How to Fall Asleep in 120 Seconds

Trouble sleeping? Here’s a military-tested trick for guaranteed slumber

Sharon Ackman
5 min readJul 13, 2018
Photo by Jon Robinson on Unsplash

When you’re on military exercise, sleep is a luxury. Maybe you can only snatch a few hours each day. So there’s nothing so frustrating as lying in your sleeping bag with your eyes closed, waiting for something to happen.

You’re totally exhausted. You have to be up in three hours for picket. You’re distracted by the noises around you. There’s a rock jutting into your hip bone. Or you’re replaying the day’s events on repeat in your head.

If you don’t sleep, you’ll burn out pretty quickly. You’ll make bad decisions. You’ll let people down and become a liability.

That’s what happened with U.S. fighter pilots in World War II. The U.S. military realized many of its pilots were making terrible, avoidable decisions due to stress and the resulting sleeplessness. Shooting down friendlies. Being shot down themselves. Even when pilots clocked off, they couldn’t relax and they couldn’t sleep. So their stress and fatigue built up, till they made a fatal error.

No one wants to be that guy.

Luckily, you never have to be. The U.S. Navy Pre-Flight School developed a scientific method to fall asleep day or night, in any conditions, in under two minutes. After…

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Sharon Ackman

Writes about food, health, and physical and mental high performance