Sleep Hack!

Do you wake in the night with worries? Try this!

When you sleep, your unconscious mind is working diligently on your problems. If you wake in the night and you immediately start ruminating about an issue you are worried about, it’s your unconscious mind telling your conscious mind that it could use some help in the form of a plan to implement during your waking hours.

So, if you can focus on one or two action items for the issue - even if they are as small as deciding to email a person when you wake up or to devote 5 minutes to journaling about the issue over your coffee in the morning - your unconscious mind will allow you to go back to sleep sooner knowing you have planned to take concrete action to address the issue. Even if it’s a very small one!

Paraphrased from the book Before You Know It: The Unconscious Reasons We Do What We Do by John Bargh, PhD, social and cognitive psychologist and expert on the unconscious mind. Bargh is also a professor of psychology at Yale University and director of the ACME Laboratory. (Automaticity in Cognition, Motivation, and Evaluation)