yourself lying in a canoe on a calm lake or curled up in a black velvet hammock. If thoughts intrude, silently repeat “don’t think” for 10 seconds.
Use 4-7-8 Breathing
This is probably the single most effective thing you can do in the next 60 seconds. The extended exhale activates your parasympathetic nervous system, which is the branch responsible for calming your fight-or-flight response and shifting your body toward rest.
Inhale quietly through your nose for 4 counts. Hold your breath for 7 counts. Exhale slowly through your mouth for 8 counts. That’s one cycle. Repeat three more times for a total of four cycles. The key is making the exhale longer than the inhale. If the 4-7-8 count feels too long, scale it down proportionally (try 2-3.5-4) and work your way up. Within two or three rounds, you’ll likely feel a noticeable heaviness in your limbs.
Stop Trying to Sleep
This sounds counterintuitive, but the harder you try to fall asleep, the more awake you become. Sleep researchers call this “performance anxiety,” and it’s one of the most common reasons people stay awake. The fix is a technique called paradoxical intention: instead of trying to sleep, you deliberately try to stay awake.
Lie in bed with the lights off, keep your eyes gently open, and tell yourself your only job is to stay awake. Don’t do anything active to keep yourself alert. Don’t move around, don’t think of stimulating topics. Just passively resist the urge to close your eyes. When your eyelids start to droop, reopen them. By removing the pressure to sleep, you remove the anxiety that was keeping you up, and sleep arrives on its own. If you wake up during the night and can’t fall back asleep, use the same approach.
Scramble Your Thoughts With Cognitive Shuffling
If your mind is racing with tomorrow’s to-do list or replaying something from the day, this technique breaks the loop. Pick a simple, emotionally neutral word like “lamp.” Then go through each letter and think of as many words as you can that start with that letter. For “lamp,” you’d start with L: lemon, ladder, laptop, lobster, lullaby. When you run out of L words, move to A: apple, anchor, acorn. Then M, then P.
The randomness of this exercise mimics the disjointed thinking your brain does naturally as it drifts into sleep. Go at whatever pace feels comfortable. If you lose track of where you are or forget your starting word, that’s actually a sign it’s working. Just pick a new word and keep going. Most people don’t make it through a second word.
Do a Quick Body Scan
Progressive muscle relaxation works by tensing and then releasing each muscle group in sequence. The contrast between tension and release triggers a deeper relaxation than simply “trying to relax.” Start at your toes and feet. Curl them tightly, hold for a few seconds until you really feel the tension, then let go completely. Move to your calves, then thighs, buttocks, lower back, abdomen, upper back, shoulders, arms, hands, neck, jaw, and forehead.
Spend roughly five seconds tensing each group and then at least ten seconds enjoying the release. By the time you reach your forehead, your body will feel significantly heavier than when you started. Pair this with slow, deep breaths for an even stronger effect.
Fix Your Environment Right Now
A few quick changes to your room can make all of these techniques work better.
Cool the room down. The ideal bedroom temperature for sleep is around 65°F (18.3°C), with a comfortable range of 60 to 68°F. Your core body temperature naturally drops by about 2°F as you fall asleep, and a cool room helps that process along. If you can’t adjust your thermostat, kick one leg out from under the covers. The exposed skin radiates heat and helps your body cool faster.
Put your phone face down or across the room. Blue light from screens suppresses your body’s sleep hormone for roughly twice as long as other types of light and can shift your internal clock by up to three hours. If you’re using your phone to read this, switch to the dimmest setting or a red-tinted night mode, then put it away as soon as you’ve picked a technique to try.
Block out light and noise. Even dim light filtering through your eyelids can interfere with sleep onset. A pillow over your eyes works in a pinch. For noise, a fan or white noise app can mask disruptions without being stimulating.
If You’ve Been Lying There 10 Minutes
Sleep specialists at the University of Pennsylvania recommend getting out of bed if you haven’t fallen asleep within about 10 minutes. The goal is to keep your brain from associating your bed with frustration and wakefulness. Don’t watch the clock, though. Instead, use your feelings as a guide: if you’re starting to feel frustrated or anxious about not sleeping, that’s your signal to get up.
Go to another room and do something relaxing in dim light. Reading a physical book, listening to a calm podcast, or doing light stretching all work. Avoid your computer or doing anything work-related. The light from a monitor up close is brighter than most people realize, and the content tends to be mentally stimulating. Stay up until you feel genuinely sleepy, then return to bed and restart one of the techniques above.
If you wake up in the middle of the night and don’t fall back asleep quickly, follow the same rule. Get up, keep the lights low, do something boring and pleasant, and go back when your eyelids feel heavy.
A Warm Shower Trick for Tonight
If you haven’t gotten into bed yet, a warm shower or bath can accelerate sleep onset significantly. Water between 104 and 109°F draws blood to the surface of your skin. When you step out, that blood rapidly cools, pulling your core body temperature down and mimicking the natural drop your body needs to initiate sleep. A meta-analysis from the University of Texas found that the ideal timing is about 90 minutes before bed, but even a quick warm shower 30 minutes beforehand can help. If you’re already in bed and don’t want to get up for a full shower, running warm water over your hands and feet for a minute or two, then letting them air-dry, creates a milder version of the same cooling effect.