Believe it or not, trying to fall asleep is the single biggest reason for not being able to get to sleep!

The reason that it takes you so long to fall asleep is because you have unwittingly conditioned your brain to not fall asleep when you go to bed. The amazing fact is that the easiest way to actually fall asleep quickly is to do the exact opposite, that is, to condition your brain to fall asleep as soon as you lie down. However, before you can do this, you must first re-educate your brain, clean it of all the sleep related rubbish that it has previously been taught.

The act of falling asleep should be something that comes naturally, it shouldn’t be a conscious effort that you strive to achieve. If you’re like me, you’ve probably had the same experience yourself, the harder you try to make yourself fall asleep, the longer that it takes to drop off. You will then start tensing up, ensuring that you are even further from that much needed sleep. By trying to fall asleep you are actually preventing yourself from falling asleep.

But why is this you may ask. Simply speaking, falling asleep is not an action, it's not something you physically do, it's something that simply happens to you. If you do try to fall asleep, then you will tense up and as a result stay awake. Although you may already have realized this, you know that you have to get to sleep, so you try even harder when it comes to bedtime. Well don’t, during a well-documented study, one test group of volunteers were asked to fall asleep as fast as they could, the winner being offered a cash prize. A second group were asked to just fall asleep as normal. You can probably guess which group fell asleep the quickest. The ones who were offered the cash prize actually took three times as long to fall asleep as those who were left to their own devices.

So the best attitude is one of carelessness. Stop trying to fall asleep. Stop! If you catch yourself doing it, it's probably because you've been lying in bed too long.

Further details on this and other sleep related problems and how to overcome them can be found at: