For the woman who can't turn your brain off at night

Real talk, let's get you a better night of sleep. If you are like most of the women I work with, you have pretty high expectations for yourself and those are harder to live by if you aren't sleeping well. Patience goes down, stress reactivity is up and even things like memory and mood all suffer. 

Your logical mind already know sleep is important.. but what do you do if your brain won't turn off at night or you wake up anxious in the middle of the night? 

In this episode, yoga therapist and yoga teacher Keri Marino shines light on some simple actions you can take to help with this struggle and sleep better too. 

If you would like to do a bedtime yoga ritual that helps you with this, sign up for Wind Down. It's an instant access yoga ritual that you can do tonight. $27 with one year of access. 

Details here:

https://thenourishedwoman.heymarvelous.com/product/96674

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Next steps ⬇️

Grab a free yoga practice to Come Home to Your Body

-> https://kerimarino.eo.page/comehome

Start a consistent daily yoga practice in Daily Devotion - 21 days of 10 minute yoga practices plus email support to keep you on track

-> https://thenourishedwoman.heymarvelous.com/product/92272/lessons

Curious about working with Keri 1:1 - learn more about her sessions in person and online

-> https://www.kerimarino.com/get-11-support.html

Help spread the word. If this episode resonated, share it with a friend and leave a review on Apple Podcasts.

Connect with Keri or learn more about her offerings at www.KeriMarino.com  and on instagram @the_nourished_woman

A gentle note: The Nourished Woman Podcast is educational and not a substitute for medical or mental health care. Please listen to your body and consult your provider when needed.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 1:44

Let's talk about when you have a hard time turning your brain off at night. I know that there's a whole spectrum. Some of you fall asleep so easily and sleep well through the night. And good on you, I am celebrating your ease around sleep. But the vast majority of my clients tell me that they have some difficulty with sleep, either on the front end or somewhere in the middle of the night. Either you lay down to try to get to sleep and your brain won't turn off and you're restless, or you go to sleep easily and then you experience that waking state and restfulness. And so I want to talk about it because part of being the nourished woman, like part of you and me and us as a collective of women, moving towards this state of feeling more resourced and better supported and healing our nervous systems and feeling like we are our most authentically expressed self, like it can it is undeniable that having a good sleep experience is important. And when we layer in all the different hormonal changes that we as women experience, then it just starts to get complicated because it's all fine and good for me to tell you to do a meditation and the health benefits of that for you, and how that will open up all this space and improve your memory and do all these great things. But if you're then not sleeping well, then we've got some issues, right? Because sleep is that time that we orient and restore on so many different levels. And so I want to talk to you, my women who do struggle with sleep, about some very practical tools that could help. And so the number one thing is to not fight that you are having a hard time turning your brain off, or that your brain or body feel anxious at these times. You fighting against it and making a negative story about it or having frustration will add new layers of judgment and shame or guilt or frustration on top. And so the first thing that we're gonna do is not judge the experience. One of my teachers, Judith Hansen Lassiter, says that when we get to those times when we're finally still and quiet, like at the beginning of the night, if you suddenly realize that your brain is going 900 miles a minute and it's having a hard time slowing down or you're feeling anxious, that in reality you've probably been feeling that a great deal of the time. It's just that you've been busy enough and distracted enough that maybe you did not notice, that you didn't have the bandwidth and capacity to actually notice it then. And so when we eliminate all the stimulation and you're laying down in your bed, then suddenly, oh my goodness, there it is. And a lot of us also may not have the best sleep hygiene. Or I have clients that are like obsessive about your sleep hygiene and obsessive about monitoring the quality of your sleep. And so sometimes we're not having good sleep hygiene and then expecting good outcomes. So exposing ourselves to a lot of blue light from screens, for example, or consuming coffee late in the day and then wondering why we can't sleep. Or you're kind of on the other end where you're like really hyper-fixated on it. You're maybe, dare I say, a little bit controlling and perfection-oriented when it comes to your sleep hygiene. And then you can get frustrated and upset if it doesn't pan out. And so we're really going to take away the emotional charge and the freedom to just judge ruthlessly and to make it a problem. And then what I want you to do is to consider creating little micro rituals throughout the day that actually are going to help you get where you want to be whenever you're ready to go to sleep. And so think of these as little pauses or micro-dosing your yoga practice. And so we can like microdose, like teeny teeny yoga practice of like one minute of noticing where your attention is going, one minute of tuning into your body, one minute of doing a quiet meditation with yourself. But it could also be like shorter practices that you do, like 15 minutes of an asana practice or a pranayama practice or meditation that just becomes woven into the fabric of your day. And I particularly love the idea of you doing some small, tiny practices during the day and then a committed bedtime yoga ritual that really sets the tone. And it's going to take your nervous system from an upregulated place into a downregulated place and help you transition into sleep. And so a preferred way for you to do that would be for you to move your body some and to help release stress and to unwind tension and to get in touch with your body. So you're getting out of your head and into your body. And then to do some kind of a journaling practice that really helps you to kind of process through the day. And then a meditation that you can do from bed that really just allows you to soothe your nervous system, to tune in, to make that transition from awake and light to sleep and dark. And if this speaks to you and you're like, girl, yes, I want that. Good news, I made it for you. It's called Unwind. Excuse me, I misspoke. It's called Wind Down. And it is a bedtime yoga ritual made for women who can't turn your brain off. And so it gives you a 15 or 30 minute practice, like physical practice that you would do that incorporates movement and relaxation. Then you have journaling prompts that will literally talk you through and get your brain to kind of compartmentalize and process the day and move towards sleep. And then it has two different bedtime meditations. And so one is your like OG go-to bedtime meditation. I've been doing this personally for years. I love this meditation and I'm giving you my exact preferred one. And then another one is the 2 a.m. meditations, or maybe it's 3 a.m. or 4 a.m. It's that meditation that you can do when you wake up in the middle of the night and you want to go back to sleep and your body is in sort of a vigilant state, right? Like we all know that time where it's you wake up and maybe you're thinking of all the work things you didn't get done or the tasks that need to be done, and your brain is trying to remind you of that in the middle of the night. Or maybe you wake up and your body is just feeling anxious. And so Wind Down is a digital access product that you can buy. It's $27. You can buy it and get started today. And if you want more ongoing yoga practices, like I was talking about, the ones that you can do during the day, that's what we do inside of my other practice with me options, like the Nourished Woman Sanctuary, or even in my 21-day course daily devotion. And so you could bundle those things together if you wanted to. But here's the thing, my love sleep matters. We don't need to stress about it. We do want to create the right mindset and the right rituals and the right routines that actually help you get where you want to be. And that's not by accident, but it's also not by force.