Insomnia- How to Fall Asleep When your Brain Won't Shut Up!

so a member of my online community asked me this um if you're laying in bed trying to go to sleep and you find your mind erasing feeling really anxious what's the next best thing to stop the anxiety cycle now you all know that feeling like i' I've been there you've got a big day ahead of you or you've had a really long day behind you and you really need to sleep like you're so tired but when you finally lay down your mind starts running and you worry about everything or you can't stop thinking about all the mistakes you made throughout the day you could feel your stress levels rise and despite your best efforts you can't sleep and that makes you more anxious which perpetuates the cycle and on it goes you desperately want to sleep but your brain won't shut up so in this video you'll learn why your brain doesn't trust you to process these thoughts during the day and you'll learn what you can do about this there is something you can do about it so let's talk about the science behind why your brain gets stuck doing this and three things you can do to escape that cycle [Music] okay so first thing about your brain you can't just force yourself to stop thinking about something we'd like to think that we can control our thoughts you might think like oh I have to force my mind to calm down or I have to stop thinking about work I have to stop worrying or else I won't be able to sleep and and again this is the classic problem with the pink elephant try not to think about a pink elephant and what happens you think about it now we we really can have a lot of influence over our thoughts but it's not through Force it's through attention what we pay attention to we get more of so just like a toddler who says a naughty word if we give her positive or negative attention she's going to say that word more so with our thoughts when we try to stop thinking about those things we accidentally tell our brain those things are really important and it makes the thoughts louder and so the more we struggle to control our racing thoughts the harder it is to sleep it's uh engaging in a struggle to sleep it's like putting on our armor and riding horseback in an attempt to go to sleep it's it's just going to make us very alert so the first step is it's just much more helpful to notice and acknowledge those thoughts than it is to try to stop your thoughts from racing and this is an essential principle from mindfulness you just notice that you're having a stressful thought and you say oh thank you mind for that thought and then you let the thought pass on and you could develop this skill by practicing mindfulness or you could try the activity leaves on a stream which um hopefully I'll remember to link in the description below okay now I'm not going to spend too much time on this because I want to really jump into the next essential strategy so if we really want to solve the problem of raising thoughts in rumination at night we need to understand why the heck your brain would do this to you like when your brain brings up all of these stressful thoughts it's doing its job it's trying to solve a problem or address a threat so for example you're like oh did I say something stupid today what if I'm rejected from the tribe and I'm kicked out of the village and I die of starvation or did I remember everything for the presentation tomorrow what if I get fired and die of starvation better run triple checks right your your brain survival instincts that is trying to tie up Loose Ends but in the middle of the night it's not a great time to actually solve problems so you end up like running in these mental circles so so why would your brain bring these things up at the exact time when you want to relax and fall asleep because it doesn't trust you to address them during the day one of the reasons that we get racing thoughts at night is because we keep ourselves so busy so occupied and so distracted during the day I mean heck we even stare at a screen while we're on the toilet uh we keep our minds occupied nearly every waking moment and this makes it so that our brain doesn't have time to file away our memories and to work through our to-do lists and and work through any worries that we have so the m we finally stop being busy and close our eyes and and remove distractions our brain is like aha now's my chance to file away each of these thoughts or work through each of these concerns um it's like updates on a computer like keeping busy all day is like constantly telling your computer that you're going to do the update later until finally your computer just forces the update on you right in the middle of something important if you don't choose when you're going to process through your thoughts and worries your brain will will decide to do it when you lay down to sleep so what's the antidote make time during the day for your brain to run its updates to work through its worries and to do some housekeeping so what does it look like on a practical level um first get rid of mindless distractions during the day so this usually means being more intentional about your social media use so instead of randomly using social media all throughout the day schedule in short time periods when you will use social media and then use an app Locker to stop the impulsive usage during the day and this is going to open up tiny moments during the day to process those thoughts like when you're waiting in line or sitting on the toilet or taking a shower hey everyone real quick if you'd like to learn more skills to improve your mental health check out my courses at therapy inan nutshell. comom I've got eight mental health courses that can help you regulate your nervous system learn to improve your mental health and work through anxiety and other really big intense emotions by June 10th of this year we're going to put all of the courses into a membership to make it really easy for everyone to access the courses the workbooks the videos plus live q&as and monthly webinars so that you can keep learning and improve your mental health okay back to the video the second step is to add in quiet time to process during your day so this might look like a quiet walk where you aren't listening to stocks or you allow yourself to just do nothing for a few minutes at a time okay like I'm really terrible at that but I can like turn off my devices and go like work in the yard for a minute and that's a good way for my brain to process uh another thing that's really helpful is like schedule in a Time Each Day to write down your worries and your to-do list um like toddlers our brains don't handle being told uh not to do something like don't hit I'm like well what you just said hit that's the only word I heard uh our brain doesn't handle like don't worry very well but our brains do do very good job with knowing when it to do something so if you say okay I want you to worry at 5:00 P p.m. every day I want you to go through the to-do list at 6:00 a.m. every day whatever it is right um so for example you could do this by like before you leave work for the day you could um write down everything that your brain wants to process and leave them there like a 5 minute like transition period of like okay here's my to-do list for tomorrow and then you leave it at work um at home you could check off your to-do list every evening at dinner time for example uh or before you start your bedtime routine you could review review your calendar for the next day so your brain knows that it doesn't have to remind you of anything when you're ready to sleep uh you could also practice scheduled worry and I've got a bunch videos on this if you don't know what that is but it's basically you're making time for your braing to worry you're teaching it to trust you that everything has been processed so that it doesn't have to nag you about them at night and and I would say this is the best long-term strategy for dealing with worries at night now you don't want to make a habit of dealing with anxious thoughts when your head hits the pillow but if you do find yourself in the situation where it's night time and you have this like dumb truckload of worries hit you right as you're trying to sleep you you just have a great option here you can choose what's going to be most restful for you you can just lie there just noticing these thoughts and letting them pass like leaves on a stream or you could get up write them down wait until you feel sleepy and then go back to bed for me most of the time I do get up I do a brain dump where I just like write everything down on a piece of paper and that often breaks the anxiety cycle for me so that I can get back to bed now again prevention is the best way to manage these racing thoughts uh process your worries during the day if you're chronically anxious and distracted during the day if if you don't work through your anxiety during the day there are no magical fixes at night um so if you don't know how to do this if don't know how to process your thoughts you could check out my how to process emotions um online course okay so you've learned about attention and you're going to practice some mindfulness which is dropping the struggle with your thoughts You' started processing your worries during the day writing them down um gives your brain some time to work through them and you've shown your brain when you do solve problems you do it at work or you write events on your calendar or you keep a to-do list on your computer but what should you do if you still get raising thoughts at that night you you you've done all this processing stuff the third skill is to learn to gently redirect your attention instead of trying to stop thinking you can acknowledge these worries erasing thoughts but then just shift your attention to something more restful so here's three things you could pay attention to instead number one gratitude practice um to feed the sense of abundance in your life just start making list in your head of all the things that you are grateful for and this can counteract sense of worry with a reminder of how blessed you are number two guided imagery you could listen to a guided meditation or walk through of a beautiful place or a gentle sleep story or you can build your own personal visualization of your favorite places or memories okay and then number three limited distraction so I like to listen to a somewhat dull audio book or a soothing podcast um for me it's archaeology stories like the fall of civilizations or down Brown history um other people like Bob Ross or sleep stories or ASMR uh basically anything that helps you drop the struggle with your thoughts or drop the struggle to sleep that can help your natural sleep Drive kick in now remember distraction is a funny thing right during the day too much distraction makes problems pile up distraction will never solve your problems but at bedtime distraction can help by redirecting your thoughts to something more restful instead of something stressful in my next video on sleep I'm inviting insomnia expert Martin Reed to teach us how to drop the struggle of sleep and overcome insomnia but for raising thoughts here are the main steps to take accept that you can't force your thoughts to stop instead tell your brain when and where to process through those thoughts during the day and then number three schedule in quiet or unstructured time without screens or stimulation and then practice scheduled worry or brain dumps to put your wores on paper then number four redirect your attention at night to mindfulness gratitude or relaxing distraction in the long run this train your brain that nighttime or the bed is a restful time and little by little you really can break the cycle of sleep anxiety and the to okay thank you so much for watching and take care oh I do have a playlist on sleep if you'd like to learn more you could check that out [Music] m [Music]

Channel: Therapy in a Nutshell

Views: 44,711

Keywords: therapy in a nutshell, emma mcadam, mental health, depression, anxiety, overthinking, social anxiety, sleep, insomnia, racing thoughts, how to fall asleep

Id: g6QK5UEXLYc

Length: 11min 33sec (693 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 06 2024