How To Quiet Your Mind For Better Sleep

Actionable Steps to Zonk Out in Seconds

The health benefits of getting a good, full night’s sleep are obvious. But no matter how much someone may understand that sleep is crucial to health and wellbeing, we have all experienced nights of insomnia. Nights where nothing we do seems to make ourselves fall asleep. 

This can even cause a negative feedback loop. We can’t sleep, but we know sleep is crucial, so we toss and turn hyper focused on how we are not sleeping, so we get stressed. We start saying things like, “I am going to have such a shitty day tomorrow now. I’m gonna be cranky because I’m not getting any sleep!” 

All this just keeps us awake even more.

Improving sleep is a $69 bajillion a year industry (I looked it up). You’d think with so much attention on sleep quality that humans would have mastered it by now. But if you look at humans today compared to 100 years ago, we can ask “is quality of sleep really any objectively better?” What exactly has all this newfangled technology accomplished? Very little, I suspect.

As with many aspects of health and wellbeing, it is important to remember that there is usually both a physical (physiological) component but also a mental (psychological) component.

I am going to focus on the latter. 

But if you are curious about the former, my first piece of advice is to read Breath by James Nestor. If you have difficulty sleeping, first start with your breathing and sleeping environment. Getting proper oxygen into your bedroom, and expelling carbon dioxide from it.

(…but before we begin, let’s have a word from our sponsor—ME!)

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…and now, back to the article!

Unfortunately, we know very little about the psychological aspects of sleep beyond supposition. But from my own experience, there are some things that I recommend if you struggle with sleeplessness.

The most important psychological aspect to insomnia is the subconscious mind. As in my example above, we know that we need sleep. But it just won’t happen.