A Gratitude Practice that Can Help You Fall Asleep Faster
Health and wellness professionals, including myself, often urge their clients and patients to sleep more, because sleep is integral to our mental and physical well-being, yet we seldom get enough. It also supports our emotional and intellectual wellness by putting our minds and bodies into a state in which we can integrate new ideas and lessons we’ve learned recently. It has been my experience that rest also reinforces my occupational wellness because when I am rested I find myself more easily inspired, and able to lean into curiosity, which in turn gives rise to new work. We know that sleep is good for us, we read articles like this one offering information on how to sleep more, and yet according to the CDC a third of US adults report getting less than the recommended amount of sleep. And while some folks are not sleeping enough because they are choosing to forgo sleep for a variety of reasons, many others would be happy to sleep more but struggle with insomnia and haven’t found a supportive and easy practice that aligns with what they want to feel, what they want to do, and what they are capable of doing at present.
The Individual and Societal Consequences of Not Enough Sleep
Lack of sleep can lead to increased risk of heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, depression, and accidents such as motor vehicle accidents. And that’s not all — when a third of our nation is experiencing a lack of sleep it can have a societal affect beyond our public health as well. Tish Harrison Warren, in her opinion piece, The Case for ‘Hibernating’ During Winter, notes that:
[A lack of sleep] also makes us angrier, more unhappy and less capable of creative, compassionate and intelligent thought. America’s sleeplessness is likely making outrage culture, political polarization and general incivility worse.
Getting enough sleep isn’t just better for you, it is better for the collective! And as a fan of burrowing under the covers and getting my Zs in, I am all about this sort of collective care—in theory. There is one problem that I face time and again: I have found that the more stressful periods of my life when I (and the people with whom I engage) would benefit from my getting more rest, are also the same periods during which I struggle with insomnia. Some folks don’t get enough sleep because they don’t make space for it, but there are also quite a few folks like me — who would sleep more if they could!
A Gratitude Practice To Support Falling and Staying Asleep
As a trauma practitioner I am familiar with people’s sleep struggles because individuals with trauma disorders frequently have trouble falling and staying asleep. The exhaustion folks experience from sleep troubles can lead to a negative cycle of sleeplessness exacerbating trauma symptoms, which then make it even harder to fall sleep. Breaking this cycle is often a hard-earned and important part of recovery.
Over the years I have amassed quite a few techniques to support sleep hygiene. These practices include: no screens after 8:30, keeping a consistent bedtime ritual, taking lavender baths, drinking less coffee in general and no coffee after 12 pm, drinking valerian root tea at bedtime, doing acupressure on myself, getting acupuncture, doing yoga nidra in bed, applying reiki self-care, and keeping a gratitude journal. (I don’t do these all at once, I pick and choose what feels good and doable during each stretch of insomnia.)
The latter practice, keeping a gratitude journal, was a simple and powerful one that I used in 2015 while I was trying to recover from post-traumatic stress disorder and a subsequent bout of crippling sciatica. My weightlifting coach had suggested gratitude journaling one day when I was lamenting my insomnia. He said, “write down three things you are grateful for each day before bed. You can keep it simple.” I thought gratitude journaling sounded like a ridiculous idea because I was so miserable that gratitude felt almost inaccessible, and I was so tired that considering doing anything before bed seemed like opting into an act of mild self-torment. Even so, because he stressed that I could keep it simple, I thought it might (maybe, possibly) be doable when most things felt too hard to try; so I gave it a whirl.
I bought an orange Rhodia notebook that I really liked and kept it with a pen on my nightstand. Having a notebook I liked made me more willing to engage with it, and keeping it on hand with a pen made it easier to do. Every night for months, right before I turned the lights out, I would date a page and then list three things I was grateful for. Some nights I grumbled and others I was keen to write my list, but regardless of my mood, I was consistent. The things I was listing were seldom grand. My body constantly hurt, and I was too scared of the world around me to feel grateful for much. So I kept it simple as instructed by my coach, and granting myself permission to make it easy helped me stick with it. Not only did I often write down ordinary things, many times I even repeated items day to day.
One day might look like:
a phone call with Kate
hot coffee
my cats
And the next:
I did some goblet squats without a back spasm today
hot coffee
my friend Crystal
And the practice did seem to help. In thinking about things I was truly grateful for and calling them to mind, I was cultivating a grateful mood for a moment. That combined with regular baths and a consistent bedtime seemed to correlate with me falling asleep with greater ease. And you don’t just have to settle for my own anecdotal evidence; Grateful thinking and grateful moods have been found to help people sleep better and longer. In one study, people keeping a gratitude journal slept on average 30 minutes more per night, woke up feeling more refreshed, and had an easier time staying awake during the day compared to those who didn’t practice gratitude.
If you are considering trying gratitude journaling, please know that there is no one way or best way to keep a gratitude journal. If you do an online search of the practice, you will find all sorts of products and prompts. I am of the opinion that for a wellness practice to really serve you, it must align with what you want to feel, what you want to do, and what you are capable of doing at present. I wanted to feel a little grateful so that maybe I could sleep more and I was capable of buying a pretty notebook and keeping a succinct daily list of ordinary things that felt extraordinarily special to me. Simply listing them was enough for me to feel grateful. I made it easy for myself to do, which made it a sticky habit, and despite being something else to do before bed, the few minutes it took, afforded me many more minutes of much needed sleep.