Say goodbye to insomnia. This method boasts a 96 percent effectiveness rate, and it only takes two minutes of your time to implement it. If you’ve tried everything under the sun to fall asleep quickly and stay asleep during the night, you’ll appreciate the simplicity and speed at which this has been shown to work.

An estimated 70 million American adults have a sleep disorder, the most common of which is insomnia¹—the inability to fall asleep, or waking up one or more times during the night. If you’re in this category, despair not, because the list of strategies to improve your sleep is long.

A method developed by the U.S. military, revealed in the 1981 book, “Relax and Win: Championship Performance,” claims to have a 96 percent success rate after six weeks of consistent implementation.

Military Method Preps Your Body for Sleep

The method centers around preparing your mind and body for sleep by deeply relaxing for about two minutes. The following summary of the process was published in the Evening Standard:²

21 Additional Strategies to Help You Fall Asleep Faster

I’ve written numerous articles over the years, detailing all sorts of tips and tricks to help you fall asleep faster and improve the quality of your sleep. For an extensive listing of suggestions, see “Top 33 Tips to Optimize Your Sleep Routine.”

Medical News Today also published a list of “21 Ways to Fall Asleep Naturally,” which included the following:³

1. Create a consistent sleeping pattern by going to bed and getting up at the same time throughout the week, including on weekends.
2. Make sure your bedroom is as dark as possible. If you don’t have blackout shades, use an eye mask.
3. Avoid taking naps during the day or too close to bedtime.
4. Exercise regularly.
5. Minimize cellphone use and use of other blue light-emitting devices.
6. Read a book to relax before bed.
7. Avoid caffeine and other stimulants at least four hours before bed.
8. Meditate or practice mindfulness on a daily basis.
9. “Count sheep” by slowly counting downward from 100 to zero.
10. Avoid eating at least three hours before bedtime.
11. Lower the temperature in your bedroom; an ideal temperature for sleeping is around 65 F.
12. Use aromatherapy; lavender is relaxing and may help induce sleep.
13. Find your most comfortable sleeping position. While the article suggests side sleeping, I would suggest you try sleeping in a neutral position—on your back with a pillow supporting your neck, not your head.
14. Listen to relaxing music before bed.
15. Don’t wait to use the bathroom; while it may seem distracting to get out of bed to pee, trying to hold it will simply disrupt your sleep later.
16. Take a hot shower or bath before bed.
17. Avoid e-books, as the blue light from the screen will impede melatonin release.
18. Try a melatonin supplement. Another, perhaps even more effective, alternative is 5-HTP, a precursor to both serotonin and melatonin. I believe this is a superior approach to using melatonin. In one study, an amino acid preparation containing both GABA (a calming neurotransmitter) and 5-HTP reduced the time to fall asleep, increased the duration of sleep, and improved sleep quality.⁴
19. Invest in a comfortable mattress. To this, I would add the suggestion of looking for a chemical-free mattress to avoid exposure to flame-retardant chemicals.
20. Minimize noise; use earplugs if environmental noise is unavoidable.
21. Avoid alcohol.

Avoid Nighttime EMF to Improve Sleep Quality

While avoiding cellphones and other devices with electronic screens (including e-readers) is important to protect your melatonin production, another factor that can have a significant impact on your sleep quality is EMFs emitted from your home wiring.

There’s actually evidence showing EMF exposure reduces melatonin production⁵ just like blue light from cellphones, tablets, and computers does, making it particularly important to eliminate EMFs in your bedroom.

EMF exposure also triggers neuronal changes that affect memory and your ability to learn⁶ and harms your body’s mitochondria by producing excessive oxidative damage, so “marinating” in EMFs all night, every night, can cause or contribute to virtually any chronic ailment, including premature aging.

This will virtually eliminate electric fields in your bedroom, unless you have adjacent rooms with wiring in them, in which case you will need to measure the electric fields with a meter after you shut off the power to see if it goes into the lowest range. Another really important step is to turn off your Wi-Fi at night. Ideally, hard wire your home so you have no Wi-Fi 24/7 in your home.

Lack of Sleep Raises Your Risk for Heart Disease and More

A review of hundreds of sleep studies concluded that, as a general rule, most adults need somewhere between seven and nine hours—or right around eight hours—of sleep per night to maintain good health.

Regularly getting less than seven hours per night has been scientifically linked to a wide array of health problems, ranging from weight gain7 to an increased risk for cancer. More recently, researchers again confirmed that lack of sleep can, over time, take a significant toll on your long-term heart health.8 As reported by Medical Xpress:9

“Middle-aged men who sleep five hours or less per night have twice the risk of developing a major cardiovascular event during the following two decades than men who sleep seven to eight hours …

“Study author Ms. Moa Bengtsson, of the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, said: ‘For people with busy lives, sleeping may feel like a waste of time but our study suggests that short sleep could be linked with future cardiovascular disease.

“‘In our study, the magnitude of increased cardiovascular risk associated with insufficient sleep is similar to that of smoking or having diabetes at age 50.’”

Men who got only five hours or less per night were also more likely to smoke, be inactive and overweight, and have high blood pressure and diabetes. Other studies have shown insufficient sleep and/or poor quality sleep can increase your risk for:

• Accidents at work and on the road: Getting less than six hours of sleep leaves you cognitively impaired. In 2013, drowsy drivers caused 72,000 car accidents in which 800 Americans were killed and 44,000 were injured.¹⁰ Even a single night of sleeping only four to six hours can impact your ability to think clearly the next day.
• Diabetes: One 2015 study¹¹ linked “excessive daytime sleepiness” with a 56 percent increased risk for Type 2 diabetes.
• Depression: More than half of people diagnosed with depression also struggle with insomnia. While it was long thought that insomnia was a symptom of depression, it now seems that insomnia may precede depression in some cases.¹² Your amygdala, one of your brain’s centerpiece regions for generating strong emotional reactions, including negative ones, becomes about 60 percent more reactive than usual when you’ve slept poorly or insufficiently, resulting in increased emotional intensity and volatility.
• Impaired memory formation and increased risk of memory loss:¹³ Sleep is essential not just for cementing events into long-term memory but also for making sense of your life. During sleep, your brain pulls together and extracts meaning while discarding unimportant details. In fact, sleep increases your ability to gain insights that would otherwise remain elusive by about 250 percent. So during sleep, part of your brain is busy stabilizing, enhancing, and integrating new memories. It’s also extracting rules and the “gist” of what’s happening in your life. Reduced productivity at work and poor grades in school are other associated side effects of insufficient sleep. Creativity is also diminished.
• Impaired sexual function: In one study,¹⁴ women with insomnia who were getting less than the recommended eight hours were found to be less sexually active after menopause. They also reported less sexual satisfaction overall.
• Increased risk of pain and pain-related conditions such as fibromyalgia: In one study, poor or insufficient sleep was the strongest predictor for pain in adults over 50.¹⁵
• Increased risk of dying from any cause: Compared to people without insomnia, the adjusted hazard ratio for all-cause mortality among those with chronic insomnia is 300 percent higher.¹⁹
• Chronic diseases: Sleep deprivation decreases your immune function,¹⁶ which can have a snowball effect, raising your risk for cardiovascular disease,¹⁷ Alzheimer’s,¹⁸ and cancer, just to name a few.

In the case of cancer, another critical mechanism involved is disrupted melatonin production. Melatonin is a hormone with antioxidant and anti-cancer activity.

It both inhibits the proliferation of cancer cells and triggers cancer cell apoptosis (self-destruction). Melatonin also interferes with the new blood supply tumors require for their rapid growth (angiogenesis). A number of studies have shown that night shift workers are at heightened risk of cancer for this reason.