Hello, and welcome back to practicing human, the podcast where every day we're getting a little better at life.

I'm your host, Cory Muscara, and in today's episode, I'm going to share a short sleep exercise.

More to come on that in a moment. First, let's settle in together with the sound of the bells.

Okay, so let's talk about sleep. This is a very common pain point for many people.

We all want it, but a lot of us struggle to get it. When we do have the space for it, we struggle to transition into it, to stay asleep, to get high quality sleep.

I've talked about sleep in various episodes on this podcast. You can search around for mindfulness and sleep to find some of the other topics.

Today, I'm going to share just one specific exercise you can do before bed, to help lower your heart rate, but specifically calm the body, which will subsequently calm the mind.

For many people, the key thing that tends to keep them up is worrying about the future, worrying about tomorrow.

A lot of times the way we tend to work with that is by shifting our thoughts, trying to focus on something else, maybe grounding into the breath, and that can be useful.

But a lot of times, this extra mental agitation is coming from physical agitation, the body being agitated.

And so by turning our attention away from the thoughts, and instead focusing more on the body and inviting the body to relax, to release, to let go, the mind often organically settles.

And by bringing attention specifically to the body, we're turning our attention away from some of those thoughts.

And so we're sort of, I don't like the expression, killing two birds with one stone, but whatever the better version of that expression is, we're doing that.

And so the simple practice is a modified body scan, where you bring your awareness to different parts of the body, let's say starting at the feet.

And you feel the sensations that are there holding it with mindful awareness, curious awareness, just not judging purely knowing what's arising.

Oh, okay, sensations of my feet right now, maybe neutral, maybe nothing, maybe you feel the heaviness from having been standing on your feet all day, whatever it might be.

Just give the feet the space to be felt.

And then you're intentionally inviting them to shut down.

And I like to say turning off.

So it's an acknowledgement of this part of the body, appreciating it for what it did for you today.

And that can be an active appreciation where you say thank you feet, or it could just be more subtle in your awareness, a great full awareness you bring to the feet.

And then as a way to invite the body to transition, letting it know that hey, we don't need you anymore, you did your work for today.

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