Meditation for your middle-of-the-night worries

Do you follow the weather? You know, do you check the forecast to see what it’s going to be like outside? Do you appreciate meteorologists? Or beat up on them? It probably depends on whether the forecasts are accurate. And they are accurate a lot of the time. Meteorologists go to school to learn how to be good forecasters. But most of us have zero training in predicting the future. Yet we do it all the time. Why do we think we can accurately predict the future?

We try to do it. We THINK we can do it.

Fortune telling, jumping to conclusions, or trying to predict the future are examples of what psychologists call ‘cognitive distortions’. You can think of these as ‘thinking errors’ implemented and repeated throughout our lives. If we are not aware of these mistakes, we continually reinforce them through subconscious repetition.

What we repeat becomes habit. Habits become beliefs. This is why cognitive distortions are referred to as ‘irrational’ beliefs. Thinking we can predict the future gives us an irrational sense of control.

I am personally terrible at these distortions. Yes, there are many more like this. The field of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) helps us identify where we make these errors of thinking. Sometimes, CBT can help us work through them, but it is often difficult.

Fortune telling, or predicting the future has been bothering my whole life. Lately, bothering me nearly every night around 3 AM. And am writing this article to share my experience and offer some assistance to those of you who also wake up in the middle of the night.

First, let me state that there are many reasons one wakes up in the middle of a sleep cycle. Alcohol. Too much exercise before bed. Screens and their invasive lighting. Kids making noise in their sleep. Hell, just being a parent. In my case, I have addressed most of these issues, yet I still awaken. My solution might not work if you have more complicated causes of waking up. The only way to really know would be to have a sleep study. But hopefully, my words will be helpful.

It isn’t the waking up that is the problem. It’s your brain. Specifically, it is the specific brain activity that performs the fortune telling.

I really don’t mind waking up at night any more. At my age and gender, waking up to pee is kind of a normal thing that probably isn’t going to get any better. So I accept it. This a small part of my strategy.

However. I DESPISE waking up in the middle of the night in a state of worry, anxiety, rumination, or even panic. I am so DONE with that mess.

Why do we treat ourselves so poorly in the middle of the night? I am never more mean to myself than when I lie awake in the darkness. What should be a comfortable and cozy experience can be truly terrible. I got so sick of the middle-of-the-night rumination and anxiety that I decided to do something about it.

Here’s what I know:

Fortune telling is an attempt for your brain to help calm you. Some part(s) of us think that, if we can just predict and control the future, we can be more relaxed about what is to come. At some point in our lives, probably when we were very young, this made sense. So we did it. Then we did it again. Then we kept doing it. Then we didn’t even know we were doing it. Pretty soon we had performed the equivalent of thousands of bicep curls and we have these bulging, Arnold Schwarzenegger arms except it isn’t muscle, it’s a part of our brain.

And the problem is, not only does this strategy not solve our problem, it createds new ones. We subconsciously develop a very strong trust in our ability to know what is going to happen in the future. And in knowing this we falsely believe we can relax. Except that the relaxation never comes. Instead, what comes is more anxiety. More worry. We go into a hyper active prediction mode where we spend tons of subconscious energy trying to gather information about the future. We are constantly running models and algorithms in our heads to process information in the moment and from the past to forecast what might, or might not happen in our future.

If reading that leaves you feeling exhausted, that’s exactly why we have to correct this distortion of reality. Because exhausted is how you feel and how your brain feels nearly all of the time as a result of this behavior pattern. In trying to prevent future worry, we create a state of near constant anxiety.

Trying to predict the future not only doesn’t work, it makes us feel worse.

And one way to understand the distorted nature of this thinking is to ask yourself: ‘What makes me think I can predict the future, anyway’. And, really, if you could, wouldn’t you head straight to Vegas, or buy lottery tickets, or put a ton of cash into stocks?

So you have to remind yourself that you do not have the ability to predict the future. No one can do that. I thought I had a special talent to ‘know’ things. How crazy is that? I’m not Tyrion Lannister. And neither are you.

But we do this. We BELIEVE this. Because we think we need to. We think we cannot possibly live a life where we abandon control. We think that by assuming the worst case scenario, spending all of our energy making predictions, and processing various ‘what-if’ scenarios we will better prepare ourselves for whatever is to come. Or, more specifically, we think we can KNOW what is going to happen.

The fear at the root of this, and other, fortune-telling behaviors is fear. Fear of the unknown. Fear of having to have faith in our ability to react and process future experience rather than being able to prepare ahead of time. This fear separates us from the present moment and forces us to reside in our minds as part of a modeling iteration. It, in essence, puts us in the matrix.

When people say we live in the matrix, this is what I think about.

If you can remind yourself that you don’t actually have special abilities to predict the future, you are on your way to recovery. Being able to catch yourself in the behavior, and remind yourself to stop, is a huge part of healing.

If you are like me, you will reject the above statement. If you are like me, these cognitive distortions are SO STRONG, SO AUTOMATIC, and SO QUICK, that you can’t possibly catch yourself before they are fully implemented. Truly, this is what makes CBT so ineffective for many of us. Our habits and beliefs are so ingrained, we don’t have the bandwidth to see them happening. This is how they became so strong in the first place. It’s a built-in survival mechanism.

However, you can LEARN to catch these beliefs before you implement the strategy. You can learn to see your brain working when you wake up at 3 AM, before the floodgates of rumination are opened. You can ‘buy’ yourself a moment to choose your fate. There are probably many ways to learn this, but there is one way that is easy. But you might not want to hear it.

Meditation

Most people get meditation wrong, so I will tell you what it means to me. Meditation is a way to practice controlling your attention. You learn to recognize your awareness, enabling you to hone the ability to place your attention in a specific direction. Meditation isn’t entering flow states, or levitating, or feeling the buzz of Earth energy. Meditation facilitates the disassembly of your ego, your ‘self’, or whatever you call the parts of you that make you, you. Specifically, it provides a gateway to the ‘observer perspective’.

Meditation is a way to learn how to step outside of your ‘ego’, or the part of your brain where the automatic programs are running. You become like an observer watching your ‘self’ going through the automatic motions of day-to-day life. This can be an incredibly powerful tool and the gateway to all sorts of healing. In the case of predicting the future, meditation will help you SEE what you are doing. It will help you gain a perspective that says, ‘wait a minute’.

Meditation, in short, helps you buy yourself a CHOICE. By being able see the code before the program is executed.

This is how I have made peace with my middle-of-the-night rumination habit. I practice meditation, for 10–15 minutes as often as I can. Maybe 3–4 times a week. This helps maintain my capacity to take the observer perspective.

I also minimized the reasons I might wake up in the middle of the night. I mostly cut out alcohol. I don’t drink much of anything to avoid having to pee. I maintain a regular sleep schedule.

I still wake up, almost every night, at 3 AM. I still experience the same seeds of rumination. I am still plagued by a concentration of negative thoughts that I don’t seem to have EXCEPT at 3 AM. I still feel the ‘urge’ to attach myself to one of these thoughts and turn into a full-blown attempt to predict the future.

But now I can step aside from myself. I can turn my head to see what is happening in my brain. I have a moment where I can CHOOSE whether or not to follow this muse. Meditation has created a pause in the process where I can sit and wait. I can decide if I want to fall back onto my old patterns and beliefs, or whether I want to take a different course. A meditation practice has facilitated control.

And because I understand what is happening, I don’t want to end up MORE anxious, MORE worried, MORE agitated, LESS likely to fall back asleep, or accepting any of the consequences guaranteed to result from allowing myself to implement the program.

Being able to catch myself BEFORE this happens has changed my life, and it can change yours.

Nowadays, when I wake up in the middle of the night I bask in the gratitude of knowing I DON’T have to follow the old pattern. I can choose NOT to make things worse. I can decide NOT to submit. Instead of attempting to control the future, I can control what is happening in the moment. I can STOP the pattern. I can PREVENT myself from feeling worse.

Once I know I am awake and remind myself that whatever thoughts I’m having are irrational distortions, unhelpful, and likely to make me feel worse, I simply breathe. I try and find gratitude for being able to catch myself. For having a chance at being ok. I bask in the glory of change and am thankful for the opportunity to grow. I am selfishly relieved that I might not have to spend the next few hours ruminating about all kinds of terrible outcomes or be tired all of the next day. I tell myself that even if I don’t fall back asleep, I am going to be better than I would have been.

This is powerful. I appreciate the control that I have about how I am feeing in the moment, happy to trade whatever illusion of control over the future I thought I had.

Like many things, the first step is admitting you have a problem and want to change. The next step is learning to take the observer position which you can accomplish through a meditation practice. There are infinite resources at your fingertips.