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Trouble falling asleep? Try these 3 quick tips

Trouble falling asleep? Try these 3 quick tips

Posted by Alan Hau on 18th Apr 2018

Wondering why some people fall asleep quickly while others stay wide awake all night long? Our minds are racing all the time during the day, and we’re not allowing our brains to take a proper break at night.

In today’s consumerism dominated society, there’s no shortage of pills and complicated gadgets to grant you the wish of falling asleep instantly. Honestly, our sleeping problems don’t go away that easily and sooner or later we build dependency on the drug, or the methods are no longer useful.

Most of us are not born insomniacs; we are born great sleepers as children, but as we grow old, due to external influences or other episodes in adulthood, we acquire poor sleeping habits. No magic pill will correct your sleeping pattern in an instant, holistic or otherwise. There is work that takes practice and effort to unwind and put the mind and soul back on the right track.

I used to take a skeptical stance towards self-help books and other holistic methods until I met a yogi master, Maria Karastergiou, during my vacation in Cambodia. Here are some tips I learned:

1. Don’t let your senses drive you

It’s always tempting to watch that next episode on Netflix or munch on a bag of snacks or enjoy a glass of merlot thinking it will put you to sleep. Unless you’re binge-watching “Virtual Fireplace with Crackling Fire Sounds (Full HD)” I wouldn’t count on it to relax you.

This one is easy. When you’re preparing to sleep in the bedroom, don’t start eating, drinking or watching an action movie. None of those actions will put you to sleep. Any excitement will only fire up all your neurons. Defer those sensory experiences to the daytime.

A prime example of this behavior is midnight snacking or boozing. If this sounds like you, there’s a good chance your body isn’t feeling nourished at dinner. Try to replace your diet with better quality food instead of adding a pill or two.

There’s a common misconception for modern people and expectations of medical effectiveness. Say eating junk food is causing heartburn and high blood pressure and we take pills to suppress those symptoms while we continue to fill our bodies with junk food.

Big businesses wouldn’t admit this to you (because it doesn’t sell products, shhhh…). It’s not about adding a regimen to counter your bad habits; it’s about subtracting our intake and replacing it something with higher quality.

When you have your common senses in control, pun intended, you are ready to move on to a more difficult area — the mind.

2. Taming thoughts and letting them go

Trying to break any routine is hard, especially when it comes to sleeping habits. The first 2 or 3 nights are incredibly dull and almost unbearable, but that’s precisely the tough part where your mind needs discipline. The mind is like a burning furnace, and if you keep feeding it topics and different thoughts, it will burn hotter and hotter and replay those thoughts, make silly projections and try to make sense of the world.

Depending on your job or stage in life, the content driving your mind could be different, but they conjure the same effect — to keep you awake and restless. I was a software engineer, so it’s about building that next solution and imagining how I would write my code. For a businessman, it could be the big deal that will make or break the company and how to present in front of your clients the next day, etc. Of course, all these events are important and should be given the utmost attention, but only when you’re 100% awake and recharged. When you don’t sleep, you’re effectively borrowing your energy the next day, so most likely you’ll wake up feeling terrible and be likelier to make wrong decisions.

Maria used to say:

“The mind is the master of your senses.”

Think about that and remind yourself regularly of that fact too.
Next time when a stray thought tempts you to follow it, don’t play along and try to brainstorm anything. Similar to a dialogue with a child, let it know the thought is interesting, but you prefer to stay put with where you are. Reigning in the mind of extraneous thoughts is one of the many ways to discipline the mind and return to a neutral state. When you master this trick you can eventually command your mind to sleep.

3. Remember to Breathe Deep

Conscious breathing is a core part of yoga and meditation. Some people avoid it thinking that meditation is a part of some ritual with religious connotations, or that it’s too gentle to have any immediate benefits. In my opinion, if breathing and meditation weren’t that useful, there wouldn’t be so many religions using this as a technique to calm the mind.

“Breath is the master of the mind.”

Different schools of thought have different breathing styles but the simplest method is literally to close your eyes:
- breathe in deeply and count to 5
- exhale slowly and count to 5

Try to keep the duration of breathing in and exhaling about the same.

For a beginner’s exercise, try this for about 10 minutes a day. The hardest part about breathing techniques for me is remembering to do it. Techniques usually require frequent practice over multiple days until they take effect. So, don’t try to do pack 50 minutes for 1 day and none for the next 4 days.

With these simple tips and techniques, your body will thank you and your mind will finally be in control of your body instead of the other way round.

Rest well, be energized and take on the world!