It’s 3:00 A.M., you wake up to find your 25lb dog has moved from lying beside you to now laying partially on you. You give Fido a quick nudge, and he graciously slides off from you and finds a comfy position at the bottom of the bed.
As you lay there trying to get back to sleep, you notice your mouth is a little dry – so you take a big gulp of water from the cup on your nightstand. Ok, now it’s time to get back to dreaming of that Hawaiian vacation….
Before you start to even think about how warm and inviting the soft, white, sandy beach would be… you quickly remember you have a court date coming up, you have custody issues to resolve, your children are struggling, and you have a meeting with a financial planner to worry about. Well, I guess the Hawaiian trip will have to wait.
As your mind shifts from one task to the next, you quickly realize that it’s now 4:15 A.M. and you’re fully-awake. It’s slightly too early to get up – your alarm is set for 5:30 A.M., so technically you have an hour and fifteen minutes to sleep… but it’ll take you a good 30 minutes to calm your mind just to get to sleep, right?
If this sounds like you, I’d say you’re quite normal. We all lead busy lives, and quite frankly don’t spend much time letting our mind rest.
It’s common for people to say “I’m always thinking” or “my gears are always turning”. That’s great, but that also causes for a lot of sleepless nights spent worrying about the past or what’s upcoming in the future.
Your body and mind need rest. Sleep is vitally important for all your internal processes – that’s when they do their work. While you sleep, your organs are hard at work filtering through all the waste (mental and physical) that you accumulated during the day.
For instance, your intestines quiet down in the nighttime, and the liver goes from trying to detoxify during wakefulness to trying to build and synthesize when you’re sleeping. Even more importantly, during sleep, all your individual cells — not just your brain cells — are being completely repaired. Furthermore, your immune system is at an all-time high while you sleep.
I definitely value a good night’s sleep, so I wanted to pass along the BEST trick – one simple technique – that gets me relaxed and calms my mind just enough to get me back to sleep.
The technique is quite simple – it’s deep breathing!
I call this the 8-7-6 deep breathing method, and it works extremely well to calm your mind and bring you back to a grounded state. I use this technique to calm down when I’m stressed and when I can’t fall asleep – and it’s worked EVERY SINGLE TIME.
8-7-6 Breathing Technique:
- Breathe in through your nose for a count of 8 seconds.
- Hold that breath for 7 seconds
- Release through your mouth (making a whooshing noise) for 6 seconds
Repeat this entire process 5 times through. Remember to relax your forehead, your jaw, and your shoulders while doing this technique. Most people need to make it a point to let go of the tension, so remind yourself before starting the exercise to get fully relaxed.
I practice deep breathing a minimum of 2 times per day. It’s just one of a handful of mindfulness practices that I do on a daily basis to keep my emotions and stress at bay. You’ll find that after a few weeks of incorporating grounding and mindfulness techniques into your daily schedule, that you’ll be able to handle stress more easily and quickly.
About the Author: Valerie Echter is a Certified Holistic Health and Lifestyle Coach, who specializes in emotional and mental wellbeing. She is a stress and anxiety expert, having worked through her own issues with severe social anxiety while at the height of her career in the oil industry and dealing with her own divorce. Valerie@EchterLifestyles.com
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