The Single Best Way to Fall Asleep Quickly

The answer is something called ‘cognitive shuffling’ and it involves thinking about random items that are easy to visualize. These should be things that are seen as non-threatening, and conducive to sleep.

Sleep difficulties

For years and years and years and years I’ve had trouble falling asleep. In my teenage years, I thought I was going slightly insane because I was going such long stretches with very little sleep.

I would lay awake at night, trying to fix all the ills of the world. How I’d stop wars, and poverty and bring peace and compassion to everything. Absolute delusions of grandeur.

Teenage dreams are hard to beat…

On top of that then there were the usual teenage worries of social anxiety, not fitting in, not being popular with girls, and failing at school because it was so hard to concentrate thanks to being exhausted all the time.

Once I could legally drink, things improved somewhat as I could self-medicate and drink alcohol to help me sleep but, well, obviously with hindsight that was a rather stupid strategy.

Drink & drugs

Alcohol will definitely help you fall asleep but you won’t have a good sleep as it puts you into a deeper sleep where you don’t have any REM sleep.

REM is incredibly important because it’s during this phase of sleep that we back up our memories and rest properly too. A deep sleep is more like a ‘dead sleep’ where there’s very little activity.

The same goes for self-medicating with marijuana. It will also help you fall asleep but smoking week wreaks havoc on REM sleep too. Ask anyone who smokes the ganja about when they stop smoking for a while, the dreams come back a hundredfold and are quite intense.

20s & 30s

Things didn’t really improve for me though. In my 20s and 30s, I would ‘miss’ at least one night’s sleep per week thanks to laying awake worrying about anything and everything. When I did sleep because I was so anxious/depressed in my daily life I would sweat like I’d been running a Sahara desert marathon.

It was horrible and I was in a vicious cycle. I gained a ton of weight and was really threading the abyss and I began to wake up gasping for breath. This wasn’t too bad when I was sharing a bed with my wife but when it happened one night alone in a hotel I needed to take action.

Sleep apnea

I was told I had sleep apnea. I didn’t even know what it was. Basically, for every hour of sleep, I was waking up 63 times. So every less than two minutes I would wake. A normal rate is for a person to have five per night, I was having 63 per hour. It was no wonder I was such a mess.

So, I got hooked onto a sleep apnea machine and it worked but laying in bed looking like a cyborg really hit home that I’d let myself fall into a hole.

Over the following 24 months, I began going on long walks with the dog, jogging, and doing some weight work, and I got my weight down from 100kg (220lbs) to 70kg (154lbs). Before I quit using the sleep apnea machine I was down to one or two events per night and so I cured it.

There were still nights, however, when I would toss and turn, mulling over the day’s events or things from my past, so, I would occasionally find it difficult to drift off to sleep.

Cognitive shuffling

A friend then recommended that I try cognitive shuffling and it was a proper game changer.

What you do is think of loosely connected things and the reason it’s supposed to work is that it mimics how our minds work during dreams.

We jump from one idea to another in an almost random but still just-about logical way. Let me give you my method.

I start with an animal, let’s say ‘aardvark’ and then from that word, I try and make other words from the letters.

So, first we have ‘aardvark’. Next would be ‘apple’, ‘ant,’ ‘reptile,’ ‘dodo,’ ‘vehicle,’ ‘arrival,’ ‘kite.’

Then I take the final word, ‘kite,’ and repeat the process.

Kite becomes ‘kangaroo,’ ‘ignite,’ ‘traveling,’ ‘emancipate’.

Now, it’s getting fun! And so we repeat the process with ‘emancipate.’

Emancipate becomes ‘empathy,’ ‘militaristic,’ ‘angels,’ ‘neurology,’ ‘carpentry,’ ‘ignorance,’ ‘paternal,’ ‘amusement,’ ‘teething,’ ‘evolution,’ and then we begin again with ‘evolution.’

Give it a try, if it can work for me, it’s certainly worth a go.

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Would you like to work on sleep issues? Contact me here if you’d like to book a one-on-one life coaching/counseling session with me.

Thanks for reading my article about developing self-esteem.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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