Struggling to fall asleep because of an overactive or busy mind? You’re not alone. Excessive thinking at night is one of the most common causes of insomnia. But what’s causing our sleeping difficulties might be a lot more to do with what we are doing during the day than what we are worrying about at night. I’ve found an interesting theory on what we can do to fall asleep faster from an Indian meditation teacher based in Basil, Switzerland. Curious?
The true cause of an overactive mind
Dhyanse, whose been doing meditation since the age of 5 and is now a prominent teacher believes that we all have too much ‘information being poured into us’ and thats causing our brains to be in state of overthinking.
Every time we are scrolling through social feeds on our phones, flick between websites, emails and texts, every time we multitask, we are overloading our brains. In fact, every time we are doing anything that we are not given our 100% attention to, we are putting extra pressure on our brains to do much more work than it was ever intended to do.
Even if you are not aware of it, your mind is still absorbing all that is happening around you, all that information is accumulated and pushed down into your subconsciousness
Whilst we might not realise that listening to the radio while driving and listening to the satnav, our brains are accumulating lots and lots of information. This information needs to processed eventually and often does as soon as we slow down which happens to be at night.
Impact of an overactive mind
Dhyanse says the impact of all this information being accumulated is impacting us in a number of different ways that we are not aware of:
- Sleep — our brains are working in overdrive, still processing stored information as soon as we slow down to go to sleep at night
- Dreams — we will notice this processing of accumulated information through our dreams. Things we may not have been consciously aware of during the day might come to the forefront at night.
- Decisions — every time we make a decision, not only are we making a decision from our conscious minds but we are being influenced by our subconscious. Those ads we think we are ignoring at the top of websites? Maybe they are having more of an impact on us than we realise.
How to sleep faster
The solution to sleep at night then is to slow down during the day, focus on doing just one thing at a time. We need to stop consuming so much content and create more awareness to the present.
Dhyanse also introduces a short technique to help us process everything we’ve gone through during the day and fall asleep faster, called the Rewind Technique.
The Rewind technique to fall asleep faster
Tonight, as you are lying in bed thinking and overthinking. Try this short technique to process your day and fall asleep faster.
- Imagine you are watching yourself on television
You are an observer of your life, not in your life. It’s important you take an outsider perspective of your life, not be in it.
Start going backwards going through the day.
Begin with entering the bedroom for sleep and apply the See. Hear. Feel. formula
2. See Hear Feel Formula
As you are watching yourself on tv coming into the room:
What do I see myself doing?
What do I hear?
What do I feel? / What was I thinking?
Notice what you were doing. What do you notice that you did not pay attention to at the time.
3. Go back and do this for every hour until you reach the moment you woke up
An hour before coming into the bedroom…
What do I see?
What do I hear?
What do I feel?
And an hour before that…
What is it that you have not been paying attention to?
Finally, you will reach the moment you just woke up. This is the moment of transition where you were neither asleep nor awake.
Relax into this moment.
Breathe into this moment.
Settle into this moment.
You can read more about sleep over at plus120
