How to Fall Asleep With Anxiety

Falling asleep with anxiety is hard. I used to toss and turn for hours on the nights before my final exams.Luckily, those hellish nights are over for me now, and in this post I'd like to share the keys that helped me learn how to fall asleep with anxiety.

I have divided this post up into two sections. The first is for quick fixes. These will be most useful to those who have a big test or other stressful event coming up. However, I cannot stress enough the importance of reading and applying the tips I give in the long-term fixes.

This section will contain the real cures. Doing quick fixes every time a stressful event is approaching is inefficient and doesn't compare to cultivating the habits, skills, and state of mind conducive to a good night's sleep.

Quick Fixes

1. Eat light

Do not eat any food within 3 hours of going to bed, and eat a light dinner. To avoid evening hunger, make sure to have a large, protein-rich breakfast and a hearty lunch. Your dinner should really be the smallest meal of your day: digestion keeps most people up unnecessarily at night.

2. No screens before bedtime

Avoid use of the computer or cell phones within 1 hour of going to bed.

3. No exercise before bedtime

No exercise within 3 hours of going to sleep

4. Relax, the right way

Watch out here. A common piece of advice is to relax and do something passive. Not only is this hard to do when you are anxious, but only serves to distract you from your anxious thoughts and doesn't shift your focus. The proper way to relax is to focus on something that you enjoy. This shifts your attention and does not temporarily block off anxious thoughts, but actually replaces them.

So what do you love doing? Make sure that what you choose a fun challenge that you have the skills to meet, not a distraction. For me, this is composing my own rap music and expressing myself through lyrics.

Long-Term Fixes

1. Cultivate the habit of meditation

What probably helped me the most was to meditate every morning and evening. This is a skill that takes simple practice to master. The instructions are really pretty simple, but it is almost like telling someone how to walk a tightrope:

 - step onto the rope

 - put one foot in front of the other

 - don't fall

Not so fast, right? However, some guidance does help. I recommend that you read The Power of Now.

2. Cultivate productivity and capacity for focus

Much of the stress that I, as a student, felt, was caused by my poor study habits. I would procrastinate on my work, and cram it in at the last minute. As you can imagine and can probably relate to, this creates an enormous amount of unnecessary stress and anxiety.

Here is the shortest description I can give of how to have work sessions:

 1. list the tasks you want to get done over the next 2-3 hours.

 2. break your work up into 25-minute sessions with a quick break in between sessions

 3. make sure to take the breaks. It is often tempting to skip them, but it is crucial to your productivity to take them

To learn to cultivate true productivity, I recommend that you read Getting Things Done.

I hope this post helped you, and good luck falling asleep!

How to Sleep on Your Back

We all know that we should be doing it. Sleeping on your back allows easier breathing and corresponds to an increased quality of sleep, and increased energy. Sleeping on your side or stomach presses your face into the pillow causes wrinkles at an early age.

So how do we make the switch?

Here are some tips to adopt the habit of sleeping on your back:

1. Practice

Every habit takes time to sink in.

This is the most important element. I guarantee you that on the first night that you attempt to sleep on your back, you won't do very well. Even if you follow the other tips I am about to tell you, you will take a very long time to fall asleep, if you don't give up.

What you should do is commit to sleeping on your back every night for two weeks. From my experience, this is about how long it takes to get used to a new sleeping position. If you have some other commitments that require consistent sleep, then put it off for a date where you know you will show up.

2. Good Evening Habits

To increase the ease at which you fall asleep, I recommend that you do the following things:

Eat a light dinner at lease 3 hours before bed

In the hour before you go to bed:

No electronics. No TV, no computer, no browsing through your phone 

No physical exercise. This includes walking, dancing, and yes, masturbation 

Immediately before going to bed, meditate

3. Good sleeping environment

Eliminate any extraneous sources of light and sound, and if you cannot do so then wear earplugs and/or a sleeping mask.

Have a glass of water by your bedside so that if you get thirsty, you don't need to get out of bed.



I hope you found this article useful. Good luck!

3 Ways to Have More Energy

1. Try Eating no Processed Grains

For most people, cutting out processed grains corresponds to a HUGE energy boosts. I recommend that you do an experiment to see if this is true for you. For two weeks, go without eating any processed grains: pasta, bread, crackers, etc. Potatoes or other natural unprocessed sources of carbohydrates are okay. If you feel the boost of energy I did, stick with the diet.

2. When You go to Bed, go to Bed. When You Wake up, Wake up

I used to be guilty of the complete opposite of this. I would read in bed, sometimes even until I fell asleep. I would use my phone to play games or text friends with the lights off, wrapped up in my blankets. When I woke up, I would lay there for a while, for hours sometimes. These behaviors have several disadvantages:

• They establish the bed as a place for things other than sleep. When you start using your bed as I recommend, you and your body will know that when you are in bed, it is time to sleep
• Using electronics before bed makes you more tired
• Snoozing makes you more tired. When you wake up, you usually have completed a sleep cycle. Going back to sleep brings you into a new sleep cycle, making you wake up even more tired when your snooze time is up
• You decrease your hours of sleep

3. Morning Habits: Move, Eat, and Drink

Most people are tired in the morning because they inadvertently starve their body, depriving of what it needs to wake up.

When you wake up, your body needs water. You have not drank a drop in the last 8 hours, and are dehydrated. The first thing I do every morning is to drink 2 tall glasses of water.

The next thing to do is to get your blood pumping, even if it is a 2-minute spring down the block, a minute of pushups, or just jumping up and down for 30 seconds. This will really wake you up and make you more energized.

After this, eat a big breakfast high on protein. Breakfast is supposed to be the biggest meal of the day, and dinner the smallest. Most people do it the wrong way around. Think about it, when you wake up in the morning, your body hasn't eaten in 8 hours. Whether you feel it or not, it needs food! Here are some great options to eat as your breakfast staple, along with your fresh fruits and veggies:

• Eggs
• Bacon
• Sardines
• Tuna
• Peanut butter
• Dairy

How I Cured My Insomia For Good

Only several months ago, sleep was a nightmare for me. I tossed and turned for several hours, and woke up constantly throughout the night. The night was my worst enemy and every morning I rolled out of bed, feeling depressed and exhausted. My days were clouded in fog and all of my energy was sucked out of me.

Enter Peter Litchfield, the man who all but saved my life. Along with his practical recommendations and proven solutions, I was introduced to binaural beats, meditation, and sleep hypnosis. To date over 100,000 people have benefited from the Six Steps program and its accompanying tools.

All the information I've scattered over this blog has all come from this package. I encourage you to invest in your sleep: it changes your life trust me. I've had several friends try this system and it worked for most of them. If it doesn't work for you, Peter will refund your money.

Check it out here

Try it out, and I will provide you with personalized guidance in conjunction with the program and a free report including the routines that I go through at the beginning and end of every day to live each day to the fullest. Contact me at vdefont@gmail.com.

Six Steps to Sleep

How to Have More Time in Your Life

If you are reading this blog, it is probably because you are not getting enough sleep. A major cause of this might be that you feel that you have too much to do during the day to sleep a lot. In this post, I

The first thing that you have to realize is that sleep is crucial to human function and multiplies the quality of your day. Some people say "I can sleep when I'm dead" but the truth is that people who sleep more are able to make more progress in their lives and be happier.

The second thing that you have to realize is that sleep deprivation is a catch-22. The less you sleep, the longer you take to get done what you want to get done, and the less you sleep. The most difficult part in getting rid of sleep deprivation is the very beginning, when you have to work more efficiently. Then once you sleep more you are able to work faster and sleep more and even have time for you hobbies.

Here is a four step plan to sleep more. I am assuming that your problem is that you have too much to do and not enough time to sleep. If this is not your case then I will be posting about insomnia later.How to Sleep 
 to
1. Identify what is taking up your time

At the end of each day, write down where every hour of your day has went.

2. Identify why it is taking up your time

Do the above exercise for a few days, and then observe the results. What is taking up your time?

3. Identify what is not necessary

4. Make a plan to eliminate these things

If some of the things that take up your time are habits or addictions, like watching TV, make a plan to reduce or eliminate the time you spend doing these things, and follow through on it. For example, I used to spend several hours a day pointlessly surfing the web. My plan consisted of blocking certain sites and restricting my internet use.

The first week will be the toughest. But if you can push through it and sleep more each night I promise you that the quality of your life will take off.

What should I think about?

If you practice the meditation exercises that I recommended, then you should have your mind under control and settled down, especially as you get better at meditation.

However, if you are like most people, you might not know what to think about when falling asleep. My advice is if your thoughts are all over the place and you're tossing and turning and can't fall asleep, then try one of the following things:

1. Count backwards from 300 by 3s. This calms you down, and takes your mind off any other thoughts you may be having. If you are really good at math and this is too easy for you, try counting backwards from 700 by 7s or 1300 by 13s.

2. Count sheep. Really. If you're like me, your brain won't cooperate and will do something like sending the sheep flying back the way they came.. Ignore this,. and simply count the number of times the act is repeating itself.

I hope this post helped you! If you are having a specific problem that you want me to address then comment and I will post about it.

Meditation

Meditation has become one of my favorite ways to relax before falling asleep. It takes some practice to master, but fortunately benefits arrive far before mastery. Here is how you can go about it:

First, make sure you are in a quiet and comfortable environment where you will not be disturbed for the next few minutes. Then close your eyes and imagine your mind being sucked upwards and rising outside of you.

Anytime a thought, good or bad, occurs to you, recognize it as a conscious thought. Rise above it, and focus on your breathing, your heart pumping, the heaviness and warmth of your limbs, or the space filling the room around you and the space filling the universe.

In the second phase of my meditation I open my eyes and continue to keep my mind blank while remaining aware of everything around me. Remain in this position for as long as it feels comfortable and then stand up.

If you repeat this a few times a day I guarantee that you will make massive progress, so make this a ritual and do not give it up. The benefits of meditation are massive, going far beyond giving you a good night's sleep.