Life after brain injury – one small victory at a time.
In a previous post, I described a counting-based strategy I use to get to sleep. When that approach began to lose its effectiveness, I tried something different.
Instead of numbers, I silently generated random, unconnected words, taking care not to repeat any of them. It felt lighter and less effortful than counting, and I wasn’t surprised to find that I could do it easily.
That ease had a history.
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For a long time, getting to sleep was less about tiredness and more about what my mind chose to do when the lights went out. Thoughts would arrive uninvited — sometimes anxious ones, sometimes creative ones. Ideas, phrases, connections. Perfectly reasonable thoughts, just turning up at the wrong time.
What I needed was not silence, but less space for those thoughts.
The core of the strategy is simple.
I begin at 1000 and slowly subtract 3 each time:
1000, 997, 994, 991, and so on.
Half a Mind to .. 