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TRAIN YOUR BRAIN TO FALL ASLEEP IN 30 SECONDS.

David Addams | October 31, 2015 | Health | No Comments

If falling asleep takes you about 15 minutes each night, that is more than 91 hour that you lose annually. What is even more interesting is the fact that you are spending more than two 40-hour workweeks just lying in your bed.  In case you suffer from insomnia and you spend more than an hour to fall asleep, you are basically spending more than nine 40-hour weeks on this activity annually. This is really an immense amount of wasted time!!!

If you are really willing to change this situation, keep reading. This article presents simple tricks that can help you train your brain to fall asleep almost instantly.

REMOVE CAFFEINE FROM YOUR DIET

It is highly recommended to eliminate the caffeine for at least two weeks prior the attempt to improve your sleep patterns and habits. Basically, foods and drinks that should be excluded from your diet are the following:

• Cola
• Coffee
• Chocolate ( including cocoa and cacao)
• Yerba mate
• Caffeinated Tea ( green tea, white tea, and decaf tea)

No matter how strange it seems, even one small cup of morning coffee can negatively affect your ability to fall asleep quickly at night. You are also likely to feel less restful, and you will tend to awake more frequently during the night. As a result, you will wake up tired and eager for extra sleep.

The caffeine lovers will be happy to learn that it is acceptable to add the caffeine back once they are done with the adaptation training. It may still disrupt you a bit, but once you have achieved the habit of falling asleep in 30 seconds, you will still be able to do so even with some coffee drank up during the day.

Train Your Brain to Fall Asleep Faster

The inventor of this training explains that about ten years ago, falling asleep has taken him 15-30 minutes. Sometimes, when he was worried or was thinking about something, it might have taken him more than an hour. However, this training has helped him a lot, and now he is able to fall asleep in less than 30 seconds.

He also adds that this refers to normal conditions. In cases of stressful day and too much thoughts of his mind, he may find it difficult to relax and fall asleep quickly.

He reached the point of falling asleep in 30 seconds through a long-term process of sleep training. This means that there isn’t any magical mental trick that can help you achieve this instantly. You have to train yourself instead, and once you`ve trained yourself to this point, the process is extremely easy and it runs automatically.

Understanding the Training Process

The training process requires commitment and it may take you a long time, months or even years, depending on how far you want to go. It isn’t difficult at all, and the only thing it requires is persistence and consistency.

First of all, you need to understand that falling asleep faster is possible. As a matter of fact, you have been probably able to fall asleep instantly after a very exhausting day, after reading a book, or after watching a movie. So, this means that your brain already knows how do fall asleep quickly, and it only needs additional training to do it more consistently.

The main reason that you aren’t falling asleep faster is that your brain is not trained to do so. You may eventually reach that point, but you are now far from there. Similarly, you may be able to do the splits, but if you don’t train your brain, you won`t be able to do the splits at all.

The crucial thing about this approach is to incentivize your brain to drop all other activities and to transition into sleep right away. If there are any consequences for a lazy approach to falling asleep, your brain is likely to continue to be lazy.

The brain is active all the time, even during sleep. It operates in different modes of consciousness, such as beta, alpha, theta, and delta phases. While lying in your bed and waiting to fall asleep, you are actually waiting for your brain to switch modes. An untrained brain takes its own time to switch modes and you end up dwelling on other thoughts, tossing and turning, or just lying down and waiting for it to be ready for transition. If you don’t train your brain it will remain naturally lazy.

Even though your conscious wants to go to sleep, your subconscious is the one in charge. So, if your subconscious takes more time to fall asleep, your conscious will have a hard time forcing it to hurry. As a matter of fact, the subconscious will keep distracting you and keeping your conscious mind occupied instead of letting your relax and fall asleep.

On the other hand, a trained subconscious is fast and obedient. When the conscious says to sleep, the subconscious activates the sleep mode and does so instantly. However, the subconscious can still reject the request in case you are partially sleepy.

The process itself includes using short, times naps so that it trains your brain to fall asleep faster. Here is how it works:

If you feel sleepy at some point during the day, feel free to give yourself permission to take a 20-minutes nap. However, make sure it lasts 20 minutes only! Use a timer to set an alarm, or use Siri on your phone. A kitchen timer with 20-minute countdown works great too. Remember that regardless of how long it takes you to fall asleep, you have 20 minutes total for this activity.

Don’t try to force it, as there is nothing special here. Just relax and try to fall asleep as you normally do. If you manage to fall asleep, that would be great. If you fail and just lie awake for 20 minutes, also great. If you sleep for couple of minutes, that would be okay too.

The most important part is getting up immediately at the end of the 20 minutes. You may be tempted to continue napping, but don’t do so. Putting the alarm across the room may be helpful, as it forces you to stand up and turn it off. If you still feel tired, you can take another nap later.

The best would be to take this nap during the day, but you can also do it in the evening, as long as it is at least an hour before the bedtime. The best time for evening nap is after dinner, as most people feel sleepy after this meal. It is recommended to practice one nap a day.

The next part of the process is waking up with an alarm in the morning. It is recommended to set the alarm for a fixed time every day.  Get up instantly when the alarm goes off.

Paying attention to the time you go to bed at night is also very important. You need a good 7 hours of sleep each night. So, if you plan to get up at 5am every morning, go to bed at about 10 pm.

By following these steps, you are basically sending your brain a massage that the time you have to sleep is limited. So, if your brain wants to sleep long enough, it has to learn to fall asleep faster so that it gets the 7 hours of sleep. If it wastes time falling asleep, then it misses out on the extra sleep.

By going to bed whenever and allowing yourself to get up whenever, you reward your brain for laziness and inefficiency. It’s okay if you take a half hour to fall asleep since your brain knows it can just sleep in later. If you awaken with an alarm but go to bed earlier than necessary to compensate for the time it takes you to fall asleep, your still tell your brain that it’s okay to waste time transitioning to sleep. 

Ingredients like coffee and chocolate acts as stimulants on which your brain counts when you don’t get enough sleep. By removing these outs, you are helping your brain to connect the dots. In this way it learns that taking too much time to fall asleep means lack of sleep, which results in tiredness and sleepiness during the day. Cutting down on stimulants and extra snooze time, causes the brain to understand that it has only one remaining solution- to adapt by transitioning into sleep much more quickly.

You need to train your brain that the sleep time is limited, instead of sending it a message that oversleeping is fine and that there are stimulants available. As the brain is naturally good at optimizing scarce physiological resources, with a bit of training it can learn to optimize its use of the sleep time, as a limited resource.

 Feel sleepy during the day due to limiting the sleep time at night is perfectly fine. You can take naps as needed, as it is okay to take multiple naps if you need to. However, make sure you keep them limited to 20 minutes max. Whenever you get up, stay up for at least an hour.

In case you are pressed for time and don’t have 20 minutes available for napping, try napping for shorter intervals, such as 15, 10 or even 5 minutes for a nap. These short naps are quite refreshing, but only if you fall asleep quickly.

It is important to teach your brain that a 20-minute nap means 20 minutes of TOTAL time lying down. If you spend of the time tossing and turning, it means less sleep.

You should also teach your brain that it has limited number of hours in bed, so if it wants to get enough sleep, it should better spend all of the time sleeping. Spending time on non-sleep activity takes out time from the sleep itself.

Once you have reached the point and you are able to fall asleep whenever you want to, you can ditch the alarm, put an end to the training process, and wake up whenever you want. You are also allowed to add the caffeine back as well.

If you find this approach too strict, you are very likely to fail. Giving your brain an easy out will only allow it to take that out, and fail in learning the adaptation presented here.

Taking into consideration that everyone is different, every person needs different amount of time to adapt. Some people will adapt within weeks and some may take much longer. The diet is one of the main factors contributing to the outcome.

Generally, more natural and healthier diet makes it notably easier to adapt to any type of sleep changes. Exercise on regular basis contributes a lot as well, especially the cardio exercise which helps to re-balance neurotransmitters and hormones.

On the other hand, following a diet which is mainly based on heavily processed foods and less physical activity leads makes people fail in the process of adaptation and making sleep changes of any kind.

– Source: www.healthywayoflife.net