Dealing with Night Time Wake-Ups

(soft electronic music) (clock ticking) (anxious music) (clock ticking) (switch clicks) (Dora sighs) It's 2:00 a.m, you're up and can't sleep, or maybe you haven't even fallen asleep yet. Well, you're not alone. Sleep can feel elusive at times, especially when you're in an unfamiliar place, like a hotel room. (soft electronic music) (chime jangles) But what do you do when you're awake, wishing and hoping for sleep? (Dora snaps fingers) First, don't try to force it. The more you try to force sleep to happen, the less likely it will. Sleep is kind of like the absence of doing, so that means we're just letting go and allowing something very natural to happen. The more you try and make sleep happen, the more you're probably thinking and worrying about the minutes ticking by, which isn't a great recipe for slumber. (clock ticking) (Dora sighs) (soft electronic music) So, try to distract your busy mind. Anxiety triggers your stress response, both in your brain and your body. This can lead to activation of your sympathetic nervous system, your fight-or-flight response, meaning you may experience an increased heart rate and blood pressure, things that usually decrease with sleep. The truth is the mind can only focus on so many things at once. If you find yourself worrying and ruminating, try shifting your focus elsewhere to something that's relaxing and soothing. By shifting your focus to something more relaxing, we're able to calm the arousal centers of the brain so we can drift off to sleep. Personally, I'm a huge fan of deep breathing, which you can also check out in the Headspace app, curated by yours truly. Scientists have shown that slow and controlled deep breathing can help move us from a place of fight or flight to rest and digest. Let's try it right now. Whenever you're ready, closing your eyes, taking a deep breath in through the nose... (Dora inhales) and out through the mouth. (Dora exhales) (light electronic music) See how good that felt? Now, if you're finding it hard to sleep and you're tossing and turning, the science actually shows that it's important for us to get out of bed so that your brain doesn't associate your bed with stress and anxiety. And of course, self-compassion and kindness are tools that we can always use, so a simple hand on the heart and an acknowledgement of the fact that it is difficult to sleep when we travel can help to interrupt those thoughts of worry and frustration. So, again, this is human and something that we'll all experience. However, the more tools that we have in our toolkit to meet these moments, the easier it will be to fall back asleep. Goodnight. Goodnight. (bright music)...