Many people today use chemical sleep aids because they can’t sleep at night.  It might be that they have a bad hip or shoulder or knee, some painful body joint, perhaps osteoarthritis pain.  I feel your pain on physical pain.  I have that too, not to the degree that I can’t sleep at night, but I have one bad hip that hurts.  It doesn’t keep me awake.

I don’t know if you have insomnia.  Many do.  They take a sleeping pill or some supplement to help them sleep.  I know many people who do that.  I read about melatonin and relaxium that are not a sleeping pill.  Doctors will say that once you take sleeping pills, you will keep taking them.  You have to have them then.  Maybe you’re there already.

In general, through my life I’ve never had a problem sleeping.  As some might describe, I have slept like a baby.  For the last couple of years, that changed.  My sleepless nights come because of my mind.  I’m thinking about something and I can’t stop thinking about it and that keeps me awake.  Maybe you relate to that description.  You can’t sleep because your mind won’t shut down and so you lay there and you can’t sleep.

I wear a fitbit that my wife got me.  For you that like wearing no watch or a more significant watch, the classic look, you might cringe at the sight of a man with a fitbit.  I understand.  Nevertheless, I like looking at the stats from my fitbit on my phone:  how many steps, the number of calories burned that day, my resting heart rate, mileage, zone minutes for peak aerobic, and my sleep score.  Fitbit gives me a sleep score.  If you wear one, you know what I’m talking about.  90 plus is excellent, the upper 70s and 80s it says is good, and below that is fair.  To me, a fair night sleep is a bad one.  Even with a moderately good night sleep, you’re not getting much deep sleep, the kind that refreshes you and keeps you with physical energy during the day.

If your mind, your rapid thinking, the brain not shutting down, keeps you awake, that’s why you can’t sleep, I wrote this post for you.  I found something.

As you read this, perhaps you suggest, pray or quote verses.  Praying and quoting verses do not shut down wakeful thoughts for me.  Don’t get me wrong.  Like Peter, James, and John I could fall asleep praying.  When I pray at night, I do fall asleep praying.  When I’m thinking about scripture, I fall asleep thinking about scripture.  Prayer and thinking about scripture though are not what put me to sleep.  They just didn’t keep me awake.  I need something different than those to put me asleep when my brain won’t stop rerunning the wakeful thoughts.

For me, words don’t stop my mind from working on things that keep me awake.  Prayer involves words mainly, so does scripture obviously.  Words can’t stop the thought patterns that won’t let me sleep.  So what do I do?

To get to sleep, I must replace the thoughts that keep me awake with other thoughts.  Scripture talks about replacing thoughts or imaginations.  You know that.  You’ve got Philippians 4:8 and Romans 12:2:  think on these things and be transformed by the renewing of your mind.  The only way for me to replace thoughts is to think about something else that won’t keep me awake.  How do I do that?

Two nights ago I couldn’t sleep the whole night.  I rested.  My sleep score was fair.  It was in the upper sixties on the fitbit.  I have a pretty low resting heart rate for my age.  My body was resting.  I didn’t feel too tired all day, but that kind of sleep does leave me sluggish in certain ways.  Two of those in a row would start to debilitate.  A string of 3 or 4 would cause harm.

I was very tired when I went to bed last night, because of the bad sleep the night before.  I prayed and then I was going to read (right now the biography of Brigham Young by John G. Turner), but I was too tired to read.  That was good news for me.  I couldn’t stay awake reading because I was too tired.  I turned off my bed lamp, rolled onto my good hip and shoulder and began the process to sleep.  My mind began to work and work.  If steam could come out of my ears from my brain, it would have been happening.  What did I do?

Most nights, my wife and I take a walk for about thirty minutes.  It’s about 3500-4000 steps on my fitbit.  We talk.  Sometimes we walk silently.  We hold hands.  It’s good exercise, but it’s mainly social, I would say.  We take the same path so many times that I have that path memorized.

It was midnight last night and I was still awake.  I decided to take the walk with my wife in my mind.  What was powerful was that it was not words.  It was imagination and mental activity.  I blocked wakeful thoughts with pictures.  My mind could easily take the whole walk in my mind and then start it over again.  I did that.  When the negative, sleepless thoughts started trying to enter my brain, I focused on the pictures, the imagination of that walk.  It worked.  The next thing I knew, it was morning.  I had fallen asleep.  The thoughts did not keep me awake.

As is usual, this procedure I used has a name:  thought-blocking.  Yes, someone thought of this already and I didn’t know it.  I haven’t tried what others have said.  I used what I wrote about here, and it worked.

If you can’t sleep for some reason, you know the power of sleeplessness.  When you get up and you didn’t sleep, that changes your day.  If you do that all the time, it changes your life.  I haven’t had much of a problem not sleeping, so this is new to me in many ways.  I think this is going to work, so I shared it with you.