I read the “Power of your subconscious mind” a long while ago, but there is one analogy that I caught on really strong and still wonder about it. The author, Dr. Joseph Murphy described our brain as a garden. If you nourish it, take care of it, you get beautiful green plants.

But leave it alone, it will grow weeds. And not the kind of weed we like. The book was written in the early 1960s, and since then there are endless new articles and blogs and papers that are based on this same theory. I spent a lot of my time with these texts.

Feed your mind good thoughts, Don’t be negative, Pray for what you want, Visualize your dreams — the advice came from everywhere.

If everyone is saying it, it must be true, right? I wanted to do it too. For 21 days, I tried to write down and visualize what I want. I tried to meditate and focus my energy and “feed my subconscious mind”. I consciously made an effort to think thrice a day about what I want. I did many of these exercises.

Having spent 6 years in business school, the next steps I adopted were imminent. Analyze your process, set-up a system to measure your results, and track them. It is all about the returns on your efforts after all, right? While I was analyzing my process,

I realized that during the day I am able to rationalize my thoughts and steer it into the direction I want. But even then, at night, I do not have control over my thoughts and it races to places I do not want to think about. I had trouble sleeping and often stayed up pondering over these negative thoughts.

This also negated all the efforts from my exercises during the day, and slowly these negative thoughts crept into the day. The mind exercises became more difficult.

So I knew I had to first solve the night problem.

I was sure that there is a theory out there that has a solution for controlling your thoughts while sleeping. I consumed a lot of material finding the right ritual before sleep.

After 100s of (not even exaggerating) of articles about do not use your phone, or have screen time, or read, or drink this and eat that, I finally found some articles that were well informed and had usable information.

(I will soon write an article ranting about useless listicles cluttering the minds and the internet, and how to sieve through these and not waste your time — I feel experienced enough on this topic).

And the answer was pretty simple. While I tried to feed my subconscious mind at day, I had to try to do this before bed-time. This simple, but with a stroke of genius, exercise helped me.

Photo by Pim Chu on Unsplash

My brain no longer participated in the negative-thought marathon at night. The brain and I combined our powers and unleashed potential we did not know we had. We even came up with many new creative projects and learned how to work as a team and not against one another.

We are becoming better friends and getting along well. Way better than before. And we even worked at night, in fact, we did a lot of this work while sleeping.

The brain always mocks me that I will never understand the genius of his ways, but I am exploring it and getting there.

While exploring, I tried to inform myself a lot about this new world I discovered, the “world of sleep”. We, as ambitious humans, do everything in our power during the day to become the best versions of ourselves.

We eat well, work-out, read good stuff, and so on, but many of us really ignore working on our sleep.

Most of us approach sleep like an auto-piloted body process that will happen when our body and mind are tired. While the inevitable happening part is true, we need to change this approach. By working on our sleep, there is a lot we can achieve.

I write about my learning in my free newsletter so you can all benefit from my research. We all know that we should eat an early dinner, but why? Cardio before bed helps you get tired and sleep better? Absolutely not. It disrupts sleep quality.

“I only sleep late on weekends”, even a 2 day disturbance in your circadian rhythm has a compounding negative effect on your health. Learn the what and whys by subscribing here: https://proactivesleep.substack.com/p/coming-soon