as a doctor I spent countless nights on call getting woken up by pages and phone calls from the hospital sometimes I can easily drift back to sleep but on many occasions I've had to rely on specific techniques to make sure that I get back to sleep quickly so today I'm going to share with you the most effective sleep strategies but first if you clicked on this video because you're having trouble sleeping right now then I want you to do these four things before we go any further in this video first turn the brightness on your
screen down as low as possible and dim any lights in your room ideally you shouldn't be looking at a screen at all but I want to help by teaching you these techniques and after that you should probably put it away if you've been lying in bed for the last 20 or 30 minutes and you just can't fall asleep this is the time that I actually want you to get up and get out of bed that's right out of bed because I don't want you associating your bed with being awake and having difficulty falling asleep and
now that you're up I want you to go and turn the temperature of your room down around 65 to 67° F or 18 to 19° C or even lower if that feels better for you and From This Moment forward I want you to stop checking the time because that's just going to make you more anxious and make it more difficult to fall asleep okay now that your environment is nicely set up let's get into some specific techniques that you can do to get you to sleep quickly starting with progressive muscle relaxation now this is by
far my favorite go-to technique my mom actually taught it to me when I was a kid she's a psychiatrist and if I ever had any stress or worried about an exam or a performance she would walk me through this and I always fell asleep later I found out that the military uses a variation of this called the military Sleep Method and apparently they teach fighter pilots to use progressive muscle relaxation followed by meditation to fall asleep anywhere within just 2 minutes although I haven't been able to find any scientific papers to back this up here's
how you do it you focus on one part of the body at a time and you tense up those muscles and then you suddenly relax them I always start with my toes and move my way up the body so scrunching up your toes and then releasing them doing the same with your calves and your shins then your quads all the way up until you get to your face most of the time I don't get all the way through my body because I fall asleep before then because I'm really feeling that sense of relaxation just sinking
into the bed or onto the floor wherever you are and just feeling your body releasing any tension this technique has been studied in many groups of people people with cancer on dialysis who are recovering from a hip fracture or those recovering from a C-section and the studies consistently show a decrease in pain and an increase in Sleep Quality and a review article shows that it decreases stress anxiety and depression so it's a pretty powerful tool now if you prefer to have someone guiding you through the whole process rather than doing it on your own there
are some great videos out there that do just that so I'll leave some links in the video description okay so now on to body scan meditation now this is very similar to the last technique but without tensing up your muscles first in other words just focus on relaxing one muscle group at a time for some reason in this exercise I always start at my head and move my way down to the toes I start by focusing on the top of my head how does it feel little bit tingly or warm I feel how the sensation
is on the pillow how heavy my head feels and then I move to my face seeing if there's any tension that's built up anywhere and often I find some tension around my mouth or usually in my jaw and I just try to focus on that feeling and have that tension melt away and again there's a lot of great videos and apps that'll guide you through detail body scans okay now let's move on to some breathing exercises starting with box breathing it's a simple technique that focuses on calming your nervous system and it's so successful that
it's actually taught to Navy Seals so they can remain calm in any situation so I figure if it's good enough for them I'll demonstrate how you do it all you do is inhale for 4 seconds then hold your breath for 4 seconds exhale for for 4 seconds and hold your breath for 4 seconds and that's one circuit of box breathing I already feel so much more calm just with that people say to do around 5 minutes to get the full impact but honestly just a couple of cycles of box breathing and I really feel the
difference it's great before bed but it's also a technique that you can use during the day if you ever feel stressed anxious or overwhelmed all right on to our second breathing exercise that focuses on the diaphragm which is that large muscle that separates your chest from your abdomen when you breathe in your diaphragm descends pulling your lungs open and pushing your abdomen out Place one hand on your chest and the other one on your abdomen just above your belly button now I want you to slowly breathe in and out through your nose focusing on using
your diaphragm in other words focus on the movement of your belly and try to keep your chest relatively still some people call this belly breathing now I Want You to Breathe in for the count of four hold your breath for 4 [Music] seconds and then slowly exhale for 8 seconds a small study has shown that the long exhalation time May reduce blood pressure during sleep through the activation of the parasympathetic nervous system for me this is a breathing technique that really helps me feel calm and grounded in my body especially if my mind is ready
racing now at the beginning of this video I told you to get out of bed if you'd been lying there for 20 to 30 minutes after getting out of bed you can do some of the techniques that we talked about or you can try to find something that's really really boring until you feel sleepy and then can return to bed now what's boring for you might be exciting for me so you have to figure out what works for you some people like to read with a dim light others like to listen to a really boring
story that has really no plotline and isn't going anywhere there's a YouTube channel called get sleepy that puts out lots of these boring stories although there's lots of other podcasts and apps that you can choose from just make sure that you turn off your computer or your phone screen when you're listening to them last I've got an honorable mention called cognitive shuffling it's a technique that I've seen circulating a lot on social media It's a combination of a word game with visualization by Dr Luke bod from Simon Frasier University I can't find any publication that
back up his theory but if nothing else has worked this is worth a try and here's how you do it think of a word with at least five letters let's use bedtime take the first letter of that word so B and think of as many words as you can that start with the letter B each time you think of a word visualize it at the same time and try to pick words that aren't stressful for you okay so starting with b baby ball banana bear and once you can't think of any other words move on
to the next letter elephant egg ear elastic my take on this is that it should probably feel like a mundane task for you something kind of boring and if it feels stressful to come up with words and visualize them then it's probably not the right thing for you so like most things in life all these techniques that we've talked about seem to give better results if you practice them so maybe the reason that I like progressive muscle relaxation so much is because I've been doing it since my childhood so don't get up if it doesn't
work perfectly the first time remember that it's normal for anyone to have a night here or there where they have difficulty sleeping also it can be normal to wake up in the middle of the night especially if you've just finished a sleep cycle so a sleep cycle typically lasts 90 minutes so if you went to bed at 10: p.m. then after two sleep cycles it might be 1:00 a.m. and you could wake up briefly and then fall back asleep again and that could be perfectly normal so if you happen to wake up in the middle
of the night don't freak out not because this could just be part of your natural sleep cycle and you're probably going to just fall back asleep naturally but if falling asleep or staying asleep has become an ongoing issue for you then you should see your doctor about it we Define insomnia as having difficulty sleeping for three nights per week for a duration of at least 3 months and that these disruptions are impacting your ability to function during the day your doctor will be able to look for any possible underlying causes and then suggest treatment options
and the first line treatment for insomnia is cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia or cbti what I like about this program is that it helps identify the underlying factors and triggers for insomnia rather than just giving a pill that sedate someone plus the easy fix of a sleeping pill likely isn't so good for you in the long run multiple studies are pointing towards a link between dementia and the long-term use of sleeping pills although it's unclear if this is just an asso iation because many people with dementia have difficulty sleeping or if the medications themselves increase
the risk of developing dementia so we still need more research to figure that out soon I'll be releasing a video that goes through my actual sleep routine something I've developed over the years based on scientific evidence there are things you can do from the moment you wake up until the moment you crawl into bed that can prepare you to have a good night sleep every night so if you want to make sure you don't miss that video be sure to subscribe and turn on that notification Bell leave me a comment to let me know how
these sleep strategies worked for you sleep tight and have a good night
