3 Ways to Get to Sleep

 3 Ways to Stop Your Overthinking Brain and Get Back to Sleep




Are you prone to overthinking? Ruminating and replaying every word of a past conversation or situation just as your head hits your pillow? Me, too!


Over the course of a few years, several books and months of counseling, though, I found ways to stop this kind of thinking in its tracks and get to sleep or get back to sleep.  


  1. Imagine your body and mind as your home. Imagine your soul as a specific being that lives within your home. Give it a name, imagine a clear vision of what it looks like, imagine where it resides within your home, etc. ( I imagine mine as a tiny seed that lives in my heart. Its name is Juli, because I know it is ME. My soul is me, not my thoughts.) After you’ve seen it in your mind's eye, named it, and imagine where it lives within you. Now imagine the ruminating thoughts as annoying roommates who want to get in to do their best to keep you awake by their annoying behavior and noise. Now imagine your soul, sitting in it’s room, refusing to let them in. You may see them at the window or hear them at the door, but you do not let them in. If they can’t get in, they can’t hurt you. They can’t keep you awake, because you have control over them. 


  1. Similar to 1), imagine your soul, name it, see it,etc. Now picture your soul (you) sitting on the top of a bridge looking down at the water and seeing your thoughts on a boat just, floating by. You are tempted to get on the boat and move along with your thoughts, letting them carry you away.  But, instead, you choose to stay on the bridge, watching them, not engaging with them, as they float by and eventually out of your sight. 


  1. Go to Youtube, Spotify, etc. to find a guided, centering meditation. Centering meditations take your mind away from thinking and guide you to focus on your physical body and what you are feeling in your body at that specific moment. Once you begin noticing sensation and feeling, you no longer have the space in your brain for overthinking. If thinking carries you away from sensation, the meditations remind you to keep coming back to sensation. If you stay with it long enough, you will probably fall asleep before the end. 


All three of these techniques have helped me SO much over the past several years when the overthinking was unbearable and sleep eluded me for many hours each night. 


Let me know if you try any of these and how they work for you. 


Be Good. Do Good. 


~ Juli 



P.S. The techniques described are not my own ideas, but I have tweaked them in a way that works for me. Original ideas were taken from books I have read (by Michael Singer, Byron Katie) over the years and the centering meditations are always a part of the Dynamic Yoga Method, which I learned during yoga teacher training at Jane’s House Studio.  


Comments

  1. AnonymousJanuary 16, 2025 at 4:17 PM

    I love the technique of number 2! I will have to try it tonight!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Samantha GimmyJanuary 16, 2025 at 5:47 PM

    Michael Singer is one of my favorite people to listen to. I also find it helpful to find an Eckhart Tolle video, turn the sound down low (just enough that I can hear his voice like a whisper) and then drift off to sleep like that. Like you said, it's like filling the space so I'm not thinking, thinking, thinking on an endless loop.

    ReplyDelete

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