Moving house is up there as one of the more stressful life events. Last week, I moved myself and my dog to a creaky 300-year-old house, in a town where I know just two people, and don’t know my way around at all.
On top of this, I’m on new ADHD medication—prescribed stimulants—which make my heart beat fast and my brain hyper-focused in a way I’ve not experienced before.
This perfect storm of events has meant I’ve been waking up earlier and earlier every day, eventually being wide awake at an eye-watering 3am. At first, I was happy to use the extra time to unpack boxes but once I was settled, the early wake-ups didn’t stop. So I went searching for a solution.
I’ve used Headspace meditations before to manage anxiety and overwhelm, and find the soothing voice of Andy Puddicombe particularly helpful on bad days.
Many Headspace YouTube meditations are around 10 minutes long—short enough to be a quick fix, but effective enough that I don’t need to look for another one after.
This particular meditation is designed to slow down racing thoughts and help you get off to sleep (or back to sleep, in my case), and it’s exactly what I needed.
The meditation
Pro tip: If you don’t want your peaceful guided experience to end with an ad or an autoplayed video, let your video fully buffer first, then play it with your device on airplane mode.
How it helped me
It drew my attention back to my body
During the meditation, Puddicombe reminds you that a busy mind needs something to do, rather than hopping from thought to thought, getting more anxious.
He encourages you to allow your mind to wander, not to criticise yourself for it, but to draw your attention back to your body and gently focus on the sensations around you.
Doing a small body scan and seeing how my blanket, mattress and bed feel, helped me to come out of my wandering mind and into my body.
Placing a hand on my belly encouraged me to connect to my breath more, and stay focused on my body’s physical sensations rather than my worries.
It helped regulate my breathing
Sometimes I don’t notice, but my natural way of dealing with a racing heart is to sigh, which isn’t exactly sleep-friendly.
One thing I’ve noticed about my 3am wakefulness is that it feels like a bolt of adrenaline has woken me up. My heart palpitates, my breath is fast and dropping off back to sleep is impossible.
This might be a side effect of my medication or just a response to my accumulated stress from moving house. Trying to correct my breath with long sighs isn’t ideal and hasn’t helped.
Puddicombe asks you to count your breath backwards from 10, while encouraging you to imagine the sensation of gently falling.
With each countdown, my breath naturally slowed down and I was breathing more deeply and regularly, which relaxed me. If you reach zero too quickly, Puddicombe recommends starting again and doing another round.
Long pauses helped me drift off
When I’m listening to an audiobook or meditation, I notice it starts to creep into the start of my dreams so I know I’m falling asleep and it’s time to switch it off.
With Puddicome’s audio, there are longer pauses giving you time to slip off to sleep without drawing you out of a sleepy state.
Puddicome’s sleepy voice also makes it feel oddly comforting, as though he is gently talking you to sleep while nodding off himself.
It was better than counting sheep
Counting sheep is an old tactic to get back to sleep, but it’s easy to lose your focus and start thinking about something else.
This meditation features counting but it’s in cycles of 10 to zero, which you can gently restart any time if your mind wanders—without judgement or frustration.
I found this particularly helpful as it felt like a no-pressure way to stay focused, rather than a long cycle of ovines leaping over an imaginary fence.