I tried the alpha bridge sleep method and fell asleep in 10 minutes
From mindful breathing to meditations and visualizations, countless sleep methods circulate social media, promising to help you relax and fall asleep fast.
While maintaining good sleep hygiene and sticking to a calming nighttime routine should be your first ports of call when you’re looking to enhance your rest, specific sleep methods can give a much needed helping hand to drift off if you’re struggling.
Thanks to a well established sleep schedule and healthy sleep habits, I don’t tend to have any issues falling asleep.
However, if I do find myself tossing and turning, it tends to be on a Sunday evening. Be that down to having a few too many social drinks at the weekend, or the prospect of a busy week coming up.
This Sleep Awareness Week, I wanted to try a sleep hack that would put my Sunday scaries to bed.
The alpha bridge method was my relaxation technique of choice and I called upon licensed clinical psychologist specialising in sleep, Dr Leah Kaylor, for her expert verdict on how effective this method is.
What is the alpha bridge sleep method?
The alpha bridge method is a sleep technique that involves breathing and eye movements to help you fall asleep fast.
It gets its name from alpha brain waves, which are brain waves that occur when you’re relaxed but still awake.
Want to give it a go? Here are the specific steps to follow:
- Get comfortable
- Close your eyes and count to 30
- Open your eyes slightly, like a half moon, and count to five
- Close your eyes again and count to 30
- Repeat steps 2 and 3
- Close your eyes again and focus on breathing through your nose
These movements are designed to mimic the bodies natural movements when you’re feeling sleepy.
What happened when I tried the alpha bridge sleep method
I tested the alpha bridge method to beat the Sunday scaries. Here’s what I found…
I failed the first time
After getting comfortable in bed, I was ready to try the alpha bridge method. I closed my eyes and began counting to 30.
But by the time I got to ten I found my mind wandering elsewhere. Admittedly, this doesn’t indicate good news about my concentration levels,
I was consumed by the typical mixture of Sunday evening thoughts — what I had to do in the coming week and reflecting on the weekend.
Once I refocused my mind back to the task in hand (counting to 30 without getting distracted) I began again. This time I fully concentrated on the alpha bridge breathing routine and reaped its benefits.
It helped me relax
Once I got into the rhythm of the routine, brushed off distracting thoughts and instead focused on the numbers I was counting, I found it relaxing.
I also noticed my breathing was falling into step with the numbers in my head. Finding this rhythm helped me focus and relax.
Additionally, flicking my eyes between fully closed and half open made my eyelids feel heavy. In turn, I quickly felt more sleepy than I did laying there with racing thoughts and nothing to focus on.
My Eight Sleep Pod 4 sleep tracker tells me I fell asleep in around 10 minutes — an ideal sleep latency.
I slept through the night
My sleep quality throughout the night was also great, according to my sleep tracker. I only (briefly) woke up once during the night and fell straight back asleep.
I hit 99% for my sleep quality metric, indicating that I spent ample time in REM sleep and deep sleep stages.
Falling asleep relaxed is key to boosting your sleep quality, and I put my relaxed state down to the alpha bridge method considering I went to bed feeling slightly bogged down by the typical nighttime anxiety I can feel on a Sunday night.
How does the alpha bridge sleep method work?
This sleep method simulates natural sleep transition. It involves a mixture of eye movements and mindful breathing to shift the brain from an alert state (the beta state) to a relaxed alpha state.
Counting creates a passive focus, helping the brain disengage from stressors. This could be useful for people who struggle with racing thoughts
“Alpha brain waves (8-12 Hz) are linked to pre-sleep relaxation,” Dr Kaylor explains. “These brainwaves are dominant during meditation, daydreaming, and the transition from wakefulness to sleep.”
As I found when testing the method, when you focus on numbers you can deflect from anxious thoughts.
“Engaging in repetitive counting, specific eye movements, and breathwork can help the brain slow down which promotes quicker onset of sleep,” the psychologist explains.
“Counting creates a passive focus, helping the brain disengage from stressors. This could be useful for people who struggle with racing thoughts, as the method prevents the mind from drifting into anxious loops.”
Meet the expert: Dr Leah Kaylor
Dr Leah Kaylor Ph.D. PLLC is a licensed clinical psychologist specializing in sleep and trauma, at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Dr. Kaylor completed her residency at the Memphis VA Medical Center, where she worked in the sleep clinic helping veterans with sleep hygiene, nightmares, insomnia, and CPAP adherence. She has also written 5 book chapters and over 15 peer-reviewed journal articles.
Alternative sleep methods we’ve tried & tested
Military sleep method
The military sleep method is one of the most well-known and well-loved sleep hacks.
Originally developed to help soldiers fall asleep in combat environments, the military sleep method involves visualizing one of two images: either you are lying on your back in a canoe on a placid, calm lake with nothing but a crystal clear sky above you. Alternatively, imagine you are lying in a black velvet hammock in a pitch black room.
While you imagine this, you practise releasing tension from muscles, deep breathing, and repeating the words ‘don’t think’ if your mind strays to promote sleep onset.
Although it might require a little practice, we believe this is an effective sleep method for most people, helping you fall asleep within several minutes or less.
4 7 8 sleep method
The 4 7 8 sleep method has mixed reviews among our team of sleep gurus with bedtime procastinators saying it doesn’t work for them and others saying it can ease nighttime anxiety. Anyhow what does this method involve?
The 4 7 8 is a breathing technique where you breathe through your nose for the count of 4, hold your breath for 7 seconds, then audibly breathe out through your mouth for the count of 8 and repeat this cycle three or more times.
If struggling to unwind at bedtime is your sleep vice, we recommend this relaxing deep breathing technique as a natural sleep aid that will help you shift your anxiety around bedtime.
Cognitive shuffling
A TikTok-favorite, cognitive shuffling can help you compartmentalize racing thoughts at bedtime and drift off into a more peaceful, restorative sleep. It involves the visualization of seemingly random objects and thoughts.
As you’re falling asleep, you purposefully think of objects and items with no rational relation between them. This is said to ‘scramble’ your thoughts.
As you continue thinking these unrelated items, your brain will effectively ‘switch off’ from trying to make any sense of the them, distracting it from anxious thoughts, and allowing you to fall asleep faster.
Tom’s Guide created this content as part of a paid partnership with Helix Sleep. The contents of this article are independent and solely reflect the editorial opinion of Tom’s Guide.
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