Lloyd “Bud” Winter was a track coach from San Jose who spent part of World War II training combat pilots for the U.S. Navy. The problem he kept running into was simple: pilots were exhausted but could not sleep. Too wired, too tense, too aware that the next mission was coming. Winter developed a relaxation technique to help them fall asleep quickly, even under noisy, stressful conditions.
It worked well enough that he kept using it for the rest of his career, eventually applying it to Olympic sprinters before writing it down in a 1981 book called Relax and Win: Championship Performance. He died in 1985. The book found its real audience on TikTok, roughly forty years after he published it.
The method has six steps, which is generous framing for what is essentially one idea executed slowly. You start with the face, relaxing the jaw, tongue, and the muscles around the eyes. Shoulders drop. Arms go loose at the sides. You exhale deliberately to release the chest, then work down through the thighs, calves, and feet.
Finally, you clear your mind for about ten seconds, either by visualising something calm, like lying in a canoe on still water, or simply repeating the phrase “don’t think” if the mind keeps wandering. The whole process takes about two minutes once you know it.
What it is, beneath the name, is progressive muscle relaxation. The technique works directly on the parasympathetic nervous system, the system responsible for rest, to bring the body down from a state of alertness. Therapists and sleep coaches have used variations of this approach for decades. The military framing is good marketing, not a different science.
The claim that it works for ninety-six percent of people after six weeks of practice appears in almost every article about the method, but there are no published studies behind that number. It traces back to Winter’s book and has been repeated without scrutiny ever since. What sleep specialists do say is that the components are individually well-supported. Controlled breathing slows the heart rate. Releasing physical tension signals safety to the nervous system. Visualisation quiets the parts of the brain that keep running problem-solving loops at midnight.
The method is best suited to people whose sleep trouble is physical and habitual rather than clinical. If you lie awake because your body holds the day’s tension long after the day ends, this gives it something structured to do instead.
It was designed for conditions where sleep is scarce but necessary, for people who need to fall asleep fast in whatever window they are given, not for those with diagnosed insomnia or anxiety disorders, for whom it is insufficient on its own.
It takes practice. Most people trying it for the first time will not fall asleep in two minutes. The two-minute claim describes the experienced practitioner, not the first attempt on a Tuesday night after watching the method explained by a stranger on a phone screen. Worth trying. Low cost, no equipment, no subscription.
