If you’re lying in bed unable to sleep, the single most effective thing you can do right now is get up. It sounds counterintuitive, but staying in bed while frustrated trains your brain to associate the bed with wakefulness. The techniques below start with what you can do in the next five minutes, then cover the habits that prevent this from happening again tomorrow night.
Get Out of Bed After 20 Minutes
If you’ve been awake for roughly 20 minutes, or you feel yourself starting to struggle and get frustrated, leave the bed and move to another room. This is the cornerstone of stimulus control therapy, one of the most well-supported techniques in sleep medicine. The goal is simple: your brain should link your bed with sleep, not with tossing and anxiety.
Once you’re up, do something quiet and low-stimulation. Good options include reading a calming book, folding laundry, writing in a journal, listening to soft music, gentle stretching, or making a list (groceries, weekend plans, anything mundane). Avoid your computer, phone, work, eating, or anything that gets your mind revving. When you start feeling drowsy, go back to bed. If you don’t fall asleep within another 20 minutes, get up again and repeat the cycle. It can feel tedious the first few nights, but it resets the association between your bed and sleep surprisingly fast.
Slow Your Breathing Down
The fastest way to shift your body from alert mode into a calmer state is controlled breathing. Your nervous system has two competing branches: one that ramps you up and one that calms you down. Slow, extended exhales activate the calming branch, lowering your heart rate and relaxing your muscles.
The 4-7-8 technique is one of the most popular versions. Inhale through your nose for four counts, hold your breath for seven counts, then exhale slowly through your mouth for eight counts. Repeat this cycle three or four times. The long exhale is the key part. If holding for seven counts feels uncomfortable, shorten it, but keep your exhale longer than your inhale. This works better with practice, so don’t expect it to knock you out the first time. Over days and weeks, your body learns to drop into a relaxed state more quickly each time you start the pattern.
Try Progressive Muscle Relaxation
If your body feels physically tense, progressive muscle relaxation can help release that stored tension you may not even realize you’re carrying. The method is straightforward: tense one muscle group for about five seconds while breathing in, then release it all at once and notice the contrast between tension and relaxation.
Start with your fists. Clench them tightly, hold for five seconds, then let go. Move to your biceps, then your forearms. Work through your forehead (wrinkle it into a frown), eyes (squeeze them shut), jaw (gently clench), shoulders (shrug them up toward your ears), stomach, thighs, calves, and feet. The whole sequence takes about 10 to 15 minutes. Most people notice a heaviness settling into their body by the time they reach their legs. You can do this in bed or on a couch if you’ve gotten up.
Stop Racing Thoughts With the Cognitive Shuffle
The most common reason people can’t sleep is a mind that won’t shut up. Telling yourself to stop thinking never works because that requires more thinking. The cognitive shuffle gives your brain something to do that’s just engaging enough to crowd out anxious thoughts, but too boring to keep you awake.
Pick any random word, like “cat.” Start with the first letter, C, and picture unrelated objects that begin with that letter: car, cake, cloud, canoe. Visualize each one briefly, then move to the next letter, A: apple, ant, anchor. Then T: tree, trumpet, turtle. If you run out of letters, pick a new word. The key is that the images should be random and unconnected. Your brain can’t simultaneously construct a worry spiral and picture a series of meaningless objects. Most people don’t make it past two or three words before drifting off.
Use the Military Sleep Method
This technique was reportedly developed to help people fall asleep in uncomfortable, noisy environments. Whether or not the origin story is true, the method itself is a solid body-scan relaxation exercise. Lie on your back, close your eyes, and systematically relax every part of your body from the top down. Start at your forehead. Think about how it feels, and consciously give it permission to release. Move to the muscles around your eyes, your cheeks, your jaw. Let your shoulders drop. Relax one arm completely, then the other, from shoulder to fingertips. Continue down through your chest, stomach, hips, thighs, calves, and feet.
The phrasing matters more than you’d think. Instead of commanding a muscle to relax, notice what it’s doing and let it soften. People who practice this regularly report falling asleep in about two minutes, though it takes most people one to two weeks of nightly practice to get there.
Set Up Your Room for Sleep Tonight
A few quick adjustments to your environment can make a real difference. Keep your bedroom between 65 and 70°F (about 18 to 21°C). A large study analyzing over 3.75 million nights of sleep data found that temperatures outside this range consistently reduced sleep quality. If you can’t control the thermostat precisely, err on the cooler side and add a blanket rather than warming the room.
Dim the lights at least 30 to 60 minutes before you plan to sleep. Blue light, the kind emitted by phone screens, tablets, and LED bulbs, suppresses your body’s production of melatonin, the hormone that signals sleepiness. Blue light in the 446 to 477 nanometer range is the strongest melatonin suppressor, and even relatively low-intensity blue LEDs can outperform the overhead fluorescent lights in most homes at blocking melatonin. If you need to use a device, switch it to night mode or reduce brightness as much as possible.
What You Did Today Might Be the Problem
Caffeine has a half-life of three to six hours, meaning half the caffeine from your afternoon coffee is still circulating in your blood at bedtime. A recent clinical crossover trial found that a single large dose of caffeine (around 400 mg, roughly two strong coffees) can disrupt sleep even when consumed 12 hours before bed. A smaller dose of about 100 mg, one regular cup, is generally fine as long as it’s at least four hours before you plan to sleep. If you’re sensitive to caffeine, your personal cutoff may need to be earlier.
Fluids are the other common culprit. Waking up to use the bathroom fragments your sleep cycles and makes it harder to fall back asleep. The Urology Care Foundation recommends limiting fluids two to four hours before bedtime while making sure you drink enough during the day. Front-load your water intake in the morning and afternoon rather than catching up in the evening.
When Sleeplessness Becomes a Pattern
A rough night here and there is normal. Stress, travel, schedule changes, and illness can all cause temporary sleeplessness. But if you’re having trouble falling or staying asleep at least three nights per week for three months or more, that crosses the clinical threshold for chronic insomnia. At that point, the most effective treatment isn’t medication. It’s cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I), a structured program that combines the techniques above (stimulus control, sleep restriction, relaxation training) into a personalized plan. CBT-I is typically completed in four to eight sessions and produces lasting results because it addresses the habits and thought patterns keeping you awake rather than sedating you through them.
For tonight, though, start with the basics: get out of bed if you’re not sleeping, try a breathing or relaxation technique, keep the room cool and dark, and resist the urge to check the time. Watching the clock only calculates how little sleep you’ll get, which creates exactly the kind of anxiety that keeps you awake.