Surrendering to sleep
One of the major inhibitors to my creativity, and energy for life in general, is not getting enough sleep. And for me, enough sleep means at least 7 hours a night. I relish my sleep like it's going out of style. And I get extremely crabby if it gets disrupted.
Usually I have something or someone to blame when I don't get enough sleep. But if I'm honest with myself, I am usually the reason for my problem.
When I can't sleep, it's usually because my mind won't turn off. I start thinking about a project at school or work. I start to get really worried about it, like I'm going to forget to do it. Like if I don't think and stress and kill myself over it right at that second, something terrible is going to happen.
So one night, when my mind was cruising at 80 mph, I was reminded of the phrase we learned from The National Geographic video: "When I weave, I weave." It was a directive to live in the moment and stop multitasking. I realized that trying to think and trying to sleep was not only multitasking, but it was impossible to do both at the same time.
So I started to use "When I sleep, I sleep" as a mantra. I repeated it to myself over and over, and tried to use it as a barrier to any rogue thoughts that threatened to interrupt. I thought it worked pretty well.
Another tactic I have used to shoo away stressful thoughts is to imagine these worries as bubbles. Every errant thought is placed inside a bubble, and I watch it float away. And once it's gone, it doesn't come back. Sometimes the bubbles are gray. Or pink. But they all float away once I fill them with my distractions.
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