How to Fall Asleep Faster: Mike Torchia's 7 pm Sleep Protocol

You are tired by ten. You get into bed, and your head starts running the meeting you have at nine tomorrow. Or you fall asleep fine and wake at two, and the next three hours are turning over and doing math on how much sleep you have left.

Mike Torchia hears that complaint constantly, and his answer to how to fall asleep faster is not a pill. It is a routine that starts at seven in the evening and ends with a memory of a beach in Florida. He laid the whole thing out on the August 5, 2026 episode of Live Well and Thrive with Larry Gaiters, in about six minutes, and it is the most specific stretch of the conversation.

This post is the sleep protocol on its own. It grew out of the post on what a mental performance coach does, which covered the rest of that episode and gave the routine one section. Here every step gets Mike’s reasoning, because the question of how to sleep better is really a question of what to do at seven. Everything below is his routine and his view, stated as his.

Mike starts by asking what you did after six o’clock

When someone tells Mike they fall asleep and wake three hours later, tossing and unable to get back down, he does not start with the bed. He starts earlier in the evening.

Tell me what you did starting from six o’clock to the time you went to bed.

The answers, in his telling, repeat. The heat was turned up on a cold night, so body temperature stayed elevated. They worked on the computer late, so the screen’s blue light was in their eyes right up to bed. His explanation is a plain one: the sun keeps you awake during the day, and at night the body is supposed to stop producing what keeps you up and start producing what brings sleep on. A bright screen and a warm room, in his view, keep the daytime signal running. The problem is upstream of the pillow, in hours nobody thinks of as part of sleep.

That is why he treats how to fall asleep faster as an evening question, not a bedtime one. The routine that follows is what he tells clients, in what he called simple terms instead of fancy names.

From seven in the evening, cool the house, dim the lights, skip the news

Steps one and two arrive together. From seven o’clock, keep the home as cool as you can, and turn the lights down. He gives no target temperature. His reasoning on the lights is that brightness keeps you awake and, in his words, stops you producing the elements that induce sleep.

Starting at seven o’clock, keep it as cool as possible in your home. Also, dim the lights.

Step three is the news. Mike’s point is that what you watch does not end when you turn it off. See a child hit by a car on the evening broadcast and your subconscious replays it while you sleep, whether you know it or not. He puts the news in the same category as the toxins people work so hard to keep out of their food. Step four is the replacement: read a book, listen to music, watch a comedy, anything that will not agitate you, because whatever agitates you at nine, you replay at midnight.

Step five is the phone. He tells people not to use it in those hours at all, and he is specific that the warmer night-time screen setting does not get you off the hook: in his view it still affects the brain. Whatever you do right before bed should leave you in a relaxed state of mind, and the phone rarely does. That is the bedtime routine for adults as he gives it: five decisions, all made before you are anywhere near the bedroom.

One childhood memory replaces the racing thoughts at night

This is the step that separates Mike’s routine from a list of sleep-hygiene rules, and it is the one he gave the most time to. As you get ready, brushing your teeth or your hair, choose a special occasion from when you were small, and go into it.

His own is his eighth birthday. His mother and grandmother took him to Florida and a hotel by the beach, and he loved to swim. Walking on the sand, he held his mother’s hand while his grandmother held hers. He turned around and saw three sets of footprints: his grandmother’s big ones, his mother’s smaller ones, and his own tiny ones, and he thought it was the cutest thing he had ever seen. He still sees the sand and his mother’s smile.

So I always reflect back, eight years old, looking at the sand, envisioning it, and the smile on my mother’s face. That puts me to sleep all the time.

He keeps a second one in reserve, fishing with his brother and father. He describes going into what he called a little dream field, and says he is deeply asleep within ten or twelve minutes. The memory gives the mind one job, and a mind with one job is not free to run tomorrow’s meeting. If you want to know how to stop overthinking at night, that is his method: not emptying the head, which nobody can do, but filling it with one thing you chose.

How to fall asleep faster once you are in bed: slow the breath, use the nose

Once you are lying down, the last active step is the breathing. Ask Mike for breathing exercises for sleep and you get one instruction, which he says he learned from professionals and now teaches: slow the breath down and breathe through the nose. He trained himself to nose-breathe and says you will fall asleep if you do it.

You need to slow down your breathing, and breathe through your nose. Slow it down and just think of the peaceful things.

He is clear about what he does not want. A company sells an adhesive to seal the mouth shut at night, and his view is that this is not a good thing, because it forces the result instead of training it. Keep the lips closed on your own, breathe slowly, and hold the memory. That is the entire technique. There is no count, no pattern to memorize, nothing to look up on the phone you already put away.

A pad by the bed, no tracker, and never a look at the clock

Mike does track the routine, but with paper. He has clients keep a pad by the bed and note how many minutes passed before they felt themselves dozing off. In his telling, the number gets shorter and shorter as the routine takes hold, and that pad is the only record of how to fall asleep faster he wants in the bedroom.

He is against wearing a watch or a ring to bed for the same reason he is against the clock. A device gives you something to think about, and thinking is what you are trying to stop. Then the rule he repeated twice on the show.

Never look at the clock. If you have to get up, do not look at that clock.

His example is the 2:30 wake-up. You look, you see it is only 2:30, the mind starts worrying about how little is left, and worry is exactly the state that keeps you up. Not knowing the time is the point. Get up if you must, get back into bed, return to the breath and the memory, and let the pad in the morning be the only number in the room.

Magnesium is a small lever, in Mike’s view; the evening is the big one

People ask him about magnesium, and plenty of them are loading up on it. His opinion, stated as his on the show: magnesium works well only when it is balanced with calcium, the forms are not all equal, too much of it gives you the runs, and studies he did not name suggest it is not that effective on its own. At most, he says, it produces a slight calming effect. The real work happens in the hours before bed.

That view is what separates the routine from a supplement stack, and it matches how Operation Fitness treats recovery in general. A shortcut is what you do instead of the work. A hack is what you do around it. Mike’s answer to how to fall asleep faster is the work: ten decisions between seven in the evening and the pillow, timed on a pad, adjusted until the number drops. The biohacks page covers the tools that sit on top of that foundation, and none of them replace it. Every program is designed by Mike and delivered by his team, and the sleep piece is handled the way the rest is: tried, timed, and adjusted, not guessed. At almost 70, Mike says this routine gets him eight to nine hours a night. He is his own first case, and if you want a second opinion on your evenings, a consultation starts with the same question he asked on the show.

Where to go from here

Watch the full episode with Larry Gaiters on YouTube; the sleep protocol runs from about the 31-minute mark. Read the biohacks page for the recovery tools Mike layers on top of a routine like this one. If your nights are the problem you keep putting off, book a consultation and bring your answer to the six o’clock question.