About Sleep
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Sleep Disorders
The fast-paced demands of life can leave our minds exhausted. If you’re having trouble sleeping due to an active mind, this article is here to help!
From insomnia triggered by relentless thoughts to daily stressors that keep us up at night, there are many reasons for sleepless nights filled with unwanted thoughts. Tossing and turning while battling an overactive mind can be frustrating, and you might even consider turning to sleeping pills for a quick solution.
However, before resorting to sleeping pills, it’s crucial to explore natural strategies and tricks that can quiet your mind and promote a peaceful night’s sleep. In this article, we’ll discuss how to stop thinking while sleeping and provide you with effective techniques to help you fall asleep effortlessly.
Nocturnal Overthinking: How Anxiety and Stress Shape Your Thoughts
Do you ever experience those nights when falling asleep feels like an impossible task because your mind just won’t stop racing? Well, you’re not alone. It’s often anxiety and stress that play the role of the sleep saboteurs. When people dealing with anxiety and stress finally get to sleep, instead of switching off, they start overthinking and worrying.
The nighttime often becomes the prime time for our brains to wake up, obsessing over every minute detail of the day. In contrast, during daylight hours, we’re usually preoccupied and distracted, leaving minimal space for deep contemplation. This is why anxiety, depression, and various mental disorders frequently emerge when we’re trying to sleep. Unfortunately, this repetitive thinking can initiate a vicious cycle that significantly disrupts your ability to fall asleep and may even lead to common sleep disorders, such as sleep apnea.
To improve your sleep quality, it’s essential to understand how anxiety and stress influence your thoughts. In the next paragraph, we will explore some strategies to calm your racing mind and to help you get a better night’s sleep.
How to Sleep When Can’t Stop Thinking? 7 Proven Strategies!
Are you tired of your racing, negative thoughts keeping you awake at night, making it nearly impossible to catch a quality sleep? The link between overthinking and insomnia is a well-known struggle in the realm of sleep health.
In the following section, we’ll explore seven proven strategies that can help you put a stop to that relentless nighttime overthinking, eliminate the difficulty of falling asleep, and pave the way for a peaceful night’s rest. Let’s dive into these techniques one by one.
1. Make a ‘To-Do’ list before sleeping
In a 2017 study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, researchers found a strong connection between worrying about future tasks and increased instances of insomnia. This often results in the frustrating experience of lying awake in bed, despite one’s best efforts to switch off and fall asleep.
Fortunately, there’s a simple remedy for a mind besieged by worry—an effective ‘to-do’ list for upcoming tasks. By writing down what you need to tackle tomorrow or in the near future, you can significantly improve your chances of falling asleep faster. This mindful practice helps prepare your mind for the day ahead, setting it at ease.
So, it’s a good idea to take a few minutes each night, about 5 to 10, to note down your upcoming tasks before you hit the pillow. If you don’t know how to make your ‘to-do’ list, you can use our free printable daily planners and habit tracker bullet journals.
2. Practice Articulatory Suppression When You Can’t Stop Thinking
One effective psychological technique for managing unwanted, emotional thoughts is known as articulatory suppression. This technique involves thinking of any word and rapidly repeating it to engage the mind and retrieve related information. It acts like a mental exercise, disrupting the phonological loop and diverting attention away from emotional or memory retention.
Surprisingly, articulatory suppression has proven to be helpful in addressing sleep maintenance issues, as research has shown its positive impact on individuals struggling with insomnia by enhancing their sleep patterns.
3. Listen to Mind-Relaxing Sounds
Listening to mind-relaxing, soft sounds often leaves a calming effect on the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that controls thought formation and analysis. These gentle sounds can create a tranquil atmosphere that helps calm your racing thoughts before bedtime.
For this purpose, you can buy a pink noise machine or take advantage of a sleep app like ShutEye®, which offers an array of relaxing sounds from white to pink. These soothing sound effects can effectively distract your mind and promote positive thoughts, playing a crucial role in quieting your racing mind at night and facilitating a faster transition into better sleep.
4. Imaginary Distraction and Mindfulness for Better Sleep
An effective strategy to combat sleeplessness is to employ an imaginary distraction technique. Here’s how it works: you create a captivating mental scenario – it could be about your ideal life, a thriving business, or even entering a fairytale world. This imaginative scenario serves as a mental diversion, steering your mind away from unwanted and stressful thoughts.
Once you’ve established this scenario, strive to fully immerse yourself in it, to the point where you can’t think of anything else. This absorption in your imagined world can help induce sleepiness.
What’s more, research studies indicate that individuals dealing with insomnia and persistent overthinking experienced a significant increase in their sleep duration when they practiced these imaginary distractions and focused on positive thoughts.
5. Add Worry Time to Your Sleep Routine
Surprisingly, writing down the worries and problems before get to sleep helps in reducing unwanted thoughts at night.
A journal on Clinical Psychology claims that making a list of factors contributing to your stress and adding viable solutions to them gives you a sense of relaxation and accomplishment, thus helping you fall asleep faster.
6. Stay Away from Blue Light
Encountering blue light at night significantly reduces sleep by interfering with melatonin production, ultimately leaving you with a lot of thoughts in mind. The blue light interferes with the circadian cycle of the human mind, making it believe that blue light is an alternative to sunlight. As a result, it reduces the production of sleep hormones, leading to sleep deprivation and a rush of intransitive thoughts.
Therefore, it is better not to use mobile, PC, or television at least 30 minutes before bedtime. It prepares your mind to release melatonin and thus get ready for sleep.
7. Relax and Meditate
Last but not least, try to opt for a night ritual full of meditation and mind-relaxing activities. For example, you can :
- Take a warm bath with lavender or chamomile oil
- Practise sleep meditation (available in ShutEye®)
- Try yoga and some stretches
- Practise progressive muscle relaxation
- Listen to relaxing podcast (available in ShutEye®)
- Read a positive book
- Practise deep breathing exercises before bedtime
All these activities help to calm your mind and relax, hence contributing to quieting the racing thoughts.
Apart from these proven ways to slow down the thinking process at night, you can opt for additional tips like eating a low-carb meal at night, taking a warm shower to relax your muscles, avoiding watching television and using a screen right before bed, avoiding caffeine intake at night, etc.
CBTi- The Ultimate Way to Sleep When You Can’t Stop Thinking!
While all the strategies we’ve just discussed are effective in their own right, they become even more powerful when incorporated into a Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Insomnia (CBTi) program.
CBTi encompasses various techniques to address insomnia symptoms, stress management, and the reduction of sleep-interfering thoughts, ultimately assisting you in regulating your sleep cycle.
The ShutEye® App complements this therapy by acting as a sleep tracker.
