Commentary: What should I do if I can't sleep and watch the dawn? Just look at the sleep training that the United States developed for pilots during World War II.
Have you ever had this experience?
Doze off secretly during working hours, and when it's a break, I want to fall asleep on a chair or in a corner, but I'm always drowsy but awake.
Although you are tired, you just can't sleep, and soon, the rest time is over. It's frustrating to talk about, not only not falling asleep, not doing anything; if you're not going to sleep you can do something else.
And there are always those people who, no matter what's going on around them, no matter where they are, they can fall asleep with a hat covering their face. Not to mention falling on the pillow at night. In fact, these can be learned.
Falling asleep in two minutes or less anytime, anywhere, is like any other skill that can be acquired by training.
During World War II, the United States developed the technology for naval pilots.
How to fall asleep in two minutes or less?
During the years of World War II, the U.S. military realized a problem: due to the enormous pressure of air combat, many pilots had a stress response, which made them weak and overwhelmed. As a result, he committed a series of fatal mistakes, accidentally hitting a friendly aircraft or getting injured by his own mishandling.
To stop the loss of pilots and aircraft, Ensign Bud Winter began research and testing a relaxation method that could be trained so that pilots could decompress, improve reaction speed, increase concentration and reduce fear.
Pre-war Winter was a successful college football and track coach who worked with psychology professors to help athletes relax and perform better under high pressure.
In fact, he defines sleep as "a state of relaxation of mind and body." The first step is physical relaxation, and the second step is mental relaxation.
How to relax the body?
In the book "Relax and Win", Winter wrote about the sleep-in-the-sleeping technique developed for combat pilots, and it was especially effective for athletes after the war. He listed clear steps to teach athletes how to relax. Let's condense them a bit here. :
Sit in your chair with your feet on the floor. Knees apart, hands drooping weakly on the inside of the knees. Now, close your eyes and lower your chin until it rests on your chest.
Take regular, slow, deep breaths. Let the wrinkles on the forehead appear and then stretch out and relax your scalp. Relax the rest of your face muscles, relax your tongue and lips, open and close your mouth like you might see a trout by the river, and breathe slowly.
Now let's deal with the eight muscles of the eye. While closing your eyes, move your eyes freely in the eye sockets. There is no point, just move up and down, left and right, and breathe slowly.
Now, put your shoulders as low as you can, even if you think they are low, make them even lower. Feel the muscles in the back of your neck, and when you feel relaxed, try to push them further.
Now relax your chest. Take a deep breath, hold it, exhale and blow out all your nervousness. Squeeze your chest down and imagine yourself in a chair as a jellyfish that has always been bulky. Breathe in slowly, and as you exhale, release more and more tension.
Now focus on the arms. Relax your right bicep, right forearm too, then right hand, fingers. Then repeat on the left arm and keep breathing slowly.
Your upper body is relaxed, feeling warm and pleasant, feeling good, and well-being invades the body.
Now it's time for the lower body, right thigh muscle first, imagine the meat hanging on the mechanism, relax. Then the calf muscles, followed by the right ankle and foot muscles. Tell yourself that your right leg has no bones. Repeat on the left leg. I feel like a pile of meat on a chair.
At the moment, we relax physically and mentally, or so you think. To be on the safe side, we take three deep breaths, exhale the last tension, and once, exhaletwice, huh~Three times, hoo~~~~
If you can't feel the slack in your body, the jellyfish-like feeling, try tensing the muscles and then letting them relax.
If you follow the steps above, you can achieve a good level of relaxation. Winter suggests trying this exercise during any stressful time to relax, de-stress, improve focus, and lead to better decision-making.
This is just the first step, the relaxation of the body, the next step of mental relaxation can "cross the threshold into a deep, relaxed sleep."
how to relax
Winter believes that once your body is relaxed, as long as your mind doesn't have any active thoughts for ten seconds, you'll fall asleep. The key to falling asleep fast is to "stop the thoughts running through your head", you must stop reflecting on the regrets, worries, and problems of the day.
Winter specifically warns against any thought of exercise: By putting electrodes on trainees to test, when we think of a sport, the muscles involved in that movement actually contract as well. Modern research confirms the above observation that as long as we visualize body movements in our minds, the muscles involved are actually activated. So, when you're trying to fall asleep, thoughts of being active can cause muscle tension and inhibit sleep.
So, if you want to fill your head with the most silent thoughts, Winter has three suggestions, any of which will help you, just pick one, and if not, pick the other:
Imagine it's a warm spring day and you're lying in a canoe on a very peaceful lake. You are looking up at the blue sky and clouds, floating clouds. Don't have any other ideas. Just focus on a picture for ten seconds.
Imagine you are lying on a large black velvet bed and the rest of the house is black, and focus on the image for ten seconds.
The third trick is to say "Don't think, don't think, don't think..." in your mind for ten seconds to eliminate other thoughts.
Are these any good?
The pilots who participated in the test were divided into two groups: one group participated in sleep training, and the other group served as a control group without training. The participants in the training group were higher than the control group in the tests of mental stress, training and physical strengthening.
After six weeks of training, 96% of pilots were able to fall asleep anytime, anywhere in two minutes or less. Not only that, but you can sleep peacefully even after drinking coffee or in the simulated background sound of guns.
After the war, Winter returned to teaching track and field and became one of the greatest sprint coaches of all time, coaching 102 U.S. champions and 27 Olympians, and once his athletes broke ten world records in sprinting.
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Winter strongly believes that his training helped pilots relieve the stress of war and athletes relieved of competitive stress. Likewise, this applies to the everyday life of civilians, dealing with tension and fatigue.
Remember, it's a technique to relax and fall asleep with the hat over your face. As with all skills, don't expect the first few times to work right away, you have to practice it over and over until you become more and more proficient at learning to relax and calm down.