You’ve had a long day at work and you’re exhausted so you get ready for bedtime…. You finish your night routine… You pull the blinds… And lights off.

Can you guess the next part?

You can’t sleep. For hours on end. It’s 3 AM and you’re desperately on your phone searching for any possible way to fall asleep.

What’s worse is the day after when you’re functioning on 4 hours of sleep (if you’re lucky). So, we worked with sleep institutes for years to help you get those 8 hours of sleep that you crave.

Whether you have insomnia, sleep anxiety or just can’t fall asleep, try these tricks out and who knows, you might get your first full 8 hours of sleep tonight. (trick #4 is my favourite one)

1. Pre-Bed Meditation

Thousands of our thoughts are constantly racing, so it’s no wonder that falling asleep is difficult.

Especially if you’ve just watched TV or gone on your phone before bed, your mind will have a lot of clutter.

So before you sleep, sit down or lay down anywhere you feel comfortable and close your eyes for 5 minutes. Not only will your mind be ready for sleep but you will feel more relaxed, easing the process of falling asleep.

If you’re new to mediation or not sure how to do it, here are a few pointers

Find a quiet place to meditate or put headphones on
If you don’t like quiet noise, play mediation sounds
Close your eyes
Bring yourself to the present moment by scanning your body head-to-toe and being aware of your 5 senses.
If any thought comes into your mind, try to let it pass without thinking about it
Most importantly, it takes practice so don’t feel frustrated if you can’t do it for the first time

2. Tell Yourself A Story

At night, most of our minds keep us awake by filling us with anxiety-inducing thoughts such as;

“Just fall asleep now”
“What time is it right now?”
“If I don’t fall asleep in the next hour, I’ll be tired tomorrow”

Thoughts like these, as you know, make it harder to fall asleep. Instead, try to calm your subconscious mind by telling yourself a relaxing story - kind of like counting sheep.

Doing so allows your brain to release more serotonin.

This way, you’ll keep your mind off of feeling anxious and you’ll ease into deep sleep without thinking about it.

3. Military 4-7-8 Breathing

This is a common sleep tactic used by NAVY seals and pilots when they have to get sleep, in stressful situations. What’s awesome about this process is that it only takes 5 minutes!

The goal is to slow down breathing by inhaling through the nose for 4 seconds, exhaling for 7 seconds and repeating it 8 times.

By the 6th cycle, you should be asleep, but remember to think about nothing or a calming story as mentioned in the previous tips.

4. Create a Sleep Sanctuary

“The room is a sanctuary that promotes rest and recovery” -Tom Hiddleston, sleep coach.

Stressful and unnecessary objects in the room are proven to not be beneficial for sleep from the subconscious stress that we don’t notice in the central part of our brain.

Try getting rid of these objects in the room that are keeping you awake, like your laptop, a pile of clothes or even extra papers from work.

This might be too long to explain fully in this blog, but try to also add objects in your sleep sanctuary that would help you sleep easier. For example, something to release serotonin like a humidifier or a weighted sleep mask. Our favourite is an anxiety-reducing weighted blanket for deep sleep. You can take this quiz to see if it can benefit you too.

5. Turn On Sleeping Music

No, we don’t mean those lullabies that parents play to wind down their children. Although they can definitely work, we're talking about binaural beats (aka neurological sound waves).

It has been proven through multiple sleep behaviour studies that they move you into deep sleep faster by stimulating the delta activity in the brain (brainwaves for sleep).

So try playing binaural beats (you can find them for free on Youtube) tonight and you’ll notice how easy falling asleep might be. You’ll sleep like a baby!

6. Be Gone Phone!

No, we’re not saying to get rid of your phone from your room because your boss wouldn’t be too happy about that.

But we all know that staring at the clock at night is no good, and the same with your phone. It emits blue light that tricks our brain into thinking that there is sunlight during the daytime.

Although we advise not going on your phone 30 minutes before bed, if you really want to, you can set your phone to "dark mode" filters and reducing screen brightness to minimize the effects.

It also makes the phone much less addictive by removing the bright colours so that you don’t spend hours on it before bed.