Can’t Sleep? Pick Up A Journal
Writing in a journal is a proven tactic for calming your mind and improving sleep. Let's take a closer look at how that works.
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Can’t Sleep? Pick Up A Journal

It’s late. You’re tired, you’ve brushed your teeth, crawled into bed and shut off the lights. You get comfortable and fall halfway into a dreamless sleep. Then the thoughts come: your mind snaps awake with stray ideas about a presentation you have tomorrow. You remember that prescription you didn’t fill, and how you need to go grocery shopping the next day. Suddenly you’re wired, tired, and you can’t sleep. 

Maybe you’re reading this from the other end of a dimly lit computer screen in the dark. Maybe it’s so late the pink light of pre-dawn has just begun to peek up over the horizon outside. Maybe this is the third day — or third month — of a bout of insomnia that just does not let up. 

Don’t worry. If you’re here, rest easy knowing you’re not alone — statistics show that somewhere between 10-30 percent of people in the world suffer from insomnia at some point in their lives. And while it may not seem like a blessing that insomnia is a common problem, its prevalence means there are well-studied tools and techniques that can help mitigate sleep loss. 

One of those tools? Journaling. That’s right: writing in a journal is a proven tactic for calming your mind and improving sleep. What’s more, journaling with a certified responder can do more than just improve your sleep — the process can actually help you uncover why you’re losing sleep in the first place. 

More on journaling with a responder in a moment. For now, let’s talk about sleeping better by picking up a diary. 

How does journaling help me get a good night’s rest?

Let’s talk about losing sleep, and how journaling can keep you from experiencing the worst of it. The first important thing to remember is that all of us experience insomnia for different reasons. 

Perhaps you’re in the middle of an extremely stressful period at work and it’s keeping you up at night. Maybe your relationship is faltering and you’re losing sleep over it. Or perhaps money troubles and car problems have got you nervous and shutting off your mind at night is next to impossible. 

Fortunately, no matter the reason for your sleeplessness, tools and tips to help you get better sleep are often universal. That is certainly true of journaling: whether you’re having problems communicating with your kids or you feel creatively stifled in your career, picking up a journal and writing down your thoughts is a sure-fire way to help calm your mind before you sleep. 

If you know the cause of your insomnia, journaling about it can be a way to reduce anxiety and mitigate racing thoughts. Sometimes our problems seem so large in our heads that they can feel insurmountable, but writing them down on the page can help them feel small, contained and easier to tackle. Creating to-do lists, venting about feelings and making diary entries about ways to improve the problems you face are all simple ways to help increase the quality of your sleep. 

Unfortunately, we don’t always know the cause of our sleeplessness. Insomnia can hit at will and at random, even when there isn’t an identifiable cause. In these cases, how can we uncover the cause of our sleep loss and remedy it?

What does a certified responder have to do with sleep?

Have you ever had a friend who knew you were in a bad relationship before you did? What about a family member who could tell your job was not right for you before you even started? 

It’s true that in life, sometimes other people know us better than we know ourselves. They help us uncover unseen problems and work with us to make decisions that serve us. The Journal That Talks Back™ works similarly. The service is self-explanatory: you write down your thoughts and feelings, and within hours — sometimes even minutes! — a certified coach will reply.

What will the reply consist of? A certified responder will gauge your mood and stress level before offering techniques and asking critical questions about what’s keeping you up at night. They will help you dig deep to uncover barriers that are preventing you from sleeping well and, upon discovering them, they’ll help you move past them.

Alternatively, even when you know what’s causing our sleep loss, having a certified responder available can still be enormously beneficial. Responders are trained to help you navigate the parts of your life that are keeping you from sleeping by challenging the way you think about every aspect of your life.

In short: certified responders can help you get out of your own way to solve the problems you’re struggling with, even when you don’t know exactly what’s causing problems in your life. Communications continue until your outlook on life — and sleep — have been completely reoriented. 

And trust us: a new outlook on life is definitely good for sleep. 

Important note:
We are a coaching company with expertise in lots of different areas like mental wellness, career, relationships, parenting and a whole lot more. While coaching in The Journal That Talks Back™ can help you to take a deeper look at the above topics, we recognize that there are times when other resources, like therapy and/or counselling, may make more sense. As such, we have begun to develop a Mental Health Directory with well over 800 resources and we are investing time and effort into really growing it. It is also developed in a super user friendly way (we hope) so that it's easier to navigate than say another government website. Click the button below to check out our Mental Health Directory.
The Mental Health Directory