If you find winding down for bedtime to be a consistent challenge, consider incorporating relaxation techniques into your pre-bed routine. Science-based exercises that promote relaxation can be a great way to prepare both your body and brain for sleep — which not only makes falling asleep easier, but also improves the sleep you get.
Luckily, you needn’t look any further than your RISE app for pre-sleep relaxation. RISE will guide you through the four main tried-and-true techniques — autogenic training, diaphragmatic breathing, progressive muscle relaxation, and soothing sounds — and also help you time your relaxation exercises with your ideal sleep schedule.
Here we’ll cover the science behind why relaxation before bed is important, and walk you through each of the four science-backed techniques more in-depth (including how you can access our audio guides via the app). Finally, we’ll suggest some other calm-promoting strategies to try in concert with these techniques to further boost your chances of achieving a dreamy night’s sleep and a better tomorrow.
We all know — perhaps intuitively — that it’s a good idea to “relax” before bed. But why? The short answer is, by purposefully relaxing in the hour or two leading up to bed (what is often referred to as our wind-down routine), we’re allowing our body to carry out biological and chemical processes that enable us to eventually fall asleep.
Suffice it to say, a relaxed body and mind is tantamount to getting a good night’s sleep. When we’re worried or stressed, we experience a physiological stress response, where the fight-or-flight part of our becomes activated, and stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline are released. Our heart rate increases, our digestion is suppressed, and more oxygen is delivered to our muscles and brain, making us alert and ready for action. This part of our ANS, which is called the , serves an important function during our waking hours — it’s certainly preferable to be alert when we’re driving on the highway in the rain, for instance, or about to give a career-defining presentation — it’s not a place we want to find ourselves in too close to bedtime.
When we take some time to relax before bed, we are able to tap into our , whose job it is to bring our bodily functions back to baseline after a period of arousal. When our PNS takes over, we move from fight-or-flight into a state of “rest and digest” — just where we need to be for restful sleep.
When we engage in behaviors that ultimately have a positive effect on our sleep quality, it means that we’re more likely to meet our sleep need (the genetically-predetermined amount of sleep that each of us needs each night in order to be our best selves — not everyone needs 8 hours), and avoid accruing sleep debt (the amount of missed sleep we owe our bodies, based on this sleep need).
Getting enough sleep isn’t just about curtailing drowsiness during the day. Sleep deprivation wreaks havoc on our health and well-being in myriad ways, including:
So finding ways to relax before bed isn’t “just” a must for better sleep — your health, relationships, and career may also depend on it.
In the RISE app, we provide audio recordings to guide you through the four most popular and scientifically-potent relaxation exercises.
These techniques are not only scientifically proven to improve sleep latency (the amount of time it takes us to fall asleep after we’ve turned out the light), they’re also easy as can be to use — you simply need to get yourself into a comfortable position and hit “play” in the RISE app.
From there, the recorded audio for each will guide you through breathing techniques, visualizations, and other passive exercises designed to calm your body and mind in preparation for sleep. If you’re familiar with body-scanning and/or different types of meditation, some of this may seem familiar.
Unlike similar features available in other apps, RISE also uses your own sleep and energy data to help you pin down a personalized schedule for when to hit play on your favorite recording. (RISE will even send you reminders to help keep your sleep on track!)
Pro tip: While these techniques are perfect additions to your bedtime routine, they’re not only for bedtime! Feel free to use them throughout the day as needed for stress relief and managing anxiety.
“Imagine a warm calm environment with your limbs getting heavier…”
During an autogenic relaxation (AT) session, you will be guided through a series of passive sensory suggestions — much like a guided meditation — related to heaviness, warmth, and other sensations in different parts of your body. Through this process, one enters a “pre-sleep” state that induces a relaxation response.
Fun fact: NASA teaches AT to its astronauts to help them better handle the unique psychophysiological stressors of being in space.
Who is it good for?
Benefits:
Whether we realize it or not, many of us tend to take short shallow breaths–something that triggers our fight-or-flight mode. Diaphragmatic breathing — also known as “belly breathing” — is a deep-breathing exercise that encourages one to take full, slow, mindful breaths instead, thus allowing the PNS to take over. Even just 5 minutes of diaphragmatic breathing each day can have a noticeable impact on stress and anxiety.
The RISE app guides you through a type of diaphragmatic breathing called “box breathing.” The instructions are simple:
Who is it good for?
Benefits:
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One of the body’s reactions to stress is to tense our muscles, as if we’re preparing ourselves to flee a potentially dangerous situation (again with the fight-or-flight mode!). Progressive muscle relaxation (PMR) relieves this (often unconscious) muscle tension by prompting us to contract different muscles or muscle groups on an inhale, and relax them on the exhale, working through the whole body. This technique makes us more conscious of where and how we hold stress and tension in our bodies, and familiarizes us with the sensation of releasing it.
While our audio recording is helpful for getting you started using this technique, this is one you should eventually be able to do on your own.
Who is it good for?
Benefits of:
While there’s disagreement among sleep experts regarding the impact of sound on sleep, many people feel that certain sounds help them enter a relaxed state (a fan or white noise machine, for instance). If you believe that ambient noise works in service of your sleep, there’s no reason to not include it in your nighttime routine. We cover whether white noise helps you sleep and the best sounds and noises for sleep here.
The RISE app lets you personalize your soothing soundscape. You can choose from many different sounds commonly associated with sleep — ambient music, car interior, and crackling fire among them — and also select the amount of time you’d like the recording to play (anywhere from 15 minutes to 2 hours).
Who is it good for?
Benefits of:
In addition to our audio-guided relaxation feature, RISE can guide you through a host of other proven habits for better sleep, to help you keep your stress low and energy high. The following bedtime-friendly behaviors — which are all facets of good sleep hygiene — will work in support of your favorite relaxation technique, setting you up for an increased likelihood of sleep (and relaxation) success:
Take a warm bath or shower to relax your muscles and bring your body temperature down for sleep
Meditation calms the mind and has been proven to , and may indirectly benefit sleep for this reason
Massage and/or reflexology can relieve muscle tension, making sleep easier to come by for some
Reading a book before bed can take your mind off the day, providing a helpful mental buffer between work and sleep
Practicing yoga nidra or NSDR may help you reduce stress before bed
We encourage you to try out all combinations of these techniques and behaviors over the course of several nights to find what works best for you — everyone’s different! — and then build a wind-down routine around your favorites.
Two final things to keep in mind when building your bedtime routine:
As a final note, remember that, while wind-down time is certainly important, better sleep doesn’t hinge entirely on what you do right before bed — choices we make as soon as we wake up can help or hinder our nightly sleep. Improving our sleep hygiene includes making tweaks to our daytime routines and behaviors, as well. Fortunately, many of these sleep-helping behaviors, when performed earlier in the day, make the task of relaxing before bed easier too. Here’s a run-down of how to structure your day for better sleep if you’d like some more in-depth guidance, and the RISE app is also a great resource for scheduling out your day with each night’s sleep in mind.
There are breathing, visualization, and other passive relaxation techniques designed to calm your mind (and body) in preparation for sleep — particularly effective are autogenic training, diaphragmatic breathing, progressive muscle relaxation, and listening to soothing sounds.
Autogenic training, diaphragmatic breathing, progressive muscle relaxation, and listening to soothing sounds are great passive relaxation exercises for sleep. For something more active, try yin yoga or gentle stretching before bed.
Progressive muscle relaxation (PMR) is a tried-and-true relaxation technique that involves alternatively tensing and relaxing all the muscles in the body.
The same relaxation techniques that work for sleep also work well for relieving anxiety. Autogenic training, diaphragmatic breathing, progressive muscle relaxation, and listening to soothing sounds are all scientifically proven to help calm the body and mind.
In the RISE app you’ll find guided audio for the four main science-backed relaxation techniques — autogenic training, diaphragmatic breathing, progressive muscle relaxation, and soothing sounds.
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