Goodnight Mind (14 page)

Look for opportunities to increase your awareness for brief periods throughout your day. Instead of letting your mind wander as you stroke your pet, do the dishes, or take a walk, be mindful of the sights, sounds, smells, and feelings in the present moment as you do these things. Stroke your pet mindfully; do the dishes mindfully; go for a walk mindfully. These exercises will train your mind to focus less on past mistakes that cannot be undone and future disasters that may never come and to focus more on what is happening right now. You can use any activity you like to help you practice mindfulness. Activities that involve all of your senses tend to work best. Below are two examples of turning mundane experiences into exercises in mindfulness: eating mindfully and bathing mindfully. Developing this new habit of mind could eventually help you tame your active mind at night.

Eat a Meal Mindfully

Eating is an activity that can and often does becomes automatic. Automatic eating can diminish your enjoyment of food and can also promote overeating, if physiological cues that you are getting full or were not really hungry to begin with are ignored. Eating a meal mindfully, on the other hand, can awaken your senses and help you pay closer attention to other experiences throughout the day. It can be a break from the tension and stress of your day. Mindful eating is a way to connect with your body and take in the current moment. There are no emergencies during a meal—just eating.

For this exercise, pick a time when you can eat alone, without being disturbed. Prepare yourself a meal and sit down comfortably to eat, but before you pick up a utensil or lift the food to your lips, close your eyes. Take a deep breath and notice the sensation of the air moving over your lips or nostrils and traveling down into your chest. Maybe the breath moves even deeper, down into your belly. Now focus your attention on the breath leaving your body. Repeat this two or more times. If you become distracted, gently return your attention to your breath. Now, look down at what you are about to eat. Notice how it looks: the colors, the shapes, the textures. What will you eat first? Take your time deciding, but when you do, focus your attention and explore the item with your eyes. What do you notice? Then engage your sense of smell. Does what you are about to eat have an enticing aroma? Focus your attention on your nose and how it draws air up into the nasal passages. Notice whether you are holding a fork or a spoon. Focus on the feeling of the points of contact of the utensil with your skin. Are you gripping it tightly, loosely, or somewhere in between? Move toward the food and pick it up with your fork or spoon. Take your time. Bring the food to your mouth and pause. What do you notice now about the food that you didn’t when it was on your plate—what do you see; what do you smell? Imagine what the food will taste like. Put the food into your mouth, but don’t chew yet. Take time to notice how it feels on your tongue. Now slowly and deliberately start chewing, paying attention to the movement of your jaws and mouth. Chew slowly at least twenty times. What do you notice about the movement of your mouth? What do you notice about the taste of the food? What do you notice about swallowing? Take your time and repeat these steps for your entire meal.

Take a Bath Mindfully

Taking a mindful bath is a popular way to practice mindfulness because it serves an additional purpose: getting clean. Although most people find taking a bath relaxing, relaxation is not the goal of mindfulness exercises. The purpose of mindful bathing and other mindfulness exercises is becoming mindful—indeed, because becoming mindful takes practice, these exercises may not be relaxing at all.

When you have filled the tub with water and settled comfortably in, start your mindful bath by focusing your attention on your breathing. Because of the acoustics in your bathroom, your breathing may sound different from the way it normally does. Or perhaps your ears are submerged, so your hearing experience is completely different than usual. Whatever the case, focus your attention on your breath for several moments. Then move gently in the tub and notice the sounds that result. Do you hear a drip? Do you hear a tiny bit of water escaping down the drain? What else do you notice? What do you notice about the temperature of the water? What do you notice about the skin temperature of parts of your body that are sticking out of the water? Now slowly begin to wash yourself, turning your attention to how each of the steps in bathing feels. Pay attention to the way it feels to lather soap on your body, the smells of the soap mixing with your natural body odors, and how the lather looks. Watch the water bead off your body as you wash away the soap. Take your time and notice each part of this experience.

Observe Your Thoughts

Perhaps you are reading this book because you have an overactive mind in general. Try as you will to shut it off, sometimes the thoughts keep coming, and their presence becomes more and more frustrating. You feel trapped by your thoughts and you want to escape. On these occasions it is as if your thoughts are a rushing current, pulling you downriver as you struggle to reach the bank. What if, instead, you could sit on the riverbank and observe your thoughts without getting caught up in them?

Try this exercise. When a thought comes to mind, simply notice it and imagine the words of the thought being written on a leaf. Imagine placing the leaf on a stream and watching it float away until it disappears around a bend. Here comes another thought (leaf). Notice it. Notice the words on the leaf as it floats away. If you notice any negative emotion, accept that it is there; notice it without judgment; gently turn your attention to observing your thoughts once more. Do this as often as necessary; that is, whenever you notice yourself distracted, refocus your attention. If critical thoughts about how this exercise is unfolding arise, put those on leaves too and set them adrift.

You can choose other images similar to the idea of a leaves on a stream. For example, you can put your thoughts on clouds that you watch drift away, on signs in a parade that you watch march past, or on bubbles that you watch float upward.

Create Moments of Zen in Chaos

A common myth about meditation is that you need to have a quiet mind in order to be successful. On the contrary, meditation is about acceptance. In meditation, a quiet mind has no greater value than a noisy mind—both are met with acceptance and with a curious, observing spirit. The concepts of “success” and “failure” are foreign to mindfulness. Mindfulness is about watching your thoughts, however noisy they are and regardless of how upsetting they may be.

The practice of observing your thoughts can, over time, decrease the likelihood that you will become caught up in your thoughts. Think of those scenes in cartoons and movies in which a central character is surrounded by chaos—when suddenly everything slows down. In this moment of slow motion, the central character is able to create some stillness to take a break and gather himself or herself. Wouldn’t it be nice to do this in real life? Mindfulness offers you such a break.

“Zen” refers to a meditative state that you can achieve for brief periods throughout your day. When things are stressful and chaotic, take a moment to sit down. Go somewhere you can be alone for a moment to shut your eyes and breathe (maybe the bathroom). Pay attention to your breath for a minute. Creating a breathing space can give you the break you need to compose yourself, re-center, and reconnect with your strength and coping skills.

You can do this any time you want; take a few minutes away from work or other stressful tasks to practice mindfulness, and observe how you feel afterward. Mindfulness is a practice wherein you become more awake and more aware—this can have positive effects on your levels of alertness. Take short mindfulness breaks throughout your day, and observe the difference in your mental alertness.

Summary

This chapter explained how acceptance can help you be more at peace with the way things are. If you can accept, for example, that you are having difficulty falling asleep and remember that being awake at night is not always a bad thing, you will likely fall asleep sooner than if you resisted the idea of being awake in a spirit of frustration. Likewise, if you accept that you may feel tired during the day, fatigue is no longer your enemy.

Mindfulness helps you change the experience of worry and rumination by increasing your focus on the present moment. It takes practice, but once you develop a habit of mindfulness, you will be more accepting of your sleep problems and they will cease to loom so large in your mind. Remember the following tips:

• Be open to being awake at night.
  
• Be open to being tired during the day.
  
• Live in the moment.
  
• Create mindful moments during your day.
  

References

Gallicchio, L., and B. Kalesan. 2009. “Sleep Duration and Mortality: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.”
Journal of Sleep Research
18: 148–58.

Kabat-Zinn, J. 1990.
Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness
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Tang, N.K.Y., D. A. Schmidt, and A. G. Harvey. 2007. “Sleeping with the Enemy: Clock Monitoring in the Maintenance of Insomnia.”
Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry
38: 40–55.

Colleen E. Carney, PhD
, is associate professor and director of the Sleep and Depression Laboratory at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada. She was a National Sleep Foundation Pickwick Fellow at Duke University Medical Center, where she was on faculty, and she founded the Comorbid Insomnia Clinic at the Duke Insomnia and Sleep Research Program. Carney is well-known for her publications in the area of insomnia and its relation to other disorders, most notably, depression, anxiety, and pain. She has made numerous presentations at national research conferences, including the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies (ABCT) and the Association for Professional Sleep Societies (APSS). She is the current president of the ABCT’s Special Interest Group for insomnia and other sleep disorders. Currently, Carney is conducting research, funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, on treating insomnia in people with depression.

Rachel Manber, PhD
, is professor at Stanford University and director of the Insomnia and Behavioral Sleep Medicine Program at the Stanford Center for Sleep Sciences and Medicine. She has treated hundreds of patients with insomnia, many of whom also have other medical or psychiatric disorders, and has trained physicians, psychologists, and nurses to treat insomnia without medication. A substantial portion of her research, funded by the National Institute of Health, focuses on the cognitive behavioral treatment of insomnia. She has authored many papers in scientific journals and presented her work at scientific conferences.