If you find yourself laying in the dark at 3am with your eyes wide open, struggling to fall back asleep, a bizarre hack could help.
According to social media wellness guru Heather Gordon, you should try rolling your eyes.
Gordon, who shares health and wellbeing content with her 16,000 TikTok followers under the name Pretty Sick Heather, shared a video detailing the trick that she claims works everytime.
And science suggests there may be something to it, with studies showing eye movements can boost levels of the sleep hormone, melatonin.
In the clip, which has amassed 2.6 million views, she instructed viewers to begin by closing their eyes.
The next step is to engage in a series of eye-rolling movements while keeping the eyes shut.
First, you direct your eyes towards the floor, and then bring them back to the centre.
Next, look all the way to the left, before bringing them back to the centre and then to the right. Then, roll them back to the middle again.
Then she tells her followers to look all the way up again before rolling your eyes in a circle clockwise and then anticlockwise.
Finally to finish, direct your eyes towards the bridge of your nose as if you were attempting to look ‘cross-eyed’.
‘You are going to do this as soon as you find yourself awake in the night and you are going to repeat it until you fall back asleep,’ she said.
‘I have never made it past two cycles of this without falling asleep. I promise you, you will not be able to do this and not fall back asleep.’
The comments below the video are filled with social media users claiming the hack worked for them.
One wrote: ‘It took me 3 cycles but you can feel yourself start to drift off and feel sleepy!! THANK YOU!!!’
Meanwhile another said: ‘I did this while watching and fell asleep. Woke up three hours later still with this video on repeat.’
One woman claimed that the hack helped her ‘sleep longer than I ever have’.
Experts say there is intriguing science that supports the benefit of the technique.
Dr Willem Gielen, a cardiologist based in Denmark, wrote about the efficacy of the method in a blog post published on the content platform, Medium.
He explained that the rolling action is associated with the release of melatonin, the hormone that regulates our sleep-wake patterns.
Therefore, by consciously rolling your eyes upwards, you can trigger this natural process and prompt your bod to start the sleep cycle.
A wealth of studies have shown that REM sleep — the most restorative period of sleep which involves rapid eye movements — helps to trigger melatonin release, providing further evidence for the link between the sleep hormone and eye manoeuvres.
One in three adults in the UK and almost half of US adults suffer with insomnia, with millions more reporting sleepless nights.
Long-term sleep deprivation can cause obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
Insomnia can be caused by stress, anxiety, alcohol, caffeine or nicotine, noise, shift work and jet lag.
If you regularly have problems sleeping, there are simple ways to improve your sleep hygiene.
This includes keeping regular sleeping hours, staying active in the day and by creating a restful quiet space to sleep.
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