Wrapping your body

Sometimes I sleep badly. I have no problem going to sleep, but sometimes I wake up too early for some reason and have trouble getting back to sleep, it's as if my mind as on some kind of high (excited about the coming day, maybe?) and isn't able to calm down until a while later, at which point I have missed two hours of sleep and just know that the day is going to be crap.

As long as you are single and have flexible work-hours, this doesn't need to be that big of a deal. If you wake up early you can go do some work and then go bac k to sleep when your mind has calmed down a little. However, that's a quite limited group of people.

Something that I've experimented with the last couple of sleepless early mornings has been a relaxation technique that I did a couple of times as a teenager. It 's pretty simple - you lie on your back, calm down, and then start thinking about your toes, of relaxing them. You then move upwards through your body and focus on each body part, relaxing it, thinking that it becomes heavier. It feels a little like wrapping your body in some kind of 'Relax-o-wrap'. You end with your mouth, nose and eyes. After that, all of your body is mentally wrapped up, and you actually feel like lifting your arm, for instance, would ruin the wrap.

Then, you start focusing on your breath. You inhale deeply, down to the bottom of your lungs, so that it is your stomach that rises and falls, not your chest. I was taught to inhale through the nose and exhale through the mouth, but it's not vital. The vital part is that you focus on your breathing with your mind. In the beginning it's frustrating and hard to focus, but after a while you suddenly realize that you almost dozed off for a second. Then you actually do doze off for a second. Then for longer. Then you start dreaming - my dreams have been weird during this exercise - often they're about falling and flying etc.

After waking up, I usally do some kind of 'unwrapping' routine, focusing on each body part and making it 'unheavy' again. I don't know how important that is, bu t it maintains the illusion of a wrap around your body, which I think is important for this exercise.

So far, I haven't been able to go back to 'normal' sleep with this technique, but I find a certain type of sleep which I think is far superior to being awake. Maybe with time, regular sleep comes as well. Progress will be reported (if I can remember to do it).