How to Stop Racing Thoughts at Night | Q&A Eckhart Tolle

Is there a difference between daytime versus nighttime awareness? How does one work with a mind that is racing at night and does not allow any deep sleep? I can control the mind during the day and not get caught up. But how about the sleep time during the day? Yes, you deal with other things. Your mind is busy dealing with things. And at nighttime the mind is left to itself. And then this is a typical example of useless. Not only useless, but self destructive and harmful overthinking or mind activity. And this is the Many people have that problem in their life. The nighttime is particularly hard. I remember that vaguely from my distant past when I would wake up in the night sometimes in a state of panic and the mind just would not stop. First thing, there needs to be a minimum of awareness. But I believe you have that, otherwise you wouldn't be here. There needs to be a minimum of awareness from where you can know that this mind activity is futile. It leads nowhere. It just creates suffering and misery. So you know that. You know that you don't want it and don't need it. There are still many people who don't have that minimum of awareness where they. They are so identified with their mind activity which tells them, I must think about this. I need to solve this problem. Now. Nobody has ever solved a problem by worrying at night. But the mind says, don't stop thinking, don't stop thinking. It will all collapse if you stop thinking. So you already know it's futile. You already know that you would rather be free of that. Okay, that's good. You have that minimum of awareness. From there you can choose. You realize the power you have. You can choose to direct your attention somewhere else. Now you may have to do that many times. There will be perhaps a tug of war between your mind and where you want it to go. So first thing you do, take a conscious breath. You're at night thinking, thinking. Suddenly I don't want to think anymore. It's futile and it hurts. Okay, how do I get out of this? Can I take a conscious breath? If you ask yourself that question, you might hear the answer in your mind saying, no, I can't do it now. And that's a lie. That's a lie by the ego invented by the egoic mind to stop you from doing it. Or you can ask, okay, I want to stop. Can I feel the feeling of energy in my hands? No, I can't do it now. I can't possibly do it now. That's a lie. There's nobody who cannot do it now. You can do it now. If you don't believe in the thought that tells you you cannot do it now. And then you do it anyway. Either take a conscious breath or feel the energy. That's the beginning of body awareness, which is a powerful anchor for presence. It takes your attention away from thinking into your body. Your consciousness moves. So there isn't enough left for thinking a lot your mind. And then you have to hold it in your body. Not through effort, not through forcing your attention into the body. If your body becomes tense, that's not it. You can't go like, I have to hold my attention in the body, okay, and now I'm forcing it down by breathing into. I'm forcing attention into the body. Now you might even succeed for a little while, but then, no, just take in a relaxed way. Attention moves into the body and you breathe into the body. So the breath awareness and body awareness can become a single practice. And then you feel the rest of the body coming alive. You can feel there's life in your feet, in your legs. It's very subtle at first. And then you feel the entire body pervaded by this sense of aliveness. Right now, as I'm talking about it, I can feel it. I'm just making an audible sound because it's hard to talk about it. So it goes almost like electricity. And that is an anchor for presence. And then your mind will try to bring up thoughts, critical thoughts that pull your attention back into thinking. So it will come up with, this is really critical to think about. And then you can feel your attention moving out of the body and back into your mind. And then perhaps five minutes later you say, oh, it's gone. And then you just gently go back into the body. You choose where you want to place your conscious attention and you do it again and again. And the moment will come when you actually enjoy being awake at night in your bed. Whereas before it was agony. And so you live. That was when I started doing that. It was so beautiful. I always. I didn't even. I loved waking up in the middle of the night and would immediately go, ah. And sometimes already as I would often naturally just go there. There was sometimes a feeling as I moved from sleep into wakefulness. It was sometimes as if I was plugged into an electric out. Wonderful, intensely alive, no thinking. So it's your. You have the power to choose where to direct your attention. And don't believe the mind when it tells you you can't do it. This is similar during the daytime. Some people have problems during the day too, being present. I can't do it now. I've got so much on my mind. Maybe when I've dealt with that, then I'll be present. But there's just so much on my plate right now. Don't talk to me about presence. It's just. Or as somebody I know who had done a lot of spiritual practice for 20 or 30 years. And then suddenly she found he and she and her husband had invested money in the MAD scheme, all their savings with a man named Madoff. And he's in prison now, but he had this wonderful scheme whereby you would get. Every year your investments would yield like 10 more 15%. Just wonder nowhere else would you get that. So they'd been highly recommended by friends. Everybody invested with Mr. Madoff, totally reliable. And then it turned out that Mr. Madoff had a gigantic ego and everybody was deceived and everybody lost their money when the crunch came. And one day she got a call from her advisor and said, sorry to tell you that the maid of financial empire just collapsed and with it all your savings. And she. When she recovered from her panic, she called a friend. I think it was a friend, or was it her husband? You know what happened? It's all gone. And a friend with whom she had been on retreat said, well, just take a few breaths and just come into the present moment. And then she said, she found herself saying, this is not the time to be spiritual. Of course, later she realized, and she actually grew enormously thrilled and deepened her consciousness later she realized this is precisely the best time to be spirit. There's no better time than this to be spiritual. So she did learn that lesson, but it took a while. And then she wrote a book about it that did so well that most of her money returned through the book. True story. This mind made sense of self is also much more focused on the negative than the positive. To be free, you awaken to who you are beyond your history and your life situation. It.