125. How To Help Your Mind Stop Racing At Bedtime

This episode is for any mom who lies in bed overthinking, worrying, planning, replaying, or feeling unable to “turn off.” We talk about   why racing thoughts happen, especially for moms, and why this doesn’t mean something is wrong with you. It’s actually your brain trying to protect the people and responsibilities you love most. I share the science behind nighttime overthinking and how stress and sleep affect each other. You are not broken—you’re overwhelmed, and today I give you a compassionate path back to calm.

If you'd like to get the show notes for this episode, head to:

 https://leighgermann.com

Transcript

For every mom who lies in bed with a tired body and a busy mind, I've got you. Today I'm going to show you why your brain does this and share five gentle science-backed ways to finally quiet your mind so you can go to sleep.

This is Leadership Parenting: How to Help Your Mind Stop Racing at Bedtime.

Did you know that resilience is the key to confidence and joy? As moms, it's what we want for our kids, but it's also what we need for ourselves. My name is Leigh Germann. I'm a therapist and I'm a mom. Join me as we explore the skills you need to know to be confident and joyful. Then get ready to teach these skills to your kids. This is Leadership Parenting, where you learn how to lead your family by showing them the way.

Hello, friends, and welcome back to the Leadership Parenting Podcast. This is the place where we are discovering all things resilience, especially applied to mamas. This is my passion, kind of the place where my heart lives and my time is spent, and all of my efforts are focused on teaching moms how to feel better in their lives.

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That just as she finally gets into bed and ready to kind of shut down her body and her brain so she could get some sleep, she finally gets in bed and closes her eyes, and her brain just turns on. Like someone flipped a switch. And the room is dark, the house is quiet, but inside her head, it feels filled with a thousand voices and unfinished thoughts and conversations.

And I just think it's a little bit universal for us. Um, I do talk with a few moms that say when they put their head on their pillow, they go right to sleep. I think I'm a little envious of that. Um, most people I know would be envious of that, but it's not uncommon, even for our best sleepers, to have times where their mind is racing right at the time when they're supposed to go to sleep, where we start replaying our conversations, things we said, things we shouldn't have said, where we plan tomorrow, we worry about next week, we think about our kids, our marriage, our work, our health, the state of everything. And the harder we try to shut it off, the louder it gets. Do you notice that?

If that's you, if that's ever happened to you, I just want you to know that there are more people that experience this than don't. So nothing is wrong with you. You're not broken, you're not bad at relaxing. I hear that sometimes. And you're definitely not just too much. Your life isn't too much, your brain isn't broken. What's actually happening is very common. And today I want to show you why your brain does this and give you a few tools to help you let it quiet down. Not through forcing it, but through understanding it, kind of going in through the back door, knowing how to work with yourself.

I think we should start out with the idea or the concept that your brain is not trying to sabotage you. It's really trying to protect you. Always, always. That's going to be our default. When you have anything that you're struggling with, I want you to say, okay, wait, I know my brain is probably trying to protect me. Just default to that because it's going to put you on the right track. Instead of feeling defective or like betrayed by yourself, it's going to help you refocus to look at this in a way that is compatible or collaborative with your brain and your body.

That's so important we do this, you guys, because it will help us lower our stress response. I don't know why our default is to kind of object and push back against ourselves. Negativity bias. I blame everything on that. We want to do the opposite because when we're under stress, and let's be honest, motherhood is almost chronic ongoing stress. The brain shifts into anticipation mode. It's constantly trying to predict and prevent and plan and solve and prepare. It's asking, what could go wrong? What did I miss? What still needs to be handled?

This is the same system that kept us alive for eons of time when there were actual threats in our environment. But now instead of wild animals, we have homework and relationships and schedules and money and expectations and emotions and all the responsibilities we carry. That's our new danger that we face every day. And our brain doesn't just clock out because the day is over. In fact, when our environment finally gets quiet, that's often when our brain feels the most freedom to do this work.

Here's what some research shows: a study out of the University of Strasbourg found that racing thoughts, especially at bedtime, not just worry or rumination, but a rapid-fire stream of thinking that was directly associated with how difficult of a time we have sleeping, even insomnia, that these racing thoughts actually increase in the evening and at bedtime. Especially they kind of tend to pile on for people that struggle to fall asleep.

And moms, I think, are one of the highest risk groups for this, not because something's wrong with our brains, but because our brains carry an enormous amount of invisible responsibility or that mental load. Our maternal stress and sleep research shows that we kind of have two patterns. Moms with shorter, more disrupted sleep have higher levels of stress. And moms with higher stress take longer to fall asleep and also feel like they don't sleep as well. So it's this cycle. Stress disrupts sleep, and disrupted sleep makes us more vulnerable to stress.

Thank you very much for all this research that probably tells us things we already know. But it is helpful to get validated. So when you can't sleep, it's not because you're failing. I think that's what I take from this research. I take number one, we're not alone. Number two, there's not anything seriously wrong with us. This is a byproduct or a symptom of the kinds of stress that we feel, especially as moms, because our brain is working overtime, especially to protect the people that we love.

And here's how I want to wrap all of that up with what I've learned. We cannot stop this process by fighting it. And I know that feels intuitive to us. We want to stop the thoughts. We want to fight against this pattern. But what I've discovered over years of working with this is that we calm it. We don't stop it. We calm it by redirecting it. Like most things, the things we fight against actually tend to increase. The feeling of being more concerned about it rather than less concerned about it makes it bigger in our lives. So that's number one.

The second thing we need to do is put a plan together that we are in charge of that starts to disrupt the stress and all the byproducts that come from that. And I'd like to mention something we almost never do. Maybe you do, and I'm really proud of you if you do this, but most of us don't do this. It's one of the biggest reasons our brains still race when we hit the pillow. We race to bed.

Think about it. We're finishing up the kitchen, we respond to one last email, we're watching a show even, maybe we're finishing something up laundry-wise or in the house. We're in motion. Your body is doing, your brain is thinking and processing. And then we look at the clock and we screech to a halt, get into bed, and expect our system to just stop and go to sleep. But that's not how bodies work. We can't go from 100 to zero and expect our nervous system to cooperate.

We need a buffer zone, a little space between the doing and the sleeping. And I often call this bridge time, the space where your nervous system finally gets to catch up to where your body is in being tired and where it's going to being in bed and trying to get to sleep. This is why bedtime routines are so important. This probably isn't new information. Your brain loves to know what's coming, it doesn't like surprises. Routines help us have that thing that our brain can expect. And so you need a routine, not a complicated one, just something that signals to your body that you're switching gears now.

For me, it's taking a bath or a shower every time before I go to bed. And it does two things. First, it's kind of a ritual. It tells my body, this is what I do, this is the transition, my day is ending. Second, and this is actually backed by some research, a systematic review of sleep studies found that taking a warm bath or a warm shower, scheduled one to two hours before bedtime for as little as even 10 minutes was associated with improved sleep quality and helps people fall asleep significantly faster.

That's because the warm water warms your body temperature up. And then when you get out and start to cool off, that temperature shift triggers your body's natural sleep response. Your core body temperature is dropped as you prepare for sleep. And a warm bath or a shower helps that happen more efficiently.

Now we kind of know that with our kids, don't we? It's a trigger for our children, both mentally and physically, to get sleepy, to let the body know it's time for sleep. So that could be one thing that you use, but it's not the only thing. Your buffer zone could be doing some gentle stretches or reading something calming, not on your phone, right? In a magazine or a book, journaling for a few minutes, praying, reading some scripture, even stepping outside and looking at the stars.

The point is, give yourself a little runway. Don't expect your mind to shut off the second your head hits the pillow after you've been in motion all day. We're trying to create space so your brain will know what's coming and will be prepared to get you in that next state, your next job for your brain and body to do.

Now, once you have a buffer zone that you've created, if you head to bed and your mind is still racing, you don't feel relaxed. Here are a couple of tools that you can use.

Remember, we're not going to stop the thoughts or try to stop the thoughts. We're going to do something when this happens.

Tool number one, I call it the brain dump. I love to keep a notebook next to my bed. I know we can also do your phone, but we're really trying to avoid screens at bedtime. And do you know why that is? That's because the light from your phone or your house, anything that gives you light in your eye, triggers your pineal gland. And that pineal gland is in charge of helping your body know when it's time to be awake and when it's time to sleep. So I prefer you to keep a notebook, something that doesn't put that light right in your eyes and trigger that little gland to keep you awake.

But when you have something by your bed and your mind starts spinning, write it down. The to-dos that you feel you're trying to not to forget, the worries, the reminders, the random thoughts that are going through your head. When you make those thoughts be accountable, meaning you're gonna grab them and you're gonna write them down, a really interesting thing happens.

The important ones come to the surface. The unimportant ones, you kind of do this immediate sorting through. You're like, well, I'm not gonna write that down. That isn't really that important. And look what you just did. You tagged that thought as not needing your attention. I love that. So we're not trying to organize this list, we're not trying to judge it. I just want you to dump what's going on in your head out on that piece of paper.

And this tells your brain, I see you and I don't have to carry this all night. And when you're done, I want you to close the notebook and say, thank you. I'm gonna handle this tomorrow. This gives your mind permission to rest.

Okay, tool number two, we're gonna shift from your thoughts to your body. Most people try to solve those thoughts with more thinking. And it's like trying to put out a fire by adding oxygen. Instead, I want you to shift from thinking to your body sensations and ask yourself, where is the stress that I'm feeling right now living in my body?

Now you might not think that you have any stress, and that would be awesome if you didn't. But my sense is if your brain is spinning on things, your body is starting to get activated. And you might not call it stress, you might just feel like it's um an attention that your body is paying, a tenseness, because those thoughts make your body want to act.

So I want you to put your focus on where this is occurring in your body. Is it in your chest? Is it in your jaw? Is it in your stomach, in your shoulders, and put your hand there and breathe into that place. Notice the temperature of your skin, the rise and fall of your chest, the feel of the sheets beneath you in your bed. You don't have to change this, just notice it and just breathe with it.

This is activating your parasympathetic nervous system. Remember, that's the other side of your fight or flight system, the part of you that calms you, and your brain will start then to follow your body.

Tool number three, I call it the tomorrow bridge. A spinning mind is usually looking for a plan. So give it a little gentle plan. Choose one tiny step for the next day. I'll make that phone call tomorrow at 10. I'll write that email after breakfast. I'll ask for help with that if it's still bothering me. Even something as simple as I'll put this paper on my kitchen table so I won't forget. It doesn't have to solve everything, just one step, and then say that's enough for today.

This gives your brain closure. Do you notice how you're kind of talking to your brain like it's a little child? That's because our brain often acts like a little child. So we want to be the adult that's guiding it, helping it know what to do with all of this.

Tool number four, the nervous system whisper. When your brain is in fear mode, it needs reassurance, not logic. Remember, you might not actually feel fear, but your body interprets all that stress, all those things that you have to get done when it's time to shut down and go to sleep, interprets that as something being wrong and as a threat. So one thing you can do is just speak to yourself.

Once again, we're talking to our brain and body, right? Right now, in this moment, I'm safe enough. For me, that's even a little bit too long. I like to just say, I'm safe. And I say it very gently, over and over, as I take a deep breath and I focus on my body relaxing.

We're not trying to convince ourselves that everything is perfect. We're just reminding our body that in this moment, you are safe. You're okay. And that is very, very much the truth.

Tool number five, we're gonna create space from those thoughts. Instead of, I've got to remember to pick the kids up early tomorrow, or else they're gonna miss their dentist appointment, or I'm gonna mess this up, or I can't handle this, or even some of those self-critical thoughts that come. I want you to put a little space between all of those thoughts to I'm having the thought that I'm gonna mess this up, I'm having the thought that I'll forget to pick the kids up.

This allows you to step into that thought process as the adult thinker and recognize that you are simply having a lot of thoughts. And none of them get to boss you around right now. You're witnessing them, you're speaking them out loud, and you're really identifying that you are not your thoughts.

This is one of our core resilient concepts. You'll hear me talk about it over and over and over again because it has so many applications. And this is another one that we can use it here when we're having those racing thoughts.

So, those are five tools that you could use, along with this suggestion to have a buffer time before you head to bed. So, if your brain has been loud lately, I want you to hear this one more time. It's not broken, it's just tired. It's a little overworked from the day, it's caring deeply about you and trying to protect you. It needs gentleness, not guilt, not blame, not force.

I always want you to think of yourself and any issue that you're dealing with, any struggle that you're dealing with. I want you to think of it in terms of being gentle, of being compassionate, of being loving to yourself.

And what we're looking to do is just give ourselves a little fighting chance to let our bodies relax and get some sleep. Because we all know that we need sleep. It's so good for us. It's not a luxury. It's foundational to how we show up for ourselves and our children.

One thing that has helped me so much is setting an earlier bedtime. I'm not talking about 7 p.m. when your kids go to bed, but earlier than 11. Start your bedtime process a little bit earlier. One thing that that does for you is it gives you a long runway. It takes off that pressure. If you do have some thoughts that are taking a while to settle down in your mind, you don't have that extra thought of, oh my gosh, it's so late, I have to get to sleep.

You can actually have that thought of, I've got plenty of time. I have enough time to try one or two of these tools and know that I've got a long runway before I'm feeling like I'm cutting my sleep short.

You guys, we are looking for everything we can possibly do to give ourselves room and grace and space to be successful at this. So tonight, choose just one of these tools to try. Maybe start with the buffer zone, give yourselves that 10 or 15 minutes of bridge time before bed, maybe move your bedtime back just a tad bit earlier so it's a little more roomy for you.

And if you feel like those thoughts are racing, pick just one thing to try. One change is enough. I want you to know that you are doing better than you think in all areas of your life. Every time I meet with a woman and she's so self-critical, she's so hard on herself. And when we sit down and we actually look at her life and what she's doing, we always feel better.

I wish I could lend you my kind of second viewpoint, my second set of eyes on your life so that you would feel encouraged. Please feel that encouragement from me right now. I'm sending you a big hug, lots of love as you take care of yourself and gentle yourself into the times where you get to rest.

I believe in you. You are not alone in doing this great sacred work of being a mom. I will talk to you all next week. Take care.

You can always find me on Instagram at LeighGermann or on my website at leighgermann.com.

The Leadership Parenting Podcast is for general information purposes only. It is not therapy and should not take the place of meeting with a qualified mental health professional. The information on this podcast is not intended to diagnose or treat any condition, illness, or disease. It's also not intended to be legal, medical, or therapeutic advice. Please consult your doctor or mental health professional for your individual circumstances.

Thanks again and take care.