Are you tired of just laying in bed for hours and you can’t fall asleep? Do you ever wake up during the night and can’t go back to sleep? Or do you not feel well rested most of the time? Today, we are going to look at 10 easy tips to help you fall asleep quickly and have an amazing night! 

Click on the video right above to learn these 10 tips or read about them below!

Now, let’s face it, if your evenings are changing all the time and you have habits that are overstimulating, your poor body and mind, they don’t know when they’re supposed to be super awake or relaxing. So let’s get started on creating your new evening routine!

10 ways to learn how to fall asleep quickly!

1. Evening practices

Choose an evening practice to help calm your mind and body. There are so many of them that you can chose from! Evening meditation, chanting, say a prayer or maybe even do some light yogic practices made for the evening. You can do this on a meditation pillow or even right in your bed, so you can go straight to sleep when you’re finished.   

If you want to discover some meditation practices that I learned while in China, read more about how to meditate for healing your body and how to meditate like a powerful taoist master!

2. Eat 3 to 4 hours before going to bed

Make sure to eat 3 to 4 hours before going to bed so that your stomach isn’t focused on digesting your food!

3. Take a shower!

Take a shower but make sure it is lukewarm, not hot. You don’t want to take a hot shower right before going to sleep, because that will raise your body temperature. When you sleep, your temperature goes down. About 20 or 30 minutes before you want to sleep, you can take your lukewarm shower.

Taking a shower isn’t just about cleaning your physical body. Have you ever noticed that when you’re feeling bad, that if you take a shower, you feel cleansed? It’s like your troubles or some kind of bad energy just went away with the water. Somehow, you feel lighter!

4. Start winding down 1 hour before going to sleep

You can even put an alarm to remind yourself to stop going all over the place or doing chores. Preferably find a soothing sound like some beautiful zen music or maybe a gong sound.

Beware of electronics!

Try turning off your electronics an hour before going to sleep. Turn off all the screens, like the TV, computer and phone, because the artificial lighting will mess up your circadian rhythm.

I feel your pain, this is something that I am still working on. I think it’s what causes me the most trouble actually for falling asleep. If you are still going to watch a movie, avoid any scary or action movies that are overstimulating.

You can also try wearing blue light blocking glasses. I haven’t tried these yet, but they’re supposed to really help with using your screens at night without disrupting your sleep. There is a study done in 2017 that shows that people who wore these had 58% more melatonin.

Try soothing music or a fictional book

Instead, try listening to nice soothing music or read a fictional book, but again read something that is relaxing and don’t pick a book that you are so excited about that you want to read the whole thing in one night. I know you guys who used to pull an all nighter whenever a new Harry Potter book would come out.

Actually, I prefer rereading my favorite books right before bed, because they don’t get me hyped up, and they make me go to my happy place!

Need inspiration for a good book? Try reading Lindsey Wei‘s books, especially “The Valley Spirit, a female story of daoist cultivation“!

5. Evening breathwork and body scan: 15 to 30 minutes to super relaxation

Actually, when my mind is racing and overthinking too much, this is the tip that helps me to fall asleep the fastest!

Instructions

Lay in your bed. Start by doing full belly breaths for 1 or 2 minutes. Then, you’re going to scan your whole body by relaxing every muscle and release any tension. Just focus on a particular body part, like your jaw and just feel it get loose and relaxed. Start at your feet and finish at your head.

You can also find a video with soothing music and someone who guides you through the process, there are so many options on the internet. You can also listen to a video where they have you focus just on your breath. I almost always fall asleep after doing 10 minutes of these types of videos. 

6. Get to bed on time

Figure out at what time you need to get to bed, so that you wake up feeling super awake. You want to create a bedtime to stick to most days, because then naturally your body will know it has to go to sleep at that time.
So, check at what time you have to get up, and then depending on how many hours of sleep you need, you can see at what time you need to go to bed.

The best is actually to figure out your sleep cycle. If you are interested, leave in the comments if you want me to write an article or do a video about this. This method will show you exactly at what time your body needs to go sleep to wake up feeling good.

7. Avoid drinking any liquids 45 min to an hour before going to bed

Try to not drink any liquids 45 minutes to an hour before going to sleep! Or not, you just know that exactly when you will be super relaxed and about to fall asleep, that’s when you’re going to have to get up to go pee. Or worse, you will wake up in the middle of the night and that’s even more annoying…

8. Use essential oils

Use essential oils such as rose, jasmine or lavender to relax! Use these in an essential oil diffuser to make your whole room feel like a safe garden.

With essential oils, if you wish to put them on your skin such as your wrists or temples, you need to dilute them in a carrier oil. Except for the lavender essential oil, but even then I would check by putting a little on my wrist to make sure there is no skin allergic reaction. To be on the safe side, simply mix one to 2 drops with jojoba or argan oil.

Some people put a drop of lavender essential oil on the side of the pillow or underneath it. But to avoid any reactions and spots on your pillow sheet, you can also put one or two drops on a tissue to put underneath your pillow!

9. Self-massage

Massage your body with oil, such as almond oil!

If you’re already tired and you don’t want to massage your whole body, you can simply focus on your feet and your head. When I was in China, I discovered that we have a lot of acupressure points in the feet. So massaging them really helps to let go of any tension! And when I am thinking too much, my head and neck get all tensed up, so I like to massage these parts to relax my mind before going to sleep.   

10. Write down your ideas!

Writing down your ideas is not about overthinking everything that happened to you during the day. It’s more about when you get a surge of creativity and ideas of things that you want to do.
Since I am more of a night person, this is when I usually get a lot of my ideas. And if I don’t write them down right away, then I keep thinking about them because I am afraid to forget them. So, I can’t fall asleep.  

Now go try these tips to fall asleep quickly!

Remember, you can also watch the video to how to fall asleep quickly here!

Try these tips one at a time, so you don’t feel overwhelmed with too much change at once. See which ones work the best for you and implement those into your new evening routine!

What other practices or tips do you have to fall asleep quickly? Share in the comments!