How to fall asleep in a few minutes

Some feedback gathered on how to fall asleep very fast. Even if you can’t do it, don’t stress yourself about it! The added stress will make it even harder. You’re still getting benefits for your body when lying in bed on your way to falling asleep — so knowing that, just keep trying the techniques below until you sleep:

Quoting from: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/fall-asleep-two-minutes-how-to-military-secret-trick-a8520991.html:

1. Relax the muscles in your face, including tongue, jaw and the muscles around the eyes
2. Drop your shoulders as far down as they’ll go, followed by your upper and lower arm, one side at a time
3. Breathe out, relaxing your chest followed by your legs, starting from the thighs and working down
4. You should then spend 10 seconds trying to clear your mind before thinking about one of the three following images:

• You’re lying in a canoe on a calm lake with nothing but a clear blue sky above you
• You’re lying in a black velvet hammock in a pitch-black room
• You say “don’t think, don’t think, don’t think” to yourself over and over for about 10 seconds.

Other tips from the HN thread discussing the Independent article (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17905574):

1. If any of your muscles are tensed, recognize it and untense them!

2. Purge all distracting thoughts. The easiest way to do this is imagine that you’re unburdened by human concerns. Imagine that you’re an immortal being floating through space, or sinking into the ocean, or floating on it.

Usually when I suffer from an inability to sleep it’s because my mind ends up focusing too hard on things that ground me to reality. Existential dread, worrying about work, thinking about technical problems etc.

So often my technique to fall asleep has been to focus my mind on the fantastical. Stimulate my imagination a bit, like what if I was a dwarf in a fantasy universe. This tends to focus my thoughts inwards and naturally segues into sound sleeping. Letting my mind wander only becomes an issue when it’s anchored to real life.

I can actually vouch for this, but I discovered it independently for myself. I realized that the nights I couldn’t fall asleep were nights my brain kept racing and thinking about different things. Kind of like a wikipedia rabbit hole where my mind keeps racing onto the next tangential thought.

So I found a foolproof solution: Relax all my facial muscles and imagine an empty, black (literally #000) void in my mind’s eye.

The physical cue is to be cognizant of your eyes; every time my eyes began to squint, I know it was because my mind was wandering off. I’d reset my closed eyes to be as loose (imagine a very bored expression) as possible and revert back to my black space. As long as I kept fighting the temptation for my mind to wander, and maintain loose eyes, I fell asleep. All anecdotal of course, but I did use this just recently at burning man while soundcamps blasted my tent, and it’s nice to see this method validated in this article.

I remember once, somebody told me that “often times when you think you’re not asleep you actually are”. Though it sounds absurd, this single line has helped my sleep immeasurably because often my sleeplessness is compounded by the frustration of not being able to sleep! So I just lie there, and let me thoughts go where they will and treat it as a kind of wakeful “dreaming”.

The idea being that even though I’m “conscious” of not being asleep my body is still getting the benefit of rest.