If you’ve ever stared at the ceiling doing mental maths about how little sleep you’ll get if you “don’t fall asleep in the next 10 minutes”, you’re exactly the audience the so-called military sleep method is built for. On social media it’s being sold as a hack that can knock you out in under two minutes. The real story is a bit less magical, a bit more methodical – and, according to sleep experts, closer to structured relaxation training than a secret army superpower.
Where the ‘military sleep method’ really comes from
The technique now doing the rounds on TikTok and Instagram isn’t new at all. Its origin is usually traced back to Lloyd “Bud” Winter, an Olympic sprint coach who also studied sports psychology. In his book Relax and Win: Championship Performance (1981), Winter reportedly describes a system he helped develop for the United States Navy Pre-Flight School during the Second World War. The goal wasn’t “wellness” – it was survival and performance. Pilots were struggling with stress and sleep deprivation, which hammered their judgement, reaction time and decision-making. Winter’s relaxation protocol was supposed to help airmen fall asleep quickly “despite loud, stressful, or dangerous circumstances” – even on airfields or in combat zones. According to the story, it took pilots nearly six weeks of practice, but there was supposedly a 96% success rate, even after drinking coffee and with guns firing around them. In the past few years the technique has been repackaged for civilians. Fitness coach Justin Agustin shared it online as a routine that can “send you to sleep in two minutes”, describing how soldiers and fighter pilots used it “to get some valuable minutes of sleep while in active war zones and battlefields”. Clips like his, plus countless “I tried the military method for a week” videos, pushed the old protocol back into viral territory.
How the military sleep method actually works
Stripped of the hype, the method is essentially a full-body, top-to-toe relaxation sequence plus a mental reset. It’s meant to take about 120 seconds to run through, with the final ten seconds focused on clearing your mind. Most descriptions follow the structure set out in Relax and Win:
- You start by getting physically comfortable – in bed, on a bunk, or wherever you’re meant to sleep – and deliberately slowing your breathing. The first stage focuses on relaxing the face: you soften your forehead, let your jaw unclench, release the muscles around your eyes and let your tongue rest loosely in your mouth. The idea is to melt away any tension from your scalp down to your chin.
- From there, you consciously “drop” your shoulders and loosen your neck, letting your upper body sink into the mattress. You allow your arms to feel heavy, relaxing your biceps, forearms, hands and fingers, as if you’re letting them flop by your sides. Some modern explainers describe imagining a feeling of warmth spreading from your head down to your fingertips as you do this.
- Next comes the torso and lower body. You let your chest and abdomen relax on the exhale, then work down through your pelvis, thighs, calves, ankles, feet and toes – paying attention to each area in turn and deliberately letting it go slack. It’s a variation of progressive muscle relaxation, but without the “clench then release” stage: here, you’re simply scanning down the body and releasing tension step by step.
- Once you’ve moved from head to toe, the physical part is done and the mental part becomes crucial. The method asks you to clear your mind for about ten seconds. One way is visualisation: picturing yourself in a calm, simple scene – lying in a canoe on a still lake, stretched out in a hammock in a dark, quiet room, or resting in a meadow under a blue sky. The scene is kept deliberately bland and peaceful, so your brain has something gentle to latch onto.
- If images don’t stick, the fallback is a short internal mantra. Many descriptions suggest repeating the words “don’t think” slowly in your head for ten seconds. If other thoughts intrude – work worries, relationship spirals, fantasy football – you notice them, set them aside, and come b ack to the image or the phrase.
In theory, once your body is fully relaxed and your mental chatter has been pared back to one simple focus, sleep should be able to take over. In practice, even the enthusiasts say it takes consistent practice. Agustin warned that it “could take as long as six months to perfect this method”, echoing the original claim that pilots needed about six weeks of nightly training before they could reliably drift off that quickly.
What sleep experts say the method is really doing
So does the military sleep method work? That depends on what you mean by “work”, and how much evidence you need.Brian Koo,MD, a physician at Yale Medicine who specialises in neurology and sleep medicine, told Verywell Mind that “there isn’t any specific evidence proving the efficacy or benefits of the military sleep method because there haven’t been any research studies investigating it.” In other words, no modern randomised controlled trial has ever been run on this exact protocol. However, Dr Koo points out that the method is built almost entirely from relaxation tools that do have evidence behind them. He says it “essentially promotes sleep using proven relaxation techniques such as deep breathing, progressive muscle relaxation, biofeedback and visualisation”. As he puts it:“Asking a person to focus on their body and distract themselves from thinking about other things is an effective way to promote sleep.” Here’s how those ingredients stack up in the research:
- Deep breathing has been shown to relax the body, calm the nervous system, slow heart rate and trigger the production of melatonin – the hormone that helps you feel sleepy. A 2018 study reported that structured breathing exercises can help people fall asleep faster by activating the body’s relaxation response.
- Progressive muscle relaxation – systematically working through muscle groups to release tension – has been found to reduce insomnia symptoms and ease anxious and depressive thoughts that keep people awake. The military method uses a gentler variant, focusing only on letting muscles loosen from head to toe.
- Biofeedback-style awareness, where you learn to notice and gently influence things like breathing, heart rate and muscle tension, has been shown in small trials to help some people with insomnia by giving them more control over their arousal levels at bedtime.
- Visualisation (also called guided imagery) – focusing on calming mental pictures – has been found to reduce distress from intrusive thoughts and help people fall asleep more quickly by giving the mind a neutral “track” to follow instead of racing through worries.
Put together, the military method is less a miracle hack and more a compact relaxation routine that pulls several evidence-based strategies into one script. For people whose insomnia is mainly about a restless body and a racing mind at bedtime, that can be genuinely helpful. But there are important caveats. Not everyone’s sleep problems are caused by “thinking too much”, and not all insomnia will yield to relaxation alone. If you have sleep apnoea, restless legs, chronic pain, severe anxiety, depression or other underlying conditions, techniques like this may feel good but won’t fix the root cause on their own. Still, if you’re one of the many adults who struggle to nod off – about 10% live with chronic insomnia and another 20% report occasional insomnia symptoms – a structured wind-down routine is rarely a bad idea. The military method may be less about “sleeping like a fighter pilot” and more about giving your brain a clear, repeatable script: relax the face, drop the shoulders, scan down the body, and give your thoughts something gentle to hold onto until sleep arrives.
