Did you know that the last 90 minutes of your day is crucial to your overall attitude?
While you sleep each night, your brain replays everything that happened in your day about two times, on average. It does this to put thoughts, experiences, emotions, and feelings in the right mental “filing cabinets” to sort them out, helping you to decide what’s important, the threats to avoid, and the good things to seek out.
What most people don’t realize is that your brain replays the most recent images, emotions, feelings, and experiences – usually in the last 30-90 minutes before falling asleep – about 15 times!
This means that if you are stressing about your day, got in a fight someone, are angry, etc., your brain is going to ruminate over those things 7-8 times more than the rest of your day, driving those feeling and experiences further into your subconscious, reinforcing them over the other stuff in your day.
I’m sure you can see how this can easily set you off on the wrong side of the bed the next day if those last minutes were spent unwisely. If you watch a horror movie before bed (or the news), got in a fight with someone, or anything else negative, you are setting yourself up for a bad day tomorrow.
This is a recent discovery in brain science, through modern EEG technology, but we have known this about ourselves for a long time. The apostle Paul was the first cognitive psychologist we know of and he wrote a letter to the Ephesians more than 2,000 years ago, with this advice: “Don’t let the sun go down on your anger.”
The solution is to work stuff out and get the negative emotions resolved in the last 90 minutes of your day, so you go to bed at peace, with happiness, gratitude and other positive emotions. Then your brain will ruminate about that 15 times instead of bad stuff, setting you up for an awesome day tomorrow.
Some brain types like keeping a gratitude journal or using a gratitude app on their phone. Other brain types choose to write successes from their day – big and little wins. All brain types benefit from focusing on who they love, why they love them and who loves them back.
Just do whatever works for you to get things resolved and in a positive state, thinking about the good stuff before you go to sleep and you will create a habit for your brain that will increase your mood, attitude, productivity and so much more!
