Mindfulness for sleep: Learn how to stop running after your thoughts

Disrupting your stressful thoughts could be a crucial factor in improving your sleep. Ensuring that you get the sleep you need could hold the key to your overall wellbeing. Difficulties with sleep are associated with depression and anxiety.

Mental health problems are also associated with an overactive mind. An overactive mind that spends to much time stressed, worrying, and overthinking the same fearful thoughts.

The more your mind keeps going around in a circle on the same worries, the more unruly the mind becomes. We all need to learn to put our minds to rest. Sleep helps to recharge the brain but doesn’t help with placing the mind to rest.

Commonly, people that suffer from excessive worry and overthinking have difficulties with sleep. Sometime they can’t go to sleep as their mind is still running around on high alert mode. They tend to wake up in the middle of the night and can not go back to sleep.

Training your mind to rest is a way to reduce repetitive thinking and get your thoughts slow down. If you care about your well-being and sleep, you need to pay more attention to what is going on in your mind.

Reducing overthinking begins with increasing self-awareness about your repetitive thinking. Knowing when you get inside the hamster wheel of your repetitive worries may hold the key for finding better sleep and inner peace.

Observe the mind

One crucial thing that you can begin doing today is to pay attention to your thoughts when you do simple routine tasks. I’m talking about when you shower, brush your teeth, drive your car or when you do the dishes. When we do these everyday tasks, our minds start and go very active in the overthinking and worry mode.

Commonly, most people do not realize that we are running after our thoughts all day and night. The mind is overthinking and running wild without ever stopping to take a break. These mental races can promote brain overload that increases stress levels with no positive outcome.

This mind overactivity continues until nighttime, and your mind does not know how to stop when its time to go to sleep. This running race disrupts your sleeping patterns. If you want to improve your sleep and your sleep quality, you must train your mind and get it to slow down.

Begin with paying attention to your daily routine and actively disrupt your mind from running wild. To stop running after your thoughts, you need to disengage the mind from useless thinking.

Stop running after your thoughts.

1. When your mind is racing, visualize a large red stop sign. See the stop sign, and move back your attention to whatever task you are doing. If you are driving, hold your wheel with a tighter grip, look at the road, and notice what is happening.
2. Pay attention to your five senses. Depending on the task you are doing, use your five senses, and continue focusing on the task. If you are brushing your teeth, notice the toothpaste’s taste or the toothbrush's sensations in your gums. Hold the toothbrush and notice how your fingers are gripping it.
3. Keep disrupting your stressful thinking during your day. Repetition is vital to get it to stick. You might have to do these five, twenty, or a hundred times. It doesn’t matter how many times you have to do it; the important thing is that you keep disrupting your mind and stop running after useless thoughts.

This exercise is a mindfulness technique that helps with mind training and brings your mind to the present moment. This technique will help you stay mindful in your day and at night. Practice daily to increase awareness about your mind and your thoughts. If you want to improve your sleep, you must pay attention to the racing thoughts that disrupt your sleep.

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