When life gets stressful, I tend to do the wake-up-at- 2-or- 3 -with-a- racing- mind thing, and after doing it for a few nights, it seems to become a habit. I don't have any cures, but I do have some magazine- quality tricks that have worked for me.
1. Keep the temp in your bedroom low enough that it's chilly when you get out of bed. I find that if I wake, and get out of bed long enough to get cold, say to go to the bathroom, when I get back in bed and get warm again it seems to relax me enough to go right back to sleep.
2. Forward bends. I stand up right beside the bed and very slowly go into a comfortable forward bend. Hanging there for a few seconds and feeling the gentle stretch in my spine and hamstrings is soothing. Don't want to get out of bed because your room is too cold? Years ago, someone on vf said to do this lying on your side, under the covers. That works, too!
3. To break the speed of a racing mind, lie on your back and move only your eyes, as if watching a tennis game, as fast as you can, 20 times.
4. When you wake up worrying, or even worse, when you wake up and realize you've actually been asleep and dreaming about your worries, break your focus using one of the above, then tell yourself sternly, that there will be plenty of time to deal with whatever crap has the nerve to disrupt your sleep tomorrow, but that you're in bed now, to sleep. Then turn your thoughts to something innocuous, like what kind of workout rotation you could do for the next 2 weeks.
Hope this helps!
Sandrine
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