Have you ever wondered how to go to sleep faster at night? Does your nightly routine of tossing and turning have you in turmoil? You probably feel like you’ve tried just about everything to battle sleeplessness, but don’t despair! Your perfect sleeping solution is still out there waiting to be found. Keep reading to learn about the importance of getting enough sleep and discover your perfect solution to help you sleep fast each night.
Why Is Sleep Important?
For you to function properly during the day and be the best version of yourself, you need to provide your body with time to rest and recharge every night. While resting can come in the form of simply lying down, the time when your body can do the most healing is when you are in REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep. During sleep, both your mind and body are free to devote their full attention to repairing themselves and regaining energy rather than focusing on work, school, socializing, exercising, or being stressed. These moments of rejuvenation have the potential to boost your mood, physical performance, disease resistance, and cognitive function as well.
There are countless benefits to increasing the amount of sleep you achieve each night, but some of the most notable ones are as follows:
- Increased cognitive and physical function (reaction times, athletic performance, focus)
- Proper regulation of hormones leading to better metabolism (maintaining or losing weight)
- Improve moods and promote mental health
- Strengthened immune system
On the other hand, some of the adverse effects that come with a lack of proper sleep may include:
- Increased risk of heart attack, stroke, high blood pressure, diabetes
- Lower cognitive function, focus, productivity
- Linked to mental health issues like depression and anxiety
- Weight gain and slower metabolism
Methods to Achieve Faster Sleep
Tired and can’t fall asleep? If you find yourself struggling to fall asleep at night, you’re not alone! According to a study performed by Consumer Reports in 2016, “68 percent—or an estimated 164 million Americans—struggled with sleep at least once a week,” with a remarkable 27 percent reporting that they had trouble falling asleep most nights. With this large prevalence of sleep issues and modern jobs growing rapidly more demanding, the importance of finding the proper method to help you fall asleep and stay asleep has increased significantly. For that reason, we have gathered together some of the most effective ways to go to sleep fast & beat sleeplessness, to slip into dreamland sooner.
Practice Breathing or Meditation Techniques
A problem that countless people face when attempting to fall asleep at night is racing, anxious, or intrusive thoughts, especially those who feel stressed in their daily lives or who find themselves overthinking about the outcomes of the next day. Taking time to practice physical activities to help sleep well such as yoga, breathing, or meditation before bed is a great way to keep yourself grounded in the moment and focus your mind to avoid those racing thoughts and keep your attention from wandering.
Yoga provides a means of relaxing both your muscles and your mind at the same time. If you have some favorite yoga poses already, consider practicing them before bed while focusing on the way your body feels in the moment to keep from worrying about falling asleep. Meditation and breathing techniques go hand in hand with the practice of yoga, giving your mind a simple task into which it can easily zone its attention and remain occupied while you work on relaxing your muscles. You may choose a certain goal to meditate upon or even visualize yourself in your happy place. We have provided some common breathing techniques to try as well:
- 478 Method: Inhale deeply through your mouth for 4 seconds followed by an exhale, then for 7 seconds followed by an exhale, and lastly for 8 seconds with another exhale. Repeat for up to 8 revolutions.
- Box Breathing: Sit up straight and exhale, focusing on flushing all the air from your lungs. Inhale slowly through your nose while counting to 4 in your head, then hold your breath for another 4 seconds. Exhale through your mouth slowly and once again focus on draining as much air from your lungs as possible. Repeat.
- Alternate Nasal Breathing: Exhale fully, then close your right nostril and inhale slowly through the left nostril. Close your left nostril and exhale through your right before inhaling again through your right, eventually closing the right nostril once more as you exhale through the left. Repeat this process as many times as necessary and end by exhaling through your left nostril.
Practice Writing Before Bed
Those who are plagued by anxious thoughts before sleep may find it helpful to take up the habit of journaling before bed. You can write about any number of things, whether it is a reflection on the events of your day, a meditation on your future goals, or cataloging your emotions. Physically writing your thoughts down not only focuses your mind on a particular task, thus keeping it from wandering, but it also is a means of forcing your anxious thoughts or worries to vacate your mind and live on the page in front of you instead.
Focus on Trying to Stay Awake
Another method that some people have found to be effective in combating sleeplessness is to trick your mind into a state of drowsiness via paradoxical intention. Essentially, this involves focusing your attention on staying awake rather than devoting your thoughts to obsessively attempting to fall asleep. The obsession with sleeping can have the opposite of its desired effect by increasing your worries and stress levels when sleep fails to come. If you try to stay up to perform a small task instead, like journaling, sleep may be more likely to find its way to you naturally without the performance anxiety that comes with forcing yourself to sleep.
Lower the Temperature
The ideal conditions to facilitate drowsiness and quick sleep are to keep the environment as dark and quiet as possible and the temperature cool. Because your body temperature decreases as you fall asleep, lowering the temperature in your room may let your body know that it is time to rest, thus helping you to settle in to sleep faster and easier. On that note, what is the best temperature for sleeping? Though it can vary widely according to personal preference, the optimal sleeping temperature recommended by most physicians falls between 60 and 67°F, with the prime temperature being generally agreed upon as 65°F.
Try Sleep-Enhancing Supplements
A completely natural sleep aid, utilizing only two simple ingredients to help you achieve a quicker and better sleep, look no further than Rest Capsule by Vitaldiol. Our formula combines the relaxing effects of both CBD and melatonin to help your body and mind secure the sleep they need to have you feeling revitalized and rejuvenated each morning. Pharmaceutical sleep aids often introduce chemicals into your system to simulate artificial drowsiness, but our naturally occurring ingredients have minimal side effects and work alongside your body’s natural processes to enhance your innate sleep function by increasing melatonin levels and helping maintain your body’s equilibrium.