Fighting insomnia, tip #318: Dump your thoughts
Keep on reading if the following sounds familiar: you go to bed but cannot fall asleep because your brain is buzzing with thoughts, plans and reminders (“It’s so-and-so’s birthday on Wednesday, and I still haven’t bought a gift!”, “don’t forget to pick up dry cleaning tomorrow”, “it would be great to end world hunger, I should look into it in the morning” etc etc).
After struggling with this nuisance for some time, I found a solution: write those thoughts down and your brain will let go of them, as if by magic. This technique was mentioned in “Getting Things Done” as a way to capture to-do items and clear your mind in order to be able to focus better. Only in our case it’s not about focusing, but more about stopping your brain from running in circles, trying to tell you to not forget something that it deems important (that’s what it feels like in my head, anyway)
Question from the audience: how do you take notes without waking up your partner or turning on the light and destroying the “I-am-trying- to-fall-asleep” mood?
Answer: use your iPhone/BlackBerry/whatever. Find an app that lets you quickly type in notes. Then you can review them in the morning and delete useless ones. My personal favorite is called “Things” for iPhone - it literally takes 2 seconds to start writing stuff down after grabbing the phone from the night table.
Oh, and by the way, the voices in your head will not be pleased if you try to cheat and write those “action items” down on a piece of paper in the dark in a completely illegible chicken scratch - your brain might chase its tail every once in a while, but it’s not stupid, you know.
