Easy Ways to Fall Asleep Without Medication

Sleep is important to people, it takes up a lot of our time, and when we can't sleep or sleep to little, it's very hard to be at our best. Everyone knows the lonely feeling of staying awake into the early morning hours, and for every time you glance over at the alarm clock, you're thinking about the morning that is drawing closer and the prospects of facing the day on too little rest. It's not a good feeling, and ironically, the more you tell yourself you really really need to get to sleep, the harder it is to find. The brain sabotages it's own desire to go to sleep. For most of us, these nights are not the norm, it's the kind of thing that happens, and it sucks, but we deal with it and the next night we fall asleep like a baby and forget all about our sleepless nights. For many people though, getting enough sleep is a daily battle, an exhausting ordeal where they fight their lack of sleep with anything from hot baths, warm milk or chemicals. Every night a new attempt to outfox their own thoughts, to get the sleep they want, but struggle to find. In this article, I am going over some of the techniques I have discovered that help me fall asleep quickly and stay asleep through the night. Before I begin though, I am not a doctor, my advice will not work for everyone, there are medical conditions that can cause insomnia where my simple tricks will not have any affect. If you are having serious problems sleeping, please talk to your doctor.

We sleep so that our mind can relax, take a break and get ready for yet another day of hopefully rational thought, but it's a paradox that before the mind can relax, you need to relax your mind. When we go to bed with lot's of thing on our mind, it's hard to get to sleep. The more we are worried or concerned or even excited or happy, the harder it is to sleep. Now, most people don't complain when they stay awake because they are just too happy to sleep, when we are kept awake by worries and problems though, that's when it starts to become taxing. Worries and problems are in ample supply, we all have things we can worry about and some times we find ourselves in situations where we seem overrun by problems. When life shows it's bumpier side, it's hard for anyone to find peace of mind, and many nights are lost to endless thinking about a certain problem or situation.

The first thing I tell myself in times of trouble, when I can tell that there are things that wants to keep me awake, is that whatever the problem is, the middle of the night is hardly ever the best time to deal with them. As pressing as a situation is to me, almost everybody else is asleep at 2:30 in the morning, and no matter how much I worry about my problems, I won't be able to deal with it in the middle of the night anyways. So I give myself permission to sleep through the night, and if the problem is serious enough, there will be plenty of opportunity to worry about it in the morning. If you can tell yourself this, and make yourself buy in to this thinking, you've eliminated feeling guilty for not worrying about something that you feel you need to deal with, and that is an important step on the road to a night of slumber.

That you give yourself time off from what you might be preoccupied with doesn't help much if you're still going over the same thoughts anyways. Trying to solve problems is a common way people keep themselves awake, worrying about not solving a problem yet is too. The most bizarre way to keep yourself awake, and we all do this. is to worry about not being able to sleep. Sometimes, after a series of failures to get to sleep, we even start worrying about not being able to sleep before we even make it to bed. The result is a powerful self fulfilling prophecy, and for every time we expect not to sleep, it get's more likely that we'll be right. The key to breaking out of these kinds of mindsets is to actively relax your mind. To actively relax sounds like an oxymoron, but we all have the power to decide what we want to think about, we can at any time change what we think about, and that is the power that can be used to relax your mind, even when the mind itself is hellbent on not relaxing.

The technique I use every night to go to sleep fast, is very simple but also very powerful. Whenever I go to bed, I make sure to engage my mind in something that I really enjoy thinking about. The technique is really quite similar to counting sheep, only counting sheep is ultra boring, and very hard for me to keep my mind on the sheep for much time at all. Instead I think about things that I enjoy, and can think in great detail about without getting bored. For example, when I go to bed, I often close my eyes and imagine I have enough money to build any house I want. I start with imagining what the house would look like on the outside, what kind of location would be perfect, the materials used and so on. I then go on to imagine myself walking into the house, and then go on to walk from room to room thinking about every little detail of the room, what kind of furniture I would put in this room, the colors on the wall, where I put the secret passageway to the library, and all sorts of details that I enjoy thinking about that will keep my mind wandering lightly and far away from anything that might keep me awake. Usually I fall asleep after having mentally walked through just a couple of rooms. Of course, to you, imagining your dream house might not be any more engaging than counting sheep, so for this to work, you need to find something that you enjoy thinking about. Maybe you'll think about every single play you've made in your record setting performance for your favorite football team, maybe it's how you expand your business to a world spanning mega corporation, or maybe you imagine amazing recipes and how you prepare them and serve them to great acclaim. The important thing is to find something that you really enjoy thinking about, and go into as much detail as you can. Your brain will slow down and fall asleep in a matter of minutes.

Sometimes though, even the most brilliantly detailed, super interesting idea, won't be enough to keep your mind of whatever might be keeping you from sleeping. When that happens, I use a technique I learned while I was reading about mind power techniques. The theory behind these techniques is that by lowering your brainwaves to the same wavelength as the universe, you'll be able to manipulate the world using only your mind. I don't believe in that theory myself, but the techniques used to lower the brainwaves is actually a great way to fall asleep. To make myself fall asleep I will sometimes lie on my back, focus on relaxing my body and imagine my body filling up with bright red light. I make sure I imagine the light is filling my arms and legs all the way out into the fingers and toes, I try to feel the light flowing through my body until it fills me up, at that point I imagine the light leaving my body again in the form of a red mist almost that just dissolves. Then I start the process over with orange light and continue through the colors of the rainbow. The different colors of the rainbow are supposed to represent the 7 different chakras, or energy centers, in your body, myself I use the same colors because it makes it easy to remember what color is next. This technique is very relaxing, and I fall asleep half way through the rainbow most times. I use this technique when my mind is very unsettled, since it's a very focused and systematic way of channeling your thoughts, it's not supposed to make you fall asleep, it's supposed to connect you with the life force in the universe, but I find that it's better to use the opportunity to get some sleep, than to ask the lifeforce for a new car.

These techniques are very simple, and can be done my anybody. With a little bit of practice, you can may yourself fall alseep in a matter of minutes and enjoy a night of solid sleep. If you have problems with waking up often in the middle of the night and staying awake, these tips will be equally helpful to get back to sleep in those situations.

Sweet dreams!