Need Help Sleeping/Napping at Anytime

[RichardCaan]

I hope you are all doing well!

With BMOQA coming soon there is one skill that I absolutely suck at and that is the ability to rack out/fall asleep/nap anywhere at anytime.

During BMOQ in the field I was the kid who was always awake in the day despite of how tired I was, this made the field portion much harder as it was insanely difficult to operate on low sleep. There were times were I was doing jack for hours in field but I could not fall asleep. The only time I actually almost fell asleep was in every class lol. Overall sleep has a STRONG association with performance.

I remember one of my instructors would always push the idea of when in doubt rack out, he would get pissed if candidates were staying awake during tasks which they didn't have to be awake for (example: being the runner during orders while waiting for the orders).

I have heard of stores of armored and infantry guys being able to sleep in a moving LAV for 15 minutes - 2 hours. Hell I could not even fall asleep on the 1 hour bus ride back from the field lol.



So what technique could I use to fall asleep or get in a short nap in uncomfortable situations (example: field, in a moving vehicle, on a bench, on dirt etc)?

 

[SeaKingTacco]

That is a difficult one to answer, because I could nap anywhere, at anytime.

But, if I was to deconstruct it, I suppose I had a mental routine. For me, I would clear my mind by mentally counting things. This broke my mind away from thinking/worrying about the right now stuff.

In short, at normal bedtime, practice a mental routine just before you fall asleep. After a few weeks, your brain will begin to associate sleep time with that routine, regardless the time of day.

 

[RichardCaan]

That is a difficult one to answer, because I could nap anywhere, at anytime.

But, if I was to deconstruct it, I suppose I had a mental routine. For me, I would clear my mind by mentally counting things. This broke my mind away from thinking/worrying about the right now stuff.

In short, at normal bedtime, practice a mental routine just before you fall asleep. After a few weeks, your brain will begin to associate sleep time with that routine, regardless the time of day.

Thanks for the response! I’ll try it and let you know if it works!

 

[Navy_Pete]

I've never been able to nap like that, and generally take a while falling asleep, but one thing I found that helped was box breathing; basically a form of meditative breathing. If I relax enough to fall asleep, awesome, if not I still slow things down and unwind. Put a link below; I sometimes find holding things that long or waiting between breaths slighty uncomfortable, so don't necessarily count to 4, but basically you just breath in slowly, hold it, breath out slowly, pause then repeat, so something you can do even if you literally only have a minute to take a 'tactical breather'.

https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/try-this-take-a-tactical-breather

There are some pretty good guided meditations on spotify etc that walk through relaxing your body, and generally you go through a sequence of flexing muscles in an area and relax as you breath out to help release tension, but again something else that might help unwind a bit and help fall asleep. I find it good after a workout generally during my cool down to help stretch out incidentally, so tend to do it a lot now during the regular day.