How To Go To Sleep FAST | Proven Sleep TIPS! [Why can't I sleep?]

This is Tom Bradecki, and do you have a hard time sleeping? I'm going over my favorite one-minute technique that lets you skip the pills, and I'm going over all my best sleep tips, and we're starting now. We're going to discuss all the melatonin tricks, the best foods, when should you eat, what should you drink, what kind of mattress should you use to fall asleep the quickest. We're gonna go over what raises and lowers your blood hormone levels, including caffeines, what chemicals. We're gonna go over all the best supplements, and I've done a deep dive on all 11 of the best and most searched supplements in America. I review which ones I like as well, and a trick in one minute that helps you fall asleep, even if that's all not working. Stick around to the end. So who is this guy to be talking about sleep? Well, I'm a medical director at a few different clinics, and I deal a lot with chronic pain. Hey, I've even written a book about chronic pain. I've talked about this with hundreds, if not thousands, of patients, and these are the best tips that I've been able to research. We're going over the studies and my favorite one-minute sleep technique to sleep better without pills. One of the most proven sleep techniques is called stimulus control therapy. It is basically a behavioral technique that programs your brain and your body to associate your bedroom and your bed with sleep, and it consistently helps you fall asleep. I know me personally, the second my head touches the pillow, I am out. I am asleep. I love sleeping, so I've read a ton of books, a ton of research studies. So here's my top tips, starting in order, that you must be doing. What about a large meal at night? This interrupts your melatonin at night. Your melatonin, this is very important. At nighttime, your melatonin goes up. It's a hormone in your brain. It's made by your pineal gland. I actually took a hormone specific set of classes in medical school and college as part of my biochemistry degree, and this was a huge focus of mine. I'm a big fan of melatonin. Eating a large meal at night messes up your melatonin levels. It messes up your insulin levels. It throws off your blood sugar. Should you have energy? Should you not have energy? Your body doesn't know if you eat a huge meal within three hours of sleep, and it puts on a lot of fat around your midsection. So you have less energy while you're sleeping. You're gonna wake up the next morning even more tired with your hormones thrown out of whack. It's really important to avoid eating that large meal. On the other hand, there are foods that contain melatonin, which could raise your melatonin, such as turmeric, nuts, walnuts, oats, mustard seeds are very common, but just don't overeat. Sleep positions as well. I have a great video right down here that goes over all the best sleep positions. Should you sleep on your front, on your side, on your back? What kind of pillow should you use? What kind of mattress should you use? People don't realize that you spend one-third of your life sleeping, and one-third of the time it can mess up your neck, your back, your hips, your sciatica, your foot pain. If you're watching this, you probably have some type of chronic pain or a hard time sleeping. Check out that video. It'll make a huge, huge difference in your life. The next thing you want to do is limit fluid intake before bed. The general rule is two to three hours before bed, just like eating a large meal, you have to avoid drinking large amounts of fluid. This will limit your bathroom trips during the night, and what happens is it will let you sleep in longer during the morning. I know if I want to wake up early in the morning, and this was a trick used by Native Americans when they were planning an attack the next day, you drink a lot of water because I know I'm gonna be getting up at like 3, 4 a.m. getting up, and I don't want to get back to bed. But if you need sleep, you don't want that to be you. But you want to make sure you stay hydrated during the day. Coffee and other stimulants after lunchtime, it's gonna mess up how you sleep. The caffeine basically runs out within a few hours in my opinion, but the brain chemicals and the brain changes, studies do show that those changes last three times as long. So your brain can actually fall asleep because of the coffee, even though you're still feeling drowsy in your body and the effects of the caffeine have worn off. Three times as long is the general rule with the changes to your brain made by coffee. Limit stimulating activities before bed, such as vigorous exercise, consuming caffeine, nicotine if you smoke, electronic devices. Now back to melatonin. Melatonin is a hormone in your brain, and what happens is when you go outside and the sun is shining, the blue light from the sun is called UV blue light. That essentially stimulates your melatonin levels to fall, so you're energetic when the sun's out. But at nighttime, your melatonin should start to rise again because your brain and your eyes are not sensing UVB blue light. But what happens is now with TVs, with cell phones, we're always getting that light, so our melatonin levels stay low. Not only do we have a hard time falling asleep, but we don't reach those deeper levels of sleep. And what happens is our quality of sleep is actually decreased. And the big secret with your brain is your brain has to actually deflate all those toxic fluids inside of it. It has to recycle your brain and get it healthy for the next morning. The reason you feel so groggy is because your brain deflates and fills back up with blood and cleans out all those neurotransmitters, those toxins. In the morning, your brain will inflate. You need that deep sleep to drain the toxic chemicals from your brain. This prevents diseases and hormonal imbalances. It's very important to go through those deep layers of sleep so you wake up refreshed. Not only is it the amount of sleep you need, but the quality of sleep. And if you're getting that blue light, then you're not getting healthy. There's some tricks. What me and my wife do is, on our phones, we have a blue light filter. So when 7, 8 p.m. or so hits, our blue light filter turns on. So your phone looks a little bit more red, but none of that blue light hits your eyes. My glasses, actually, I had them specially built. It used to be expensive, but now it's pretty cheap. I have blue light filters built into my eyes. So during the day, it squeezes in through the sides, but when I'm using my cell phone or my computer screen, it's not actually coming through. So I have a double fail-safe. If you wear glasses, or even if you don't wear glasses, get some UV ray protective glasses that you can wear inside the house while you watch TV. I have some links down below because that's an easy solution. But during the day, you want to expose yourself to that natural blue light. Make sure you get outside even 5-10 minutes a day because that will lower your melatonin during the day, give you energy, and shoot it back up at night and give you that energy back for when you wake up the next morning. Very, very important. And on that note, night lights. Don't have any UV producing lights in your room. There's actually a study I read where people who have a UV light tend to have more health issues and have much poorer levels of sleep because of that light in your room. Make sure it's pitch black in your room. Establish a consistent sleep schedule. One big change I made in my life is I started cutting out alcohol. As soon as I cut out alcohol, I started going to sleep consistently and my health took off like a rocket. There's so many benefits to not drinking alcohol. I could go over them forever, but if you're serious about getting rid of your health problems and you're still drinking alcohol, it's messing up your sleep, it's messing up your hormone levels, consider getting it out of there because on Fridays, Saturdays, it's gonna mess up your sleep cycle. It sabotages your entire week, ruins your muscle growth, causes knee pain, hip pain. One of the biggest things that you could change regarding your sleep. Keep your sleep consistent. Even on the weekends, keep falling asleep at the same time. Your body will thank you. Create a sleep-friendly environment in your room. Make sure it's pitch black. You can get a nice plant that produces some oxygen in there. Make sure you have thick blinds that lower and close your windows. And you also want a noise machine. One big thing is a noise machine cancels out all the street noise, all the loud bangs, thuds, the crickets, the wolf howling in your backyard, potentially depending on where you live. Listen, we have three little kids under five right now and with the noise machine, all three of them fall asleep much better. If we don't have them, they all wake each other up. It's crazy. Now, if they get really loud, we're there to listen to them. Hopefully. Don't go calling Child Protective Services on me. It helps everybody sleep. Everybody's well-rested. And we don't use night lights for the kids either. The night lights sabotage their sleep, in my opinion, and studies tend to prove that. The temperature in your bedroom. Studies show that you want a cool temperature. So you want to lower the temperature in your room. Hey, with inflation, you can save money on heating anyway. But if room temperature is 72 degrees Fahrenheit here in America, you want to get it maybe mid-60s or mid to high 60s at the very least. Hey, colder the better. You'll save even more money. You can thank me later on your heating bill. Consider comfortable bedding. I have a great video below on sleep positions. Should you sleep on your front, your side, or back? Make sure you watch that. But it's very important to get a proper orthopedic or memory foam pillow. Because when you sleep, if your neck's curved or bent, that strain on your cervical nerves, on your back nerves, it adds up and makes a huge difference to creating achiness, soreness, and poor sleep. If you don't have the proper sleep position, you're not going to sleep as well. And I know it's not the cheapest to get like a memory foam or a fancy mattress, but I have some links below for toppers. We've got this for everybody in our family and that helps your butt sink, your shoulders sink, keeps your spine level. The general rule is you want your ears level with your shoulders. So you don't want to be forward. You don't want to be back. You don't want to be twisted and or contorted. That's what leads to scoliosis levels, compression, spinal stenosis. People in retirement age, almost 50% of people have spinal stenosis. You don't want to be straining that back and causing scoliosis on top of that. Switch up a great routine. Calming, book reading. I know with my kids, we pull out a book, we read even 10 to 15 minutes, they start getting sleepy. But if we're watching like a Disney movie or something, the blue lights hitting them, everybody's bouncing off the walls going crazy. Get in the habit of some book reading. It'll calm everybody down. It'll calm your brain. It'll get you right into bed. And that goes with warm baths. Relaxation techniques. Make sure your bedroom is for sleep and intimacy only. No TV, no blue light there. If that's still not doing it, consider natural remedies. So natural remedies like herbal teas, like chamomile or lavender have been shown to be very effective. Essential oils like lavender or valerian root. These have been shown to help as well. I'm a big fan of natural sleep supplements and my favorite is melatonin. But always check with your doctor. Melatonin is phenomenal for me. I don't use it every day, but on days where I know I need to catch up on sleep, I will actually take it a little bit earlier. Man, within half an hour, I am out. Even with small dosages. And I have very pleasant, vivid dreams with this. I'm a big fan. Listen, melatonin is in our eggs. It's in nuts. It's already a natural substance. It's not a synthetic hormone, like injecting yourself with testosterone or something. This is a natural substance. Just to prove that melatonin is all natural, it is in things like nuts, turmeric, oats, mustards, a lot of vegetables, a lot of seeds. Very common. All natural. Now here's our one-minute trick. I promised you a great one-minute trick. It has to do with the parasympathetic nervous system and the vagal response. Now have you ever heard of the Iceman Wim Hof? I love this guy. But basically what he does when he sits in ice for 20 minutes or a couple hours, that activates his parasympathetic nervous system. So essentially you have two nervous systems. You have your sympathetic, which is your fight-and-flight. Like if somebody slaps you across the face or punches you, you're like ready to rumble. You're energetic. You're amped up. Whereas your parasympathetic nervous system calms you down. So I think about my dog. When I put that thunder jacket to squeeze him, that creates some pressure. And that basically calms the dog down. He gets sleepy. And that's this one-minute technique. The parasympathetic nervous system is characterized by lowering your heart rate, lowering your blood pressure, lowering your stress hormones, while promoting relaxation and digestion. The parasympathetic nervous system is also stimulated by massage. If you have a spouse and they give you a back massage, a foot massage, you tend to get sleepy and relax. This can promote relaxation and there's a real science behind it. I actually list my favorite massage guns, my foot massagers. My mother-in-law, for example, I get her a foot massager. She always uses it every night. And there are some areas, when massaged, they activate your vagal response. And this is the one-minute technique that helps promote better sleep. One of them is essentially taking your fingers and your thumbs and massaging right there. I'm actually getting pretty sleepy right now just doing that. That's a great technique. Your vagus nerve is a cranial nerve. It is the longest cranial nerve and it runs down your neck. So when you're having neck pain and soreness, that can be agitated and not working properly. But if properly stimulated, it reduces your fight-and-flight, helps you sleep, helps your heart rate and breathing. If you eat a large meal, it can be irritated. It helps stop the inflammatory response and can help control hormones in the gut. So massaging it, studies do show it makes you sleepy, activates some of that good hormone response, less stress, easier breathing. That works really well. So I'm just doing this for 20 seconds right there. So see my neck muscles right here. I already feel relaxed and I'm pressing them as they press into my occipital lobe. So I'm just pressing as they press into my occipital lobe. I'm gonna come up here and as I'm pressing right there, that's 20 seconds. So there are a lot of studies also on the median nerve and the ulnar nerve. So essentially if you have a carpal tunnel, that's gonna make your wrist and your median nerve get compressed just like I'm showing in this picture right here. But there's a lot of studies that show that essentially massaging these can help you calm down, decrease your breathing or relax. There's actually some studies I showed that have a correlation with higher melatonin levels. So essentially taking a look at your median nerve and your ulnar nerve might be a strong option. And then part two is in the middle of my wrist, I'm taking my thumb and I'm just gently massaging there. And we're talking 20 seconds. I'm just massaging in the middle. That right there activates your parasympathetic nervous system, gets you nice and sleepy and there you go. And then right here you have your ulnar nerve. So one was in the middle, one's on the outside. Just pressing it right there. I'm just massaging 20 seconds. I can already feel that working. That 20-minute technique, I don't have to use it often because all the other stuff, as soon as I touch the pillow, I'm out. And I wake up early. With these techniques, I actually have to sleep less and I'm more refreshed. I'm up every day around 4 a.m. I'm up and at it. That's what lets me film these videos. That's why sometimes I whisper and you hear kids yelling. That's when it's time to get up and get ready for the day. That's my 60-second technique. Massage your neck muscles as they insert into your occipital lobe. Massage the center of your wrist and massage the outside of your wrist. 20 seconds, 20 seconds, 20 seconds. Now the trick is, if you're falling asleep, studies show if you can't sleep for more than like 20 minutes, get up, do this technique, do it for about a minute. Potentially take some melatonin at that time if you're having a hard time because otherwise you develop clock-watching anxiety and your stress hormones can shoot up. You don't want to get into that pattern. You want to do something to break the pattern. Calm yourself down with this parasympathetic nervous response. Try the stuff on the list. Am I missing anything? Tell me what works, guys. I care about you. If this video helped, send it to your friends. Send it to your family members. It really helps the channel. Give us some comments and some subscribes. Thank you.