Too Anxious To Sleep, Too Stressed To Relax
5 ways to unwind your brain when your mind's too wired to meditate
I’ve been unusually restless the last two or three nights. I’ve got a lot on my mind. Of course, there’s the new normal of Covid-19 news: Leicester city’s going into lockdown & the US recorded its 7 highest ever days of new cases over, you guessed it, the last 7 days. But there’s more buzzing round my mind in the middle of the night than this.
I turned 60 over the weekend & whilst I definitely subscribe to ‘older & wiser’, it’s a bit of a shock. On top of that, we’ve decided to put our house on the market so the stresses are building, (if you’ll pardon the pun).
I’m way more skilled than I used to be at managing stress and so this period of unease & sleeplessness doesn’t bother me much.
It used to though. And I know many people out there are struggling with everything that’s competing for ‘worry attention’ these days.
Something that always used to bug me was the whole ‘take time out to meditate’ approach to stress management. More recently it’s been Mindfulness that’s got the limelight but nonetheless, the expectation is that meditating is key.
Therein lies the problem, for me at least. If you’re anything like me, you need to be sufficiently calm already in order to meditate. Relaxed enough to sit quietly when your mind is yelling for it all to just shut up & go away.
It’s that old ‘If I could meditate, I wouldn’t have anxiety, would I?’ conundrum.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m a fan of meditating. But I’m also an old hand at the sheer busyness of an anxious mind that makes meditating a seeming impossibility.
Here’s my point.
What can you do to relax your mind when meditation or mindfulness just isn’t on the cards for you? How do you calm things down enough to get some decent sleep again?
5 Ways to Relax Your Mind (Without Meditation):
Here are five of my favourite, tried & tested non-meditation techniques. No lotus position, no tinkling bells, no being aware of ‘Now’, just something that makes a practical difference to an overly anxious, stressed-out mind. Something to relax you enough to let sleep become possible once more.
1. Lists
The problem with too many thoughts is that it clutters up your thinking. Having so many ideas blasting around your skull takes a lot of effort to keep track of. Which is anxiety-provoking in itself.
A great way around this is to get these thoughts out of your head and written down. If a thought’s written down, you don’t have to try to remember it, do you?
I favour these two lists:
Worry list
Write down everything on your mind that worries you, big or small. Often this list is shorter than you expect and worries can seem smaller when they’re put into words.
Some people like to keep the list so they can cross things off as they get fixed or add to them when they need to. Others like to get everything down on paper and then ceremonially burn it!
Happy list
Write down everything you can think of that made you happy/laugh/smile in the last three days. There’s always something if you look hard enough. Anxious & stressed minds naturally search for problems & ignore what’s going well. You can use this cognitive bias to good effect when you focus on happy things. After all, if something made you happy, the world can’t be as dangerous as your mind thinks it is, right?
2. Wash mud off your hands.
Nature’s a fabulous relaxation tool, especially if you get up close. So if you need to wash mud off your hands, let’s face it, you got up close!
It doesn’t matter if it’s pulling up a weed or two, making a mud pie with your daughter or just writing your name in a flower bed with your finger! (No? Just me then...).
Studies show that engaging with nature releases all those hormones that’re great for relaxing mentally.
Exposure to nature not only makes you feel better emotionally, it contributes to your physical wellbeing, reducing blood pressure, heart rate, muscle tension, and the production of stress hormones.
3. Listen to your favourite music.
I don’t mean ‘relaxation’ music here. I’m mean music that makes you feel good.
Sometimes you might want quiet gentle music, other times it’s pump-up-the-volume and let all the frustration out. (I usually use headphones but occasionally the speakers get a good old airing too!)
It doesn’t matter whether you choose gentle, calming music or loud, raucous music. It can be modern or classical or Northern Soul or Punk or EDM. It’s entirely up to you.
The idea is that afterwards, you’re more relaxed than when you started. Remember that ‘loud & exhilarating’ can bring just as much relaxation as ‘calm & soothing’.
4. Immerse your imagination in your favourite place.
This one’s usually called a ‘visualisation’ (but I’m not a fan of the name). You see the problem here is that only some people are good at visualising. People who go on about ‘visualisation’ are ‘visual thinkers’. People who experience their world primarily through sight, colours, light, shadows, shapes. You get the picture, (notice what I did there?)
Many many others prefer sounds or textures or aromas or flavours. Some like a mix of senses. Some like words, creating an internal narrative talking though what’s going on.
If you know which you are, great. Off you go & imagine away.
If not, try this:
Think of a favourite place. Imagine what it’d be like being there right now, (just getting a sense of it’s enough). Look around for things that let you know how relaxing this place is. Listen to the sounds close by, far away. Feel the textures, warmth, coolness. Pick out the gentle scents in the air….
Using all of your senses, allow yourself to drift into this place. Stay here as long as you like. It’s surprisingly relaxing and gets easier and easier with practice.
5. Help someone.
Altruism’s built into our psyche. It’s all about being a social creature. We subconsciously keep track of who we’ve done favours for and who’s returned them. Who do we ‘owe’, who ‘owes’ us.
But it goes deeper than that. It’s so ingrained that we feel good when we help others, especially when it happens with no expectation of a favour in return. It’s also been shown to be remarkably effective at flipping your stress reaction from a highly negative ‘fight or flight’ to a positive ‘tend & befriend’.
Best of all, the good deed can be small or large, it doesn’t matter, you still get the same buzz. So go on, help someone for no other reason than you can.
Summary
These 5 techniques will help your mind unwind over the next few days. As you become less stressed & anxious, sleep can return in its own time.
In the meantime, if you’re looking for something to help you sleep tonight, then this insomnia mp3 ‘Hypnotic Slumber: beyond Insomnia’ is highly effective. Stream it free when you become a subscriber or download it from my website.
You might want to check out this article too: The 3x3 Sleep Pathway That Delivers Total Rest
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