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You know that feeling when you try to work, but your mind goes brrrrrrr….

I had that in the past few months. A lot of noise. A lot of unwanted distractions. And my mind goes brrrrr.

40 times speed, thinking. Not voluntarily. Of all the things I need to work on. All the things I need to handle and manage.

If that’s what coke does to your brain, man, that should be how governments do their advertisement campaign against drugs. This is certainly not the way to live your life everyday.

I couldn’t sleep much. Insomnia is a bit__. So, I got on the internet and I found these two videos by HealthyGamerGG.

1.      The Neuroscience Behind Fixing Your Sleep Schedule

2.      Why You Need To Get Better At Doing Nothing

If you don’t know Dr K, he is an awesome psychiatrist / YouTuber aiming to help people around the world cope with the stress and mental health of everyday life.

Here’s what I learned and how you can benefit too in your daily life.

The Neuroscience Behind Fixing Your Sleep Schedule

The reason why people have bad sleep schedules?

Dr K thinks that it’s impulse control. When we want to sleep, there are a lot of impulses to do something. Looking at your phone, fiddling with something, watching some porn getting tired, try to sleep, and then repeating the cycle.

And also, you have a lot of unprocessed emotions throughout the day. Those emotions are unprocessed as you do a lot of things throughout the day and the emotions get flooded out by us distracting ourselves with other things like watching reels, and videos and trying to block them out through entertainment.

Actually, how do we process emotions then? Dr K says it’s when we do nothing.

Yes, NOTHING.

As we get busier throughout the day doing more and more things, the time to do nothing or be idle gets less and less. We also multi-task more things and watch more entertainment in our free time.

The brain keeps track of all these things. And when you haven’t done ‘enough’, the brain is like ‘Bro, don’t sleep. We are not done.’

The key point? Stress. You are too stressed to sleep.

That’s when Dr K recommends that we should get better at doing … nothing.

Why You Need to Get Better at Doing Nothing

That is where I get to his next video, Why I Need to get better at doing nothing.

I have never thought about this before. How do I do nothing? I have never tried it. I am just reminded of the joke that people make of men – that we can think about nothing.

But that’s essentially the point of Dr K’s video. We do much throughout the day. And we add more and more things to our day. Our mind and body try to cope more and more too but it becomes worse.

That’s where I am getting my problems with sleeping. I am stressed constantly about the things I need to do or don’t do. So, I do them. And I add more and more things to my list.

Oh sh__, this is getting worse.

Dr K recommends that we need to actually … do less and carve out time to do nothing. Counterintuitive to my monkey brain to do more things in life.

Doing nothing allows you to process things in your mind, and ease stress. And focusing on less things throughout the day helps you to have less on your mind.

So, I am Trying to Do Less

This is easier said than done.

I tried doing this. I listed out all the priorities and tasks I wanted to do for the day. Then, I cut them down to only 3.

Let me tell you. My monkey brain tried to add things all over again. I was so unsuccessful in doing this in the initial stages that I had to tear my list every time I added things into it.

But I tried again and again. And soon, I only have like limited things to do. I had actually improved how I plan things throughout the week.

So, try this.

List out all the things you want to do. Gradually cross out things you don’t actually need to do. How do I do this? I take a tip from Marie Kondo. Does it spark joy? Or more specifically, does it spark an interest in me to do it?

If yes, keep it in. If not, take it out.

But the Best was Actually to Do Nothing

Meditation was a good way to do this.

I do this twice a day. I set a 50-breath count for when I meditate. I will just count and breathe. And it’s actually quite nice to think about nothing but counting and breathing.

I am also constantly reminded of this ‘Monkey Mind’ video here. Whenever any thoughts come when I meditate, I tell my monkey mind, “Hey, monkey mind, hello, I understand, but let’s focus on breathing”.

This was quite a good thing to remember when I meditate.

That’s not the only thing. I will literally sit on a chair and just stare into the window. When my mind disturbs me, I will tell my mind to come sit with me also.

After a while, I get bored. But it’s a good kind of boring. I will think about things that happened throughout the day. And the mind actually gets to process.

When I go to bed now, I just put on my reading glasses and read. No smartphones, no technology. I will switch it off.

After about 30 minutes, I really get tired. And from there, a good 15 minutes of lying in bed got me to sleep comfortably.

It Felt Better to Do Things Now

After focusing on just a few things a day and doing nothing, what I realized was that I got better at doing things.

I didn’t feel that much burnout anymore. Yes, of course, there are sometimes when I feel the ‘need’ to do more but it wasn’t that strong.

It was like my mind got to rest and process. And it bothered me less and less throughout the day.