This Stanford Psychiatrist Studied Hypnosis For 40+ Years: 3 Tricks He Swears By

“When you're having trouble getting to sleep, you usually do the wrong things right away,” Spiegel declares. You look at the clock to calculate how much sleep you’re losing, or you think about your jam-packed to-do list the next day, which only arouses you more. “Your body gets tense, your muscles get tight, your heart rate and blood pressure go up, and you have more trouble sleeping,” he adds. 

Instead, he recommends comforting your body. “Imagine you're floating in a bath, a lake, a hot tub, or floating in space,” Spiegel says. You also may want to practice what he calls a cyclic sigh, “where you inhale halfway, hold your breath, and fully and slowly exhale through your mouth,” he explains. “As you do that, you trigger the soothing parasympathetic autonomic system and help your body relax.” 

Keep floating in your imagination, and if you have any negative thoughts about your sleep habits or upcoming work schedule, detach them from your body—project them as if you were watching them on a movie screen. “You may even think of something you can do to help with the problem, but you're experiencing your thoughts as if they were just flowing through you, not something you need to act on,” Spiegel adds. “And that can help people get to sleep.” 

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Just like with sleep, it’s important to make your body feel comfortable in the face of stress. Stress often results in a snowball effect, Spiegel says, where you “have an interaction with your body that makes things worse rather than better.” Your body experiences a fight-or-flight reaction (muscles tense, heart races, skin feels clammy), and you feel even worse from those physical effects—which then feeds into more anxiety. 

That’s why Spiegel recommends calming down the physical body. “That's an area where you actually have control, regardless of how stressful things are,” he notes. Again, “imagine being in a place where your body feels most comfortable, like a warm bath, floating in the air, or taking a swim in a mountain lake. Whatever makes you feel good, and just affiliate with that feeling,” he adds. “Once you get that sense, you've already taken a step toward diffusing the stressor, because it's not making your body feel so bad.”

Next, he recommends picturing events or experiences that actually went well the day before. What did you do that helped somebody else or made you feel good? That way, you can take control over what your mind focuses on while making sure your body doesn’t distract you. “Take care of the physical part of the anxiety, and then think about a way of dealing with the problem,” he shares. 

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