When you can’t get to sleep

I have always had a hard time going to sleep.
Something about the quiet and the dark at night makes my imagination wake up and plague me with exhausting thoughts.

Sometimes when I can’t go to sleep, my husband can’t either, because I keep thinking of things and blurting them out.  Poor husband.

I went through a phase where whenever I could not sleep, I prayed.  I didn’t pray asking to go to sleep (well, I have done that, but that isn’t what this phase was about).  Mostly, I prayed for my children, or other people whose struggles were known to me.  Now, I think this is a very worthy thing to do.  However, I think it is better to pray with my husband, out loud, for the children and other pressing prayer issues, and to do it before I try to go to sleep.  Otherwise, it is easy to lose discipline and slip into doing something that I think is praying, but it is really worrying and fretting.

In terms of preparing my mind for sleep, this is one of the best mental exercises I have found:
Think lofty thoughts about God and try to grasp things about Him that are ungraspable.
It offers the following benefits:

•  I am thinking about God, so my thoughts are wholesome and pure.
•  I am thinking about things that are beyond the human imagination, so I never get them figured out.
•  I am thinking about things that are hard for me to understand, so I get tired.

You may ask, How do you come up with lofty thoughts to think about God?

Here are three ideas:

1. Think through the attributes of God.  You can just try to list them, or you can work on memorizing and remembering the Bible verses that explain them.
2. Read a theological book about God that is just a little too hard for you.  It should not be so hard for you that you cannot understand anything you are reading.  It should just be a little bit too hard, so that you have to read a sentence over a few times, trying to figure out what the author means, and then, as you begin to unravel it, you just need to set the book down for a minute and close your eyes and ponder and ruminate... and all of sudden you have drifted away.  I have a few books that work like this.  There are two minor problems.  Number one, watch out for the really heavy books (I’m talking physically heavy, hard cover, five-inch books).  If they slide off the bed and hit the floor, it can make for a rude awakening.  Number two, be sure you have a way to get the last light turned off.  If turning off the last light goes along with closing your eyes to ruminate, you are golden.
3. Listen to a good sermon on your CD alarm clock.  There is nothing like turning the sermon on at a low volume--so you have to strain just a bit to hear--and lying down on your soft pillows in the dark.  A particular pastor preached through the entire Bible, and we bought his sermon series. He is excellent, so I have to be careful to use sermons I’ve already heard when I apply this technique.  I discovered it when Shawn used to travel a lot.  Being frightened at night, I liked to hear this pastor’s reassuring voice in the night hours.  I liked to have his words replacing the fearful thoughts of my imagination.  As I lay there getting warm and comfortable, I would catch one of his ideas and my mind would float off in exploration of it.  Before I knew what was happening, I had been asleep for a long time and my alarm was signaling the morning.

Of course, if the problem is not your mind but your body, these ideas might not help.  Then again, they might.  You never know until you try.