There's nothing worse than lying in bed after an exhausting day, but your body just won't let you fall asleep.
About one in every three people in the UK experience regular insomnia, according to the NHS, a condition where you find it hard to get to sleep. While having a bad night once in a while is unlikely to harm you, regular poor sleep can put you at risk of serious medical conditions, including diabetes and heart disease.
Aside from not drinking coffee too close to bedtime and avoiding screens, there are also ways you can 'trick' yourself into falling asleep more quickly. Sharing a hack he wishes he knew before he hit his 30s, dermatologist Dr Scott Walter shared "how to actually fall asleep fast doesn't want you to" – and says it's been a "real game-changer".
Taking to TikTok, Dr Walter explained: "I'm a doctor and sometimes I have trouble falling asleep, and I'm going to tell you about the method which was like a light switch moment for me, once I'd learned it."
The doctor prefaced his trick by saying it doesn't involve "something like taking melatonin", which is a synthetic version of the hormone responsible for making you sleepy, "or other supplements". It also "doesn't involve taking a hot shower before bed or even reading," he continued.
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Instead, the doctor shared a "simple mental exercise" called "cognitive shuffling", which is a "way to rearrange or reorganise your thoughts", and can be thought of as the same things as shuffling a deck of cards. The idea of it is to distract "your mind from conscious thought patterns" which may be keeping you awake, and there are actually several ways to do it.
Firstly, Dr Walter recommended: "Just thinking of random words objects that have nothing to do with each other, for example cow, leaf, sandwich." Also keep repeating them in your head until you drift off to sleep.
If thinking of random words requires too much brainpower for you, there's another method. "First, pick a letter of the alphabet, two, you start counting your heartbeat, then every eight beats you think of a word that begins with that letter," Dr Walter explained.
According to the health professional, this works because it not distracts your brain and also mimics what is known as "micro dreams" which we experience when we're starting to drift off to sleep. So when you initiate this, you're letting your brain know it's 'safe' to fall asleep.
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