“It’s enough to drive me crazy: I’m lying awake at night and can’t relax.” In my work with leaders at various levels, I experience again and again that people are under a lot of pressure from different directions – on the one hand for job-related reasons, on the other hand for private reasons. And in many cases, it is a combination of both. Are you familiar with this, too?

Runaway thinking is a habit

There are things in your head that keep your mind occupied, that simply never give you a moment’s peace. The thoughts circle around a problem like moths around a lantern in the night. These thoughts create something that I like to call “problem trance.” You come to a state in which your thinking virtually revolves around this problem of its own accord, holding you captive. But for most of us, runaway thinking is not much more than a bad habit.

In this situation, your thoughts are like a puppy that you let off the leash: it does what it wants. Running around from one corner to another. From one thought to the next. And the whole thing escalates.

The whole day is already ruined when I wake up

You surely know the following as well: you wake up in the morning, feel peaceful for the first 3 or 4 seconds, then comes the first thought … bam! What day is today? Wednesday. Oh yes, the meeting this afternoon with the boss. How will I manage to survive that? And then one thought follows another and another. If you woke up too early, going back to sleep is out of the question.

Studies show that we think ten thousand individual thoughts in a day. When we take a closer look at this, most of them are repetitive. Much of this is marked with negativity. We are either worrying about what will be in the future or regretting what happened in the past. Only a small part of this thinking is actually purposeful.

Our intellect – a wonderful device!

The lucky thing for us is, we humans possess our intellectual brainpower, with which we can solve problems, clarify complex topics and tackle challenges – as long as our intellect is used purposefully. If we let it run out of control, what I’ve described above will occur. Our evolution is to blame for the fact that we often think in negative terms. For reasons of survival and self-preservation, we focus our attention more keenly on things that could have a threatening character. This leads to a negative distortion in our thinking and, as a consequence, in our perception.

There is a study that led to the conclusion that the wandering mind is an unhappy mind. The wandering mind – the mind that is not reined in – is as a general rule an unhappy mind. So, the mind does not necessarily make you contented.

You are not your mind!

And now comes the good news: you are not your mind, your thoughts. Thinking is simply just a process. A process that flows uncontrollably and from which you can distance yourself, too. You can take up the position of an observer. This means that you no longer become mired in your thoughts, but rather go along with each thought. The advantage is that you can bail out. At any time.

Imagine that your thinking is a torrential river that flows all day long. That’s as it should be. After all, the mind’s job is to think, to produce thoughts. But you don’t have to swim along in this torrential river the entire time, trying to keep afloat. You also don’t have to swim against the current because you want to fight against your thoughts. Rather, you can simply swim to the bank, climb out, set yourself on the edge and begin to observe your own thinking. You no longer need to pick up each individual thought. In other words; you don’t have to believe everything that you think.

My tip:count the thoughts

A helpful mental game for falling asleep more easily is to count thoughts instead of sheep. Pretend that you are lying in the grass, looking up at the sky, and each thought is a cloud that rolls by. Just count. Simply watch. Without picking up each thought. This can be difficult at first, but it is a matter of practice.

The more you succeed in training and developing your mindfulness and presence in this way, the more you will condition your brain to be in this state, so that in the future, you no longer have to respond reactively to every thought. For once, you can simply observe, in a completely relaxed manner, that you are worried and that the worries can just be left to being worries. And you will see that this makes it quite a bit easier to fall asleep in the evening. And you can be sure that all of your thoughts will be there the next morning. They will not get lost. Also, you won’t miss out on anything if you stop going along with every thought.

I wish you lots of success with this exercise.