Mindfulness and Practicing Sleep

I know you guys are fans of Headspace. I love Headspace. Yeah, me too. That's a good one. We've talked about Headspace before, but for those of you listening, if you're not aware of it, Headspace is just a great kind of guided meditation, if you will. It's almost like guided breathing. It's not even, I hate to use the term meditation because it freaks people out. They're like, I don't want to get all woo-woo like that, especially for the executive type guys. Like, no, no, no, it's guided breathing. And man, you can just get in the zone like right away with that app. It's crazy. What's cool about it too is, you know, if your mind is racing all the time, like part of the reason why I never could meditate was I couldn't stop thinking. And when I have that headspace on, I'm listening to the guy on it. And it's something about his voice that just puts me in a trance or either just knocks me out of sleep. So it's the only thing I've ever been able to use to actually get into that trance-like state where your body feels heavy and you're really getting into it. I use it for sleep, man, because one of the things that I teach clients is that you need to practice sleeping. You've got guys that say, it's so hard for me to get to sleep. That's because you're not practicing sleeping. What you're doing is you can't sleep after a minute, so you're bored, so you pick up your phone or you do something else. you got to start practicing. So start practicing, like taking naps in the afternoon and start practicing sleeping. If you want to get good at it, that's what you have to do. And one of the tools that we'll use is we'll use that guided meditation throughout through headspace to kind of get them chilled, chilled out because he's got that soothing voice, you know? Yeah. It's, and it's, you know, it's crazy because it's just 10 minutes or, and I, I just stick with like the 10 minutes. I can't, I haven't gone past that yet. attention span is possibly too short. But within that though, it feels like the more frequently you do it, it seems like that 10 minutes, all of a sudden it's like, it just goes by like nothing. Like you get started and you can start to get into a deeper, I don't know, Zen state. I don't know the terminology around it, but deeper Zen state. Like the more you practice it, the quicker you can switch it on to the degree that you can start to utilize those breathing techniques during the day and your body kind of recognized, like just start to do some deep diaphragmatic breathing and all of a sudden you can take your stress hormones way down. And then within the app, it's like, I've, I've done it. And I felt like I've been just doing it for like a minute and it will have been 10 minutes all of a sudden. Yeah. It's huge. It's pretty cool. You know, you're getting somewhere when you don't even need to have, like, I can do it now without the app. I can get myself into that kind of that feeling within a minute or two. But you know, when you talk about practice people think about practice like okay I going to practice hitting a I going to practice my golf swing But you have to practice your least mode Practice doesn stop at the gym When you go home you have to practice relaxing and that's what people don't do anymore. You have to practice being still. Just sit in the room and just be still and see how long you can do that. I mean, that's difficult, right? We just can't unplug anymore. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's, it's just such good advice. And instead of, you know, like so many people, you know, we, we don't sleep enough, wake up early. Like I get up super early, I have long days, family. Um, and sometimes it's just like going somewhere, you know, and shutting off the lights. And I'll kind of like, I'll look at my phone and I, in fact, I did it right before our podcast and I was just like, I was just, you know, dragging and it's just like, shut the lights off. I'll lay down flat on my back, wherever it is. It could be just flat on the floor in a, in a room and just like, okay, mentally I'm like, it's going to be 10 minutes. So let's say it's 1257. I'm going to, I'm going to just go till just for till 107 and just simply doing that. Sometimes I fall asleep for a couple of minutes. Sometimes it's, I feel like it's just, you know, just unwinding and it makes an amazing difference in my energy, my, my cognitive function and for people doing something like that, as opposed to being like, Oh, I'm dragging, I better turn to a, you know, a double espresso or a muffin or some shit like that, you know? So I'm, you know, you're all, I'm on the same page. Yeah. Have you ever, you ever taken a coffee nap? no what's that all right so we get a double espresso or a quad or something like that and you uh get your headspace ready slam down the coffee slam down the coffee and then lay back and try to take it like a nap and 20 20 25 minutes later the coffee will wake you up and the research showed that it works better than a coffee or nap alone no kidding yeah i used to do it all the time when i was teaching i'd be just be sitting there waiting like waiting for the caffeine to kick and fall asleep before it kicks in fall asleep before it kicks in yeah that happens something like when you first start doing it but then you start like you start getting into it man i used to have the best naps i would because i was working such long hours and um lunch would hit and i had an hour and a half for lunch it was like all right first 30 minutes i'm gonna do my coffee nap so i would slam a couple of or i would take like a couple of caffeine pills you know 400 milligrams of caffeine and then i'll put the headspace on and i'd be out and i'd wake up like 20 minutes later, like right on the dot. Like, yeah, yeah, it's, it's nuts. And it's, it's part of the practice. Like I legitimately do that probably almost every day is sort of a midday, like just find a spot, lay down 10, 15 minutes, usually most 15 minutes, most of the time I'll fall asleep for, you know, part of that. Yeah. It just goes by like nothing. And it is crucial because I, you know, I just don't sleep enough. And so many of us don't. So you can plug in techniques like that to uh you know to help manage some of that stuff help but you know you gotta have that siesta it's okay it's okay because it is a thing man if you're tired the rest of the afternoon some people will say well i'm not going to take a little nap because if i take a nap that's time i can be working the thing is if you don't take that nap the rest of your work that day is going to be crap and there's no point in continuing to work if you're going to put out rubbish stuff yeah I'm going to be so much more productive I'm going to I'm going to be more present when I get home from work I'm not going to just be a sloth like I'll be home I'll get home I'll have more energy I'll make better nutrition decisions I'll be more mentally switched on and so the mindset of like you just have to be hustling all the time if you're not you're not committed you don't care you know it's like dude it's okay that you know to to chill out here and there and anyways with that?