30 Ways To Help You Switch Off At Night

SarahHughes
February 22, 2021
September 12, 2023

Picture the scene.

It’s 11pm, you’re in bed, your mind is racing and your mental “to do list” is getting longer by the minute. Fast forward to 1am, you’re still awake, tossing, turning, and still not able to switch off at night. Your eyes keep popping open and your hand is twitching for your phone, so you can scroll mindlessly in the hope it will distract you from the fact that you just can’t get to sleep!

Sound familiar? This is me pretty much most nights, or at least it was up until fairly recently when I decided to seek help.

I’m certainly not alone. We live in a time of information overload. What with 24-hour news, social media, WhatsApp, emails, Teams, Slack, we’re always receiving information and were always available through one channel or another. The pandemic has only exacerbated this, as we rely even more heavily on technology to keep in touch.

It’s also increased our anxiety levels, caused stress-induced health issues for many of us and blurred the boundaries between work and home, feeding into an “always on” culture, meaning many of us are struggling to relax, switch off and get the rest we need, until at one point or another we reach burnout.

I didn’t quite reach that point thankfully. Randomly, my trigger for implementing change was watching Batman Returns with my son. As I watched scenes of the film with the Penguin, played by the awesome Danny DeVito, I realised that I looked as bad as Oswald Cobblepot, or at least the bags under my eyes were so deep and dark that they could compete with his, without the hours that Danny spent in make-up to achieve them!

Sleeping just 4-5 hours a night was obviously taking its toll on the way I looked and felt and I knew I couldn’t carry on functioning this way for much longer, without a bigger fallout awaiting me (a more serious one than the mortification of realising I looked like the Penguin!).

I needed to find ways to help switch my brain off and implement techniques to stop overthinking everything, or I’d end up slipping even further down the rabbit hole.

So, I turned to my wonderful Facebook community – many who had experienced sleep deprivation themselves – but were able to manage it.

They kindly shared their different techniques and methods to help them switch off at night, and I in turn am sharing them here in the hope that some of them might work for you too.

We may thrive on stress and little sleep for a short time, but none of us are robots. Rest is essential for our physical and mental health and is something we cannot do without.

I’ve implemented a combination of the above and it’s working for me most nights, I hope some of them do for you too.

Do you have any further techniques or tips that help you switch off at night so you can get the sleep and rest that you need? I’d love to add what works for you to this list. Email me at sarah@muvemediaandmarketing.co.uk

Read more:

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Working from Home – Friend or Foe?

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Returning To Work After Lockdown?

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Do you struggle with switching off at night? Here are 30 tips to help stop your mind racing, so you can get the rest you need.
Sarah Hughes
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Try to establish a daily routine and start and stop work at the same time every day.
30 WAYS TO SWITCH OFF AT NIGHT
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Self care
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me time
mind racing
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self-care
switching off
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Health