This is an ABC podcast. Oh man, I can't say can. That's such a good day, you need tomorrow. I really need to go sleep.
I must remember going to go to the floor tomorrow. Don't think about sleep. Oh, and I can't forget the kids' talk of you. Don't think about sleep.
At least, he's like, bloody itchy. Is that the baby? I'm not the story again. I wish he would get that looked at.
Oh, sorry I am. How I ever function at work tomorrow. If you've ever struggled to get to sleep or stay asleep, you'll have had some of that stuff rattling around in your head. You know, being kept awake at night by that revolving door of random thoughts.
And then suddenly, you check the clock and it's almost morning. Hi, welcome to Mindfully. I'm Brett Kirk. I used to be the captain of the Sydney Swans.
Please, please, the MZG, I've vanquished captain. And now I'm an assistant coach. Plus, I'm a husband and a dad to five awesome kids and a champion of mindfulness. I've teamed up with Smiling Mind.
They're the experts in mindfulness. And together, we're bringing you Mindfully. Have you ever heard the term, monkey mind? It's a phrase my kids and I use to describe.
When your mind gets a bit out of control, swinging from thought to thought like a cheeky monkey in a tree. Mindfulness can help calm that monkey. It's all about being in the present. It's like feeling the warmth of the shower in your scalp.
Really, really tasting that sweet crunchy apple when you bite into it. You literally stop and smell the flowers. Mindfully, creating a calmer and happier you. We're all looking for a good night's sleep.
In this series of Mindfully, we're talking about how Mindfulness can help you sleep better at night. If you're one of those people, the toss and turn, you're not alone. Up to 40% of our Australians report having trouble sleeping. That's a huge number.
So, what keeps you up at night? I'm overthinking, studying. And then I think just winding down, I wind down for hours at the end of the night. Probably spend time on my phone when I'm winding down just mindless things like that.
As soon as I jump with the bed, just knock out. I'm a bit of an insomnia. At different points in the year, it takes me maybe four to five hours to get to sleep at night. Before exams and stuff, I used to pull all nighters.
It's probably a good nine out of ten. At the moment, it's not great. I get woken up quite a lot, but it's because I have a 14-month-old. So, this is my sleep issue.
There's can't do much about it at the moment. I sleep like a baby. I think the thing that helped me most was not trying to get to sleep. Just thinking about it is okay that I can't sleep and I'll cope the next day if I don't.
It can ruin your whole week because it just starts to cycle mentally of thinking, well, if it took me that long to sleep the night before then it'll take me that long again. You're just absolutely wrecking the day. So, it's highly frustrating, but obviously there are worse things in life. When I can't sleep, it makes me feel exhausted the next day, run down all week.
Yup, cranky. Mindfully. Wow, that's a lot of sleepless nights. Let's find out how mindfulness can help you feel more rested.
Dr Moira Junger is a psychologist from the Sleep Health Foundation. So Moira, what are some of the main reasons people find it hard to get to sleep and stay asleep at night? The main reason if we were to summarize it is that this is too much on their mind. You know, their mind is doing mental gymnastics, thinking about rumination, like all the stuff that has happened, all the anticipation, all the stuff that might happen, all the wadives.
So, it's really under the heading of what we call hyperarounds, also just being too wide and tired, but unable to sleep because there's just too much going on, too much stimulation. And what type of effect can lack of sleep at when someone's happening? Well, everyone will know that listeners will know what it feels like when you don't have enough sleep. And the main things are our memory and our concentration, and a sort of cognitive things, our ability to regulate our mood, not be too grumpy, not be falling asleep, not having a excessive daytime sleep in this where we might just accidentally fall asleep and so it risks of accidents, et cetera.
It's really just that cloudiness and feeling quite flat like you can feel really awful because you're not able to fulfill all the roles that you would want to fulfill at home or in the workplace. And so, do you believe mindfulness can help you sleep better? The research tells us that it can really, it is really important benefits for getting off to sleep quicker and for getting better quality sleep and all those sort of scientific things, but what people report is that they just feel better, and they may not sometimes get even more sleep, in fact, but they're less worried about sleep, they're not seeing it as a disaster. And so, in that way, it just takes the full of the accelerator and takes off the striving, and we know, everyone knows that, anyone listening who has had trouble sleeping, the worst thing you can do is actually try too hard and put too much pressure on the situation, because everything else in life that we have, whether it's our fitness or our performance on a mass exam or anything you can think of, it stands to reason that the more effort you put in and the more you try, you'll get better results.
However, so the unfortunate sleep-reparadox or the awful cruelness of insomnia is that the more you try, the more elusive it becomes. So the mindfulness helps in that we can teach people to be much more accepting and you can't try to sleep, you've got to actually just allow it to come to you. It's hard to tell people not to try. Yeah, it is, but that's where you can redirect your focus to somewhere else, just to say, if you're finding that you just want so much effort into the sleep, you actually just redirect your focus to something else, like, okay, I'll get up, do some reading, do some mindfulness meditation, do something else, even watch some TV, if it's not in bed, and you're not too much bright light in your eyes and those sorts of things, some distraction to actually allow them to actually wait for the sleepiness to come, because the general rule of thumb to it is you shouldn't be in bed, unless you're sleeping tired.
Often what we see happen is everyone gets into bed, a lot of people get into bed at a certain time, because I think it's the right thing to do, and then they might lie there, stop turning and getting in a cycle of frustration. It's really important to actually remember that you need to be sleepy, and tired, and ready for sleep, to even go in any of your bedroom. So not watching what the clock says on your wrist or on your phone, and obviously we're having to talk about that, but that putting devices away at least an hour, you know, I would say an hour or two, but leaving minimum half an hour before bed to actually allow yourself to not have that stimulation in the bright light from the devices, and it's no magical cure, it's not going to happen overnight. I totally agree, because I think when I first got into meditation, given my background, I sort of used to judge myself in terms of everything I did being an athlete.
So I'd sit down and meditate, and I'd be like, oh, I didn't switch off then, or I'll switch off then, and I get really frustrated because I wanted to get an outcome every time, but as time progressed, I realised I had to let go of that. It wasn't actually about the outcome, it was just being in it for that time, and if I had to come out of it early, well, so be it. That's right, which is really hard, isn't it when the outcome is with your late sport, and your performance or sleep is like performance, the ultimate performance, isn't it? We tell ourselves, we need to get it right.
We're going to be really gentle and patient with ourselves. Thanks so much, Moira. I've really, I knew I'd love this conversation, I'm sure we were going for a long time. We could go on forever.
Thanks so much. Mindfully, with Brett Kirk. Dr. Addie Woodham is a clinical psychologist and the CEO of Smiling Mind.
Hi, Addie. Hey, Brett. So we've got four different sleep meditations, can you tell us a bit about them? Yeah, the first one is called Breathe, and so often we forget to breathe, and breathing is actually a really powerful tool to regulate our physiological arousal, and that actually helps us regulate our body ready for sleep.
There's a one called Starry Night, and that is a meditation that's designed to help us learn how to unhook our thinking from excessive thinking and worry and rumination and prepare for sleep. There's one called Connecting, and that's one that's designed to help us cultivate feelings of gratitude, calm and stillness. And so it's designed to actually build positive emotions, which will help us, I suppose, to counteract any of those negative emotions that we might have been thinking if we're worrying about things. So the more you can, the more you can practice cultivating gratitude, the more likely you are to automatically go to the positive rather than the negative.
It's interesting our brain actually has a negativity bias, so we're more likely to think about the negative, but if we can practice focusing on the positive, it actually balances that bias out. And then the fourth one is called Accepting, and accepting can be really hard for some people, but a practice of learning how to accept, and neither be too positive or too negative, but just to accept that things are as they are, can be a really useful practice to help us get rid of those worries and fears or thoughts that are buzzing around our mind and learn to accept that life is as it is, and hopefully that will also help with sleep. So given the sleep meditations, is it something you do lying down at night just before you go to bed, or where else can we use them? So these meditations are designed to be done lying down in bed, and they're a great way to help calm and relax and hopefully fall asleep.
If you're someone that finds that you either have a poor quality sleep or you're waking up later in the night or in the morning, you might actually find that meditation throughout the day is equally beneficial. When we practice during the day, it actually helps us cope with stresses and worries as they arise in the day, and hopefully leave them wherever they are, maybe at work, and not bring them home. Thanks, Daddy. I'm sure everyone out there listening wants a better night's sleep.
So thanks again. Thanks for having me, Brad. Up next in your feed are four meditations specifically designed to help you sleep. If you know someone who finds it hard to go to sleep, make sure you tell them about mindfully.
Look out for the next season of Mindfully, which is all about how you can use mindfulness to get the most out of your relationships. Or catch up on the previous series, which you can use to get the most out of school, work, create a calm home, or perform to your full potential in the sporting arena. If you've got a mate, a colleague, or even an old auntie who you think would benefit from mindfulness, let them know about Mindfully. You can find Mindfully in the ABC Listen App, subscribe in iTunes, or wherever else you get your podcast from.
Mindfully is brought to you by Smiling Mind and ABC Audio Studios. It's produced by me, Alex Lullback, and my bosses are executive producers, Justin Kelly and Rachel Fountain. And I'm Brad Kirk.