If you’ve been lying in bed for 15 to 20 minutes without falling asleep, the single best thing you can do is get up. It sounds counterintuitive, but staying in bed while awake trains your brain to associate the bed with wakefulness and frustration. Getting up and resetting is the core technique used in clinical sleep therapy, and it works both for the night you’re struggling with and for building better sleep over time.
The 20-Minute Rule
Don’t watch the clock (that alone can keep you awake), but if it feels like roughly 15 to 20 minutes have passed and you’re still alert, get out of bed and go to another room. Do something quiet and low-stimulation until you feel genuinely sleepy, then return to bed. If sleep still doesn’t come, repeat the cycle as many times as needed. The same rule applies if you wake up in the middle of the night.
Good activities for this window include reading, listening to soft music, doing a crossword puzzle, drawing, writing, or meditating. The goal is something engaging enough that you’ll actually get out of bed for it, but not so stimulating that it wakes you up further. Avoid housework, exercise, video games, computer work, or anything that gets your heart rate or mental activity going. And don’t sleep on the couch. The point is to reserve your bed as the only place where sleep happens.
Two Breathing and Body Techniques That Help
4-7-8 Breathing
This is one of the simplest ways to shift your nervous system from alert mode into a calmer state. Inhale through your nose for 4 counts, hold your breath for 7 counts, then exhale slowly through your mouth for 8 counts. The extended exhale activates the part of your nervous system responsible for relaxation. Repeat four or five cycles. You can do this in bed or during your “reset” time in another room.
Progressive Muscle Relaxation
Starting from your fists and working down to your feet, tense each muscle group for about 5 seconds while breathing in, then release completely while breathing out. Move through your fists, biceps, the backs of your arms, forehead, eyes (squeeze them shut), jaw, tongue pressed to the roof of your mouth, lips, neck, shoulders (shrug them up to your ears), stomach, lower back, buttocks, thighs, calves, and finally your shins and ankles. The full sequence takes about 10 to 15 minutes and often produces a heavy, drowsy feeling by the end. Many people don’t make it through the whole list before falling asleep.
Try Telling Yourself to Stay Awake
This sounds strange, but it has solid clinical backing. The technique is called paradoxical intention, and it works by removing the performance pressure you feel when you’re trying to force yourself to sleep. Sleep is an involuntary process. The harder you try to make it happen, the more your focus and effort actually block it.
Here’s how to do it: lie comfortably in bed with the lights off, but keep your eyes open. Give up any effort to fall asleep. Give up any worry about still being awake. When your eyelids start to feel heavy, gently tell yourself, “Just stay awake for another couple of minutes. I’ll fall asleep when I’m ready.” Don’t force yourself to stay awake, either. Just stop trying to sleep. For many people, this shift in mental framing is enough to let sleep arrive on its own within minutes. If you wake up during the night, use the same approach.
Set Up Your Room for Sleep
Your bedroom environment has a bigger effect on sleep onset than most people realize. The ideal sleeping temperature for adults is between 60 and 67°F (15 to 19°C). Your core body temperature needs to drop slightly before sleep can begin, and a cool room helps that process along. If your room is warm, even cracking a window or running a fan can make a noticeable difference tonight.
Darkness matters too. Any light source, especially the blue-toned light from phones, tablets, and laptops, suppresses the hormone that signals your brain it’s time to sleep. The recommendation is to stop looking at bright screens two to three hours before bed, though even putting your phone face-down and dimming overhead lights in the last hour helps. If you’re already in bed scrolling, that screen is actively working against you.
A Warm Shower Before Bed
A warm shower or bath taken one to two hours before bedtime can measurably shorten the time it takes to fall asleep. The water temperature that works best is around 104 to 109°F (40 to 42.5°C), and you only need about 10 minutes. The mechanism is straightforward: warm water brings blood to the surface of your skin, especially your hands and feet. When you step out, that blood rapidly releases heat, dropping your core body temperature. That temperature decline is one of the strongest signals your body uses to initiate sleep.
If a full bath or shower feels like too much effort tonight, even soaking your feet in warm water triggers a similar cooling response.
Magnesium as a Longer-Term Option
If trouble falling asleep is becoming a regular pattern, magnesium is one of the more evidence-supported supplements for sleep. The recommended approach is 250 to 500 milligrams taken as a single dose at bedtime, tried nightly for about three months to gauge whether it helps. Magnesium glycinate is the form most commonly recommended for sleep because it’s well absorbed and less likely to cause digestive issues than other forms. This isn’t a quick fix for tonight, but it’s worth knowing about if sleepless nights are becoming frequent.
When Sleeplessness Becomes a Pattern
An occasional bad night is normal and not a cause for concern. But if you’re having trouble falling or staying asleep at least three nights per week for three months or longer, and it’s affecting how you function during the day, that meets the clinical definition of insomnia disorder. At that point, the most effective treatment isn’t medication. It’s a structured program called cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I), which is essentially a more thorough version of the techniques described above, guided by a sleep specialist. Many people see significant improvement within four to eight sessions, and the results tend to last longer than what sleep medications provide.