If you’re lying in bed unable to sleep, the single most effective thing you can do right now is get up. Staying in bed while frustrated trains your brain to associate the bed with wakefulness, making the problem worse over time. What follows are both in-the-moment strategies and longer-term fixes that address the most common reasons people can’t fall asleep.
Get Out of Bed After 20 Minutes
If you’ve been awake for roughly 20 minutes, or you notice yourself starting to feel frustrated, leave the bedroom. Move to another room and do something low-key until you feel genuinely sleepy, then return. If you still don’t fall asleep within another 20 minutes, get up again and repeat. This approach is the cornerstone of cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, the most effective long-term treatment for sleep problems.
The key is choosing activities that occupy your mind just enough to break the cycle of “trying” to sleep, without waking you up further. Good options include reading something light, folding laundry, journaling, gentle stretching, listening to calm music, or making a list (groceries, weekend plans, anything mundane). Avoid anything on a bright screen, anything work-related, or anything emotionally engaging.
Slow Your Breathing
When you can’t sleep, your nervous system is often stuck in an alert state. Controlled breathing is one of the fastest ways to shift it. The 4-7-8 technique works well: inhale through your nose for 4 counts, hold for 7 counts, then exhale slowly through your mouth for 8 counts. The extended exhale is what matters most. It activates the branch of your nervous system responsible for calming you down, slowing your heart rate and loosening muscle tension. Repeat the cycle three or four times.
You can do this in bed or in another room. If counting feels like too much mental effort, simply focus on making your exhale longer than your inhale. That alone triggers the same calming response.
Try Cognitive Shuffling
Racing thoughts are one of the most common reasons people can’t fall asleep, and trying to suppress them usually backfires. Cognitive shuffling gives your brain something to do that’s just interesting enough to interrupt the worry loop but too boring to keep you awake.
Pick a random, emotionally neutral word like “cake.” Take the first letter (C) and visualize as many objects as you can that start with that letter: car, carrot, cottage, candle. Picture each one briefly before moving on. When you run out, move to the next letter in the word (A) and repeat. The trick is to stick with neutral, mundane images. Anything related to work, relationships, or stressful topics will pull you back into alert thinking. Most people don’t make it past the second or third letter before drifting off, because the random, disconnected images mimic the way your brain behaves as it transitions into sleep.
Relax Your Body Deliberately
Physical tension you’re not even aware of can keep you awake. A progressive relaxation technique, sometimes called the military sleep method, works by systematically releasing it. Lie on your back, close your eyes, and start at your forehead. Focus on each body part, notice how it feels, and consciously let it go slack. Move down through your face, jaw, neck, shoulders, arms, hands, chest, stomach, thighs, calves, and feet. Spend a few seconds on each area. Most people hold tension in their jaw and shoulders without realizing it, so give those extra attention.
Cool Your Room Down
Your body needs to drop its core temperature slightly to fall asleep. If your bedroom is too warm, this process stalls. The ideal sleeping temperature for adults is between 60 and 67°F (15 to 19°C), which feels cooler than most people expect. If you don’t have precise thermostat control, crack a window, use a fan, or swap to lighter bedding.
A warm shower or bath can also help, counterintuitively. When you step out of warm water, blood flows to your hands and feet to release heat, and your core temperature drops. A meta-analysis of existing research found that water between 104 and 109°F taken one to two hours before bed, for as little as 10 minutes, significantly shortened the time it took people to fall asleep. If it’s the middle of the night and a full bath isn’t realistic, even soaking your feet in warm water can trigger the same cooling effect.
Block Blue Light Before Bed
Light in the blue wavelength range (roughly 446 to 477 nanometers) suppresses your body’s melatonin production more than three times as effectively as longer-wavelength light. Phones, tablets, laptops, and LED bulbs all emit significant amounts of blue light. Scrolling your phone in bed doesn’t just keep your mind active; it chemically delays your body’s readiness to sleep.
If you’re struggling with sleep regularly, dim the lights in your home in the hour or two before bed and switch devices to night mode or use blue-light-filtering settings. Better yet, put screens away entirely. If you use your phone as an alarm, place it face-down across the room so a notification doesn’t light up your ceiling at 2 a.m.
Watch Your Caffeine Window
Caffeine has a half-life of four to six hours, meaning that half of the caffeine from your 3 p.m. coffee is still circulating at 9 p.m. One study found that caffeine consumed as early as six hours before bedtime measurably disrupted sleep, even when people didn’t feel like it was affecting them. A good cutoff for most people with a standard evening bedtime is 2 p.m. at the latest. If you’re particularly sensitive, noon may be more appropriate. Tea, chocolate, and some medications also contain caffeine that adds up.
When Sleeplessness Becomes a Pattern
A bad night here and there is normal, especially during stressful periods. It becomes a clinical concern when you have difficulty falling or staying asleep at least three nights per week for three months or longer, and it’s affecting how you function during the day. At that point, the issue is chronic insomnia, and the most effective treatment isn’t medication. It’s cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I), a structured program that retrains your sleep habits and thought patterns. Many people see significant improvement within four to eight sessions, and the results tend to last longer than those from sleep medications.
If tonight is just a rough night, the combination of getting out of bed, doing something calm, using a breathing or body-scan technique, and keeping your room cool and dark will give you the best shot at falling asleep. The more you practice these strategies, the less often you’ll need them.