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Soothe your ruminating mind, again, especially with ADHD or trauma histories, getting away from all the catastrophic thinking, the stressful thoughts that are kind of putting you in Stress Response rather than Rest/Digest mode, allowing yourself to have something really easy and accessible to redirect your brain from those ruminating, catastrophising thoughts into something.

Hi, I'm Eve Menezes-Cunningham and welcome to The Feel Better Every Day Podcast. I am so excited to be sharing new trauma-informed and ADHD-friendly ideas for you to help you take better care of yourself, that highest, wisest, truest, wildest, most joyful, brilliant and miraculous part of yourself, as well as the basic self-care, which we all know can be so challenging at times.

I really appreciate you tuning in. If you want a deeper dive, you'll be getting bonus content each week. If you sign up to the Sole to Soul Circle, you can do that for free or from as little as eight euros a month. And you can also find more ideas in the book, 365 Ways to Feel Better, Self-Care Ideas for Embodied Wellbeing https://selfcarecoaching.net/book

Hi, welcome to episode 49 of The Feel Better Every Day Podcast. We're celebrating World Sleep Day with lots of holistic tips to experiment with. See what works for you, you know what's best for you. Some of them might appeal, some might not, they're all offerings. I've already recorded half of this and it turned out I didn't record it, so I'm starting again. In my imagination what I'd recorded was golden, so I'm just going to do my best to make it as good as possible.

#1 Set a positive intention around what sleeping well means for you

We often think about what we don't want to feel like, so tired, cranky, exhausted, drained, depleted. Think about what you actually do want. Think about how you want to feel when you wake up, like energised, refreshed, recharged, alert, feeling well, enthusiastic. Make it as vivid as you can for yourself, which leads on to…

#2 Visualising what you want

Worrying is exhausting for our nervous system and it's really easy to do. We get into rumination mode and especially with trauma histories or ADHD, it's really common. So replacing worry with imagining what you want is a discipline. It will get easier and it's the ideal thing to practice when you're trying to get to sleep.

So thinking about what you do want. So it might be a great night's sleep or it might be something you want in your life. It might be a holiday you're looking forward to. It might be something you're looking forward to in your relationship or work or with your home or travel or whatever it might be. Use images. I mean, thinking about counting sheep, you don't have to count sheep.

You can think about something you actively want, put that into images in your brain. That's going to move away from the more language-based thinking, which is more like kind of for the daytime and it encourages sleep, moving into that image-based thought pattern. So win-win. You're more likely to move towards what you actually want and also it will relax you and help you sleep.

#3 Make your self-talk soothing

Even if you feel like you're lying to yourself. Now I don't advocate lying lightly, but in this case I do. Even if you feel like you're going to be shattered tomorrow, imagining that now is not going to help you. And it's going to keep you awake rather than helping you sleep. It's going to inhibit any sense of Rest Digest parasympathetic activity.

Even if you feel like you're lying to yourself, imagine yourself as a beloved puppy, baby, kitten, goat, whatever, something you love and talk kindly to yourself about how no matter how tired you might be, it's going to be okay. It's going to be o