Having trouble sleeping? Does this sound familiar?

• You feel like you’ve tried every trick in the book to get to sleep
• Constant irritability
• Dangerous lapses in concentration whilst driving or at work
  

There are a number of mistakes that are killing your sleep.

You may be making several critical mistakes, during both the day and at night, which are literally killing your chances of sleeping soundly on a regular basis.

That's not really your fault though, because you never knew about them. Your doctor may not have the time to educate you about those mistakes — and most of the time he doesn't even know about them... since the bulk of his sleep education is being handed to him by pharmaceutical companies' marketing reps. The corporations that make billions of dollars by feeding you pills don’t want you to know about those mistakes, neither do they want you to learn how to stop making these mistakes.

Studies and tests done by sleep researchers have showed that the capacity to fall asleep, then enter and stay in a deep sleep is a skill. It's something you can become good at — even if you've gotten, after a long time of poor sleep and bad conditioning, very bad at it. Many people tell me that they have tried to every trick in the book and nothing works, “no matter how hard I try I still can't get to sleep”.

Therein lies their first mistake, trying to fall asleep is proven to be a major contributor to sleep deprivation, the harder you try to sleep, the less likely you are to “drop off”, you start thinking about trying to relax, you start working the brain, you start worrying about tomorrow, you just don’t stand a chance.

Each time you try to fall asleep you are actually moving further away from getting to sleep, you fall into a vicious circle that can be very difficult to get out of. The crux of the issue is how to relax your brain and teach it to fall asleep automatically without any conscious effort from you.

The act of falling asleep should be something that comes naturally, it shouldn’t be a conscious effort that you strive to achieve. Put simply, falling asleep is not an action, it's not something you physically do, it's something that simply happens to you. So the best attitude is one of carelessness. Stop trying to fall asleep. If you find yourself doing it, it's probably because you've been lying in bed too long.

Further information on insomnia and other sleep related problems and how to overcome them can be found at: How To Sleep At Night