When you lay down to sleep, deepen and lengthen your breathing patterns -- shoot for five second inhales and five second exhales. You'll be taking 6 breathes per minute. This takes some practice but works nicely.

Take a deep breath and hold it. While holding your breathe, tense up the muscles throughout your entire body and hold both for 30 seconds. Exhale completely and relax. Take several relaxed breathes and repeat three times.

Choose any relaxing color (blue, green, yellow, etc). Place your hands on your stomach and imagine that you are expanding a colored balloon in your stomach. Exhale an insomnia/anxiety color (red, black, etc) through your mouth. Continue this for 5-10-50 times, whatever it takes. It is impossible to focus on your body/breath while entertaining thoughts.

Take a hot shower or bath before bed, or get up and do so

if you are unable to fall asleep within 15 minutes.

Take some sleep food for the brain. Before going to bed eat 1 ounce of protein, 1 ounce of cheese and 5 grapes or the equivalent.

Get out of bed if you have not fallen asleep within 15 minutes. The brain is quite easily programmed. I don't want your brain to associate "bed" with "awake."

Once you're out of bed do not watch TV, get on the computer, listen to stimulating music, turn on a bunch of lights or do anything else that stimulates your brain into high gear.

Once out of bed do sit quietly, meditate on emptying the

mind, listen to quiet, soothing music or do some "light" reading. The research shows that deep meditation is as restorative as sleep and takes less time than sleeping for 8 hours.

Purchase a Brain Entrainment CD and some ear buds (they are the most comfortable to sleep on). Make sure the CD is designed for sleep. I won't go into all the scientific details here. Just know that the brain needs to be in delta wave state 60 minutes for you to wake up feeling fresh. My favorite is "Sleeping Through The Rain" by a company you can find at www.hemi-sync.com </cgi-bin/redir.pl?url=http://www.hemi-sync.com>/. Don't try this on just a boom box. The ear buds are very important to make this work.

Make sure your bedroom is dark. Lights out!

Exercise regularly. Exercise does a fantastic job of regulating sleep cycles. The only catch here is do not exercise within two hours of bedtime, as this can activate mind and body systems that will keep you awake.

Drink Chamomile Tea an hour before bedtime and take Valerian root with it. If you open up your first bottle of Valerian root and it smells like rotten socks, don't throw it away, it's supposed to smell like that! Can you believe it!? ;-)

If worse comes to worst, consult a doctor. There are many effective medications used for sleep which can be prescribed by your doctor. Some of these include Ambien, Temazepam, Sonata, Remeron, Benadryl (nonprescription), Melatonin (Don't take this if you have Seasonal Affective Disorder) Trazadone and others.

Stay away from alcohol as a sleep aid. Many will argue that alcohol gets them to sleep, but brain wave studies show that once asleep, an individual does not reach the restorative level of sleep that results in feeling well rested in the morning.