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You are exhausted, your body yawning from sleep. Once your head hits the pillow, however, your mind is flooded with worry, making sleep elusive, sometimes impossible.
Don’t worry, experts say: there are relaxation techniques you can use to calm that racing mind.
“Think of these relaxation exercises as tools in your Better Sleep Toolkitsaid sleep specialist Rebecca Robbins, an instructor in the division of sleep medicine at Harvard Medical School.
“Practice them and you’ll get better and better at falling asleep, which is the holy grail, right? Nobody wants to spend time hanging around at night.”
Deep breathing is a science-backed method to calm the body and mind that can easily be done before bedtime and when you wake up in the middle of the night.
Changing the rhythm of your breathing slows your heart rate, lowers your blood pressure, and stimulates your body’s “rest and digest” parasympathetic system, which can tune out worry and anxiety.
“Consciously focusing on your breath can help you separate yourself from the thoughts that are flying through your brain,” Robbins said.
There’s a number of deep breathing techniques you can try. Diaphragmatic breathing, also known as abdominal breathing, focuses on relaxing the diaphragm, the main muscle of breathing. Begin by taking a deep breath in through your nose for a slow count of six, making sure you can feel your stomach rise with your hand as it fills with air. Count to six again as you slowly breathe out.
“Strive to inhale effortlessly, smoothly, and soundlessly while treating your exhalations as soft, long sighs of relief,” suggested CNN contributor Dana Santas, a certified strength and conditioning specialist and mind-body trainer.
Stay in the moment, Santas said, concentrating on the sounds and sensations of your breath: “Direct all of your senses to follow the path of the air as it moves in through the nose, down the throat, into the lungs, and out again. If your mind wanders, bring it back to your breath, happening here and now.”
Meditation is a centuries-old method to calm the body and mind. Studies show it can help perfectionists stop judging themselves and can help in treatment smoking, pain, addictive disorders and depression, among others.
Using direct measures of brain structure and function, A study I found that it only took 30 minutes a day of meditation practice. over the course of two weeks to produce a measurable change in the brain.
“When you teach people these kinds of mental exercises, it actually changes the function and structure of their brain,” said neuroscientist Richard Davidson, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and founder and director of the Center for Healthy Minds. , told CNN in a previous interview.
There are many resources on the internet to help someone start meditating. Davidson and his colleagues have created a science based free app designed to help people practice meditation and mindfulness.
Visualization is another sleep aid. Imagine a quiet, peaceful place in your mind and fill it with specific objects, colors, and sounds. researchers They have found that people who visualize in detail can more successfully push unwanted thoughts out of their minds.
If you’re having trouble filling the scene, the researchers suggest asking yourself questions about smell, touch, and light, such as “Can I feel the sun on my skin? What do I smell in the air?
You can also visualize your body relaxing, experts say. As you breathe deeply and slowly, imagine that your breath is a wind coursing through your body, relieving stress and relaxing tension as it moves through each part of your body and then escapes.
“I like to think of the breath as a light in your mind’s eye that grows bigger when you breathe in and gets smaller when you breathe out,” Robbins said. “Those tangible strategies where you visualize something and compare it to a breath are really powerful.”
Most of us are not even aware of how much tension we have in our muscles until it shows up in back pain and headaches.
Progressive muscle relaxation is a way to relax those muscles, making it easier to fall asleep, experts say. You tense and relax muscle groups in the body in a certain order, starting at the head and working down to the toes and feet.
Each section of the body is forcefully tensed and held for 10 seconds as you inhale. Strive to squeeze each muscle hard, but not to the point of cramping or pain. Then, as you exhale, suddenly relax the muscle all at once. The University of Michigan Health recommends doing the exercises in a systematic order that you can find here.
Experts say exercise has an added benefit: There’s no room in the brain for anxious thoughts.
This is a way to keep your mind from repeatedly listing all the things you need to do (or haven’t done), but it only works if you do it before you go to bed.
Don’t worry in bed. Schedule a ‘worry time’ — a period of time out of the bedroom, out of sleep, to worry about things that naturally creep into your mind at night,” said sleep specialist Dr. Raj Dasgupta, assistant professor of clinical medicine at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine.
“Write a list of things you need to do tomorrow,” suggested Dr. Vsevolod Polotsky, professor of medicine and director of sleep research at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
“You can even email it to yourself. It gives you satisfaction and the realization that it’s night and there’s nothing you can do with your list, but you can attend to it tomorrow,” Polotsky said.
All of these mind tricks and relaxation tips serve a purpose beyond that night’s sleep, experts say.
“They are extremely beneficial from a classical conditioning standpoint,” Robbins said. “If your body knows that what comes after the end of these activities is sleep, then it starts to condition itself, and after a little while, your body will more easily enter a relaxed state, which increases your chances of sleeping.” .
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