How to Use Your Sleep for Success, Health & Wealth Even If You Have Insomnia | Reconditioning Sleep

How to Use Sleep to Hack Your Mental Health, Learning and Work Life

In this video, I will teach you exactly how you can use your sleep to get marvelous results for your health, your character, your success, and your happiness, even if you are suffering from insomnia right now. So I urge you to watch this video till the end and keep making notes as you go.

The way we feel when we awake in the morning depends on how we were feeling or thinking when we went to sleep.

If we retire holding a grudge against a neighbor, with a resolve to "get square" with somebody who has injured us; if we have hatred or jealousy in our heart; if we are envious of another's success, and if we go to sleep nursing these feelings, we awake in a depressed, exhausted state, feeling bitter, pessimistic, irritable, unhappy, about as nearly like a devil as it is possible for a human being to feel. The destroyer was at work all night, running amuck among the delicate brain and nerve cells, furiously tearing down what beneficent Nature had taken such pains to upbuild. But, when we take pleasant, kindly, loving thoughts to bed with us we awake refreshed, in a happy, contented frame of mind. Our sleepless faculties spent the hours in upbuilding, performing friendly offices for us during the night.

Few people ever think of preparing the mind for sleep, yet it is even more necessary than it is to prepare the body. Instead of making our subconscious mental processes build for us in the night, we allow them to tear down much of what we have built during the day. Many of us grow old, haggard and wrinkled in the night, when just the reverse ought to be the case, for Nature herself has ordained that night should be the building, the renewing, time of life.

If we were only to prepare the mind for sleep with the same intelligence and care that we prepare the body; if we were to give it a cleansing mental bath, wiping from memory's slate all black, discordant pictures, all the worries and fears which vexed and perplexed us during the day instead of having the nightmare panorama passing and repassing before us during the night, robbing us of needed rest and neutralizing our upbuilding, recuperative forces, what a difference it would make in our achievement, in our lives!

I know men whose lives have been revolutionized by adopting the practice of putting themselves in a harmonious condition, getting in tune with the Infinite before going to sleep. Formerly they were in the habit of retiring in a bad mood, tired, discouraged over anticipated evils, worrying about all sorts of things. They would discuss their misfortunes at night with their wives and then fall to thinking over the unfortunate conditions in their affairs, their mistakes, and the possible evil consequences that might result from them. Naturally, their minds were in an upset condition when they fell asleep, and, as might have been expected, the melancholy, black, ugly pictures of the misfortunes they feared, vividly exaggerated in the stillness of the night, became etched deeper and deeper on their brains and did their baleful work, making real rest and reinvigoration absolutely impossible. When they reformed their habits, changed their thought, and retired in a peaceful frame of mind with the intention of going to sleep, instead of tossing about thinking of their troubles, their business straightway began to improve. They were stronger, fresher, more vigorous, more resourceful, better able to cope with difficulties, to make plans and to carry them out than when they were depleting their physical and mental resources by robbing themselves of their best friend, Nature's restorative,—sleep.

Many people tell me they cannot stop thinking after they go to bed. Their brains are so active, doing their next day's work, that they cannot stop the mental processes for hours.

Of course you cannot stop all thinking the first night you begin to form the new habit, when you have practiced the old night-thinking habit for years; But if you persist, and make it a cast iron rule to allow no anxieties or fears, no business troubles or discords of any kind to enter your bed chamber, you will succeed in accomplishing your object.

Think of your chamber as the one place sacred to rest, where the things that trouble and harass and vex during the daytime shall find no entrance. Put this legend over the door, or in some conspicuous place where you can see it. "This is my holy of holies, the place of supreme peace and power in my life from which all discord must be shut out." When you undress and lie down, say to yourself, "I have done my best during the day. Now I am going to drop thinking, drop worrying and planning, and get good, refreshing sleep to prepare me for to-morrow's work."