Every night around 2 am, I wake up with thoughts that lead to more thoughts and more thoughts that get my heart racing and my head in memories and then planning and then in emotions and before I know it’s 5 am and I’ve got no sleep. Can anyone please recommend a good meditation to halt this chatter in its tracks so I can go back to sleep? Does anyone else experience this?
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Hi and welcome, Kirsty!
I experience this fairly often, too. I’ve noticed is that if I can catch myself right as I’m first starting to wake up and immediately shift into slow, deep, conscious breathing, it often prevents the whole chain reaction from taking off. A few steady breaths can be enough to keep my nervous system from tipping fully into “alert mode,” and I’ll usually drift back to sleep much more easily.
If I miss that window and the thoughts start running, it feels a lot harder. Once the mind is spinning and the body is keyed up, everything suddenly feels important and sleep feels far away. So my first suggestion would be to experiment with catching it as early as you can and going straight to the breath, not to control it, but to slow things down.
If you’re already fully awake and breathing alone isn’t doing it, that’s when I find it helpful to put something on. On the FitMind app, Yoga Nidra can be really effective for calming the nervous system and giving the mind something gentle to rest on, and many people fall back asleep during it. You might also want to explore the Sleep & Dreams module in the app for other options designed specifically for nighttime waking.
And if the thoughts have a strong emotional charge, the new Combat Training module can help release some of that underlying energy rather than getting caught in the content of the thoughts.
Hope that helps, and you get some good rest tonight!
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I try a meditation or I concentrate on feeling my breath at the tip of my nose and counting my breaths with a goal of getting to 100. Usually I fall asleep around 50 breaths. I also tell myself to stop thinking
Hi Kristi! Ya, I hate that. I talk back to my default mode (call him “faulty”) and tell him I will schedule worrying and write in my journal or planner later so be quiet hehe. Like Ashley said, you can sometimes catch it before you get too hyped with some kind of trick but if you can’t that’s fine. Then just go with it and get up out of bed for a bit. Trying to sleep when you’re already up like that never seems to work. It eventually will go away if there is not much resistance. I feel like when I get up and go read or do something on the computer for a bit, write out my thoughts, and so on that I’m dirt tired real quick.