Sometimes I have trouble sleeping, and this can have severe consequences the following day, especially if it is a workday. I figured that many techniques must have been devised for helping people fall asleep, especially in high-stakes settings such as sports, the military, certain key value driving professions, etc. So, I asked A.I., and it found this technique that was devised by U.S. track coach Lloyd Bud Winter, to help Olympic athletes relax. This technique was later adopted by the U.S. military, and it can, supposedly, make someone fall asleep within a couple of minutes.

Of course, it is not a method that can be mastered overnight: It may take a lot of consistent daily practice to train your nervous system to flip the "sleep switch". Reports have allegedly shown that in the military, after 6 weeks of exercising this method daily, it has a success rate of around 96%. If that is true, it is phenomenal.

So, here is my adaptation of Bud Winter's technique, as a flat list of steps suitable for listening to as a narration when going to sleep. I call it an adaptation because I have removed some stuff that are unsuitable for bedside narration, and I have added a few more steps about "additional sensory detail" which I saw proposed somewhere, but I do not know whether they exist in the original.

• Close your eyes.
• Breathe slowly.
• Relax your forehead,
• your jaw,
• your tongue,
• and the muscles around your eyes.
• Let your shoulders drop as low as they can go,
• as if they are sinking into the bed.
• Relax your neck.
• Let your upper and lower arms go limp on one side,
• followed by the other.
• Relax your hands,
• and fingers.
• Settle your torso.
• Take a deep breath,
• and exhale.
• Relax your stomach muscles
• and let go of any tension you are holding in your torso.
• Relax your right thigh,
• then your right calf,
• right ankle,
• and right foot.
• Relax your left thigh,
• then your left calf,
• left ankle,
• and left foot.
• Your entire body should now feel heavy and limp.
• Now that your body is physically relaxed, stop thinking about any worries or tasks.
• Imagine yourself lying flat on your back in a canoe,
• on a completely calm, serene lake,
• with nothing but a clear blue sky above you.
• Embrace more sensory detail of your imagined scene,
• by bringing to your mind the smells of that setting:
• The cool humid air,
• the wet wood from the boat,
• soil, moss, and grass from the shoreline,
• green notes from water plants, and trees around the lake.

I created an mp3 file so that I can listen to this when going to sleep.

Here is version 1:

Here is how I made it:

1. For converting the text to speech, I used the MAI (Microsoft AI) playground because it is free, and it is incredibly, astonishingly, mind-blowingly good. I experimented a bit and found that voice "Harper" with style "Softvoice" produced excellent results for my purposes. It does have a limit on the amount of text that it will process, so I had to do two prompts and receive two audio files.
2. For editing the audio, I used Audacity because it is a well-known, free, and decently capable audio editor. Here is what I did in terms of audio editing:
   1. I very aggressively de-essed the speech.
      • After a lot of experimentation, I realized I had to use the Filter Curve EQ effect to cut out everything above about 5 kilohertz by configuring it as follows:
        1. From 20 Hz to 4 kHz a flat line at 0 dB, then
        2. from 4 kHz to 6.1 kHz a steep slope dropping from 0 dB down to -27 dB, and then
        3. from 6.1 kHz to 20 kHz a flat line at -27 dB
   2. I slowed down the speech.
      • As it turned out, 75% speed was too slow, but 80% speed was just about right.
   3. I inserted longer silences where I thought they were needed.
      • In order to give the listener some time to follow each instruction.
   4. I mixed it with the music. (See below.)
3. For the music, I used Google Gemini, because it is one of the few services that a) actually work, and b) do actually understand what I mean when I say "in the style of Brian Eno's ambient music". It only creates 30-second tracks, which is a joke, but for my purposes it was okay because ambient music can be repeated over and over again, especially when it is in the background, with human voice in the foreground.
   • I decided that music is necessary as an introduction, in order to give me some time, from the moment I press "play" on the bedside phone, to turn off the light, lie on the bed, and cover myself with the quilt before the instructions start playing. Using several seconds of silence as an introduction would not work, because the problem with silence is that you never know whether you have actually started it, or whether you made a mistake and nothing is happening.
   • Once I had the music as an introduction, I decided to keep it playing in the background during the instructions.
   • The creation of the music was the hardest part. Most generative A.I. services out there simply do not do that. ChatGPT pretended to do it with some workarounds, but when I asked it to try some of those workarounds I realized that it was only wasting my time. Some, like Suno, do not understand the instructions and create useless nonsense. Some are particularly twisted; for example, Udio demanded that I enable DRM on my browser, (I should have refused right then and there,) and once I did that, it went ahead and created some music which was decently close to what I had asked for, but it would, of course, not let me have it. How debauched is that?

I will leave you with a quote from Lloyd Bud Winter: