It’s 10pm and there you are, getting into bed, prepared for the important meeting coming up in the morning. You planned out your whole night to get to bed early, and crawl under the covers as planned.
Before you know it, an hour has passed.
And another.
And one more.
This is quite common, and there’s a simple explanation. I’m hoping you’ll come away a little more satisfied and knowledgeable than just thinking that the universe hates you when this happens.
When we try to put thought(s) aside to get to sleep, despite our intentions, we tend to stay up even longer as we unconsciously monitor the situation to see if we’re succeeding. If you’re curious about learning more about this phenomenon, look into Ironic Process Theory – I won’t get into the weeds here.
What to do when we can’t sleep
A solution? Don’t struggle to eliminate thoughts, accept them and trust your future self to take care of them.
A common misconception about meditation and mindfulness is that the goal is to find peace through elimination of thoughts. This is impossible – unless you’re dead, of course. Our brain will continuously leak thoughts until the day we die. We cannot stop the flow of thoughts, but we can find peace in the midst of them through choosing acceptance instead of constant struggle to change them. To practice acceptance means taking time to process the thoughts.
If you experience this pattern of overthinking at night interrupting your sleep often, it could be a sign to spend more time during the day slowing down to process your thoughts so you don’t have a traffic jam in your mind when nighttime arrives.
Being too busy and overloaded all the time isn’t a badge of honor – it’s a sign of an unhealthily struggling person. If your mind is fighting you, it may be time to spend more time with it.
This can look like sitting down every so often for a few minutes without a goal in mind, just letting our thoughts flow without trying to struggle to change them. Whatever comes along is perfectly fine. We don’t struggle, we flow.
If we give ourselves breaks during the day to think, our mind won’t fight us to do it at night when it’s time to get those Zs.
