Turn Off Your Mind to Sleep Well

How can I "turn off my mind" and fall asleep?

Well, there's a couple of different methods that I actually talk about in my book to help people with that. So the number one thing that I tell people to do is to create what I call a worry journal. So this is a, and you can just use a piece of paper, where you put a line down the middle, and on one side you have a column that is what is my worry, what is it that's going on that I can't stop thinking about. And you write that down. And on the right side of the column, you actually put down one thing that you can do to help solve that problem. Now, it may just be that I'm going to think about that tomorrow at such and such a time, or it may be that wow, now that I've been lying without all these other distractions, I came up with an idea to solve that problem. Do one for one, write down your list. Fold the piece of paper in half, stick it in the drawer, and you're done worrying about that for the night. You've come up with some ideas, you've thought about a couple of things, now you can allow your mind to rest and relax. The other thing that I have people do as far as anxiety is concerned is distraction techniques. So there are many of them. One of my favorites is very simple for people to do, and all I ask people to do is to count backwards from 300 by 3s. This is not an easy thing to do, but you can't think about anything else while you're trying to do it. And it's so doggone boring that people oftentimes just drift off. I've never made it past 150 myself.

You've made it all the way down to 150?

I've made it down to 150.