If you’ve ever tried to fall asleep with a car alarm screaming outside your window or with the stress of work deadlines ricocheting through your head, you may have wondered just how people in really, truly stressful situations can ever get their much-needed shut-eye.

Well, a viral trend, called the Military Sleep Method, claims to have the answer. Thousands of TikToks and dozens of YouTube videos — some with more than a million views — say that this five-step method is guaranteed to lull you into Lalaland within two minutes. That is a pretty sweet promise, but is it plausible or a pipe dream? We asked experts to look beyond the hype.

What is the Military Sleep Method?

First, let’s dig back a few decades to see where this “method” comes from. While there are no published studies available to give definitive proof of its origin, all roads seem to lead back to a book published in 1981 called Relax & Win: Championship Performance in Whatever You Do, by Lloyd “Bud” Winter, a renowned college track coach who, according to the back cover of the book, developed this sleep method when training combat pilots in World War II, hence the "military" name. Winter then went on to use the method to help his athletes — including several Olympic sprinters — optimize their sleep so they could wake up refreshed and ready to go break some records. And though Coach Winter died in 1985, he still has an active website, which in March 2020 reposted a video from Bright Sidepromoting the method.

Here's the five-step process that proponents of this sleep hack say will help you conk out in any stressful situation in just 120 seconds:

• Step 1: Lie on your back with eyes closed and relax all the muscles in your face, including your tongue, jaw, and eye sockets, and focus on keeping your forehead smooth.
• Step 2: Drop your shoulders as low as possible to release tension in your neck. Then relax all the muscles in one arm, from shoulders to fingers, and then the other. If needed, tense up muscles first before relaxing them.
• Step 3: Breathe out and relax your chest
• Step 4: Relax the muscles in your legs from the thigh down through the calves, then ankles, feet and toes.
• Step 5: Clear your mind by using images to sweep away intruding thoughts, such as picturing yourself on a canoe in a calm, blue lake, or wrapped in a black velvet hammock in a dark room. Any time a new thought comes into your head, say to yourself “Stop thinking, stop thinking!”

And … off you go to sleep.

Does the Military Sleep Method work?

Videos touting this method claim that 96% of people who practice this for six weeks are successful at falling asleep in two minutes, but there do not seem to be any actual studies to confirm this, and to be honest, a number that high immediately sets off fact-checking alarm bells, so we’re guessing it’s just a very enthusiastic guess. But what we do know is that the elements of the Military Sleep Methodare a version of progressive relaxation, a well-studied and tested method that has been used by sleep coaches and therapists for decades, says Ellen Wermter, a board-certified Family Nurse Practitioner and behavioral sleep medicine specialist with the Better Sleep Council.

This type of head-to-toe relaxation is also known as a body scan, and it’s a well-known method of achieving a relaxed state, adds Greg Hammer, MD, a professor at Stanford University School of Medicine and author of Gain Without Pain: The Happiness Handbook for Healthcare Professionals. “There are many articles promoting this method of inducing relaxation and sleep, and I am a believer that both breath-workand body scan techniques promote health, including sleep,” he says.

One large review published in 2023 in The International Journal of Health Sciencefound that progressive muscle relaxation significantly decreases the prevalence of insomnia in the elderly. And while there may not be any easily accessed studies about this method as used in the military, there is some recent research about progressive relaxation in people with insomnia because of another stressful situation: patients who were in isolation in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. A 2020 study at Fujian Medical University Union Hospital in China found that “progressive muscle relaxation training can significantly reduce anxiety and depression and improve sleep quality in COVID-19 patients during isolation treatment.”

The all-around data is strong enough that a task force commissioned by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) in 2023 to look at different methods for treating people with insomnia, and reported that while there wasn’t extremely strong evidence that relaxation works for those with chronic insomnia, “the modest benefits of relaxation likely outweigh the minimal potential harms and burdens.” They added that because it has minimal costs involved, and most therapists are capable of guiding their patients in the method, it was worth a try.

Wermter says that any sleep method that helps you distract your brain and wind down can be helpful. “These progressive relaxation methods give your brain a job to do that is focusing on your muscles and not overthinking things that happened during the day or stressing about things that might happen tomorrow,” she says. “You’re also helping your muscles do what they already would be doing during stage one sleep, which is releasing tension, slowing down movement, and resting.”

Dr. Hammer also notes that the visualization aspect of the method is also helpful for promoting sleep, pointing out that a 2020 study in the Journal of Medical Psychology supports this.

Pros

As stated above, it is harmless, low-risk and costs nothing. It can put your body in a state of relaxation and bring a sense of calm, if not necessarily instant sleep, in two minutes. It is also a method that can be done anywhere you need some extra mojo to fall asleep, such as on an airplane or in a lumpy guest-room bed.

Cons

There’s nothing inherently bad about it, but Wermter is not a fan of one particular step: While she thinks imagining yourself floating on a lake is a lovely, “I never find telling myself, ‘stop thinking,’ to be helpful,” she says. A better option is to picture yourself doing a task that you enjoy and know really well, she says. “An athlete might imagine themselves making a free throw, feeling themselves gripping of the ball,” she explains. “I like to imagine myself making cookies, getting the flour out and the crinkle of the bag and the little puff of flour as I open it and measure it out. As you're thinking about each step, your brain has something to chew on, so it's not thinking about the other things that keep you up.”

Can you really fall asleep in two minutes?

We all know that are some people (cough cough, my husband) who can fall asleep as soon as their head hits the pillow, and then there are those of us who take a half hour or more as our brain eventually winds down from all the stress of the day (ahem, any woman with small children, big children, cats, dogs, a stressful job, no job or perimenopausal symptoms). But Wermter has an interesting take on this: “In sleep medicine, there's really no formula that says that if you fall asleep in X number of minutes, then you're winning at sleep,” she says. In fact, a much better measure of how good a sleeper you are is how rested you feel the next day, she says. She adds that falling into instant sleep isn’t even realistic for most people. “We all need a winding-down period. It’s like when you put on the brakes when you’re driving — the car has to slowly come to a stop.”

Dr. Hammer is also a skeptic: “I have significant concerns about the expectation that the method will result in onset of sleep within two minutes,” he says. “It is well known that looking at a clock during a difficult night of insomnia is a bad idea!” He points out that focusing on a race against time is probably counterproductive for most people who are trying to fall asleep.

Bottom line

The Military Sleep Method is simply a new way of marketing certain well-documented relaxation methods, and it may very well work, though the promise of two minutes is not particularly realistic. It’s certainly worth trying — though don’t forget the importance of good sleep hygiene, which includes keeping your bedroom dark, quiet, and cool, and avoiding caffeine, alcohol, and screens before bed.

 

Good Housekeeping