Could challenging your thoughts help you fall asleep?
Read this:
“Some people lay awake and convince themselves that if they don’t fall asleep
soon, something horrible—like a car crash or a layoff—will happen to them the
next day. One way to challenge those thoughts is to ask people how many times
that has actually happened, Grandner says. By making the case that those
possibilities are very unlikely, people can let them go. “It arms you with some
ammunition to combat irrational thoughts, he says”-http://time.com/4651743/insomnia-sleep- therapy/.
Like engineering a reason why you need to go to sleep (or else)!
I personally love and hate this technique, only because your brain is always going
to want to fight back somehow, at least for most folks that is the case.
The great thing about this technique is that you can really go through all the thoughts that
go in and out of your mind and sort out the ones that are truly logical and the
ones that are completely absurd.
Your thoughts are not stupid, but sometimes they show up at times that are
inconvenient, like when you are trying to go to bed early.
As seen above by the “Doctor Grandner”, we tend to think of the worst possible outcomes to every situation,
but how many times have those things that we thought about actually came to pass?
Close to none for me.
There are those moments where you think about something so hard that it actually happens,
but then it is never anything too serious that you can never ever come back from.
Challenging your thoughts that go through your head as you lay back in bed could
help a lot, just by questioning “Oh really now?”, can shut the mind up for a good
couple seconds.
That is where journaling can truly come in handy.
You can right these irrational thoughts down and describe them with as much detail as you can
possibly muster up and then read it out loud and listen to how crazy it actually
sounds.
It happens to be quite comical and then you can fall asleep content
knowing there is like a two-percent chance someone is going to break into your
house while you sleep and the whole house bursts into flames.
Too much? Okay go drink you some chamomile tea. 🙂
Here are some more thought challenging resources to help you:
