When we’re at home, we might be kept awake by our kids, or because we had too much caffeine, or just the general anxieties of day-to-day life. And even when we’re on a relaxing vacation, just being in an unfamiliar bed in a faraway time zone can keep us from getting as much rest as we’d like.

Melatonin can help, sure, but there’s one surefire trick (and one that’s incorporated into a famed U.S. military sleep technique) that can help us relax and drift away: deep, slow breathing. If you meditate or do yoga regularly, this might come naturally to you. But for the rest of us, there’s Dodow.

Meet Dodow

Dodow, a new gadget from France that originally gained popularity as a crowdfunding project, is roughly the size of a coaster, and performs one simple function. It projects a dim blue light onto the ceiling of your bedroom (or tent, or wherever you’re having trouble sleeping). As the circle of light slowly grows in size and intensity, you slowly breathe in to match. After a pause, it'll start dimming and shrinking even more slowly, signaling that it’s time for you to calmly empty your lungs. The process will repeat, and before long, you’ll likely doze off without even realizing it. It’s basically a metronome of light, and by synchronizing your breathing with Dodow, and by focusing on taking deep breaths rather than on whatever stresses keep you up at night, it really can help you clear your mind and relax your muscles for sleep.

Bring It Anywhere

I can’t sleep without a white noise machine, and while I have a dedicated speaker that I use at home, I find that it’s not worth packing while I travel. Sure, the white noise app on my phone might not sound quite the same, but it’s good enough, and saves room in my suitcase.

But Dodow is so off-the-wall, and its light projector is so unique, that no phone app could really replicate the experience. Luckily, they designed it to be small enough to fit into the outer pocket of your suitcase (and also sell an official travel case), and since it can run for hundreds of nights on a set of AAA batteries (thanks to the built-in timer that shuts it off automatically), you won’t even need to pack an extra charger.

Better still, there’s no need to pair it to your phone, or connect it to Wi-Fi, or download software updates, or subscribe to a subscription service, none of which are exactly conducive to relaxing and falling asleep. Heck, you don’t even have to fumble around in the dark to find a button to operate it. Just tap anywhere on the top surface once to activate Dodow for eight minutes, or tap twice to have it run for 20. $60 for such a simple product (or $98 for a pack of two) initially seemed a little steep to me. But there’s really nothing else like it out there, and you even get 100 nights to try it out and see if it works for you, with free no-questions-asked returns. But anyway, on those nights where you just can’t seem to doze off, wouldn’t you pay a few bucks for something that could help?

Photo by Matheus Vinicius