There Are Lots of Hacks to Fall Asleep Faster. Do They Work?

It’s clearer than ever how important sleep is for your health. Getting enough sleep lowers your risk for cancer, cardiovascular disease and dementia. But falling asleep isn’t always as easy as just laying down and shutting your eyes. Enter countless new hacks for getting your body to relax and move into that precious state of shuteye. Does this sound familiar? If you breathe this many times for this many seconds, or imagine this specific thing, you’ll fall asleep in two minutes.

Is there anything to these sleep hacks? Here’s what you need to know.  

What we know about falling asleep  

Sleep medicine doctors have a very effective way of knowing whether you’ve fallen asleep: the electrical activity in your brain. In a sleep study, they will use an electroencephalogram, or an EEG, to look at that activity and track what phase of sleep you’re in. Doctors know you’ve gone from being awake to being asleep when the EEG slows down.  

But you can’t force this to happen — instead it’s about creating the right environment for your nervous system to relax and your brain to calm down.  

“Falling asleep is something that happens given the right circumstances, it's not something you do,” says Nathanial Watson, MD, a neurologist and sleep medicine specialist who is co-director for the UW Medicine Sleep Center. 

Many of the sleep hacks you might see on social media, or the sleep meditations you play before bed, are simply repackaging ways to create those circumstances.  

“You can label it whatever you want, they're all basically using the same techniques,” says Watson.  

What are those techniques?  

Deep breathing

One hack that’s been recirculated on social media is the military sleep method — supposedly what soldiers use to fall asleep in active combat — which starts with closing your eyes and breathing deeply. And guess what? That can be a very helpful way to get your body ready for sleep.  

“We know that deep breathing can foster relaxation,” says Watson.

Deep breathing slows your heart rate and lowers your blood pressure, and helps you move into the parasympathetic, or “rest and relax,” nervous system, which is all very conducive to sleep. 

You don’t need any kind of special method to do this, though. One easy way to try it? Breathe in deeply while counting to four, then hold it and count to seven, and finally exhale for the count of eight.  

Progressive muscle relaxation

Another technique used in the military sleep method and many other hacks is progressive muscle relaxation, in which you mentally scan your body from head to toe, relaxing each muscle and releasing tension as you go. You can imagine a warm light moving from your head, down your arms to your fingertips, then from your heart down to your toes.  

“Progressive muscle relaxation can also put the body and the mind in a state that is prepared to allow sleep to happen,” says Watson.  

Visualization

Visualization is another proven way to create the circumstances for sleep that comes up in different techniques for falling asleep. Watson recommends finding something to visualize that you’re interested in, but that doesn’t really matter.

“All you're trying to do is distract the brain from thinking about things that are more activating as you're trying to drift off to sleep,” says Watson. “For me it might be what are the Seattle Mariners’ batting averages right now.”  

This is not the same as ruminating on something that’s giving you stress, like a presentation you’re preparing to give at work. It’s finding something that you can focus on to steer your brain away from those sorts of things so you can start to relax.

The risks of using a specific sleep hack

For all of these techniques, you can find apps and videos to give you guided instructions and meditations, but beware of getting too focused on following instructions perfectly.  

“People sometimes develop difficulty sleeping when they're trying too hard to sleep,” says Watson.

If you’re attempting to perfectly follow a specific sleep protocol, you can actually increase your brain activity and make it harder to fall asleep.  

The importance of a sleep routine

One thing is for sure: Having a consistent routine before bed is crucial for good sleep.  

“The body needs to know that sleep is imminent, and that's why having a consistent schedule in your life is important,” says Watson. “If you do the same thing every night — wash your face, brush your teeth, put on your pajamas, get into bed, read five pages of a book — and then go to sleep, that will make it such that when you finally turn off the light, everything that you have told your body up to that point is that it’s time to sleep now.”

In fact, Watson says, consistency itself is probably more important than what you choose to do before sleep. If every time you go to bed you do the same deep breathing exercise or body scan, that’s more important than the content of the exercise.  

Of course, it’s also important not to incorporate things into your before-bed routine that activate your brain, like scrolling on your phone or watching TV, which can confuse your brain and keep you awake past the point where you’re tired.

“All these things take effort; prioritizing your sleep is not easy,” says Watson. “But if a person does those things, their reward will be consistent, restful nightly sleep.”