Daily Gratitude: Another technique to help you get to sleep

There’s lots of ways to help you fall asleep.

You know you’re supposed to have a set Schedule even on the weekends , minimize screen time before bed, keeping your bedroom cool, dark and quiet.

Limit caffeine after 2 pm or even earlier. Minimize alcohol because it fragments sleep.

Do relaxation and breathing techniques.

Do a brain dump before bed. Get everything bothering you out on paper. That way it won’t be rumbling around in your head keeping you from getting to sleep.

Put the clock somewhere else so you’re not just watching it all night like you see in some of the ads for sleep meds.

If you can’t get back to sleep after 20 minutes get up and do something else – in another room. And not on your phone.

Often when things are bothering me and I can’t sleep I get up and do expressive writing. That means just fervently writing anything that comes to your mind. Even if it’s just one word over and over again. Or a bunch of curse words. When you’re done you throw it out. It’s not a journal. There’s something about sending the thoughts from your brain to your hand and out.

Do all your physical exercise before 2-3 hours before bed.

Limit naps to 20 minutes and before 3 pm.

Despite most of these things when I have a lot of trouble sleeping. I revert to my old standby. I came up with this in 2004 and it’s worked every time I’ve used it.

I go through the alphabet with one goal – to come up with something I’m grateful for – one thing per letter.

I have yet to make it through the entire alphabet. The last time I was asleep by the letter O. This focuses your mind on something specific but also something very positive. It also does a remarkable job of soothing your nervous system. Another favorable condition for falling asleep.

Daily Gratitude: What does my vision have in common with your growh? Another strange question but with an intriguing answer

One day last November I woke up with blurry vision. After months of evaluation, they think it’s just a need for different, stronger glasses.

The thing I was hung up on was the sudden onset. Did my eyes change and get so bad overnight?

Not in this case. There were tiny minute changes over time – since my last pair of glasses.

All these unnoticed changes accumulated and finally there were enough of them that their effect became noticeable to me.

I think this is lilke any growth we have – or wish to have.

When we put our minds towards changing something in our lives, we expend large amounts of energy on it. Do you know the saying – “Every day in every way I get better and better.”?

It doesn’t say “in just one day I’ll BE all better”. It says every day.

So you keep plugging away, being disciplined with the techniques you’ve learned to make the changes happen.

I’m sure you know that so many times, you see nothing happening.

You get discouraged

You wonder ‘’is this working?” and sometimes you even say “why bother.”

You’ve seen no evidence of any change, any growh.

But then one day, some personal crisis occurs and you surprise yourself at your response. It’s not like you. Even your friends or family say “wow, what happened to you. Where did the Joe I know go?” because you’re not reacting the way YOU ALWAYS DID. They are astounded . You are pleased.

Did this change happen overnight.

No

It built up but the effect of the “day by day you’re getting better and better” became apparent after all those months (and sometimes years) of change.

It’s only then that you realize something was really happening and it was worth it.

Then comes another intersting part.

I had to get used to my glasses. You’d think that the magic would be for everything to be seen perfectly once I don the new pair.

Not necessarily. I wear trifocals so there’s a bit of a high wire trick to balance the three different fields of vision.

Oh and then then there’s the difference between night and day

Your brain has to get used to the change in the lenses. It requires a period of adjustment. Whereas something looks great for me up close, I still have problems with night distance vision. So all is not hunky dory in the OK Corral.

More adjustmennts are necessary.

Same with your growth. In both cases we can call it fine tuning. You may have used some specific techniques to learn how to better handle condition A. But it’s possible that those same techniques are not as ingrained to help you with Condition A if it’s prolonged for instance. Or maybe if it’s more intense. It takes more adjustment. And that’s ok too.

It’s like getting different colored belts in martial arts. A different color for greater levels of skill.

That’s what we should be striving for with change. So, next time you’re discouraged, touch your glasses if you wear them and look at someone else’s glasses if you don’t. Hopefully by then it will trigger you to remember that it’s a process and changes have occurred and are accumulating. Remember the song “The Rose”?

Daily Gratitude: How can your dashboard help change your life?

I want to introduce a concept that involves mental pictures or imaging.

This is called the Thought-o-meter. Thanks to Napoleon Hill for this idea.

Put an image in the front of your mind of one of those meters on your dashboard. It’s always there as you drive and you’re usually checking it out as you move along.

Once you get this image in your mental dashboard you will constantly be checking it.

On this meter put the word negative on the left side and the word positive on the right. You can color code them if that will make them more impactful for you.

This is your thought-o-meter.

All day long practice periodically looking at your thoughtometer and see where it is. If you see it on the left (negative) stop and figure out what thoughts you’re having.

Then pretend you’re driving your car and mentally put your foot on the brake – find a thought or image that will make the needle on your meter zoom on over to the positive side

If you can find something funny to take the place of your negative thought, it will be even more effective.

The point is twofold. One, you want to get your mind from the negative side of the dial over to the positive side.

Secondly you can’t erase a thought (whether positive or negative). You have to replace it. That’s easy to remember.

Replace don’t erase!

Does it work?

This morning I was reading something political and started to get upset.

But I immediately recognized it, stopped and asked myself “can I control this? Can i do anything about this right now?

And of course the answer was no.

That’s all well and good and it stopped me from reading any more but it didn’t totally get rid of the anger and frustration I was feeling. You know when they say someone is stewing over an issue?

Well that’s what was happening internally even if I had turned off the burner. All I’d read and thought was still simmering inside.

What to do?

This works Even if you haven’t totally become aware of what’s causing those internal yucky feelings. (That’s a medical term – yucky.)

First I visualized my thought o meter and saw that the dial was over on the left (negative). I wanted to get it over to the positive side and since I said I was stewing, I thought about making a stew and then having it served up to me in a fancy dish and it made me laugh. That process enabled me to replace my thought and get a good laugh too.

I think if you practice this all day long it will become a habit and then when you really need to deal with something hard, you’ll already have the tool in hand.