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COURSE

Deep Sleep Naturally

With Michael Mackintosh

Sleep is your birthright. Most sleep programmes fix one or two things — this one fixes everything. From your nervous system and bedroom to forgiveness, open loops, and your sense of purpose — because all of it affects how you sleep. Over 30+ days, you will discover how every area of your life is connected to the quality of your sleep. Your nervous system, your environment, your thoughts, your relationships, your sense of purpose, your spiritual life — all of it either supports your sleep or sabotages it. And when you know which is which, everything changes. You will learn how to remove what is keeping you awake and replace it with what your body, mind, and soul actually need to rest. You will rewire your nervous system from the inside out. You will address the root causes most sleep courses never touch. And you will rediscover what it feels like to wake up genuinely restored — clear, calm, alive, and ready for your day. This is not a quick fix. This is a complete transformation of your relationship with sleep, with rest, and with life itself. Your body remembers how to do this. You are not broken. You are simply missing some pieces. This course gives you every single one of them.

A holistic life transformation for the deepest, most restful sleep of your life.

35 Days

176 students

No ratings

23 min / day

English

About this course

Meet your Teacher

Michael Mackintosh

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Sedona, AZ, USA

Michael Mackintosh has spent over thirty years helping people sleep better, rest more deeply, and live from a place of genuine inner calm. His guided meditations have been listened to more than five million times and have earned over 85,000 five-star reviews, with thousands of listeners specifically crediting his work with transforming their sleep after years of insomnia, anxiety, and exhaustion. Through working with thousands of people struggling with sleeplessness, Michael discovered that poor sleep is rarely just a physical problem — it is a whole life problem. Sleep Naturally is the result of that discovery — a genuinely holistic approach that addresses everything affecting your sleep, so you can finally rest the way you were designed to. Beyond sleep, Michael is the founder of Awakened Academy, one of the world's original spiritual life coach certification programme, through which he has trained over 1,250 coaches across 25 countries. He is the creator of multiple transformational courses and programmes spanning meditation, consciousness, purpose, and holistic wellbeing, and the author of several books on spiritual development and conscious living. He lives and teaches in Sedona, Arizona.

View Profile

35 Days

176 students

No ratings

23 min / day

English

Lesson 1

Welcome! You've Found The Last Sleep Course You'll Need

You made the right choice coming here. Most sleep programs fix one or two things and wonder why nothing changes. This program fixes everything. Across 35 sessions, you will upgrade every area of your life that affects sleep: your nervous system, your environment, your emotions, your relationships, your finances, your sense of purpose, and your spiritual connection. Michael has slept deeply almost every night for years because of exactly what he shares here. By the end of this session, you will know what to expect, what to do first, and why this time is genuinely different.

Lesson 2

Your Nervous System Upgrade — Why You're Wired At Bedtime And How To Reset It Tonight

This session is the foundation of everything. Once you understand why your nervous system gets stuck in stress mode and refuses to switch off, every other session in this program will make complete sense. You will discover that cortisol responds to uncertainty and unresolved things, not to hard work or busy days. That single insight changes everything. Then you get four immediate tools you can use tonight: the extended exhale, the VOOO vagus nerve activation, the full body shake and the warmth signal. These speak the language your nervous system actually understands. Use them tonight and you will feel the difference.

Lesson 3

Meditation: Yoga Nidra — The Ancient Practice That Walks You Into Sleep

Yoga Nidra is one of the most powerful sleep practices on earth, and you can use it tonight. Instead of fighting to fall asleep, you are guided into the space between waking and sleeping, where the body rests as deeply as sleep while a quiet thread of awareness stays present. That is where the deepest restoration happens. Michael guides you through a full body scan, paradoxical states that dissolve the controlling mind, and a profound experience of your own natural peace. Many students report that within a few sessions, even the first two minutes begin to carry them into deep, natural sleep. Your only job is to receive.

Lesson 4

BONUS: The Sleep Science That Will Change How You Rest Forever

This optional bonus session reveals what is actually happening inside your body and brain while you sleep. Once you understand it, you will never compromise your sleep again without knowing exactly what you are compromising. You will discover the three distinct challenges of sleep and why each needs a different solution, the journey through light sleep, deep delta-wave sleep, and REM, what the glymphatic system is and why its 2012 discovery was one of the most significant scientific findings in decades, and why even a single night of poor sleep leads to a measurable build-up of the proteins linked to Alzheimer's disease. This is the science that turns better sleep from something you would like into something you are committed to.

Lesson 5

Your Sleep Diary — The One Habit That Reveals Everything About Your Sleep

What gets measured gets managed. The simple act of paying consistent attention to your sleep begins to change it. This session walks you through exactly what to track each morning: hours slept, quality from one to ten, how long it took to fall asleep, how rested you felt on waking, and what you changed. That record becomes the evidence of your own progress. On difficult nights, it shows you how far you have come. Students who keep this diary consistently get significantly better results from this program.

Lesson 6

Bonus Meditation: The Deep Relaxing Breath Meditation For Better Sleep Tonight

This guided meditation works at a level most practices never reach. Drawing on the understanding that you are a soul, a being of light temporarily in a body, it invites you to breathe in divine light and breathe out every worry, tension, and burden you are carrying. As you inhale, you fill with pure spiritual light. As you exhale, you release everything that no longer serves you. Students describe it as unlike anything they have experienced before: a direct sense of being held, cleared, and restored from the inside out. Use it before sleep, during the night, or any time you need to release what you have been carrying and return to what you actually are beneath it all.

Lesson 7

How To Break Free From The Number One Sleep Killer

If you change nothing else from this entire program, change this one thing, and your sleep will improve. This session explains exactly what screens and media do to your nervous system in the evening. It is not just the blue light. The content itself keeps your cortisol elevated for hours after you stop watching because your nervous system cannot tell the difference between what is on screen and what is real. Michael shares the story of a client called Rachel, trapped in a cycle of exhaustion, media, comfort food, and sleeplessness, and exactly how one change broke the pattern completely. You will leave with a clear, realistic alternative for your evenings.

Lesson 8

Bonus: Turn Your Phone From Sleep Enemy Into Sleep Tool

Your phone has the meditations and tools you need for better sleep. It is also the most efficient sleep destroyer ever created. This session solves that completely. Michael walks through the exact apps, including Brick, Opal, Freedom, and One Sec, that let you block every distracting app from a set evening time through to morning while keeping your meditation apps and essentials fully open. You will understand why a pre-commitment device beats willpower every single time, how to set the whole thing up in minutes, and how to design your phone so it works for your sleep every night instead of against it.

Lesson 9

The Light-Sleep Connection — How To Signal Your Brain That Night Has Come

You are biologically wired to the sun. The artificial lights in most modern homes are quietly blocking the signal your brain needs to produce melatonin and prepare for sleep. This session explains the difference between blue-spectrum light that tells your brain it is midday and the warm orange light that signals night, why fluorescent and LED lights work against you, and the specific changes, including tungsten bulbs, salt lamps, candles, dimmer switches, and blue light blocking glasses that make a measurable difference within days. Michael also shares the light alarm clock that wakes you gently with sunrise simulation, so your mornings feel completely different, too.

Lesson 10

Your Bedroom Is Either Working For You Or Against You — Let's Fix That

Your bedroom is either designed for deep sleep, or it is not. Most people have never consciously made that choice. This session walks through everything that matters: the temperature range of 60 to 67 degrees Fahrenheit that allows your body to initiate deep sleep, the direction of your bed, the mattress and pillow personalisation most people never do, complete darkness, sound management and why every single object in your room is either sending your nervous system a safety signal or a subtle threat signal all night long. By the end of this session, you will know exactly what your bedroom needs and what needs to leave it.

Lesson 11

How To Clear The Day Before Your Head Hits The Pillow

Most people bring the entire weight of their day to bed without ever choosing to put it down. This session gives you a three-part nightly ritual that changes that completely. First, identify three wins from your day so you fall asleep focused on what you have gained rather than what is missing. Second, write down whatever is still stressing you so it moves from your nervous system onto the page. Third, offer it up to a higher power and choose to surrender to the highest good for all. Michael shares a personal story of being four days from losing his home, doing this practice on the beach in Hawaii, and sleeping deeply that night for the first time in weeks. This is the most practical thing you can do for your cortisol before sleep.

Lesson 12

The Sleep Supplement Guide — What Works And What Doesn't

This is the complete honest guide to sleep supplements. What actually works, what does not, and how to experiment intelligently so you find what is right for your body. Michael covers magnesium glycinate, which he recommends above everything else, and explains why most people are severely deficient in it, plus ashwagandha, L-theanine, melatonin, CBD, passion flower, valerian, lemon balm, reishi mushrooms, GABA, tart cherry juice, kiwi fruit, walnuts, and warm golden milk. There is an honest word on alcohol and why it is one of the most deceptive sleep disruptors, despite feeling like it helps. Supplements work best when everything else is in place. Use them as support, not as a solution.

Lesson 13

Safety Through Your Senses — Reset Your Nervous System Quickly

Your five senses are a faster and more direct route into your nervous system than your thoughts. Once you know how to use them consciously, you have one of the most powerful relaxation tools available anywhere, anytime, for free. This session reveals a remarkable piece of neuroscience: your eyes are literally part of your brain, and the moment you shift from narrow-focused vision to wide, soft panoramic vision, your stress response switches off almost immediately. Michael explains why staring at your phone is one of the most activating things you can do, then walks through all five senses and what each one can do to bring you back to calm. Use this before sleep, in the night, or any time you need to return to the present moment.

Lesson 14

Meditation: Sensory Awareness Meditation For Nervous System Relaxation And Sleep

This guided practice uses your five senses to bring you back to safety and reset your nervous system in just a few minutes. Beginning with soft, wide vision that switches off your stress response, then moving through sound, touch, smell, and taste, the practice anchors you completely in the present moment and shows your nervous system directly that you are safe right now. The more you use it, the faster it works. Use it before sleep, in the middle of the night, or any time anxiety has taken hold. Find a comfortable position, close your eyes, and simply receive.

Lesson 15

When Sleep Won't Come — Your Complete Rescue Plan

After this session, you will never feel helpless on a difficult night again. The single most important shift is this: stop trying to sleep. Take it completely off the table. Your only job is to relax. From there, Michael gives you a complete toolkit for every scenario. Which meditations to put on, when to get up versus when to stay in bed, how to use journaling in the middle of the night to resolve the very thing keeping you awake, which teas and supplements help and at what times, and how to reframe the 3 am wake-up so it stops feeling like a disaster. You will leave this session knowing exactly what to do, no matter what any night brings.

Lesson 16

The Open Loop Problem — Why Your Brain Won't Switch Off And How To Close It

The racing mind that keeps you awake is not random. It is your nervous system doing exactly what it is designed to do: scanning for unresolved things. Unopened emails, uncommitted plans, unfinished conversations, things you said you would do but have not. Cortisol responds directly to uncertainty, and these open loops keep it elevated all night. This session guides you through the Brain Drain exercise: write down every single open loop in your life, then apply the serenity prayer framework to decide which ones to resolve, which to consciously release, and which to simply cross off permanently. Students who do this thoroughly consistently report sleeping that same night differently.

Lesson 17

The Worry Box — How To Empty Your Mind So Sleep Can Fill It

Sometimes the Worry Box is exactly what is needed. Write the worry on a small piece of paper, place it in a dedicated box, close the lid, and hand it over to a higher power. What makes this more effective than simply deciding to let go is the physical act itself. It creates a neurological sense of completion that pure intention cannot replicate. Michael learned this from a student who called it her God Box, bought his own wooden box after hearing about it, and has used it ever since. Keep it outside the bedroom. Use it any time a worry arrives. Return to sleep knowing it is held.

Lesson 18

Deep Letting Go — How To Release What The Day Left Behind In Your Body And Mind

Some things cannot be thought away. When the Worry Box is not enough, this session gives you a deeper practice. The key insight is this: negative feelings typically last between 90 seconds and 12 minutes when you stop suppressing them and allow them to arise. It is the resistance that keeps them locked in, not the feelings themselves. Michael guides you through the practice of allowing a feeling to come up, observing it with curiosity rather than fighting it, and then offering it to a higher power with genuine willingness to release. Done regularly, this clears the accumulated emotional residue that builds up in the nervous system and blocks sleep.

Lesson 19

Your Sleep Mantra — How A Few Sacred Words Can Rewire Your Mind For Rest

Your mind runs approximately 60,000 thoughts a day, and 95 percent of them are the same thoughts you had yesterday. If those thoughts are anxious or negative, your nervous system has been bathed in stress chemistry all day. By the time you lie down, your brain is wired for stress, not rest. This session introduces the mantra and affirmation practice as a genuine neurological rewiring technique, not positive thinking as a surface coating, but a deliberate, repeated practice that gradually replaces habitual negative patterns. Michael shares his own personal list, explains the difference between waste thoughts, positive thoughts, and eternal thoughts, and gives you a specific method for choosing and using your own anchor thoughts every single day.

Lesson 20

Meditation: Deep Sleep Meditation — Surrender Into Complete Rest

Layer by layer, surrender by surrender, this full guided meditation takes you into the deepest rest your body has ever known. Michael moves through every layer of your being, including skin, muscle, bone, organ, cell, and the quantum energy field beneath all of it, inviting complete surrender at each level. He introduces your personal anchor phrase for difficult nights, guides you through the paradox of feeling simultaneously heavy and light, and brings you to the extraordinary threshold where the body is deeply asleep, and awareness remains softly present. This is your go-to meditation for nights when nothing else is working. You do not have to try to sleep. You only have to receive.

Lesson 21

Feeling Safe, Sleeping Deep — The Spiritual Practice That Finally Lets You Rest

The nervous system cannot fully rest while it believes on some level that something is wrong or unresolved. This session goes to that root, not the practical unresolved things covered in earlier sessions, but the existential sense of safety that only comes from understanding who and what you actually are. Michael explores the spiritual truth that you are an eternal being. What you are cannot be harmed, cannot be lost, and cannot end. He introduces the practice of meditating on yourself as a soul, a point of light, returning home to a world of infinite silence and peace as you lie down each night. This is the practice behind all the other practices.

Lesson 22

How Your Relationships Affect Your Sleep — And What To Do

Relationships live in the body. Unspoken tensions, unresolved dynamics, conversations you know you need to have but keep avoiding: all of it quietly elevates your cortisol every day and follows you to bed every night. This session covers both dimensions. The practical: snoring partners, children disrupting sleep, and noise. And the deeper: the person you are thinking about at 2 am, the thing you have not said. Michael introduces the Magic Mantra practice of sending genuine love and good wishes to a difficult person for 21 days before having the hard conversation, and shares a remarkable story of a student whose sister reached out after 10 years of silence on day 11 of the practice.

Lesson 23

Forgiveness — How To Put Down The Weight That's Keeping You Awake

A student left a comment on a forgiveness meditation, not a sleep meditation, saying she had finally slept three nights straight and woken up refreshed. Forgiveness is not a spiritual nicety. It is a nervous system medicine. Every time you think of the person you resent, your system re-experiences the original wound, and cortisol rises again. This session gives you the forgiveness letter practice: write the apology you always needed to hear, from the person who hurt you, to yourself. Read it back out loud. Let it land in your body. Forgiveness is not a gift you give to the other person. It is a gift you give to yourself. It is the ultimate open-loop closer.

Lesson 24

How To Clear Your Conscience So Your Body Can Rest

The people who sleep most peacefully are not perfect. They are people who deal with things when they go wrong rather than letting them sit. Unacknowledged wrongdoing creates an open loop in the conscience that hums quietly in the background and gets louder at night when everything else goes quiet. This session walks through every form of making amends: direct, written, indirect, restitution, living amends, and self-forgiveness, explaining when each is appropriate. Michael shares his own experience of sleepless nights that only ended once he dared to reach out and acknowledge something he had been avoiding. Clearing the past allows genuine rest in the present.

Lesson 25

Decode Your Dreams — While You Sleep Your Soul Speaks

When you begin sleeping, your dream life deeply opens up, and this bonus session gives you the tools to understand what it is saying. Drawing on Jungian psychology, Michael explains that dreams are purposeful communications from the unconscious, always trying to restore balance to what is one-sided or unacknowledged in waking life. You will learn how to record dreams immediately on waking before they vanish, the major archetypes, including the Shadow, the Anima and Animus, the Wise Old Figure, the Child and the Trickster, and the universal symbols, including water, houses, vehicles, animals, flying, falling, and death. Michael shares his own three-night dream sequence that led him to stay in Hawaii for five years.

Lesson 26

Why Your Thoughts Are Keeping You Awake And How To Stop Them

You are not your thoughts. But if you have never truly experienced that distinction, you are being run by thoughts you never consciously chose. This session introduces the observer practice and the ABC method used by therapists: identify the Activating event, the Belief you hold about it, and the Consequence that belief creates in your life and your sleep. Michael shares a personal story of being completely paralysed by background beliefs about sending emails until this practice broke the pattern. The two magic words that shift everything are: I am noticing. Say them, and you move instantly from being a prisoner of a thought to being its witness. Once you can see a belief clearly, it loses its power over you.

Lesson 27

Bonus: My Complete Personal Sleep Practice — Everything I Do Every Night

This session answers the question every student eventually asks: What do you actually do? Michael shares his complete personal sleep practice with full honesty. The single change that makes the most difference above everything else: turning off all media and locking his phone and internet away each evening. His consistent 4 am wake-up practice. How he sets up his nights through his mornings. And exactly what he does as he lies in bed: going through the wins of the day, offering everything up to a higher power, and then simply holding the thought of infinite light and peace as he allows himself to drift away. He also shares what happens when he stops doing these things, which still occasionally happens, and what brings him back. Progress, not perfection. Always.

Lesson 28

Your Dharma And Your Sleep — Why Living Out Of Alignment Keeps You Awake

When you are genuinely living your Dharma, the work you are here to do in service of the people you care about, you want to get up in the morning. You sleep more deeply. Your whole system feels oriented. When you are not living it something stays restless no matter how well everything else is in place. This session helps you identify or reconnect with your Dharma through three clear questions: what do you genuinely love to do, who do you want to serve, and what problem do you want to help solve? You do not have to quit your job or move countries. Even spending a few hours a week doing something genuinely aligned begins to feed the wellspring, and the restlessness that has been keeping you awake begins to ease.

Lesson 29

Bonus: Movement And Naps — How Your Day Creates Your Night

Sleep is not just what happens at night. It is the result of everything that happens during the day. This session explains why your body was designed to move, how exercise raises your body temperature and then allows it to drop in a way that signals deep sleep, and why a 20-minute walk in natural morning light is one of the most powerful sleep interventions available. Michael shares his personal nap practice: 17 minutes, not trying to sleep, just letting go, and how understanding your body's natural 90-minute energy cycles changes everything about when to rest and when to work. Movement and rest during the day are not separate from your sleep. They are part of the same cycle.

Lesson 30

Choose To Be Happy Now — The Attitude That Transforms Your Sleep And Your Life

This is the session behind all the other sessions. It addresses the single deepest cause of chronic sleeplessness that no supplement, technique, or bedroom upgrade can touch: the habit of making peace conditional. Once this is sorted. Once the money is right. Once that is resolved. The low hum of that perpetual deferral is chronic cortisol. Michael shares a story of standing on a Hawaiian beach with every item on his list ticked and still feeling something missing. The realisation that followed changed everything: if he could not be at peace there, he was never going to be at peace anywhere. The shift is not giving up on improving your life. It is choosing to be genuinely okay right now while you continue to move forward.

Lesson 31

Money, Stress And Sleep — How To Stop Your Finances Following You To Bed

Financial stress is one of the most common causes of the 3 am wake-up and one of the least addressed in sleep programs. This session is not about making more money. It is about the one thing money anxiety actually responds to: clarity. Cortisol is driven by uncertainty, and the moment you know exactly what you are dealing with, your accounts, your income, your outgoings, the uncertainty drops, and with it the cortisol. Michael walks through practical tools, including budgeting apps that connect all your accounts in one place, how to audit your expenses and find what you are paying for unnecessarily, and why seeing the truth, even when it is uncomfortable, is more peaceful than the anxious not-knowing that wakes you at 3 am.

Lesson 32

Clear Your Home, Clear Your Mind — How Your Space Affects Your Sleep And Soul

Your nervous system is continuously processing your physical environment. Every object, colour, shape, sound, and smell in your space is either sending a safety signal or a subtle stress signal around the clock below conscious awareness. This session makes the case for space clearing as genuine sleep medicine, not aesthetic preference. Michael explains why clutter under the bed is particularly disruptive, how to apply the spark-joy method through the lens of nervous system response, what colours research shows support sleep most, and how clearing even just your bedroom creates an immediate sanctuary effect your nervous system responds to gratefully. A calm space creates a calm mind, which creates deep sleep.

Lesson 33

Bonus: Why Menopause Wrecks Your Sleep And What To Do Tonight

This session is specifically for women going through perimenopause or menopause whose sleep has been affected. If your sleep was fine before, and menopause changed everything overnight, this session is for you. You will finally understand exactly what is happening in your body and why it is directly affecting your sleep. Then you get everything that actually works: a specific 3 am protocol for when a hot flash wakes you, how to use the Yoga Nidra and sensory awareness practices from this course for this transition specifically, the room temperature and bedding changes to make tonight, which foods and supplements help most, why the cortisol connection makes everything worse and what to do about it, and why the emotional inner work in this course matters more than ever right now. Built from years of working with women going through exactly this, and the latest research. Warm, practical, and genuinely helpful.

Lesson 34

You Did It!!! Everything You've Gained And What Comes Next

If you have made it here, you have done something most people who start courses never do. You showed up session after session and did the work. This final session celebrates how far you have come, recaps every dimension of the program from nervous system tools and environment upgrades to emotional clearing, forgiveness, relationships, spiritual practices, and purpose, and gives you a clear map of what to do next. Michael's recommendation: go through it again. The second time, you hear different things because you are in a different place in yourself. This program is not a one-time event. It is a resource you return to as your life changes, and it will reward you differently every single time.

Lesson 35

Meditation: Attract Abundance While You Sleep

Before sleep, the window to the subconscious mind is open. Welcome abundance into your life now using self-image work, affirmations, and the Law of Attraction. Tap into the vast power within you and create your heart's true desires. This practice contains elements of hypnosis. Listen for 40 days or more for optimal results. When you are deeply rested, clear, and genuinely settled on the inside you operate at a different frequency. Opportunities meet you differently. Relationships feel different. Work flows differently. This meditation explores the connection between the quality of your sleep, your energetic state, and your capacity to attract and create the life you are here to live. Drawing on the deepest principles in this program, including the soul's natural state of peace, infinite light, and divine connection, it anchors you in that high-vibration resting place and opens you to receive everything that belongs to the life you are aligned with.