What's up, guys, Jeff Cavaliere, Athleanx.com. So, if you're one of the 270 million people worldwide
who can't get to sleep at night, this video might be a godsend for you. Because I'm going to share
with you two ways that I can help you to start falling asleep and potentially 60 seconds or less,
because I know it worked for me. See as a former insomniac, I grew up not being able to sleep at
all. I was a kid from a divorced household who literally had anxiety and stress every time I put
my head on the pillow until I learned a couple of things. If you aren't sleeping, you aren't
recovering. And if your goal is to grow muscle and build muscle, if you're not sleeping and you're
not recovering, you're not building as much as you can. Not to mention just feeling better as a whole
and having enough energy to get through your next day. It's very important to get your sleep. So,
the early advice that I was given to get myself to sleep was to do one thing, progressively loosen up
the muscles in my body that were more tense than I was aware of when I was just lying there. So,
you could try it. In other words, untightened up the muscles of the face and jaw. Unshrug
those shoulders, make sure they're not up near your ears. Uncurl the toes, relax the feet.
Well, how the hell do you really do that effectively, especially as a young kid,
when you don't even know what it's actually supposed to feel like? Well, what I realized
later on when I became a physical therapist was most people don't know what that feels like. If
you came to me after having a shoulder surgery, you were coming in for rehab, you probably be
sitting here like this. Everything would be tensed up naturally because you're trying to protect
yourself. And we don't realize the amount of tension we carry in our bodies every single day,
almost every single moment, until we're made aware of that. So, the best thing you can do
is become aware of the tension you have, and it becomes a hell of a lot easier to release it. So,
here's what you do. When you lay down tonight, the first thing I want you to do is raise your
eyebrows up as high as you possibly can and hold them for 5 seconds. This is obviously activating
the muscles in the forehead, but then exhale and let them relax. And being able to come off of a
peak contraction or a heightened contraction is going to allow anybody to comprehend what
relaxation actually feels like, rather than saying relax them more than what you thought
they already were. It doesn't work that way. The next thing you do is squint your eyes as hard
as you possibly can for 5 seconds. And when you do that, you then exhale for 5 seconds
and relax your eyes again. And then you work down next to your mouth. You smile as big as
you possibly can to look like the Joker as hard as you possibly can for 5 seconds. And once again,
you relax and breathe out in 5 seconds. And we work our way down. Now to the traps and
shoulders. You pull your shoulders up as hard as you possibly can, and then you let them sink
down and relax and breathe out over those 5 seconds. Each one of these is going to take
about 10 seconds. What you'll be shocked about is by the time you get to your fifth or sixth one,
you may already be asleep. Because as you're de-stressing your body and letting go of that
tension, you're increasing the amount of relaxation throughout your entire body.
The other thing that's happening here is if you're someone that's suffering from
racing thoughts at night, you're distracting yourself with a very mundane process. You're
not thinking about the arguments you had during the day. You're focused on each muscle group and
breathing in and then breathing out and it has a very calming effect on the entire body. Now,
there's one other thing that you might be doing, and this is something that I start to adopt a lot
more recently that's helped me tremendously as well. And it's actually with my phone. You see a
lot of us will use our phones before we go to bed. And you may have understood of late that it's not
a good thing because exposure to blue light has a very triggering effect in terms of our alertness
levels because it interrupts the normal secretion of melatonin in our bodies. So simple enough
solution, just put the phone away an hour before bed. Right? Like I can tell you, for me, that's
not a very realistic option. I may get text from clients very late at night because they might be
traveling the world or off doing a movie somewhere and I need to be able to have communication with
them. I can't completely put the phone away. But what I can do is this. And what that does is
it creates a red filter on your phone and it gets rid of the blue light. And as we know, the color
of the light that's coming through, your phone is going to be either a positive or a negative signal
in terms of your physiology. We don't have to look any further than my friend Andrew Huberman,
who has shown the powerful effects of light on human physiology. Getting exposure to sunlight
early in the morning can completely reset your mood and your alertness levels for the
entire day. While having the wrong exposure to light prior to bed can have that interruption,
like I said, on that melatonin cycle, which is going to keep you up all night for reasons
that are pretty much out of your control other than the fact that you had your phone out.
Now, if you're on an iPhone, I'll show you exactly how to do this, because I want this
to be incredibly helpful and show you how easy it actually is. If you're on an Android phone,
just look it up, because I'm sure there's a way to do this as well. So, you go to your settings
and when you're in settings, you want to go to accessibility, and under accessibility you
want to go to display and text size. Now on the bottom, you'll see something called color
filters. You'll turn that on and then tap on that button there that says color. Filters and
go down to the color tint. You're going to want to slide the intensity in Hue all the way up,
which is going to turn it to red. At that point, you've got it set up, right? But how do you do
this where you can actually automate the process so you can just triple click the button on the
side of your phone? That's easy to under your settings, you want to go back to accessibility,
slide all the way down until you get to the accessibility shortcut. And at that point
you're just going to click color filters. From here, all you have to do is triple click
the button on the side of your phone, and that's going to allow you to quickly switch from red to
blue or blue to red, and you'll be able to do that about an hour or so before you go to bed
to make sure that your eyes are adjusted and you're not interrupting that critical sleep.
Two hundred and seventy million people worldwide can't get it right. And as a matter of fact,
it's one of the most Google searched terms out there - Can't Sleep. Well,
hopefully after this video, you have something you can do about it to get yourself to sleep
very quickly. Talking about getting the sleep, sometimes the positions you put your body in can
compromise your ability to do that as well. I actually have a whole video on the best sleeping
positions to give you a more restful sleep, so you wake up feeling better every single
day. If you're looking for a complete program guys, we have them over at Athleanx.com. And if
you haven't done so, make sure you click, Subscribe and turn on your Notifications,
so you never miss a video when we put one out. All right, guys. See you soon. Rest up.