Clear your mind
Does your busy brain stop you falling asleep? Business and personal mentor Siimon Reynolds shares a simple tactic that can set your mind at rest.
Stop your busy brain sabotaging your sleep with this easy three-step bedtime routine
Here’s a technique that will make you both more successful and give you peace of mind. At the end of a stressful day, many people end up endlessly tossing and turning in bed, worrying about their life. This ruminating about what happened in the daylight hours rarely improves your situation, but majorly increases stress and greatly reduces actual sleep time.
It’s an awful way to end the day.
But start doing the Evening Mind Clearance and everything will change for the better. In essence, the mind clearance has three steps. First, you create a list of the things that you’re grateful for in your life.
All too often we forget all the good stuff that happens in a typical day and instead end up focusing on the one or two things that went wrong. By simply creating a mental list of the positive parts of the day that you’re grateful for, your mood is almost instantly lifted and your mind becomes much more serene.
The next step is to forgive anyone who has behaved badly towards you.
Perhaps a workmate was rude to you, or a friend was disrespectful. Think about each of these such moments and instead of replaying the scene over and over and getting more and more worked up, just send them forgiveness and kind thoughts, and let it all go.
I’ve heard a Chinese parable in which two monks were forbidden to touch women. One day they were walking out in the countryside and they encountered a young lady who could not cross a river. One of the monks offered to help her across the water and she thankfully agreed. He picked her up, waded across the river and put her down safely on the other side.
For the next three hours, the other monk refused to talk to the first monk, so upset was he that his friend had broken the monastic rules.
Finally, the monk who helped the woman turned to him and said, “I put that woman down three hours ago. Why are you still carrying her?”
If you have a grievance with someone, each night simply forgive them as much as you can, and let it go. Believe me, your life will be a whole lot happier if you do.
Just taking these two steps will vastly lower your evening stress levels, but taking the third step moves you to an even better mental place. In the last step, you spend just a minute or two before sleep visualising the next day and your life in general going really well. See yourself performing superbly, imagine yourself enjoying the day and feeling great about what you’ve achieved at the end of it.
No matter what stress you’ve experienced throughout that day, this visualisation switches your mind back to you living an inspiring and optimistic future.
Doing the Evening Mind Clearance will take you only three to five minutes, but it will clear your mind of much of your day’s stress and agitation, replacing worry with calm, and anxiety with positivity.