Brian Gubernick explains why practicing gratitude before sleep reprograms your subconscious. Your brain processes emotions during sleep and consolidates neural patterns, so what you feel at bedtime shapes overnight learning. He recommends ending your day with felt gratitude, adding visualization or affirmations, and tracking how your mood and calmness shift over a week.
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Thank you for joining me today. It's Brian Gubernick, and welcome to the No Days Off podcast, where we believe that every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. Most people that you may turn to as a thought leader or an influencer in this world, most of those individuals preach some sort of gratitude practice in the morning, like a wake up grateful sort of mantra, if you will. However, Dr. Joe Dispenza has a much different approach. He actually says that gratitude at night, just before you go to bed, is the real secret. Why? Well, because your subconscious, your subconscious mind doesn't clock out necessarily when you do. It actually keeps running all night long. And whatever emotional and mental state you fall asleep in is what your subconscious will marinate on for hours. So the real question isn't just what do you do during, during the day, it's what are you handing to your subconscious to work on overnight? Now let's back up a little bit. We'll talk about Joe Dispenza. Many of you may not know who Joe is, and for those that do not know him, Joe is, I think, technically a chiropractor, but he's a researcher and he's a bestselling author and he's put out some documentaries. He's spent an awful lot of time, decades, studying neuroscience and epigenetics and quantum physics and all sorts of things I have no clue about. And his focus oftentimes, a lot of his research is on how thoughts and emotions shape our biology and how they shape our reality. He teaches it— he teaches that through things like meditation and visualization and gratitude that we can actually rewire our brains, rewire them altogether. We could also influence gene expression. We could create all sorts of new outcomes in our lives as a result. He does these workshops and things like that that attract thousands of people worldwide to do just this. So when he talks about gratitude at night, he's not just speaking philosophically. He's actually framing it as a method for reprogramming the subconscious, reprogramming the subconscious mind during its most receptive state. There's a lot of science behind this. So when you practice gratitude at night, not a, not a checklist, but, but, but kind of like this deep-felt gratitude, you're actually planting a seed. Right before sleep, your brainwaves start to slow into what you may have heard before called your alpha and theta states. That's when the line between conscious and subconscious starts to blur. Gratitude really isn't just a thought, it's an elevated emotion. If you've ever been grateful or expressed gratitude, you probably have felt this elevated emotion. It tells your subconscious We are safe. We are abundant. We have enough. And while you sleep, your body and mind reorganize around that sort of message. Stress unwinds as a result. Your nervous system shifts to recovery. You wake up less reactive. You wake up more resilient. Morning gratitude primes your filter for the day. Night gratitude programs your operating system. This is a very different approach than what most will teach. Now, what I found interesting when I was learning this, and it was shared with me by my buddy Julie, she said she heard an episode of Dispenza's podcast where he discussed this and shared it with me. And, you know, I thought it'd be great to share with you. When I got to thinking about it some more, I had to ask myself, what, you know, if this is around gratitude, What else can we maybe prime our minds with? Like, if gratitude works, what else can I marinate on overnight that pays dividends for me the next day? So some thoughts I had, um, again, we talk about visualization a lot of times, like in the morning, visualize how you want your day to be. Well, maybe I should start visualization of tomorrow's performance, maybe mentally rehearse the big meeting or the negotiation, see myself executing it calmly and powerfully. The subconscious will treat this visualization as rehearsal. And then overnight, it's going to strengthen the neural pathways that Joe Dispenza talks around. So I think first I could prime my mind with visualization of tomorrow's performance. I also think that at night, I can start to learn what I would call integration, review maybe what I studied or read or practiced that day, and just run through it one more time before bed and signal to my brain that it needs to be, that information needs to be consolidated into long-term memory while I'm asleep. I think this works with affirmations, especially affirmations tied to identity. So many of our No Days Off Nation are in the affirmations. I'm talking about though, what are the identity-level statements? Not the fluffy affirmations or slogans, the identity-level statements. Things like, "I am disciplined. I am a leader who stays calm under pressure." Saying these things at night primes the subconscious to align behavior with that identity. And then lastly, you know, one that I'd put down, I think release, I would call it, and forgiveness. Like clear the slate at night. If you don't clear the slate at night, your brain spends the night ruminating. So, a practice of some sort of release or forgiving yourself or forgiving others frees up subconscious bandwidth. And with that subconscious bandwidth, you can instead focus on growth instead of those, you know, replaying those negative loops. Now, this works. It works and it's science-backed. Why? Well, there's a handful of things. Neuroplasticity, maybe you've heard of that. The subconscious encodes patterns most easily. It encodes patterns in altered states like alpha and theta brainwaves. Both waking up, which is when most encourage us to do things, and falling asleep, when it isn't talked about all that much, those are prime windows to encode these patterns and create this neuroplasticity. Uh, it also works because of what's called emotional encoding. See, the subconscious doesn't speak English, it speaks emotion. Elevated emotions like gratitude, joy, certainty— these things stick. They stick. That's emotional encoding. And then lastly, there's this overnight processing that occurs. That's part of the science here. Your brain runs offline during your sleep, call it for 7 or 8 hours, what you hand it just before sleep, you know, sets in, like whatever you put into your brain before, before sleep sets, it really becomes the operating instructions for your brain. So if you put garbage in, you're going to get garbage out. But if you give it something powerful to process overnight, it's going to set up those operating instructions. So, as we wind down today's episode, what are the action steps you might be able to take? First, I think it goes without saying, try ending your day in gratitude. Before bed tonight, maybe write or think through a few specific things that you're grateful for. Try not to just list them though, try to feel them. Try to replay them in your mind or when you write them down. Next, I would challenge you to maybe choose a different prime. In addition to gratitude, choose a prime, pick another category like visualization or affirmation or review, these things we just talked about, and spend a few minutes with it. And then lastly, track, track how this goes, track your results. For the next week, just notice, take note. How do you wake up? How do you wake up? Do you wake up differently? Are you more calm? Are you more clear? Are you more prepared and ready? Make notes of that and track your results. Just try for a week ending your day in gratitude and choosing a priming source and track the results and see how it goes. I think again, most people give their subconscious junk food before bed. And that— when I say that, what I'm talking about, scrolling social media, stressing about tomorrow, replaying today's failures. And then they wonder why they wake up kind of anxious. Well, I think you ought to flip the script. Use gratitude, use visualization, use identity, prime your brain to marinate on all the right stuff instead of the wrong stuff. And I think that's how you go to bed ordinary and you wake up much closer to extraordinary. That's all I have for you today, the No Days Off Podcast. Thank you so much for listening. And remember, every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. So let's get after it.
