Name: How to QUICKLY Fall Back Asleep in the Middle of the Night (As You Age)
Uploaded: 2025-05-12T14:35:06.000Z
Duration: 10 min 22 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Past simple

Did you know that as we age, our bodies have a natural tendency to wake up more in the middle of the night?

To-infinitive

While this can be totally normal, what do you do if you struggle to fall back asleep?

Future simple

Well, in this video, I'm going to share with you some of my crucial tips and techniques, as well as four key things to avoid so that you can fall back asleep in the middle of the night quickly and easily.

But before we get into my sleep tips, which you're going to want to stick around for,

I want to answer the question of why seniors tend to wake up more in the middle of the night in the first place.

So when you're falling asleep, your core body temperature rises, rises, rises until about 1030 at night.

Then it hits its peak and then it begins to drop.

That drop is a signal to your brain to release melatonin.

Think of melatonin as sort of the key that starts the engine for sleep.

Because at some point, your core body temperature will actually hit a bottom and start to go back up.

When it starts to go back up, this is when you actually move into a lighter stage of sleep.

Typically between one and three o'clock in the morning.

Since as we age, we naturally spend less time in deep sleep.

These body temperature fluctuations can trigger our nighttime awakenings.

First, let's jump into discussing things you need to be avoiding.

The reason I'm starting here is because I typically see people doing these things at night which are likely triggering their inability to actually fall back to sleep.

The first thing to avoid is waking up and looking at the clock.

I know this sounds trivial and in the grand scheme of things, it's probably not the worst thing to do.

Looking at the clock and registering what time it is becomes the very thing your mind begins to fixate on.

You look over at the clock and see what time it is.

Then you instantly do the mental math and determine how much time you have left to sleep.

You're back to that time of night that you hate.

This is exactly the kind of cycle that builds anxiety by increasing your heart rate.

The one metric that you must know is that you must have a heart rate of 60 beats or below to enter into a state of unconsciousness.

So the goal here is to avoid an increased heart rate altogether by not looking at the clock.

So the second thing to avoid is looking at your phone.

Basically, everyone sleeps next to their phones.

It's very easy to just reach over, grab it, and either check the time or see if you have any notifications.

While I see this more often with my younger patients, it is becoming more common with my seniors as well.

If your phone isn't already on the lowest dimmer setting, the light from your phone can activate your brain, which makes it harder to relax.

And number two, you're increasing your heart rate, which is the opposite of what I need you to be doing.

The third thing to avoid, and I hate to say it, is getting up and going to the bathroom.

If you got to go to the bathroom, please go to the bathroom.

But a lot of my seniors, they wake up in the middle of the night and they say to themselves, well, maybe I have to go.

This can be incredibly disruptive for you getting back to sleep.

Remember, in order to enter into a state of unconsciousness, you need a heart rate of 60 or below.

So here's what happens when you wake up to go to the bathroom.

Well, you go from a lying position to a seated position to a standing position.

And when you walk over to the bathroom and then come all the way back to your bed, what do you think you just did?

You just raised your heart rate, which puts you at a disadvantage when trying to fall back asleep.

Please don't stress yourself out too much here.

I don't want you to think that if you get up to pee, you'll never be able to fall back asleep.

Sometimes having to pee is what's keeping you up.

It's just something for you to be aware of next time you wake up, because it could be something that you control.

The last thing to avoid is turning on the lights.

This is typically associated with either getting up and going to the bathroom or going to get some water or a snack from the fridge in the kitchen.

Light can significantly affect an individual's circadian rhythm.

Circadian rhythms are internal patterns that change over a 24-hour cycle in response to environmental cues.

For example, light alerts the body when to be awake, while darkness signals the body to feel more tired.

So when a person is exposed to artificial light, it can confuse the body into thinking it should be more awake at times when it should be resting.

If you have to get up, I'd recommend keeping a small nightlight either in your bathroom or in your kitchen to minimize the amount of disruption that you might be experiencing.

Another helpful tip would be to keep a glass of water on your nightstand so you don't have to get up out of bed in case you're thirsty.

OK, Dr. Bruce, well, what happens if I'm avoiding all of those things and I still struggle to fall back asleep?

Well, I'm glad you asked because now we're going to talk about some of those critical tips and techniques to help you get back to bed.

But I do want to pause here really quick and ask, if you like this kind of sleep content, please do me a huge favor and like this video and subscribe to the channel below.

It really means a lot to us here at Sleep Doctor, and that support allows me to keep making this kind of content for you guys in the future and hopefully improving your sleep out there.

Also, if you're consistently waking up tired or feel overly groggy during the day, it might be worth getting screened for sleep apnea, especially if you snore.

It's way more common than you might think, especially in seniors.

And unfortunately, four out of five people with sleep apnea don't even know that they have it.

The good news is that there's a whole host of treatment options out there that can make a dramatic improvement in not just your sleep, but to be fair, your overall health.

Another piece of good news, you don't need to go to a sleep lab or see a sleep specialist to be screened for it.

There are now these super high quality home sleep tests that allow you to test yourself from the comfort of your own bed, and you can get your results back within just a couple of days.

So if you've consistently struggled with your sleep and you can't seem to do anything about it, do me a favor.

Click the link down in the description and order a home sleep test.

Seriously, it's worth just getting tested even if just to rule out sleep apnea.

My number one favorite technique I tell people to do if they're struggling to fall back asleep is called 4-7-8 breathing.

If you've heard of this already, that's great.

And if not, it's a simple breathing technique to follow.

All you do is breathe in for a count of four, you hold for a count of seven, and then you breathe out for a count of eight.

You're not going to push air in and out really hard.

This is a gentle breath filling in your lungs, holding, and then pushing the air out.

What this does is it forces you to use your entire lung to breathe as opposed to shallow breathing, which has only been filling up about half of your lung.

By extending your breath, you use the entire lung and your heart no longer has to pump as many times, which is lowering your heart rate.

Most seniors should be able to get their heart rates to about 60 beats or below.

If you are someone whose heart rate will not go to 60, then just focus on getting your heart rate as low as 10 to 15 beats lower than what it is when you're just lying down.

Trust me, lowering it a little bit can go a long, long way.

So the second technique you can try is doing a mind-focusing technique.

This is something I personally do anytime I'm experiencing some level of restless sleep.

You're going to think this is crazy and it's a new form of counting sheep.

It's called counting down from 300 by threes.

Close your eyes and you start at 300 and then you count down to 297, 294, 291.