Sleep Like You Mean It
Does your brain turn into a dramatic 14-year-old at bedtime - suddenly chatty, emotionally intense, and suddenly convinced it’s all very urgent? You are not alone. Ruminating, or obsessive thinking about a stressful or traumatic moment that you can’t stop replaying, has the potential to wreck your sleep. Research suggests ruminating is an unconscious conditioned response that reinforces the belief that if you analyze the event a little more, you will discover a solution so that the thoughts and feelings will disappear. Don’t fall for it. That’s a bedtime scam, and your brain is the con artist.
Just like you’d ground a teenager for sneaking out after curfew, you can put your brain in a timeout. It’s been acting up and it knows what it did. This happens when you interrupt the tendency to ruminate by observing your surroundings, which anchors you in the present moment. By now, you’ve probably picked up on a theme: your mind can’t spiral if it’s too busy noticing how soft the sheets are or whether your feet are cold. Anchoring isn’t just for boats and therapy metaphors - it works for sleep, too.
One of my coach’s weird superpowers is knowing exactly when I’ve mentally left the building - even when I’m nodding and pretending to listen like a pro.. I don’t know how he does it because my obsessive thinking is invisible but he is able to identify my mental state pretty quickly. He’ll ask me what I see, hear, feel, and smell - which is just annoying enough to snap me out of my thoughts and back into the room. These statements interrupt my thinking and I am able to reconnect to the interaction with my coach in the present moment.
When I am not in a coaching session, I can choose to take responsibility for my out of control thinking by paying attention to my five senses. My favorite time to ground my thinking is at night when I am trying to fall asleep:
I’m hot. Duke, my chocolate lab, is trying to merge into my ribcage. I hear the white noise machine, which now feels aggressively loud. Stick a leg out. Smell the lavender oil. Feel the fan. Remember I have to pee. Get up. Come back. Now I’m cold. Great. Back under the covers. Smell…something vaguely comforting. Probably the dog. I feel the sheets. I hear the car with the Hemi engine racing down the street. I smell…
And just like that, my mind gets present, my body relaxes and I am able to fall asleep. Grounding doesn’t erase the thoughts, it just cuts the mic on the part of your brain doing a TED Talk on regrets and what-if’s. Let your senses take the wheel.
Let me know what you discover when you ground your mind and let your senses guide you to sleep.