When I can’t sleep, I turn around and sleep “upside down” - moving my pillows to where my feet were beforehand, and my feet to where my head was beforehand - and I stick with that for a week or so. It gives me a week or so without insomnia and then wears off, so I have to turn myself back around for the next 7-12 day period.
Admittedly this could just be a me thing, but let’s put our faith in this method and let the power of placebo effect take hold. Boom, minor bouts of sleeplessness are cured.
What are your own examples of this?
You can’t make yourself calm down because our emotions control us, not the other way around - but you can control your breath and your breath can affect your emotions. Box breathing, 4-7-8, or even just deep “flower breaths”. All work great at centering yourself when emotions are getting out of hand
You can control your emotions. It takes effort. For example if I’m in a bad mood I can step back and realize I’m actually hungry and that’s why I’m temporarily negative.
The emotional thing:
It is important to remember feelings are things and they arent given to us. But they belong with us. And while you cant suppress or choose to not have an emotion : You can control your actions, reactions and responses around emotions. Cognitive therapy can help.
The breathing thing:
be careful with it. Some people with mechanical breathing disorders (apnea) might be worse off if messing with breath counting and to just make sure they are taking a full breath or acknowledge breath and swifty move on to something automated like heartbeat or checking in on body parts so as to not mess with the mechanics of the brain for taking a natural breath.
After decades of meditation using breath work it started to make my anxiety worse as i found it made my waking and sleeping apnea way WAY worse. Im pretty sure it is what caused the mechanical issue in the brain to hold a breath or not pull it in for too long until suddenly dizzy.
Takes a lot of time with habit building on letting it go to break this cycle in the brain.
Box breathing makes me feel out of breath, which is not an improvement.
I did it for years and im pretty sure it is the cause of the mechanical apnea i have. Ive cut box breath out of my habits and traded it for body checkins. I think its improving the apnea. Slowly. Once the brain builds a habit of holding breath it is super hard to make it let go.
Yeah, I’m told that it takes practice. I usually just do intentional deep breaths. Works great for kids (IME at least)
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