마음이 먼저 깨어 있을 때When Your Mind Is Still Awake

1. A runway before bed

A plane doesn’t drop straight from cruising altitude onto the runway. It descends gradually. Your nervous system works in a similar way. If you go to bed at full working speed, part of you is still in the air.

Try setting aside 30 to 60 minutes before bed as a buffer zone.

• Finish work, email, difficult conversations, and the news before it starts.
• Dim the lights and lower screen brightness.
• Do things that slow you down: a shower, stretching, a light book, a cup of caffeine-free tea.
• Doing things in roughly the same order each night turns the routine itself into a signal that it’s time to come down.

On busy nights, even 15 minutes counts.

2. Worry earlier in the evening

Worries you put off during a busy day tend to show up all at once in a quiet bed. If that happens to you, give your worries a time slot other than bedtime (Carney & Waters, 2006).

1. Pick 10 to 15 minutes in the early evening, not right before bed.
2. Split a page in half. Write your worries on the left.
3. On the right, write one small next step for each, like “call tomorrow morning.” If there’s nothing to do yet, write “nothing I can do right now.”
4. Fold the page and leave it somewhere away from your bed.

If the same worry comes back at night, tell it briefly: “That’s on the page.”

3. Stepping back from thoughts

Pushing thoughts away (“stop thinking about it”) often makes them come back louder. Instead of fighting them, you can put a little distance between you and them. In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), this is called defusion.

• Name it: instead of “Tomorrow’s going to be a disaster,” try “I’m having the thought that tomorrow’s going to be a disaster.”
• Let it float by: picture leaves drifting down a stream, and place each thought on a leaf as it comes. When the same thought returns, place it on another leaf.
• Give it a title: name the thoughts that show up often. “Ah, the ‘tomorrow’s meeting’ story again.”

The aim is for your body to rest even while thoughts are still there.

Research on adding ACT to insomnia treatment is still limited, so at PADO we keep standard CBT-I at the center and add these defusion skills on top.

4. Letting go of trying to sleep

Sleep is one of the few things that moves further away the harder you try (Part 01). So try changing your goal in bed from “fall asleep” to “be comfortable.”

• Resting comfortably for a short while is fine. If you’re lying awake for a long time or getting frustrated, get up, as agreed in Part 03.
• To stop doing the “if I fall asleep now I’ll get…” math, start by turning the clock so you can’t see it from bed.

5. Calming from the body up

Some nights it’s easier to start with the body than with thoughts.

• Longer exhales: breathe out for about twice as long as you breathe in. The count doesn’t need to be exact.
• Release muscle tension: working from your feet up to your shoulders, tense one area for about 5 to 10 seconds, then release and notice the looseness for about 15 to 30 seconds. This is called progressive muscle relaxation. Skip any area that’s painful or injured.
• Rest on one sensation: the weight of the blanket, the temperature of the pillow. Let your attention settle on one thing you can feel right now.

Discreet Grounding · Micro Break · Window of Tolerance

If you’ve experienced trauma, focusing on your body can feel more unsettling than calming. If so, it may help to keep your eyes open and rest your attention on things outside you, like looking at objects in the room one by one. It’s okay to stop if it doesn’t feel right.

6. About the evidence

American Academy of Sleep Medicine guidelines give relaxation therapy a conditional recommendation as a stand-alone approach (Edinger et al., 2021). Writing down worries and next steps in the early evening has been shown to reduce pre-sleep mental arousal (Carney & Waters, 2006), though results on sleep itself have varied across studies.