Doctor shares easy trick to fall asleep at 3am

Many people struggle to stay asleep, waking at random times during the night, which disrupts their sleep and can lead to restlessness.

Keep reading to know more.

Waking up in the middle of the night is a feeling of frustration that many people feel, especially when they have to wake up early in the morning.

A lot of times, people try their best to fall back asleep, but it is usually futile. And apparently, it is quite common for people to wake up at 3am and then struggle to get back to sleep. Now TV doctor Amir Khan has shared some tips on how you can fall back asleep during those twilight hours.

In a video shared by Dr Khan, who routinely appears on ITV, he shared, “Guys, I shared a reel about why people wake up at 3 am in the morning, and hundreds of thousands of people have watched it, but lots of people have asked ‘well, what do you do when you wake up at 3 o’clock in the morning? How do you get back off to sleep?’ He went on explaining, “Let’s talk about a technique called cognitive shuffling. You know that I’ve talked at length about the health benefits of sleep.”

The doctor went on, “But what if you just can’t get off to sleep because your brain won’t let you? Imagine it. Everyone else is asleep, the house is quiet, you’re lying there in bed, but your mind won’t stop churning out stressful thoughts.”

He went on, “Work, money, kids, planning, scheduling, problem solving. Your brain is too active to let you sleep. In fact, the stress of all these thoughts tells the brain it’s not safe to sleep, and you have to stay on high alert.”

While some people might turn to the classic ‘counting sheep’ trick, Dr Khan had another alternative he wanted to offer.

He said, “It’s called cognitive shuffling, and the idea is it interrupts your racing mind, and instead scrambles your thoughts, inviting your brain to go into sleep mode, and assuring it that it is safe to sleep.”

So how do you successfully do ‘cognitive shuffling.’ First, you think of a random word and focus on the first letter of the word. After that, you mentally name a list of words that start with the same letter.

After that, you will want to visualize each phrase before you move on to the second letter of your chosen word, and after that, you merely repeat the steps again and again till it helps you go back to sleep!

This tip could really help you fall back asleep if you struggle with it sometimes. Share this with others who might benefit from it as well.