Hey. It’s Devin Burke, your coach and guide to a peaceful night’s rest. And in this training I’m going to share with you how to stop anxiety in its tracks so that you can fall asleep peacefully. Anxiety is one of the underlying causes of insomnia. I find in most cases it is the cause of insomnia or continuing to experience onset or maintenance insomnia. So today we’re going to talk about what are some simple steps that you can take to eliminate anxiety so that you can then get to sleep. So let’s dive right in. The first step is to unplug. Unplug from all the things that are creating anxiety in the first place. So in today’s world, we live in a very stressed, fear-based society. So the news, social media, all of these things are doom and gloom and exacerbate anxiety. They exacerbate fear, they exacerbate doubt and worry.
On top of the fear, doubt and worry you might have without tuning in to social media, not to say to completely unplug to live under a rock, but oftentimes we are not aware of the inputs that are actually creating the outputs which ends up creating this underlying sense of unease. So allowing yourself space to stay up to date with current events, but also not allowing yourself to get swept away by those current events or be controlled by social media and get sucked into that whole social media world of negativity is a critical first step if you’re somebody that’s experiencing anxiety and that anxiety is affecting your sleep. Step two is eliminate stimulants. Most people don’t realize that coffee, chocolate, a ton of things have stimulants in it, and if you are in an anxious state, that’s like dumping gasoline onto a fire.
So make sure that if you are using caffeine or if you’re using any type of stimulant, you want to cut that. You want to cut it out because that’s only exacerbating the anxiety. It’s not allowing your body to get into the parasympathetic, and it’s easy to get hooked on stimulants. It’s easy to not be aware that things that you’re consuming actually have things that stimulate us, so be sure to check the labels of the things you consume. And if you’re currently someone who has anxiety and you’re using caffeine, I highly recommend that you eliminate caffeine or get off anything, pre-workout, any kind of thing that has anything that’ll stimulate you is really important. You don’t want to put gasoline on a fire, and the fire here is the anxiety, so cut it out. Step three is consistent bedtime schedule. One of the most simplest things you can do is wake up at the same time and go to bed at the same time.
This helps reset the circadian clock. This also helps give you a sense of certainty and gives your body a sense of regularity. Regularity, that’s a hard word to say. So you want to make sure that you are getting in bed at a certain time. You want to make sure, especially that you’re getting up at a certain time and you don’t want to get in bed anxious. So if you have anxiety and you’re experiencing anxiety, you want to make sure that you allow that to be processed through your body. And there’s many different techniques, many different strategies for how to do this, but you don’t want to bring your anxiety into bed because now you’re going to link bed and anxiety, and we want to make sure we separate bed and bedroom and anxiety because that is not a good combo. If you’re bringing your anxiety into bed, then you’re training your mind that bed and bedroom equals anxious, and we want to break that cycle right away.
How you do that is, well, there’s a lot of different techniques, but one of the most effective techniques is actually to not make it wrong that you’re experiencing anxiety. Allow the energy of the anxiousness, however it shows up for you just to be there and accept it, and allow it to be there. This can take some practice, but embodied acceptance is the best way long term to deal with anxiety, not to pretend it’s not there, not to push it away, not to distract ourselves from it. Even doing things so that you don’t experience anxiety can become a barrier to releasing anxiety. So again, we’re not going to get specifically into all these different techniques on today’s training, but one of the things that you can most easily take action on is not go to bed if you have anxiety. So don’t take the anxiety to the bed and bedroom. Do something, either allow it to process through or do a breathing technique or sit with it until it passes, then get into your bed.
Step four is release the tension and the stress. Oftentimes, we don’t realize that we’re carrying around so much unnecessary tension and stress in our bodies. I like to give the example, our bodies are like batteries, and we pick up these negative charges all day long, and if we don’t discharge those charges, we end up taking them into the night and they end up creating hyper arousal. Then the cortisol starts to go, the adrenaline starts to go, and here we go again on the cycle. So releasing tension and stress throughout the day, whether it’s massage, whether it’s exercise, whether it’s meditation, breath work, getting outside, talk therapy, a coaching session, whatever it is, you want to make sure that you’re releasing that pressure valve throughout the day so that when you get towards the end of the night and it’s time to start to wind down, you don’t have all this charge, all this tension in your body. A great practice is to start to become aware of the ways in which your body constricts, that rhymed.
So what I mean by that is notice during the day the thoughts, the people, the environments that create a sense of tightness in your body, and then start to understand where these triggers are coming from. Allow them to process through. Allow yourself to identify what the thinking is that’s creating the tension, and then do something to release it. It’s really that simple. It is that simple, but it does take practice, really, really, really important. So here are the steps. I’ll go through them one more time as we wrap up. Step one is unplug. Step two is eliminate stimulants. Step three is consistent bedtime schedule, and step four is release tension to stress throughout the day. If you found this useful, please like it, comment, give me some feedback on this video if you enjoyed it, or if you know somebody who needs to hear this, get it and share it with them. If you’re new to this channel, welcome, subscribe, and if you’re not new to this channel, thanks for watching and I’ll see you in the next training.