If you’re lying in bed unable to fall asleep, the single most effective 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. Get out of bed, go to another room, do something quiet and unstimulating, and return only when you feel genuinely sleepy. This technique, called stimulus control, is the foundation of every evidence-based insomnia treatment. Beyond that one rule, there are specific strategies for your body, your breathing, and your environment that can help you fall asleep faster tonight and sleep better long-term.
Get Out of Bed When You’re Awake
Every time you lie in bed scrolling your phone, watching the clock, or staring at the ceiling, you’re strengthening a mental link between your bed and frustration. The fix is simple: if you haven’t fallen asleep within roughly 15 to 20 minutes (don’t check the clock, just estimate), get up. Move to a different room. Read something boring, listen to quiet music, or do light stretching. Go back to bed only when your eyelids feel heavy. If you wake up in the middle of the night and can’t fall back asleep, do the same thing again.
This works because your brain is a pattern-recognition machine. Right now it may have learned that bed equals lying awake and feeling stressed. You’re retraining it so that bed equals sleep and nothing else. This same principle applies to other bed habits: don’t work in bed, don’t eat in bed, and don’t watch TV in bed if you can avoid it.
Slow Your Breathing Down
Slow, deliberate breathing activates the branch of your nervous system responsible for rest and recovery. The simplest approach that research supports is breathing with a longer exhale than inhale, something like four seconds in and six seconds out. This ratio consistently outperforms more complicated patterns in studies measuring nervous system relaxation. You don’t need to count perfectly. The key is making the exhale noticeably longer than the inhale and keeping the pace slow enough that you’re taking about six breaths per minute.
You may have heard of the 4-7-8 technique (inhale for 4 counts, hold for 7, exhale for 8). It’s widely recommended, but a BYU study comparing breathing patterns found that simpler slow breathing with a longer exhale was actually more effective at shifting the body into a relaxed state. If 4-7-8 works for you, keep doing it. If you want something easier, just focus on long, slow exhales.
Relax Your Body in Stages
Tension hides in muscles you’re not thinking about. A progressive relaxation technique used in military training works through the body systematically: start with your forehead and consciously release tension there. Move to your cheeks and jaw. Let your shoulders drop as far as they’ll go. Relax your arms, then your hands and fingers. Move down through your chest and stomach, letting each area go slack. Finally, release your legs, and let your feet flop naturally to the sides rather than pointing up at the ceiling.
Pair this with slow breathing. The combination of muscular relaxation and deep breathing works faster than either one alone. Most people who practice this regularly can fall asleep within a few minutes, though it may take a couple of weeks of nightly practice before the technique clicks.
Try Cognitive Shuffling
Racing thoughts are one of the most common reasons people can’t sleep. Your brain gets caught in loops, replaying the day, worrying about tomorrow, or fixating on the fact that you’re still awake. Cognitive shuffling is a technique designed to break that loop by giving your brain something just interesting enough to follow but too random to sustain anxious thinking.
Pick a simple, neutral word like “table” or “water.” Take the first letter and think of as many words as you can that start with that letter: tree, train, towel, tiger. Visualize each one briefly. When you run out, move to the next letter in your word. If you chose “table,” you’d go from T words to A words (apple, arrow, ant), then B words, then L words, then E words. If you lose track or forget what word you started with, that’s not failure. That’s the point. Your mind is drifting toward sleep. If you’re still awake after finishing one word, start again with a new one.
Cool Your Room, Warm Your Extremities
Your body needs to drop its core temperature by about one to two degrees to initiate sleep. A bedroom between 60 and 67°F (15 to 19°C) supports this process. If your room is warmer than that, you’ll have a harder time falling asleep and staying asleep.
Here’s the less obvious part: warming your hands and feet actually helps your core temperature drop faster. When blood flows to your skin’s surface, especially in your palms and the soles of your feet, heat radiates outward and your core cools down. A warm shower or bath 60 to 90 minutes before bed triggers this effect. A meta-analysis of studies on pre-bedtime bathing found that people who took a warm shower or bath fell asleep faster specifically because of this core temperature drop. Wearing warm socks to bed works through the same mechanism, sending blood to the surface of your feet where heat can escape.
Watch What and When You Eat
What you eat in the evening can measurably change how quickly you fall asleep. A study comparing meals with different glycemic indexes (essentially how quickly they raise blood sugar) found that eating a higher-glycemic meal four hours before bedtime cut the time it took to fall asleep roughly in half, from about 17.5 minutes to 9 minutes. The same meal eaten only one hour before bed was less effective, taking about 14.6 minutes. The takeaway: if you’re going to eat carbs in the evening, do it with dinner rather than as a late-night snack. Foods like white rice, potatoes, and bread have higher glycemic indexes.
On the flip side, heavy, fatty, or spicy meals close to bedtime can cause discomfort and reflux that keep you awake. Caffeine has a half-life of about five hours, meaning half of it is still active in your system five hours after you drink it. An afternoon coffee at 3 PM still has a quarter of its caffeine circulating at 11 PM.
Skip the Antihistamines
Over-the-counter sleep aids like diphenhydramine (the active ingredient in most “PM” medications and products like ZzzQuil) will make you drowsy, but the quality of sleep you get is poor. Experts at Baylor College of Medicine note that while antihistamines help you fall asleep, overall sleep quality suffers. They can also cause sleepwalking and other unusual sleep behaviors. For older adults, the risks are more serious, including confusion, urinary retention, and dry mouth. These medications were never designed for sleep and aren’t recommended for regular use.
Melatonin is a better short-term option. It works best when your natural melatonin timing is off, such as after travel or a schedule change. Start with 1 mg and take it about 30 minutes before you want to sleep, since it takes 20 to 40 minutes to kick in. You can increase by 1 mg per week if needed, but more isn’t necessarily better. Many people respond well to doses between 1 and 3 mg.
When Sleeplessness Becomes Chronic
A bad night here and there is normal. But if you’re struggling to fall or stay asleep at least three nights per week for three months or longer, 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, or CBT-I. This is the first-line treatment recommended over sleep medications because it addresses the root causes of insomnia, including the habits, thought patterns, and associations that perpetuate it, and its effects last long after the treatment ends. Sleep medications, by contrast, are generally only meant for short-term use.
CBT-I typically runs four to eight sessions and includes the stimulus control technique described above, along with sleep restriction (temporarily limiting time in bed to build stronger sleep drive), relaxation training, and strategies for managing the anxious thoughts that fuel insomnia. Many therapists offer it, and several app-based versions are available for people who can’t access in-person treatment.