How I Cured My Insomnia WITHOUT Medication - How to Fall Asleep Fast

Why hello there! Welcome back to my channel. If you've ever struggled to fall asleep or maybe you've suffered from insomnia then probably like me you found yourself on google looking up how to fall asleep fast or tips to fall asleep more quickly and then what you found was all these blog articles that had lists of different ideas, some videos, and because you've been trying to fall asleep for a few hours at this point you read through these articles, you watch the videos, and you probably realized pretty quickly that you've already tried some of these ideas, some of these ideas your common sense just tells you won't work, and then there's a couple that maybe you haven't tried yet and so maybe you put them to the test. Well honestly my entire life I've struggled to fall asleep very quickly. In fact when I was a child I would routinely spend hours lying in bed every single night, not being able to fall asleep, and then in the morning sometimes I would wake up early, sometimes I would sleep in, but it didn't seem to make a how early I woke up or how active I was during the day. In fact I would say that on the days when I was the most active and exerted the most energy those were the days that I actually had the biggest trouble falling asleep. So this is something that has plagued me my entire life, I've never really been able to overcome it. I will say though that as an adult the problem has gotten somewhat better. Now instead of every single night having it take me hours to fall asleep now most nights I fall asleep in somewhere between 20 and 60 minutes and the nights when it takes me hours are relatively few and far between. However it's continued to frustrate me that it takes me a while to fall asleep and just lately I've been thinking a lot about how it seems strange that in the mornings when I wake up I normally feel rather tired, not exhausted, I consider myself to be a morning person but throughout the entire morning I feel kind of tired and I want to take a nap. But as the day progresses I feel more and more awake and in fact by the time we get to the evening I feel very awake and I have no interest in going to bed which isn't very helpful because then I don't want to go to bed and so I often will procrastinate going to bed and that means that I don't get to bed obviously on time, at an early time and so that makes waking up early and being productive first thing in the morning difficult. Which you might say well why don't you just work later in the day? But the thing is I actually do my best work first thing in the morning if I really just sit down and start working right away before I get distracted by other things. So this has just been a struggle for a long time but I've been thinking about it a lot lately and trying to figure out why that might be. So just like you might do if you had a question about why is this happening to me, I again took to google and I googled a few things like why am I more awake in the evenings? Why am I more tired in the mornings? Why do I get less and less tired throughout the day, more and more energetic throughout the day? Now in doing this research I found a few different reasons why different people suggested that I might be feeling tired in the morning. Some of the more common reasons included speculation that I could have a disorder like sleep apnea that is preventing me from sleeping well or that I could have a food allergy that is preventing me from sleeping well or that I'm not getting enough sleep or that I'm eating an unhealthy diet that's causing me to be chronically fatigued or that I have a really inconsistent bedtime so that my body doesn't have a stable circadian rhythm. And while that last one is ever so slightly true, most of these others I already know probably are not true because I eat a very healthy diet. I have tried going to bed at a very consistent time in the past and that didn't really help. I get plenty of exercise and I've had myself tested for food allergies and I'm already not eating the things that I know I'm allergic to so it didn't really seem like any of these were the problem and beyond that I actually feel like I'm sleeping pretty well at night. It didn't seem like I was tired just because I wasn't getting enough sleep. It seemed like for some reason I have more energy in the evening which causes me to not want to go to bed which causes me to not get quite enough sleep however that doesn't explain why I feel tired in the morning but then more energetic later on. So I really didn't have much of a solution however there were a few articles that suggested that the cause of all of these symptoms could be that my circadian rhythm was off. Basically maybe my body thinks that night time starts later than it actually does and ends later than it actually does. So for example maybe my body thinks that night time starts at 1am and ends at 11am. If that's the case then that would completely explain why those are the hours I am tired during and those are the hours that I want to sleep and then the hours from 11am to 1am are the hours when I'm most awake. And then beyond that my circadian rhythm could be off in the sense that maybe my body thinks that a day is 25 hours long or 26 hours long instead of the actual 24 hours. So now of course this was all very theoretical and I didn't know for sure whether or not that was the problem and so I did a little bit more research and I tried to figure out what I could do to fix this problem. Now the first thing that I thought of to do was to fix my circadian rhythm and so after a little bit more research I discovered that one of the easiest ways to fix your circadian rhythm is by shining a full spectrum light on yourself in the morning so that your brain gets the signals that that is morning time and then later on in the day ensuring that you aren't being exposed to blue spectrum light such as the light that comes from your phone or from your computer or monitor and perhaps to wear some orange tinted glasses or sunglasses that simply filter out the blue light so that my brain thinks that that is night time. And this was a relatively simple thing to do so what I did was I took to Amazon and I looked at the different full spectrum light options that were available and honestly a lot of them were rather expensive especially considering that I wasn't really sure if this was actually the problem so I didn't want to spend all that much. However I did find one that was only about $30 and the ratings were actually pretty good so I went ahead and I ordered that. The light came in just a few days and I took it out of the box and it looks really good. It actually looks really solid. I was worried it might be really flimsy or seem really cheap. It's relatively small but it does seem solid so I took it out and I set it out and it works really well. It has three different brightnesses and you can set a timer on it which I don't think I'll actually use that timer setting because I'm planning to just shine it on my face while I'm working each morning just for a while. I suppose I might use the timer setting but I don't really have plans to use that for now. Like I said the light is small but it's very bright so I think that it will work just fine. Now beyond learning that it was possible that my circadian rhythm was off I also learned something else really interesting and that was that according to some doctors the phase of sleep that you wake up during can actually have a bigger impact on your mood and how rested you feel than the amount or quality of sleep that you get. So something that you probably already know that I already knew was that when we sleep we go through different phases. We go through phases of lighter sleep and deeper sleep and then there's also the period of REM sleep which is the lightest phase of sleep and it's also the phase in which we experience the most dreams. However I didn't realize that we actually feel the best if we wake up during that REM period of sleep. Now normally there wouldn't be a way to really ensure that you wake up during this period of sleep however what I discovered is that there are some apps that can track your sleep and can actually wake you up during one of those periods of REM sleep. So basically how these apps work is you set a window of time during which you want to wake up so perhaps between 6 30 and 7 o'clock in the morning and then throughout the night the app tracks your sleep. It can either do this with the accelerometer in your phone tracking your movements or else it can use the microphone in your phone again to track your movements and so by tracking your movements it can sense when you're in the lightest phases of sleep because that's when you're moving around the most and so then whenever you're moving around the most during that window of time that you said you wanted to wake up during the alarm will go off and one thing that seems really nice about these apps is that if you hit the snooze button or even if you just basically turn the alarm off it will go off again in just a few minutes if it senses that you aren't moving around. Now this seemed really intriguing to me because I've noticed in the past that if I take a nap I feel awful afterwards and the reason for that could be because after you fall asleep you fairly quickly within the first 30 to 60 minutes go into the deepest sleep phase and that is the phase that you have the potential to feel the worst if you wake up out of and I think that maybe I'm just really sensitive to that myself because I know that if I take a nap and it's less than a few hours long when I wake up I feel incredibly groggy and tired and I'm really not good for anything for the entire rest of the day. Now I really wanted to take my sleep hacking one step further and get some sort of device that could measure my sleep even more accurately. I was thinking that maybe if I got a fitbit or an apple watch or something like that then it might be able to track my sleep by sensing my pulse and actually measuring my heart rate and that seems like that might be more accurate than just judging my movements during the night because the fact is that I share my bed with my husband and I share my bedroom with my baby also and so if the app is sensing my movements based on sound it seems like it might be picking up a lot of irrelevant data that could be distorting the results. So I looked into some alternative options but I wasn't able to find any great ones. Let me know down in the comments if you know any devices that I could purchase to help me figure this out even more and maybe we can make a part two of this video but here's basically what I found. First of all devices like the apple watch or a Garmin fitness tracker or the fitbit they all have apps in them that can attract your sleep quality very similar to the apps that I can already get on my phone and these apps are perhaps more accurate because they are based on your heart rate but none of them have built-in alarm clocks that can wake you up during the right time in your sleep cycle and that's the main function that I really want this device or app to have. So it didn't seem like it was worth it to spend over a hundred dollars for a device that was just going to give me slightly more accurate information about my sleep but not really help me do anything about it. So I looked into some other options. I found one device that you can strap around your head that does exactly what I want but I don't want to sleep with something strapped around my head continually. I mean if it was just for a one-week experiment or something then I'd go ahead and do it but I'm not just looking for a little experiment I'm looking for something that can continue to help me for years into the future. I also found a device that sounded like exactly what I wanted that is something that straps onto your wrist however at least according to my research it looks like that device has been discontinued and isn't made anymore. So I'm still on the lookout for an actual device that I can use to track my sleep even more accurately and like I said that might turn into a second video but let me tell you about the results that I have experienced over the past few days as I've been using the full spectrum light and the sleep cycle app on my phone. So basically what I've been doing has been really simple. I'm using the sleep cycle app which is a free app that you can get on android or ios to track my sleep at night and to wake me up at the optimal waking time after about seven to eight hours of sleep. Each day I've been going to bed at about 10 30 to 11 and then I've been setting the alarm to wake me up between 5 40 in the morning and 6 10 in the morning and then beyond that every morning after I get up after I brush my teeth and things like that and I sit down to meditate and then to work I've been shining the full spectrum light on my face for about one hour. Now what has happened has been really interesting mostly because it was not what I was expecting. I thought that what would happen would be that I would start to almost immediately need less sleep because my sleep quality would be improved and because I'd be waking up at that optimal time in my sleep cycle I would feel so much better regardless of what time I woke up so I wouldn't need to sleep as much. However instead here's what's been happening. Now first of all the thing that might be the most interesting to you is that I've been able to fall asleep much more quickly. I wasn't really expecting that to happen at least not in the short term. It wasn't really something that I was focused on but I'm feeling much more tired in the evening. In fact as early as about 8 30 to 9 pm I start feeling really tired like I want to go to bed and that definitely was not happening just a few days ago but within two days of shining the full spectrum light on my face I started to have that effect where I felt very tired relatively early in the evening. So I've been getting to bed a little earlier than I was before. Now not quite as early as I want to be getting to bed but that's just because my days are busy. I'm getting to bed as early as I can. I'm not sitting around procrastinating reading or scrolling on social media but really just as early as I can which for this past week has been at around 10 30 pm some days as late as 11. When I go to bed I'm falling asleep in less than 15 minutes absolutely. I can't say exactly how quickly it is partly because the app takes several days to calibrate and so I've only have a few days of data to go on so far but I would say on average I'm falling to sleep in about five minutes each night which is crazy fast for me. Okay and then beyond that now I do sleep with the baby in my room and she is waking me up because she gets hungry at night but in between being woken up I feel like I'm sleeping deeper and actually I feel like I'm having a harder time waking up for the baby which is slightly inconvenient but I do think it's an indication that I'm sleeping deeper. Now what is happening in the morning is I'm waking up with the sleep cycle alarm and it is a relatively comfortable way to wake up however it's a little bit strange for me because I'm used to waking up right when my alarm goes off and not hitting snooze because I don't want to be in the habit of hitting snooze. I want to just you know get up right when I said I would get up however with the sleep cycle app it's kind of hard to do that because it wakes you up so gently that you turn it off and you're not really fully awake and then it goes off again a few minutes later and you wake up a little bit more goes off a few minutes later you wake up a little bit more so I'm waking up at a really good time. I'm waking up at about 6am which is when I want to be waking up and it is more comfortable but it just feels kind of strange and not quite as much in my control because I'm not leaping out of bed when my alarm first goes off because I'm just not awake enough to do that yet so I'll have to wait and see kind of how that plays out. I am feeling much more awake in the mornings. That morning grogginess is almost completely gone. Now the part of all this that feels really strange is that I definitely am not sleeping less. In fact I'm sleeping significantly more. The sleep is better, the sleep feels more restful, the sleep is deeper but I'm sleeping all the way from So between seven and a half to eight hours. Now obviously that's not an enormous amount of sleep or a strange amount of sleep however prior to starting this experiment I was sleeping on average about six and a half hours a night and there was plenty of nights when I only slept six hours or even a little bit less and I was getting by all right. Sure I felt a little tired throughout the day especially in the morning and I was having these other problems that I already discussed where it's taking me forever to fall asleep and I was having trouble being motivated in the morning but I felt like I was getting by and so it's really surprising to me that now I'm sleeping seven and a half to eight hours a night and that doesn't feel like too much sleep. So so far this experiment has been really interesting and if you happen to be struggling to fall asleep or feeling tired in the morning like I was then both of these things that I ended up doing the sleep cycle app which is free and then this full spectrum light that I tried that like I said I think it was about like 30 to 33 dollars um they both helped a whole lot and I'd recommend them to anyone who is struggling with these issues. If you want me to do an update on this perhaps in a month or so both after I've been using these two solutions for longer and also perhaps after I find a device that I can actually wear to track my sleep even more accurately then I think that might be an interesting thing to do but just let me know down in the comments if that's something you want to see. All right well I think that that is it for this video. If you liked this video and you want to see more videos about personal development or success or entrepreneurship which is actually what I normally talk about on this channel then do hit that subscribe button down below so that you can join us for the next video. Thank you guys so much for watching. I really appreciate you taking the time to join me and let me know if you thought this video was interesting. I hope you're having a fantastic week and I hope to see you again next time.