I Trained Myself to Fall Asleep in Under 10 Minutes. Here's How.

Magnesium, melatonin, ashwagandha, sleepy mocktails, mouth tape, a 12-ingredient sleep stack that somebody's selling you for $79 a month. There are literally thousands of sleep products out there, and almost none of them tell you the most important thing. Sleep isn't a one-lover problem. And I know because I've personally tried a lot of these supplements to help improve my sleep. It used to take me at minimum 45 minutes to an hour, sometimes 2 hours to fall asleep. And sometimes if I woke up at 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning, my mind would just be racing and I wouldn't be able to go back to sleep. So I was reaching for different types of sleep aids to just turn my brain off. Now, don't get me wrong, some of these supplements and products can help some people, but none of them can fix a problem that they're not actually aimed at. And for most people who can't sleep, the problem isn't because they are missing some sort of ingredient that is sold in a supplement. It's that nobody actually took the time to figure out why that person can't actually sleep and what the mechanism is behind it. So now, after personally taking the time to address that problem for myself, I now fall asleep in under 10 minutes. Without sleep aids. And really the thing that helped me the most was actually spending less time in bed. So now in this video, I wanna show you the core techniques and tips that I found that are backed by science to help me fall asleep in less than 10 minutes consistently. First of all, let's talk about the framework behind sleep. Sleep in itself is very multifactorial. It involves your body, your mind, and your behaviors all at once. That's why a single supplement rarely fixes the problem at its core. So I actually took the time to go through a CBT-I or cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia program. really to learn more about these factors that influence sleep and how to actually train myself to sleep better. And CBT-I is actually one of the first-line treatments that a lot of sleep doctors will recommend. And the biggest lesson I learned throughout this course is that you really have to diagnose what your sleep issue is before you decide to find a treatment for it. So there are 3 questions you want to go through when you're trying to fall asleep and addressing what is actually the issue here. Number one is your mind. Is your mind constantly racing when you try to go to sleep? Are you thinking about What just happened your day and replaying through different situations, or maybe you're worrying about falling asleep. Those are all mind-related symptoms. Next is your body. Is your body something that keeps you up? Meaning maybe it's like restless legs or your body is just feeling wired, or you lay down and you have a really high heart rate, or do you have tension or pain sitting in the body that's keeping you up? Third is looking at your behaviors. Like, is your sleep schedule actively working against you, or do you even know about what a proper sleep schedule should look like for you? Maybe you're spending too much time in bed, or you've been doing doing other activities in bed like working, checking emails, watching TV, that your brain starts to subconsciously associate bed with an activity. Maybe you have an inconsistent wake time, or you just haven't allowed yourself to build up enough physiological sleep drive. Those are all behavioral components to sleep. Each one runs in a unique, different kind of circuitry and system in the body, which is exactly why fixing one of those things doesn't always fix the other. Now, oftentimes a lot of folks who have trouble sleeping experience all 3 of those things, as I did. So let's go through each of those, and you can figure out which one of those 3 categories you fall into, or maybe all 3. So let's start with the mind, because that's probably the one that a lot of you guys can relate most to, in particular having a racing mind while you're laying down to go to sleep. Now, if you fall into this category, the goal here is what researchers call to lower your cognitive arousal, which essentially means giving your brain permission to stop problem solving, because our brains love to problem solve, but it's not really convenient at 11 PM. So here are some research-backed ways to help lower cognitive arousal. Number one is just taking about 5 minutes and writing out a to-do list before you go to bed. Now again, our brains love to problem solve, so unfinished tasks kind of just nag at our brains and they want to hold on to those things and problem solve. So writing them down actually is a way to trick your brain to say, hey, these things are finished or going to be finished, but they are out of your working memory and onto paper. Another key thing is giving your brain something boring to do. Well, maybe not even just boring, but monotonous. Reading a book, knitting, doing a relaxing and somewhat easy puzzle, following an audio-guided meditation track. So if you give your brain something else to focus on other than your own worries, your own to-do list, your own stuff for the day, it's really only able to focus on that thing and less on your own stuff. Now those are 2 really good techniques to lower cognitive arousal, but here's the thing: if your body is still tense or wired or maybe holding pain, then you're still not going be able to fall into a deep and restful sleep. Which brings me to the second category, and that is that your body is wired. Now when I say wired, again, I mean like a racing heart rate. Maybe you feel jittery, you have extra energy in your body, or you're feeling tension or pain in the body. If any of those apply to you, then you know that your nervous system is not going to let you drift off to sleep easily. The goal in this category is to work to switching your nervous system from fight or flight to rest and digest. For me personally, in addressing this category, a lot of what I was personally experiencing that was keeping me up and keeping my body wired was pain. I had been having a lot of neck and low back issues and sometimes having numbing and shooting pain going down my arm when I laid down at night. And that was a guaranteed way to keep me up for at least an hour. But sometimes if it wasn't even that, it was just tension in my body from just the constant go, go, go, go, go, and then trying to get to sleep right away. Now here are a few things that I learned really help to lower your physical arousal. Studies have shown that even just 10 minutes of a warm bath or shower can meaningfully shorten the amount of time it takes you to fall asleep. So the reason why this works is because warm water actually helps to pull blood to the surface of the skin, which then helps our bodies to dump heat even faster and therefore lower our core body temperature, which is a key signal to induce sleep for our bodies. So that's one technique that I found really, really helps, because once that core temperature drops, it allows our heart rate to slow down and our bodies to feel less tense and less wired. Secondly, if you're somebody who is dealing with chronic pain, it is very important to help address the pain and lower that pain stimulus before initiating sleep as well. And that's actually where today's sponsor SKG comes into play. Now, these 3 devices from SKG genuinely live in my wind-down routine and have helped me reduce my pain so much before going to bed. So here's how I personally use them to help reduce my pain before going to sleep and help my body relax. First in the routine is the SKG W9 Ultra. This one I usually start with early in the evening, usually right after dinner, especially if I've lifted fairly heavy that day or had a particularly difficult volleyball session, my low back is usually pretty tense. And that's exactly what the W9 Ultra is for. It combines kneading from 8 titanium nodes, pulse stimulation, and heat with red and near-infrared light. And it's slim enough to wear underneath a shirt, and it straps on perfectly so I can move around with it if I don't want to necessarily stay on the couch. So even while I am reading and trying to settle down my mind, I can actively have this on and also be settling down my body at the same time. Next, on nights where my neck is just really flaring up in pain and I cannot seem to get rid of it with any amount of stretching, I reach for the G7 Pro neck massager. The G7 Pro uses TENS and EMS technology to help reduce pain. Yes, the same type of tech that's used in physical therapy offices. TENS actually works on your sensory nerves to turn down the pain signals, and the EMS gently contracts and releases those muscles. And the titanium heads heat up in about 5 seconds, which feels so, so lovely. So after I've finished a round of using the W9 Ultra, I will put on the G7 Pro and allow that to reduce some of the neck pain I have going on. And best part is the G7 Pro folds really easily so I can bring it with me when I'm traveling so I don't have to, you know, have any pain issues when I'm trying to fall asleep in a hotel. And finally, once I'm ready to turn off the lights and finish reading, I put on the PS700 neck and shoulder massager. Unlike the other 2, this one is just purely physical kneading, so no TENS, no EMS. The massage heads are actually designed to mimic like actual physical kneading into the shoulders to reach deeper tissues. Now the reason why I save the PS700 for last is the built-in audio tracks. When using the paired app with the SKG device, you're able to access over 100 different audio tracks that are relaxing soundscapes, guided meditations, different music, breathing exercises that can help you to relax. It's quiet. It shuts off after about 15 minutes and it allows you to gently drift off to sleep. So those have been 3 key devices to helping me to reduce my pain levels, allow my body to release some tension in my body before going to sleep. Now, one caveat is you don't want to use any of the devices with the TENS or EMS like the G7 Pro or W9 Ultra if you have a pacemaker. Or some other embedded electrical device in your body, but the PS700 is still fair game. So thank you SKG for sponsoring today's video. And if you're interested in checking out any of those 3 devices or you want to get all 3, links are down below in the description. So speaking of guided meditations and breathing, one last way to actually decrease tension in the body and lower your heart rate is focusing on your breath, specifically by doing a longer exhale than your inhale. A longer exhale nudges your nervous system towards rest and actually lowers your heart rate. Personally, I'm a fan of doing 4-7-8 breaths if I'm trying to relax. Plus, it also gives my brain the boring job of counting numbers. And finally, the third category that is really important that helped me to fall asleep in under 10 minutes is focusing on my behavior. Now, an important thing to consider is that when we are talking about sleep behaviors, we're not just talking about the behaviors that you do right before you fall asleep. We're talking about the behaviors that you do throughout the day that lead up to an optimal sleeping environment. So one of those big things is orchestrating your day so that you have a food cutoff and a work cutoff. I personally found that cutting off my food intake around 6 or 7 o'clock is ideal. And same with work, cutting off my work by 7 PM at the absolute latest and turning that off, not having to respond to emails, has been such a good way to allow my brain to decompress. So cutting off your food and your work 3 hours before you go to sleep is optimal. Secondly, another big component of the CBT-I course was learning how to improve your sleep efficiency and decrease the amount of time that you're spending in bed awake. One of those facets included avoiding doing anything else but sleeping in your bed. So even reading I was doing in my bed before, and I took that to the couch in the living room. That's really important because your brain starts to subconsciously associate different rooms and environments with a certain thing. So another huge behavioral component of the CBT-I course that I went through was focusing on sleep efficiency, and that required something called sleep compression, which means compressing your sleep window into a smaller window than you normally would to increase something called physiological sleep drive, which I'll get to in a second. Let's say I was normally going to sleep at 9:30 PM and would lay in bed not able to fall asleep until 10:30, and then maybe wake up a couple of times in the middle of the night with a racing mind. This course would recommend actually compressing that sleep window and waiting until about 11 or 11:30 to go to sleep. That would be compressing my sleep window to less time, which then over time makes you more tired, makes you more efficient at falling asleep at that time every single night. And then gradually you lengthen that sleep window little by little until you're still able to fall asleep quickly at 10 o'clock or 9:30 PM again. So yes, while the first couple weeks were rough and it felt like I wasn't getting enough sleep because I really wasn't. Here's what was actually happening. First, again, building that sleep pressure or that physiological sleep drive. There's actually a chemical in your brain that builds up called adenosine that increases and increases and increases the longer that you're awake, and that's a big part of what makes you sleepy. Secondly, that consistent wake time anchors your body's circadian rhythm, so your body starts to predict a consistent sleep window for waking up and then going to sleep. Now, that part of the sleep training is actually fairly hard to take yourself through on your own. So I'll actually put the link down below to the CBT-I course if you're interested in checking that out, because that'll take you through that sleep compression and expansion technique. So there you have it. After a duration of time of practicing those behavioral cues and some of those different techniques for lowering cognitive arousal and decreasing physical tension and pain, I'm now able to fall asleep in under 10 minutes consistently, which is honestly a miracle. If you would have told me a year ago that that was possible for me, I would have not believed you. I would have been like, what kind of miracle drug did you give me? But no, it was no supplement, no distinct medication. It was working on these 3 components that are really important for improving your sleep: your mind, your body, and your behavior. So which one of those categories do you fall under? Are you more of a person who tends to have racing thoughts, or does your body keep you up with restlessness or tension or pain? Or do you feel like you just have bad sleep behaviors that are leading into bad sleep habits, or all the above like I ended up having? I'd love to hear down below in the comments what you struggle with most in sleep and what you found to genuinely help. And of course, if you want to dig into more of your personal sleep habits and how that factors into your overall health plan and how you can optimize your well-being, then go ahead and book a call with us down below in the description, because that is exactly what we do with a lot of our clients when we are looking at their nutrition, Their physical fitness, their work-life behaviors, and their sleep health. Because health is never just about one single thing, but sleep is certainly a big part of it. Thanks again to SKG for sponsoring today's video and getting my body out of pain. And if you guys thought that this video was helpful and liked it, please give it a thumbs up, subscribe to the channel. I will see you guys in the next one. Bye!