Dr. Matt Walker

And when you go to sleep or you try to go to sleep or you wake back up and you try to get back to sleep, you just have this Rolodex of anxiety.

the modern world we are constantly on reception and very rarely do we do reflection and unfortunately for many of us and i've been guilty of this the only time we do reflection is when our head is placed on the pillow and we turn the light out and that is the last time you want to be doing reflection that's the worst moment

And at that point, I think everyone can empathize with the idea of you turn the light out, you're under stress, your mind goes to those few things.

In the darkness of night, thoughts become almost 10 times worse than they do in the bright of day.

And at that moment, you start to ruminate.

When you ruminate, you begin to catastrophize.

And when you catastrophize, you're dead in the water for the next two hours.

So what do you do?

The problem is, as I said, your mind is on itself.

And it's going through these repeated loops.

Anything you can do, for example, you can do some kind of a meditation.

And when I was researching data for my book some years ago, I did look into meditation.

And I wasn't a meditator.

I was a hard-nosed scientist.

didn't really kind of embrace with that notion or even that group of people.

But time and again, I read paper after paper and the data was very strong and it was coming from research groups that I respected very much indeed.

So I thought, well, okay, I should probably give this a try.

And that was six years ago.

And since then, I now meditate for 10 minutes every single night before bed.

I do a guided meditation because I'm not particularly skilled.