How To Calm Your Mind And Actually Fall Asleep | Dr. Michael Breus

0:24Dr. Michael Breus:Thank you.

0:30Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

0:41I would argue a lot of sleep-related issues are fear-based, right? So you might have been safe physically, but emotionally, things weren't necessarily where you thought they should be or understood they should be. And that fear can really play a role. Most of sleep issues that I deal with have an anxiety component to them. And when I think about anxiety, it's not like, oh, I'm afraid of this or, you know, I've got a phobia about that. It's there's a level. My heart rate is up. There's stuff going on. It's not it's not working here. And I'm I'm concerned. I'm scared. That will override just about anything.

1:17Really? Yeah. I give you an example. If you were a patient of mine and you walked in and let's say you were taking 10 milligrams of Ambien, I could utter one sentence looking at your medical chart. and i could make that ambient not work i could just turn you and say you have cancer boom you ain't sleeping that night right it overrides the pharmacy right this is the most powerful drug in the world is your brain and if you can figure out how to use that to your advantage now we're talking right so i'm not saying anything against pills there are plenty of people out there who use medications and and by the way there's nothing wrong with that there are certain situations where pharmaceutical intervention makes a ton of sense, right?

1:58If you're a paranoid schizophrenic, you get your Ambien, okay? You know, you've been in a motor vehicle accident, got terrible pain. Hey, you might need a sleeping pill. My goal is to try to get people off of those medications when they're not necessary. Almost everybody was able to sleep without pills when they were younger. So let's see if we can figure out how to get back to some of that. Yeah. And as a psychologist, then what shifts in the mind that causes people not to be able to relax and slow down their thinking. Right. What is it a traumatic event? Is it a, is it a, a reoccurrence of an uncertainty around events?

2:35Is it a constantly thinking about the past, worrying about the future? What ruminates in the mind that causes us not to sleep? All of the above, right? You literally hit almost all of them. So it's traumatic events, but it can be as simple as daily worries, right? I mean, here's the thing. You know, I've heard this many times. is a lot of people, they wake up in the middle of the night and they get monkey mind, right? Now, I'm not sure I have to give a formal definition of monkey mind, but I think we all know a little bit of what that is. It's, are you worried about your kids? Are you worried about your job?

3:05Did you get the right groceries? What's that noise? Letter in the house, right? There's a whole host of things that can be out there. This causes a level of what we call physiological arousal. What it does is it turns on what's called the sympathetic nervous system. So you've got an autonomic nervous system breaks out into two pieces, sympathetic and parasympathetic. This is the fight or flight was just sympathetic. And then the rest and digest is the parasympathetic. We want at least before bed and during sleep, we'd love you to be in the parasympathetic. But when you wake up in the middle of the night, here's the thing that's kind of crazy.

3:40Have you ever woken up in the middle of the night for a good reason? Has anybody run into your room and said, happy birthday in the middle of the night? I don't know. Hey, it's joyful. But not many times. Not many times. believe it or not, our brain is built. When we wake up in the middle of the night, we immediately go to the negative. And that can be problematic. And so you start to think about different things. Sometimes people flip on the TV. I got to be honest with you. You flip on the TV nowadays, it's tragedy all over the place. It's geopolitical stuff. It's financial stuff. It's emotional stuff.

4:11I mean, there's a lot of things that are influencing us on the regular. What I try to explain to people is you need runway to land the plane, right? So you need time before bed that we don't have all of those things going on so that I can lower your heart rate. So here's the crazy part is if everybody gets just one piece of evidence from, from this podcast, you want a heart rate of about 60 or below to enter into a state of unconsciousness, right? If your heart rate's above that, it's going to be tough for us to get you there. Now, don't get me wrong. There There are people out there with high blood pressure who may never get a heart rate below 60.

4:47But I'm just talking about a lowering of the heart rate pretty significantly to allow your body to begin to relax and then allow the sleep process to take over. And if your mind is constantly ruminating on stressful things or it's watching stressful things, it's going to be hard to bring it back down. Exactly.

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6:41Again, have an amazing day, and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.

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