In this article I wanted to share some helpful methods to fall asleep with a little more ease and grace.

It’s a scenario that seems to happen to all of us at one time or another.

You lay down sleep (this happened to me 3 nights ago!) and your body is exhausted but then your mind wakes up.

It’s almost like there are two different versions of you. The body and the mind.

What I’ve found is being able to merge the two is really helpful to fall asleep. If my body is really tired but mind is active, it’s a recipe for a bad night.

The feeling of waking up exhausted sucks. It ruins everything the next day. Fortunately I’ve been able to get really great sleep scores most of the time and I feel really rested when I get up in the morning.

One thing I see missing from all the sleep gurus and sleep experts is they speak negatively about competing sleep programs while only emphasizing their program. What I like to do is put all the tools on the table and choose the one that works and even combine them.

I call this idea “stacking the odds in your favor“.

Here’s an example….. somebody will read about how taking melatonin can help with sleep then they start taking melatonin without realizing they’re taking it all wrong. Then after 3 or 4 nights they stop taking melatonin and start taking some herbs to help with their sleep.

Then when the sleep herbs don’t work, they move onto CBT-I, sleep hygiene or even sleep restriction therapy. They bounce from one thing to the next. You’ll never get anywhere with your sleep if you do this.

I recommend building new foundations as “stacks”. You add one stack upon another slowly over time.

If you need methods to fall asleep I’m going to share some below. But these sleep tips work better if you add them to pre-existing “stacks”.

The first sleep stack I want you to add into your life is regulating your light environment. I call it “living a circadian lifestyle”.

The second stack I want you to add to these particular methods to fall asleep are specific supplements to turn off your mind. If you can’t turn your brain off when you go to sleep, it’s very possible you have a genetic mutation in the COMT gene. If you do have that genetic mutation, you’re not going to be able to “break down thought”. Everything we eat and consume has to be digested, broken down, assimilated and then excreted.

“The COMT gene (rs4680) which results in a valine to methionine substitution, significantly impacts cognitive functions such as working memory and executive function, suggesting a crucial role in regulating mental processes.”

And this study says..

“Our data indicate a critical role for the COMT gene in an apparent interplay between dopamine metabolism and cognitive function, with the methionine variant significantly impairing cognitive performance under stress conditions.”

If it’s food that happens with the hydrochloric acid in your stomach and you liver producing bile and digestive enzymes. Then the beneficial bacteria in your gut transmute that food into nutrients that can pass through the villi in your intestine directly into your blood stream.

But what if it’s not food?

What if the thing that “came in” was an argument with your boss? What if it was a fight you got into with your wife? What if it was the shocking news of the death of a loved one?

This also (just like food) must be “broken down” and utilized in our lives, whether for good or for bad. If you have a genetic mutation in the COMT enzyme, it’s like eating a hundred hot dogs but not being able to produce stomach acid to digest it.

It’s going to be perceived by the body as a stressor. And this is what is keeping you awake at night, unable to relax and fall into sleep.

It’s like a mean joke right?

I would encourage you to read that article and learn about those supplements to turn off your brain so you can “let go” and sleep.

The 4 Methods to Fall Asleep

Hopefully you’re already putting into practice a circadian lifestyle. This is the foundation for sleep in my opinion. It’s simple but not always easy. I need to write an entire article all about how I live a circadian lifestyle.

Living this way will help you produce the right hormones in the right amounts at the exact right time so that you can have a deep restful sleep. Timing is EVERYTHING, just ask your suprachiasmatic nucleus and see what it says. 🙂

If you’re living a circadian lifestyle and still having issues turning your mind off because you’re overthinking at night, then start taking those 4 supplements to help mitigate the COMT genetic mutation.

Now that you’re doing those two things let’s talk about “thought blocking”. This is a way to take control of how your mind works when you fall asleep. The term “Thought Blocking” is an umbrella term for the suggestions below.

Articulatory Suppression

This has worked wonders for people, even if they’re not taking the supplements or living a circadian lifestyle. It’s that powerful. What I’ve found is that when combined together, you’ll fall asleep much much quicker. The idea behind articulatory suppression is to say a one or two syllable word over and over again. You can think it in your head over and over again or you can mouth it or whisper it. But you cannot say it out loud. I don’t think your spouse would like that. I like to use the word “ocean”. I love surfing and I love waves so this is a no brainer.

Plus I can envision the ocean in many different scenarios. I can let my imagination run wild. You want to focus on the word and you want to use it like a sleep meditation that prevents you from thinking stimulating thoughts that produce emotion.

To take articulatory suppression to another level you can imagine something like a shape in the same setting as the word you’re using. In my case I can think about ocean waves going through or over a circle or a triangle. I can see all the details of what that might look like.

Cognitive Conundrum

A cognitive conundrum is a paradox or riddle that requires a little bit of thought to figure out but it’s not too difficult to where you’ll give up and then let your mind wander. When your mind wanders it’ll take you by the hand to the most stressful place it possibly can. I like using mental games or mental puzzles that can take a long time but are easy to figure out.

One of them that works for me is count either down or up to 1000. I consider this my “warm up” to the cognitive conundrum. This is like stretching before the big game. It’s just warming up. Many times I don’t even make it to 1000. But the idea behind using this as a warm up, is to condition your mind to stay on one thing and not wander.

Something that can add a little bit more difficulty would be counting from 1 to 1000 but doing it in series of 4 or 7 (you can pick any number you like). I like 4 or 7 because it requires a little bit of thinking along the way. If it were 5 you could easily think 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30 etc. It’s too easy that way.

You could also count down from 1000 this way. It’ll cause your mind to concentrate and stay focused.

Now that your warm up is over…

Here’s a method to fall asleep that works really great for me.

Assuming I was able to count to 1000 either directly or in multiples of 7, then I’ll think of an animal whose first letter matches each letter in the alphabet.

I would think…

• A for Ape
• B for Baboon
• C for Cheetah
• and so on….

By the time I start this method to fall asleep I’m physically exhausted from living a circadian diurnal lifestyle, I’ve taken the supplements to calm my mind and I’ve counted to 1000 already. Most times I cannot even get to this point. I’ll fall asleep long before this.

In face now I’m falling asleep in under 10 minutes. You can track this on an Oura Ring or a Whoop Band. I used to go to bed at 3am after having got off work at midnight and I’d just lay there wide awake.

I’ve come a long long way and I’m so grateful for that.

Another variation on the animal / letter method to fall asleep is doing it with countries or cities.

It would go like this…

• Sydney
• Yemen
• New England
• Denmark
• etc

If you’re new you can mix cities and countries together to make it easy. If the cognitive conundrum is too difficult you’ll give up and your mind will wander off. It should be just difficult enough to have to think a little bit for the solution but not too difficult to where you’ll give up and let your mind go off.

Taming the mind is the key with this.

Visual Diversion

This requires a little more unstructured concentration and visualization. I don’t like this one as much but you might. Essentially the idea is to imagine being in a situation that is extremely uplifting and relaxing to you. It can’t be uplifting in an emotional way though. It wouldn’t work if I were to envision having the basketball in the final 10 seconds of a game and hitting the game winning jump shot. That (for me) would stimulate too much emotion, which is what we’re trying to avoid.

My scenario would be imagining myself getting a massage on the beach in Hawaii. The key is getting into the gritty details. This is what forces your mind to think about this scenario and not having stressful thoughts that produce hormones that keep you awake.

I would be thinking about the sound of ocean waves in the background, the smell of flowers and the smell of whatever oils they’d be using etc. I might be thinking about drinking a Lava Flow and really getting into the massage.

I’ve found visual diversion doesn’t really work for me. It doesn’t give me enough structure. There’s no end point like there is counting to 1,000. It gives my mind too much leeway to go places I don’t want it to go. I need to have a short leash for my mind or else it wanders off.

But for some people visual diversion is a really powerful method to fall asleep. For me not so much.

Acceptance

This involved being able to let go and detach your happiness from outside circumstances. This is hard to do unless you’ve had experience putting in the work doing spiritual exercises (like meditation or ZaZen) during the day.

One thing I like to ask myself when confronted with a negative thought or a stressful thought is “is it true?” The 3 most powerful words you could ask yourself. If I’m thinking to myself that I’ll get fired from my job tomorrow because I sent an email that I shouldn’t have then I’ll ruminate on this idea for hours.

I’ll think to myself what if I get fired? What skills do I have? What’s the job market like? What other companies would I want to work for?

This is a scenario that actually happened to me. At the datacenter I worked in (where I was working swing shift) my co-workers and I would call our boss by the nickname “Plug”. He was bald but obviously got hair plugs. They were bad. Really bad. And they were red.

Nothing against getting hair transplants but he was also a real jerk to us.

At the end of the night we used to have to send a status report to our bosses and CC the upper management and CEO. As a joke, instead of calling him by his name I said Dear Plug, and I actually sent it.

I was so shocked that I did that. I had the email all written up to show a friend how funny that would be. Then a server crashed so I had to repair it, which took 20 or 30 more minutes. I came back to my computer forgetting I called him Plug and just sent it.

I had the look of a deer caught in some headlights after that went out. I even thought about trying to go into his computer and delete it. About a dozen other people would have received it too.

Needless to say I didn’t sleep that night. My friends and I still joke about it today.

But learning how to accept not getting sleep is key. Your limiting belief could be “If I don’t get enough sleep tonight, I’m going blow the job interview tomorrow“. The first thing I’ll ask is, “is it true?” Will I really not get the job if I don’t sleep? Is it possible to even know that?

Then I’d start asking myself questions like how would it be if that is true? Could it also be true that I can get 2 hours of sleep but feel like I got 8 hours? Is that possible?

Conclusion

I’ve found that I usually don’t even have to resort to sleep tactics like “Thought Blocking” because I’m in alignment with nature through my circadian lifestyle. As humans we are inextricably linked to nature and the environment. The further we veer from that the more health challenges (like insomnia but also cancer, diabetes etc) we’ll have.

Ask yourself if 2,000 years ago we had to have sleep hacks like “thought blocking” in order to fall asleep? What happened to society to where we need sleep methods like this?

After over 18 years of research (do you notice all the scientific papers I link to?) I can tell you that the number one reason for sleep problems in society, is adapting electricity and nnEMF into our  daily lives. This includes EMF exposure, looking at blue lit screens and living an indoor lifestyle.

This is why I’m such a stickler for getting you into the habit of watching the sunrise every single morning.

Diet is another issue that’s secondary but also important. Eating a standard American diet (SAD) is a huge problem.

But if you adopt the principles that I teach as your foundation, most likely you will not need these methods to fall asleep each night.

With that said, there are times these sleep methods have become useful, even for me.

Questions:

• What methods to fall asleep have worked best for you?
• What methods have not worked that well?
• Do you live a lifestyle that’s close to nature? If not, why not?
• Do you watch the morning sunrise?
• Do you block blue light?
• Do you ground daily?

Comment below.