“How can I stop my mind racing when I’m trying to go to sleep?”
The following BASE Journal entry was written by Marianne Weddell.
Marianne is a Clinical Psychologist based in Melbourne (Naarm), Australia.
We have all been there. You have had a really busy day, or you have just felt sluggish all day and bedtime has finally rolled around. You get into bed ready for sleep and instead of drifting off to your mind turns on like someone just challenged you to write down as many things that are stressing you as you can in 5 minutes. Your mind gets hooked into one of the items on the list and begins to unpack it taking you to the worst-case scenario or thinking about how you will be burdened with the consequences forever.
Whilst this feels unfair and like a punishment, it is actually what our brains are designed to do! Our brains map out risk to ensure our survival as a human species. Our minds are both “threat assessors” and at the same “time collectors of random facts”.
These functions protect us by gathering as much information from our environment as we can and sorting it into categories to save us time when new information comes in. What this leaves us with is a lot of highly sorted facts and a hyperfocus on the dangerous ones. For some of us the repetition of these dangerous facts begin to convince us that they are not rare possibilities but certainties. Our bodies respond to this certainty with the fight/ flight response making our heart race, our breathing laboured and, our stomach clench and focus narrow towards the threat. These experiences can lead to syndromes like depression and anxiety.
When you experience anxiety or depression your mind becomes fixated on the danger or negative categories and when resting it thinks it time to review and plan for these becoming a really to help you prepare to survive. This is event is more likely if you have had past experiences that were traumatic, sad or unpleasant.
Now that we have advanced past the caveman era, we want to set the threats aside when we are safe to function on living a valued and meaningful life. For many it is a struggle against our minds design, past experiences and our biology. The “what if” or “just in case” mindset becomes fixed.
But thankfully! there are many strategies that we can try available to help us in this battle to calm our mind.
Here are some that I have found helpful for me and my clients….
Mindfulness and Mantra’s
I teach mindfulness in my role as a Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) practitioner and try to practice mindfulness in my everyday life.
Mindfulness has been described by John Kabat Zinn, an early pioneer in this field as paying attention, on purpose in a particular moment. It is a concept from Zen Buddhism that embraces impermanence encouraging us to see the world anew in each moment. Impermanence can also be described as thinkin that “everything comes and goes”.
So how does this help us sleep?
It lets us create an observer space to notice without reacting. If you can defuse from your thoughts and watch them curiously as stream of nonsensical concepts, they become less threatening.
You can state to yourself “I am having the thought that I’m struggling to get to sleep…” instead of “I am never going to get to sleep tonight”.
If you want to know more about this, explore the work of acceptance and commitment therapy or ACT.
It gives us something to focus on in the moment such as your breath. “I am breathing in deeply; I am breathing out deeply” without the intention of sleeping. Consequently, the action of focusing on breathing deeply can settle your body chemistry and help insight sleep. You might also add mantra to this and say “Thanks Mind for keeping track of things for me’’, “Let it be” or mine “Everything is as it should be, everything will be ok” .
If distress comes up, instead of pushing it away accept it, approach it and let it be present in the moment, notice where you feel it in your body and the urges it gives you. Make space for it with your breath. Allow it to be there. Remember what ever we resist in life has a way of persisting.
Strategies for negative and worrying thoughts
Ironically, another way of dealing with racing thoughts is to challenge your negative thoughts with Cognitive Behavioural Therapy strategies (CBT) such as:
Gathering facts for and against the thought like detective to create more flexible and realistic thinking.
Noticing frequent negative thought patterns that we call cognitive distortions such as shoulds, black and white thinking, always jumping to conclusions, generalising one negative out come to all your life events. You can play a game with yourself to identify these patterns and by virtue stop taking them so seriously.
Thinking about the things that we can change and acknowledging that all the worrying in the world won’t change something. I can be helpful to get out of bed and write the things you can do on a list for the waking hours
In closing, the answer to this question is that you can’t stop your mind from racing when you try to sleep but you can work with a racing mind to move towards a better sleep experience.
Marianne Weddell
Marianne is a Clinical Psychologist. Marianne works as a Private Psychologist in her own practice Talk Psychology where she sees clients one on one. Marianne also works to support other health professionals and clinicians as a Clinical Manager and Trainer at her other role in Public Mental Health in Victoria.
Marianne specialises in Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), Complex Trauma and mood disorders.
Marianne is also BASE Founder, Amelia’s Mum! Marianne’s passion for mental health and supporting others has strongly influenced Amelia to follow in her footsteps.