Can’t Sleep? Racing Thoughts, Stress, and the “Next Step” Method to Regain Control

This episode was recorded at midnight.

Unable to sleep, with a racing mind, tense body, and a wave of anger rising, James chose not to ignore what he was feeling. Instead, he picked up the microphone and turned a moment of frustration into a moment of reflection.

In this raw and honest solo episode, James explores what happens when life throws setbacks your way — slipping habits, unexpected problems, and the feeling of being overwhelmed by too much at once. He shares how he caught himself spiralling and made a conscious choice to respond differently rather than fall back into old patterns.

This conversation is about the power of the next step. Not fixing everything at once. Not judging yourself for setbacks. But choosing one small, healthier action in the moment — whether that’s pausing, breathing, listening to your body, or creating space for clarity.

James also talks about the importance of prioritising focus, giving emotions a voice instead of pushing them away, learning to truly relax, and becoming your own observer so you can notice when you’re heading off track.

If you’ve been feeling stuck, frustrated, or overwhelmed, this episode is a reminder that growth doesn’t come from perfection — it comes from awareness and choice.

You always have a next step.

Transcript

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I don't usually record at midnight, but tonight I couldn't sleep. My mind was racing. My body was tense, and underneath it all, I realized I was angry. Angry at setbacks. Angry at slipping habits. Angry at feeling stuck for a moment. So rather than ignore it. I listen to it. In this episode, I talk about what happens when life throws challenges at you, and how small choices can stop a spiral before it begins. This episode is about how I caught myself spiraling and how I chose the next step instead. Welcome to You Matter. I matter, a transformational podcast about reconnecting with what truly matters. I'm your host James, and each week is an opportunity to explore a little bit deeper who you really are with amazing guests. We explore topics such as purpose, connection, commitment, and what it really means to live more consciously. If you've been feeling disconnected from yourself, from others, or from life, you are in the right place. Join us on new matter. I matter. Now. Let's begin. I am recording this podcast on. Thursday evening, midnight, which is very unlike me to record a podcast or do any work at this time of the night. And the reason I'm doing this is because I can't sleep and I can't sleep because my head is racing. My body is red hot. I'm literally. Tossing and turning in bed, and I feel like I need to get out my system now. There's so many India innuendos there in that what I just said, but the reason I'm recording this is because. My mind's just racing with, there's a few things happened and the first thing that's happened is I've had this ongoing issue with my car. In an ideal world, if I had known three years ago what was gonna happen with my car, the amount of things going wrong, I would've got rid of it then and there, but I haven't, and I keep on. Fixing the issues and then it's, I keep the car and then it has another issue and it's got a light and I've just got to the end of my tether with it and it's just so frustrating that, I've gotta replace something else on this car. There's that going on. And then also. There's a few new habits which I am starting to create in my life. Really some healthy habits such as getting up in the early in the morning, getting work done. There's other ones are doing the, my morning, my devotional practice every day. And because of the car and the frustration, I've slipped on a few habits. Oh, actually one was Healthy Ute and the other Side a pizza and all that kind of stuff, which isn't bad. I know that it isn't bad, but it's just that slip up. And there's other ones that I've slipped up on that's just so frustrating. There's a few other things as well, and I just feel, I've just noticed when I was lying in bed trying to sleep, that I just feel angry. I feel so angry. So what I did. Was I allow myself to speak out the anger, to allow myself to go into my body, connect to where my anger is, and just allow that anger to say what it wanted to say and what it wanted to say was that. I've come so far and allowing these things to stop me, to get me angry, to get me frustrated is not unacceptable, but I have a choice I can carry on in what I was doing. And allow myself to slip back into my old ways, which I have done in the past, or I can allow myself to choose new, healthier ways of dealing with that. And I suppose one of the, one of the ways for me this evening was just to get up and record this conversation. We all have. Challenges in their life. I think everybody has challenges in their life, some bigger than others. We all have things which go wrong. We all have habits, new habits that we wanna create or are creating, and we have setbacks, and they're all okay. Having setbacks, having challenges. It's all good for us because it helps us to grow, but. It's the idea, the choice. It's having a choice to, I can choose how I respond to this, get frustrated. I can choose whether I go and eat rubbish food, slipped back into watching porn and other things. And all it requires doing is the next step. All it requires is to work on what's the next step to some, and there's sometimes it's all almost like during drawing this, during the line in the sand, she said, you know what, I'm not gonna do that. I'm gonna choose to do something a bit more healthy. I'm going to record a podcast. I'm going to go and have a drink of water. I'm gonna get up and meditate for five, 10 minutes. Or it might be, I wanna go and have a chat to a friend. I allow myself to prevent that anger in a healthy way. I'm going to, perhaps I was going to, forget about the car for now'cause there's nothing I can do about it. And focus on something else. And this is what I wanted. This is what I wanted to get across. Really what I wanted to get across was the idea that we have challenges, and then with ev, with each challenge, all we have to do with each challenge is to take the next step. Like today. Today I caught myself. I were, I had this idea, I've got, I'm trying to sort out my website. I'm trying to sort out some coaching webpage for it. And I had this idea of creating these experiences, these immersions because I was doing anyway, but I thought, you know what? I can create an eight immersive series so we can have eight full days throughout the year. There could all be one day events and my mind was racing and I was like yeah, let's do this. And I just caught myself just because I was trying to think of trying to do too much too soon. I started to get overwhelmed and because I was just starting to get a little bit overwhelmed, I actually, I real I might lose to realize, which then allowed me to just to take a deep breath. Take a deep breath, and ask myself, what can I do now? And this allowed me to change from having this, trying to think of what can I do with all this kind of stuff. Yes. And getting overwhelmed, it allowed me to just create small plan of the next couple of steps I can take. And at the same time, once I'd done that, I did a small section of my book. And that was it. I went and got some lunch. But quite often we have we have what's called a to-do list. We have 30 things on our list to get done that day, and it's no wonder we get overwhelmed in this fast paced living. I know from personal experience from myself that. When I work like 5, 6, 7, 8 hours continually, I get within probably an hour and a half, two hours without having a break. I get, my mind gets boggled. I start fearing off what I'm doing. I lose focus. So when we have these kind of moments, what can we do? The first thing you can do, which I do, is to prioritize your day, especially the tasks which require a lot of energy in the time that you are more productive. So like I know that. In the morning. That is when I'm most productive throughout a day. So I usually get up when I'm working on a business day. It's get up at six, do my morning routine till about seven, seven till nine. I usually do business work, if not my other client. Then I go and do CrossFit, then I come back and do another couple of hours. And then by that time it's lunch. And in the afternoon when I'm a bit more tired, I do a bit more of the easier tasks and anything that I wanna do personally, like perhaps go for a walk or go and do food shopping and. By doing this, it allows me to prioritize the harder tasks when I'm more productive. So I find it easier to focus, find it easier to get tasks done and I don't know why, but this last half hour I've sent an email, I've wrote a section for the book, I've recorded a podcast, I've. Done a bit of research on electric cars. There's four things I've done in about a time period of half an hour, which that's for me that is bloody productive. That is. The next thing that I do is to figure out how do I focus regards to time? So I know that doing two or three hours of work continually does not work for me, but I know that if I do an hour. Then I can have that hour of focus time. Then I'll have 15, 20, 30 minutes off, and then I'll come back for another hour. So I will make sure that I prioritize this time so that I can focus more on the things and tasks that I want. This means that the next step. That I need to do can get, be accomplished, whatever that is, whatever for whatever the challenge. So the for, for example, a challenge might be that I wanna get a page done for my website. So during that hour, I'll focus that hour on that website page and then they'll have half an hour off and so on and so on. It. Or it could be that I've got an issue with my car like I have, so then for that hour. If that's not my business time, I'll then prioritize researching and looking for parts that I need or ringing garages or going out and getting it serviced or whatever that, whatever the task next step is. And the next step might actually be about giving that feeling or sensation or stress, an actual voice. So what do I mean by that? Quite often we have these emotions such as anger, frustration, overwhelm, stress, or whatever it is. And we try to push it away, or we try to fight through what's going on. So say for example. We're feeling angry. We're feeling angry and frustrated because of a situation such as the car or such as, um, something's happened in a relationship or in a friendship or whatever it is, but we have this feeling or sensation and we just try to, rather than trying to understand it, we try to push it away. So maybe we just need to take a step back. Maybe we just need to allow that part of ourself to have a voice. Now, this might seem very alien to a lot of people, but I'll tell you something. When you start to allow these parts a voice, quite often that sensation or that feeling or whatever it is, tends to either reduce massively or. In a lot of cases, from what I found, it tends to go, so how do I do that? And this can be as simple as just kind of allowing ourselves just to relax a little bit, maybe some deep breathing or maybe just something which gives you a bit of soothing or a bit of calmness that might be some nice music and asking yourself. Where in my body do I feel this sensation? So you might feel, you might sense that you are angry. So you might feel where I, where in my body do I feel anger? And for me, right this moment, I feel it, uh, in the center of my chest, slightly below my heart. So at bottom of my, I think it's my rib cage. I feel it there. So then what I'm gonna do is then ask the question of that area. What is it that I need to know or what is going on? How can I change this? What do I need to actually know in order to make us take a step forward? And once you've asked the question, I probably ask one question rather than loads of questions. I then allow the answer, the words to come from that place. So what I mean there is that. As I'm speaking, my focus in my head or is down in that area and allow the words of that area to come out. And so what I found is that the more that I practice this, the easier it becomes and the more effective it becomes. Because initially this will be very different, very alien to a lot of people. But I tell you, when you start doing it every day, the parts which wanna be heard, feel heard, and quite often for me especially, no disappear. Another super duper important thing, tip that I can give you is to prioritize relaxation. We live in a world of giving and doing, and even I notice myself when I've got time to spare, I will find, I'll try to find something to do. But I very rarely allow myself to actually sit and be and to just do nothing because I find it hard. But when I do it, there's a whole, I find this, it just creates this space for new ideas to come in. It creates this space for relaxation in different parts of the body to actually. Relax and calm. It allows the head to actually become quiet for a moment, which creates this calm, creates this peace, creates this sense of awe. And so relaxation really needs to become part of your routine. You know how we go to the gym and we exercise and we go and read books to learn things. We need to be able to relax so that we can de-stress, so we can allow space, so we can calm, create calm in our life. And so I want to emphasize so much of the importance of relaxation. And it's this idea that it's hard, for most people, relaxing is hard. I recently went to a four day retreat and there was quite a bit of yoga twice a day, and the whole. Idea of the retreat was a reset to relax to chill, to create that calmness. But what I noticed was that the more space that I had, the more things I was looking to do, so much so I was going up to the people who are running it and asking them, do you need anything to, do you need anything doing? Do you need anything doing? Do you need anything Doing? But in fact, what I probably need in that moment is just to relax.'cause quite often what we actually need is usually the hardest thing we can do. And so it's prioritizing relaxation. Now, that might mean that you prioritize 15 minutes before you go to work. Perhaps you might have a cup of coffee and you just sit in the conservatory and listen to the birds. Or maybe if it's sunny where you are, you go outside and sit on a table and watch the sunset, the sunrise. You might go and have a walk and allow yourself to be with every step and to observe what's around you. It might mean sitting, lying in bed and just daydreaming and just being in that moment. It might mean going for a walk in a woodland. I. Whatever that is for you. But I really wanna emphasize the importance of relaxation. And one of the key things that I have learned is the, as I start to relax a little bit more, more stuff actually comes because I'm allowing that them new ideas to come in The final thing that I wanna say for this solo podcast episode is the importance of becoming your own observer. I, so what do I mean by that? What I mean by that is by having the self-awareness to be able to. Observe yourself. Observe your body language, observe your habits, observe your beliefs, your thoughts. And the perfect example would be this morning when I allow myself to get carried away with. I trying to do too much too soon and becoming overwhelmed and becoming, because I was becoming the observer, and I've started to become aware of when things are stopping me, when things are coming up, I'm able to stop then and say, okay, what's wrong? And that allowed me to notice the overwhelm. Which then allowed me to have a conversation with that overwhelm to realize that the problem isn't doing the work. It's that I'm going, trying to do too much too soon. So then I took a step back, or this evening when I was like laying in bed and I was getting angry and I couldn't sleep. That's not the, that's not a problem. But it that, just being able to observe that and to become aware of that, I was able to realize that it was to all to do with being angry and what's been going on for myself. So then I was able then to communicate with that part of me. So I was able to have that conversation to realize that I'm doing an amazing job. I'm not take, I now can just take the steps. I am taking the steps. I was said a little bit of a small step back and there's been other occasions where I've realized things are going on and because I've been able to observe changes in my body, whether that's sensations, whether that's because I start to get a little bit anxious or overwhelmed. Another key thing when it comes to observing is being able to observe yourself throughout the day, your actions, the way that you respond to different people. I've noticed one thing I'm practicing at this moment is deep listening, but I noticed that as soon as I start to have a chat to people, I'm always trying to think what to say, but then when it comes to the other person speaking, I switch off. So it's being able to observe things like that and being able to observe new habits. Where is it working, where's it not working? Being able to observe your body language. So maybe when you are around people, you are hunched over or, or maybe, maybe you are confident and you know, it's like your body. Your body is back. But being an observer is really key to transforming your life because when you observe, you then have the choice to change Thank you for listening. If something in today's conversation resonated, take a moment to sit with it. And if you feel called, share this episode with someone who might need it to you matter. I matter is a growing space, and if you would like to stay connected. You're welcome to follow or subscribe wherever you are listening. It really helps us work to reach people. It's meant for. These conversations matter. You matter. I matter. Until next time, take care of yourself and the relationships in your life.