Hello everybody and welcome to the mindful kind.

I'm your host, Rachel Cable, and I'm here to share insights into my mindfulness journey

and inspire you to create your own.

Each week, this podcast will bring fresh and exciting news about mindfulness,

from my personal experiences to useful tools and different

mindful techniques.

Hello, you're listening to episode number 15 of the Mindful Kind podcast and today I'm talking about mindfulness and sleep.

This is a topic rather close to my heart as one of the very first benefits I noticed when I started

practicing mindfulness was there was a huge improvement in my sleeping habits and sleep quality.

So in this episode I thought I would share a bit about my experience with mindfulness and sleep and let you know a couple of useful tips towards

the end of the episode. Before I started my mindfulness practice, I did not sleep well. If I wasn't

tossing and turning until the early hours of the morning,

I was waking up way before my alarm was due to go off and I'd lie there trying to get back to

sleep and actually just stressing about my day. I would wake up several times during the night

and get more and more frustrated because I knew I was exhausted, but I just couldn't stay asleep.

I'd often be in tears in the middle of the night because I was just so tired and stressed and afraid of the idea of trying to get through the next day without the energy I needed.

So when I first started practicing mindfulness, I began to understand what it felt like to

just let things be. I stopped pushing and striving and controlling all the time and began to

sink into the moment without the pressure.

Really, I learned what it felt like to relax and I don't mean just going through the motions

of relaxing like I had before when I would read a book or take a bath and not actually switch

off. I learned what it felt like to slow down,

...