You know those kinds of things that people do so naturally that they think anybody can do it as easy or as good as them?
Like, imagine amazing outfits with only a 3-seconds-glance throughout any closet (can a glance be 3 seconds long??).
Or splitting that $359,79 dinner bill (plus 15% tip) by 5 friends in 4 seconds.
Or scheduling the day so optimally that they can fit there their two jobs, the yoga class, the kids’ practices, a couple of errands, making dinner, read a book and still have time to drink a bottle of wine with their partner.
BTW, I am not any of these persons, but I kick ass at one very important skill.
My superpower is to fall asleep!
That’s right, I can fall asleep in seconds and almost anywhere, and believe me when I say it is a great skill to have, but I never thought I was any special until I started to notice that most of my friends and acquaintances struggle to fall asleep!
It is no news that sleep is extremely important for our well being.
Having enough (and good) sleep is a major factor in the success (or lack of it) in any area of our lives.
And especially for our health, it is vital. You can check this book and I’m sure you’ll be amazed by many of its insights.
I do not sleep as long as I should or wanted to, because I’m not very good scheduling my day (I’m a one-superpower-only kind of guy) so I tend to have a lot of stuff to do late at night, but I fall asleep in a remarkably easy and fast way.
Although I knew this characteristic was very positive, I never thought much about it, until I came across this article from Sharon Ackman:
The one thing I could really relate with was this:
The last step is to clear your mind for 10 seconds. That’s it. No thinking about what went wrong that day, or what time you need to get up, or when you’ll get to call your partner.
(…)
Instead, you need to keep your mind still. You can do this by holding a static image in your head.Sharon Ackman — How to Fall Asleep in 120 Seconds — Medium
This is precisely what I do ever since I can remember. The minute I lay in bed to sleep, I close my eyes and instantly comes up a smooth grey “wall” that I focus on and, for my girlfriend’s despair, 15 seconds later I’m snoring like a drunk bear.
Only when I read Ackman’s article I understood that this visualization is part of a “sleeping routine”, which means that it can actually help some people that struggle for falling asleep, otherwise, this wouldn’t be taught in the army.
I find it hard to explain my own version of this technique, but I’ll give it a shot.
When it’s time to go to sleep I lay in bed with my belly down and I close my eyes and I kinda look towards my forehead (with my eyes shut) and I visualize a grey square similar to this:
This grey square comes with silence and void, it’s like I’m in a room protected from any distraction, although I can only see one of the walls.
I do this with absolutely no effort, it just pops up and all my attention is on that image. I don’t listen to any sound, I don’t care about any of my problems (and believe me, I have my fair share of them), I don’t think about what I have to do the next day, I simply “look” at that grey square that is standing 2 inches from my forehead and in less than a minute I’m sleeping.
I can’t tell you why I do it, or how I do it, I just do it.
I don’t need to intentionally relax my body or tell my limbs to go to sleep. I’m a lazy person, so my body always wants to rest, so I guess I’m lucky?
The fact that I don’t sleep as many hours as I should also contribute to my body feeling tired at the end of the day, so it’s easier to rest.
On the other hand, from my experience, it’s the mind that controls the body, so it is my mind that I need to tame, and again, lucky for me, my mind doesn’t give me much work on this issue.
If only my mind was so easy to put to work as it is to put to sleep, I would be a world-renown creative machine.
I’m not sure if this can really help anyone, because like I said, I put zero effort on this and it comes naturally to me.
It’s like asking Chris Hemsworth for dating advice. The guy just needs to breath to get a date, while the non-Nordic-gods like us need to put a little more work on it, so we must take advice from “natural-born (fill the blanc)” with a pinch of salt.
Anyway, if you struggle to fall asleep I think you should try this or even the whole “military-tested trick” mentioned in the article above. It may cost you a little in the beginning, but who knows, it might work and improve a really important aspect of your life.
If it doesn’t work, you won’t get worst, so you don’t take any risk of losing anything, so go for it, pull out that grey square from your mind and use it as a filter for any sleeping distraction.
I hope it works, sweet dreams!
*Mentioned book is an affiliate link.