Caroline woke from a nightmare about rejection with her heart racing, even though nothing real happened. Your mind doesn't know the difference between imagined and real, so a bad dream triggers actual stress chemicals. She shifted her mood by listing things she was grateful for, and shows how a nightly gratitude practice can change your chemistry and help you sleep better.
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Hi, my name's Caroline, and last night I had a dream. Now, don't worry, I'm not going to start into some, like, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat thing, but there's a couple of things that came out of this dream that I just thought it was really important to share with other people, because I'm sure you all dream too. This dream, unfortunately, wasn't a very nice one, and I woke up in the small hours of the morning with my heart racing, feeling just like abject rejection. It was like everyone that was supposed to love me had, had pushed me out. And that made me recognize that even a thought creates a massive change in your bodily chemistry. Hi there, Amanda! How lovely to see you. Hi! And so, your mind doesn't recognize the difference between imagination and reality. So, even just thinking about something that wasn't happening at all, it created that physiological fight-or-flight response chemistry in the body that caused me to wake up. Because my mind had the intention of going, my goodness, you need to deal with this, something really bad is going on! I managed to fall asleep, but even the next morning, I still woke up with a state of agitator— sort of agitation, real unrest, and it was almost as if that chemistry was still floating around in my body, and I had to really work quite hard this morning to use some of the tools to change that chemistry back in. And that's really the second point that I wanted to let you know about, that you can change your feelings, your body chemistry, by what you think about. I had no control of those thoughts in my dreams last night, but I did the next morning. So, I just spent a few minutes in bed thinking about all of the reasons I felt loved. You know, the dream was something about rejection, but this morning I decided to choose about recognizing how loved I am by, you know, my family, all sorts of things. And very quickly, similarly, that chemical reaction in my body changes. I tend to teach a lot of my clients a very, very simple technique to do normally at night. It's a little gratitude exercise. There's a lot more details about it in a free download you can get on the website. But very simply, if you just fall asleep recognising all the things that you're grateful for, ideally things that have happened in that day, because if you keep changing it rather than focusing on, I'm I'm grateful for XYZ, and you do that every night, it kind of loses its power a little bit. When you reflect on your day and recognize, you know, thank you to that driver that let me out in the traffic jam, thank you for that deer that just popped up in the woods when I was walking and just gave me one of those magical moments, you then create that chemistry in your body that then stays with you while you sleep, just the same as my bad chemistry stayed with me and was there in the morning. That can also help you sleep much more effectively too. So 2 very quick things to take on board. Your thoughts change your body chemistry. So literally by changing your thoughts, you can change your body chemistry. That changes your feeling. So if you recognise that the feelings that you've got, it's probably because the chemistry isn't right. Work it back the other way. Change your thoughts. You can get much more control over your feelings. Hope that's helped, and I'll see you again very soon. Bye for now. Bye for now.
