Body-First Healing Podcast

Somatic Practice for Sleep: Why Your Body Won't Let You Rest

• Britt Piper • Episode 51

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Having trouble sleeping at night or getting into rest mode? This somatic practice episode is for you! First, Britt walks you through why difficulty resting is rarely about a busy mind and almost always about nervous system safety. Rather than trying to force sleep, this somatic practice helps your body learn that it can set the day down. You will be guided through a brain hold, orienting to your room, and a gentle micro-pendulation between activation and support, followed by five simple ways to help your body downshift every night. Remember that your body was never trying to keep you awake. It was trying to keep you safe.


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Welcome to the Body First Healing Podcast. I'm Britt Piper, Survivor Turn Somatic Experiencing Practitioner and Aut. If you feel stuck in old patterns, overwhelmed by your emotions, or disconnected from yourself, you're in the right place. Each week, I'll share practical somatic tools, personal stories, and conversations to support you in building a more regulated and embodied life. Because you can't talk your way through healing. You have to feel your way through. Together, we'll explore what it means to come back to yourself and create a life that feels safe enough to fully live in. I am so glad that you're here. Today's episode is for the moments when you are finally done with the day, you have answered the emails, you've gotten the kids to bed, brushed your teeth, you're climbing under the covers, and your body is exhausted, but somehow you still can't rest. And maybe you're finding that in these moments, your mind is busy replaying the day. Maybe you're thinking about tomorrow. And maybe you don't even feel anxious, but you just feel awake. Like your body has somehow missed the memo that it's bedtime. If this resonates, then this episode is for you, my friend. It is going to meet you there in that process. Today I am going to walk you through a somatic practice, and we're not going to try to make you fall asleep, but we're going to help your body do what it was designed to do slowly, naturally, and without force. Welcome back to the Body First Healing Podcast. I am Britt Piper, Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, author, and trainer. And I am so excited for today's episode. Now, before we move into the practice today, I want to help you understand what's actually happening in your body when you have a hard time resting down.

Why your body won't let you rest

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Because difficulty resting isn't just about having a busy mind. Okay. It isn't that you're bad at relaxing, your body is not broken, your nervous system has one primary job to keep you alive. And one of the ways that it does that is by paying attention to whether the environment feels safe enough to actually let go, or what we call yield. So if you think about it in that way, sleep is actually one of the most vulnerable things that we do. When we sleep, we surrender our awareness, we surrender control. We stop monitoring the world around us. So before the body and the nervous system allows that to happen, it wants to know that the day is complete, that there isn't anything left that needs to be responded to. But the challenge is our modern lives rarely give the nervous system that feeling. Just think about it in this way. Okay. The emails never seem to end. The notifications, they just keep coming. Like there's always one more thing to think about, one more decision to make, one more conversation that we have to replay. So your body stays just alert enough, just activated enough to remain prepared. And it's not doing this as a way to keep you awake, but it's just trying to keep you safe. And when we don't understand that, we often fight our bodies. We try and force relaxation, we try to quiet the mind, but the nervous system is not going to respond to pressure. It responds to safety, which means that rest isn't going to be something that we force. As I said at the beginning of the episode, think of it as more so it's something that we allow. So tonight we're going to do just that. Okay. We're going to simply help the body and the nervous system recognize that it doesn't have to keep holding on to the day anymore.

The brain hold

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All right, so let's begin. I'm going to invite you, my friend, to just find a comfortable position just lying down. And when you're ready, I'm going to invite you to just bring one hand to your forehead and one hand to the back of your head. And let your back hand just rest at the base of the skull. And just simply let your hands be there. Now at the base of the skull is where the cerebellum is located, which is the governing system of the body. Temperature, digestion, heart rate, everything operates from here. So this hold, it's one of the most natural things that your body already knows how to do. I mean, just think about it. When we're overwhelmed or stressed or we're emotionally exhausted, where do our hands go? We instinctively hold our head. We lean into our own touch because it creates just this sense of support, a sense of what we call containment, or this feeling that we're no longer carrying everything alone. And there's a breath. Now there's also something happening physiologically here. Your hand on your forehead is supporting the front of the brain, where so much of the planning and the problem solving and our mental activity happens. And then again, the hand at the back of the head is resting near those structures involved in regulation and survival. So this simple hold can begin reminding the nervous system that it doesn't have to stay on high alert. Now, as you stay here, just notice. Okay, notice the warmth of your hands. Notice the weight of your head. Notice the places where your body meets the bed beneath you. Know that there's nothing to change, okay, nothing to fix. We're just simply allowing ourselves to be supported. And if thoughts continue showing up, that's okay. Okay, we're actually not trying to stop the thoughts, because that creates pressure. We're simply giving your body another experience to pay attention to. The touch of your hands, the rhythm of your breathing, the support beneath you. And little by little your awareness begins expanding beyond the activity of the mind. All right, let's gently release those hands.

Orienting to your room

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Now, if your eyes are closed, can you allow them to just softly open? And then just begin to take in the room around you. Just slowly. Okay, without searching for anything. Just letting your eyes naturally land on different parts of your environment. Maybe you notice the ceiling or a lamp or the blankets, a picture on the wall. So we call this orienting. And orienting helps your nervous system recognize where you are. Not in tomorrow, not back in today's conversations, but here in your room, in this moment. Now I'll invite you to find three things that feel neutral or maybe even comforting. And as you do that, just allow your eyes to rest on each of those things for just a few moments. And as you do, just notice what happens inside your body. I'll say sometimes nothing dramatic happens. Maybe sometimes it's more subtle, like your shoulders softened just by two percent. Or your breath became just a tiny bit slower. Whatever you notice, just remember that it's enough. Okay, let's move on from orienting. Can we gently allow your attention to come back inside? Internally. And just simply notice where your body is still holding the day. Maybe it's your jaw, your shoulders, your chest. For me, it's often my stomach. Maybe it's a feeling of buzzing, tightness, restlessness. Just notice. And instead of asking it to go away, see if you can just begin by acknowledging it. And you might even say to yourself, of course, this is here. Of course, my body is still holding today. Of course, a part of me is trying to stay alert. Just let yourself notice the intelligence in that, the somatic intelligence. Your body isn't trying to make your life difficult. It's trying to make sure that you don't miss something important. And it's trying to protect you. And sometimes the most regulating thing that we can do is stop treating our activation like an enemy. And we can do that by simply letting that part of you know, right? Attuning to it and letting it know, I see you. You don't have to hold all of this by yourself. Even as I say that, I feel that in my body. Try and just stay with whatever you're noticing. Without trying to change it. Just allowing yourself to be with it for a few

Micro-pendulation

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breaths. Alright. So now we're gonna do just a micro pendulation. Okay. I'm gonna invite you to just gently bring your attention to that area of activation. And just only enough to notice it. Okay, not enough to become overwhelmed by it. Track it for a moment. And then slowly begin to shift your attention to somewhere in your body that feels more settled. Maybe it's your hands or your feet. Maybe it's the feeling of the blanket resting across to your body. And then just move that attention back and forth. Oscillating. Activation and then support. Restlessness and then steadiness. And we're doing this slowly without rushing. Just allowing the nervous system to discover that it doesn't have to stay locked into one experience. That it can move, it can soften, it can return. I think we need the reminder that sometimes the body doesn't need us to eliminate activation. It simply needs to experience that activation isn't the only thing that's here. Okay. And as we begin to close, just notice your body one more time. Notice the support beneath you. Notice your breath. Notice whatever is here that's not asking to be anything else. Okay, and then just remind yourself that your body was never trying to keep you awake. Okay, it was trying to protect you and to make sure that the day was complete. And it was doing this by keeping you safe before letting go. But now you get to give it another experience, right? One where it doesn't have to earn that rest. It doesn't have to solve one more problem or think one more thought through. It just gets to

Five ways to help your body downshift at night

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soften. Okay, now before you drift off, I want to leave you with just a few simple ways to just help your nervous system downshift every night. Okay, first, create a transition. Give yourself even just five minutes between the demands of the day and getting into bed. Okay, think of it like a bridge. Okay. It needs a bridge into rest, not an abrupt stop. So I want to go back through and remind you of the practices that we just did because maybe one of those could be your bridge. So we had the brain hold. Okay, that's our second thing here. The brain hold, which is where you place one hand on your forehead and one hand at the base of the skull. And this allows your nervous system to feel supported before asking it to rest. Number three, orient to your room. Okay, take a slow look around your space, just like we did. And that allows the body to really feel into this environment, which is different from the demands of the day. Number four, feel that support beneath you. Instead of trying to stop thinking, can we just notice that the mattress is holding our body? Allow your attention to move towards that support, that surrender, and that yielding, especially in the back and in the legs. Number five, remind your body that today is over. Okay. You could do this by simply just saying nothing else is being asked. Nothing else is being asked of me right now. Sometimes just those few words are enough to really help the nervous system begin letting go. Because rest isn't something that our body forgets how to do. Sometimes it just really needs help remembering that it's finally safe enough to do it. All right, my friends, if this work resonates with you, this is exactly what we go deeper into inside of the Body First Healing program. Every Monday, we have our nervous system gym call. It's called our somatic resource and reset call. It's a 30-minute call where we do somatic practices just like this. It's where we don't just understand the nervous system, but we learn how to work with it in real time. Remember that you can always join us in the program. Be sure to share this episode if it landed with you. Tag me on social media. Let me know how it supported you today. I love, love, love your feedback more than anything. All right. I will see you next week here on the Body First Healing podcast. Bye, guys. Thank you so much for tuning into the Body First Healing podcast. If this episode resonated with you, I would be so grateful if you subscribed, left a review, or shared it with someone that you love. I'll see you back here next week. And until then, be gentle with yourself. You're doing the best you can with what you have, and that is more than enough. Just a quick note this podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for medical advice. Always consult a qualified provider for personal support.