Fall asleep faster

Let’s cut the cr*p. You need sleep.

Without it you’re a moody mess, your memory’s shot and your body stops doing what it’s told. Everybody knows this. Most of us still lie there at 1am staring at the ceiling.

I’ve done my share of staring. What I’ve worked out is that dropping off comes down to two things.

• How warm you are.

• How wired you are.

Get both right and you’re gone in minutes. Get one wrong and you can lie there for hours. Here’s what works for me, and the bit of it that has proper science behind it.

You’re not going to sleep if you’re sweating like a pig.

Your body has to drop its core temperature to go off, and it can’t do that in a hot room. So make it cold. Colder than feels comfortable when you first get in. Window open, fan on, thinner duvet, whatever it takes.

If you share a bed with someone who likes it tropical, that’s a negotiation. Win it.

Seems backwards, right? Hear me out.

A hot bath doesn’t cool you down. It warms you up. Then you get out, your body dumps the heat fast through your hands and feet, and the drop is the signal. Your brain reads a falling core temperature as time for bed.

This one has real evidence behind it. Haghayegh and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin went through seventeen studies in 2019 and found that a bath or shower at 40 to 42°C, an hour or two before bed, got people off to sleep faster and gave them better sleep once they were under. Ten minutes in the water was enough.

The timing is the whole trick. Fifteen minutes before bed is too soon, because you’re still hot when you lie down. An hour or two before and you climb into bed on the way down.

If you’re pounding coffee, tea or cola late in the day, don’t wonder why you can’t sleep.

Caffeine is a sleep killer and it lasts longer than you think. Drake and colleagues at the Henry Ford hospital in Detroit, 2013, gave people 400mg of caffeine, about two big coffees, at bedtime, three hours before bed and six hours before bed. Even the six-hour dose cost them over an hour of sleep on the monitor.

And they didn’t notice. Their sleep diaries said they’d slept fine.

Six hours before bed and it still took them twenty-odd minutes longer to drop off. So cut it off by mid-afternoon. Yes, even that harmless afternoon cup counts.

Going to bed on a full stomach is a bad idea. Your gut is working when the rest of you is trying to clock off.

Don’t go to bed starving either, or you’ll lie there thinking about toast. I stop eating two or three hours before bed. That’s my rule, not a study’s, and it works.

Exercise is great for sleep. Don’t be a dumb*ss and hit the gym right before bed, though.

A hard session pumps you full of adrenaline and leaves your heart going, which is the opposite of what you need. Stutz, Eiholzer and Spengler at ETH Zurich looked at twenty-three studies in 2019 and found evening exercise doesn’t hurt sleep, and if anything deepens it. The one exception they flagged was vigorous training finishing within an hour of bed. That’s the one I’m talking about.

Train earlier. Evening is fine. Bedtime isn’t.

Love an afternoon nap? Cool. If it’s after 3pm you’re shooting yourself in the foot.

Sleep works on pressure. It builds all day, and a late nap lets it out, so by midnight there’s nothing left to push you under. Nap early or not at all.

Sometimes it happens anyway.

Don’t fight it. Lying in bed trying to sleep is the one thing guaranteed to keep you up. Get the breath going instead: four in through the nose, hold for seven, eight out through the mouth. I wrote the whole thing up in Breathwork. It’s the one I use when the plane’s taxiing, which is a worse place to be awake than your own bed.

If that doesn’t do it either, get up. Sit in the cold kitchen for ten minutes until you’re actually tired, then go back. The bed is for sleeping in, not for lying awake in.