Warning: this is one of my “ramblers”, but I will try my best to get To My Point.
Does your brain tend to switch on as soon as you lay down to go to sleep? Mine does. I wondered why I can’t have all these motivating/planning/brainstorming thoughts in the morning, when I’m ready to enact them. Instead of fighting it, I decided to devote about 10/15 minutes to embrace it and jot it all down.
Before embracing it, I tried to “meditate” or gather my thoughts in the morning. Pre-coffee, my brain wouldn’t have anything to do with this. Instead, I now keep a classic college-ruled notebook and pen on my nightstand, easy to grab.
In bed, I write down my ideas for branding my Twitch stream, what outfit I really feel like wearing to work tomorrow, what food I want to prep and take with me to the office. Having it put down on paper clears it from my mind and allows me to get to sleep much easier instead leaving those thoughts bouncing around my head energetically, yelling at them to “Keep it down, I’m trying to sleep!”
Soon, I was also adding emotional tidbits to the journal: how I felt about my work day, what I was thankful I had or had happened, internal struggles or turmoil. I found this had the same effect as my planning thoughts. Written down, somehow it wasn’t quite my problem anymore. I had shared it with the notebook, and could let the college-ruled lines deal with it for a little bit. I could come back to it later. This freed my brain for the very important task of falling asleep.
Obviously, my problems were still mine, no matter how much I wrote down or willed the journal to take them from me. But now I could get some sleep. Sleep is SO important. Ever been told you need to restart your computer? Sleep is like a restart for our brain.
I almost felt as if I were Dumbledore, extracting my memories and dumping them into the pensieve so I could get some rest and come back to them later with a more objective perspective.
I know it sounds cliché, but try letting a notebook deal with your thoughts while you sleep. Who knows, maybe you’ll find a new perspective or solution the next day. Probably not written back to you as if Tom Riddle is answering, but in the words you wrote yourself.
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