The Miracle Morning (Updated and Expanded Edition)

11

THE MIRACLE EVENING

Your Strategy for Blissful Bedtime and Better Sleep

“If you’re going to bed at the same time and waking up at the same time each day, you will find that not only will the quality of your sleep improve, but in some cases, you might not need as much.”

—Dr. Michael Breus, clinical psychologist and sleep medicine expert

“May the angels from heaven bring the sweetest of all dreams for you. May you have long and blissful sleep. Good night my friend!”

—Unknown

For years, people have asked what my evening ritual is. And, for years, I’ve been slightly embarrassed to tell them that I didn’t have one. My answer always seemed to be a letdown.

That was until I realized that being intentional about how we end our day might be as important as how we begin it. This chapter will help you to create your Miracle Evening ritual with the following benefits in mind:

•Overcoming difficulties falling and/or staying asleep.

•Letting go of stressful thoughts and feelings so you can go to bed feeling calm and relaxed.

•Setting up your internal and external environments to wake up feeling more refreshed and energized.

•Drifting off to sleep feeling grateful and at peace.

If you struggle with feeling stressed at the end of the day and have difficulties falling or staying asleep, this chapter is especially for you. As someone who has struggled with and overcome chronic insomnia and extended bouts of sleep deprivation, I know how physically, mentally, and emotionally devastating it can be. So, I am committed to doing whatever I can to help people end their days in a way that enables them to feel great and sleep well.

As I mentioned in Chapter 5, our mental and emotional state in the morning is typically a reflection of whatever mental and emotional state we dwell on as we fall asleep. What you allow yourself to focus on before bed can not only make it difficult to doze off, but also weighs on your subconscious mind while you sleep and affects how you feel when you wake up. So, if you end your day allowing yourself to think stressful thoughts, it will affect your ability to get a good night’s sleep and you’ll likely wake up feeling stressed and not feeling well-rested.

If, instead, you establish an evening routine that enables you to let go of stressful thoughts, calm your body and mind, and focus on what you’re grateful for, then you’re much more likely to fall asleep feeling peaceful, grateful, and happy, sleep well, and then wake up in that same blissful state. With this perspective in mind, it would only make sense to be highly intentional about how we close out each day to prepare our mind and body for not only restorative sleep but also an optimal start to the following day.

“I Want to Die”

From November 2019 to May 2020, I averaged two to four hours of sleep per night. If you’ve ever experienced even a single night when you were only able to sleep for a few hours, you know how detrimental that can be to your mental, emotional, and physical well-being. Six months of chronic sleep deprivation left me severely traumatized, experiencing hallucinations and thinking people were trying to kill me, suffering from unyielding depression and debilitating anxiety, and even contemplating suicide.

Each night, I would lay awake, tossing and turning and staring at the ceiling. My mind would race, plagued with all the crazy things going on in the world, problems in my personal life, and fear of my cancer coming back—all creating a storm of anxiety. My heart raced in unison with my mind, and cortisol flooded my veins, causing me to feel wide awake while simultaneously mentally and physically exhausted. During the day, I felt unwell and unhappy and spent much of my time in a very dark place.

The sleep deprivation was feeding my depression and anxiety, while depression and anxiety were contributing to my sleep deprivation. I was in a vicious cycle that would not end unless I did something to escape it. One night, from our guest bedroom, where I had been sleeping alone for the last two months so I wouldn’t be disturbed when Ursula came to bed, I desperately sent her the following text message:

Sweetheart, I don’t want to worry you, but I have to be honest. I want to die. I can’t take this anymore, and I don’t know what to do.

A few hours later, Ursula woke up, read my text, and came into the guest room. She hugged me and told me she loved me. She was coming from a place of hopelessness as much as she was from a place of compassion. In full transparency, our marriage had barely survived the past few years and was on the verge of falling apart after the past six months. We were both suffering, but only I was the cause. Having not gotten a good night’s sleep in nearly half a year, I had become a different person. I was not the positive, happy, joyful man that Ursula married. I was anxious, fearful, depressed, and unpleasant to be around. As much as she loved me, she could only take so much, and seeing me give up hope was causing her to do the same.

I began researching and experimenting with various strategies to improve my sleep. Similar to how the S.A.V.E.R.S. emerged in 2008 out of desperation and depression, the solution to my sleep nightmare came, over time, through trial and error, as I developed the Miracle Evening.

Around that time, I was scrolling through the Miracle Morning Community Facebook group when one of Brian Marshall’s posts caught my eye. Brian has become one of the most consistent Miracle Morning practitioners in the world, having now completed over 2,200 consecutive Miracle Mornings (and counting) without ever missing a single day. According to Brian, he owes his uninterrupted track record of Miracle Mornings to the evening routine that set him up for success in the mornings, which he called R.E.S.T.E.R.S.—his own acronym to optimize bedtime and sleep. Brian’s post that day read:

I have recently completed more than 260 consecutive days of TMM. No breaks, no shorts, no missed days. My life has transformed into something far more enjoyable and deliberate. I feel vibrant and absolutely glowing with AWESOME. I am solidly behind the wheel of my life and have amazing clarity of purpose and direction. Each day I wake better than I was the day before because each day, I faithfully complete my S.A.V.E.R.S. My uninterrupted track record, however, is owing to an evening routine that I have also done for as many days. It’s like S.A.V.E.R.S. in the evening. I have started to call them R.E.S.T.E.R.S.

The R.E.S.T.E.R.S. acronym stands for Read, Exercise, Shower, Tally, Empower, Relax, and Sleep. Like the S.A.V.E.R.S., Brian’s R.E.S.T.E.R.S. provided simple, actionable steps to wind down in the evening and prepare the mind and body for optimal sleep, and inspired me to design the Miracle Evening ritual. My version includes some additional steps that I’ve found to be highly beneficial to prepare my physical, mental, and emotional state for an optimal night of sleep. There are also aspects of Brian’s routine, such as showering, that I do every night automatically, so I didn’t feel the need to include them in my written evening ritual.

I’ve organized the exact steps of the Miracle Evening into the acronym S.L.U.M.B.E.R.S. (I know, I know—so many acronyms). The word slumber is defined as “to sleep,” and since the ultimate objective of this routine is to help you sleep better, it felt like an appropriate acronym. I’ll walk you through each of the steps and then give you some thoughts on how you can use them as is or as a springboard to design your own Miracle Evening.

The S.L.U.M.B.E.R.S.

My Miracle Evening starts a few hours before bedtime and has enabled me to go from being a sufferer of chronic insomnia and sleep deprivation to sleeping peacefully and waking up feeling refreshed and rejuvenated. My current Miracle Evening can be summarized into the following steps:

•Stop eating three to four hours before bed.

•Let go of stressful thoughts and feelings.

•Use natural sleep aids if needed.

•Map out your next day.

•Boycott blue light.

•Enter a blissful state with bedtime affirmations.

•Read a book that makes you feel good.

•Sleep like a baby.

While this may or may not feel like a lot at first glance, these steps are quite simple and will likely become automatic and effortless for you rather quickly. And while each of these steps can be extremely beneficial on its own, like the S.A.V.E.R.S., when combined, they can completely transform how you feel every night before bed and how well you sleep. Let’s explore and expand on each step.

Stop Eating 3 to 4 Hours Before Bed

As mentioned in Chapter 8, digesting food is one of the most energy-depleting processes that our body endures (just think of how utterly exhausted you feel after eating a large meal). And while that might trick us into thinking that eating a meal before bed is a good strategy, since it makes us feel tired, the impact of eating close to bedtime is detrimental because it forces your body to continue working through the night and can leave you feeling like you were hit by a truck in the morning. So, being intentional about what time you eat, how much you eat, and which foods you eat is crucial to optimizing your sleep and how you feel in the morning.

Although it can take between 24 and 72 hours for a meal to move entirely through your GI (gastrointestinal) tract, what we’re concerned with here are the three to four hours it takes for food to move from your stomach to your small intestine. That phase of the digestive process is where most of the heavy lifting occurs, and then your body can rest, heal, and rejuvenate while you’re sleeping.

The length of time it takes for a meal to be digested is based on variables such as the quantity and types of food consumed. For example, foods that are high in fiber are much easier and faster to digest than foods that have a low fiber content. Two to three hours should be sufficient to digest high-fiber foods, such as most fruits, vegetables, nuts, beans, and whole grains. It might take four hours (or longer) to digest foods low in fiber, such as meat, bread, pasta, chips, and foods that are high in sugar. And, of course, the larger the meal, the longer it takes your body to digest.

I recommend working toward being able to finish your last meal of the day three to four hours before your bedtime. For example, if you go to bed at 10 pm, I recommend eating dinner around 6 or 6:30 PM to allow your body adequate time to digest. If your schedule or forces outside of your control leave you with no other option than to eat closer to bedtime, I suggest eating as small a meal as possible (smaller than the size of your fist) and choosing healthy foods, preferably those that are high in fiber.

If you are currently in the routine of eating dinner closer to bedtime or snacking late at night, understand that this will require a conscious effort and commitment on your part. To make it easier on yourself, I encourage you to gradually move up the time you finish your last meal so that your body and mind can acclimate. In other words, if you currently finish eating one hour before bedtime, try moving that up to finish 90 minutes before bedtime. Do that for a week, and then move to two hours, and then to two and a half, three, and so on. Include this change as part of your 30-Day Journey, and within a few weeks, this will start to become natural, automatic, and easy for you.

Your choice is to either eat close to bedtime, burden your body with the task of digesting food while it’s supposed to be resting, and suffer the consequences in the morning—or start making a conscious decision to finish eating earlier and give your body an opportunity to rest, heal, and rejuvenate while you’re sleeping so you wake up feeling reenergized.

Let Go of Stressful Thoughts and Feelings

Do you find that as you lay down to sleep, you are often consumed by thoughts about things that are out of your immediate control? As in, you ruminate over things that you can’t (or won’t) do anything about in the present moment?

Maybe your thoughts are directed toward something that happened in the recent past or your to-do list for the next day. Maybe you’re worried about all your unfinished projects, your financial situation, health challenges, a conflict you’re experiencing in a personal or professional relationship, a loved one who is suffering, the state of the world, the economy, or anything else that you have no control over as you lay down to go to sleep. The problem is that when we worry about things that are out of our immediate control, we naturally feel out of control, and that causes us to experience sleep-disrupting stress and anxiety.

Put another way, when we worry about things that are out of our control, we feel unsafe, and feeling safe is our most fundamental psychological need. When we don’t feel safe, our nervous system engages our fight-or-flight response. It is nearly impossible to relax and fall asleep peacefully when we feel like our safety is threatened in some way. Thankfully, unless we are in some sort of immediate danger, feeling safe is a conscious choice that we can make. By simply acknowledging and affirming that we are indeed safe as we lay down to sleep, we can enter a state of psychological safety.

I used to spend most nights thinking and/or worrying about all the above until I had a breakthrough of what might seem to be an obvious realization: my only objective at bedtime is to prepare my mind and body for blissful sleep. That’s it. Nothing else. Therefore, all our thoughts (or lack thereof) and actions should be in alignment with that singular objective.

Allow me to take a moment to clarify what I mean by “blissful” sleep. I define a state of bliss as feeling completely at peace and deeply grateful. This means that when my head hits the pillow, I am no longer going to ruminate over or replay what happened that day unless it is something that supports me feeling at peace and grateful. There’s nothing wrong with thinking over your day as you fall asleep if it brings a smile to your face. But avoid allowing yourself to replay stressful events, think about what went wrong that day, or worry about the not-yet-here future, because those thought patterns can be detrimental to your ability to get restful and restorative sleep.

With this awareness, I decided that I needed to start flipping my mental “off” switch once it was time to wind down for the night. I needed to either stop thinking about things that caused me stress (easier said than done) or to replace those counterproductive thoughts with productive ones that supported me in feeling calm, peaceful, grateful, happy, or any other state that helped me to make the transition to blissful sleep. To do this, I implemented the following process of acknowledging, accepting, and then letting go of stressful thoughts and feelings in three effortless steps.

The first step in letting go of stressful feelings is to acknowledge what you’re feeling and the perceived cause. Allowing yourself to dwell in a stressful emotional state and focus on anything that is out of your immediate control—right before bed—is not productive and robs you of feeling at peace as you prepare to fall asleep. However, attempting to ignore, suppress, or bypass a painful emotion is equally unproductive, as it doesn’t address the feeling and usually perpetuates it underneath the surface.

To truly let go of a stressful feeling, you must bring it from your unconscious to your conscious mind so that you can acknowledge it, process it, and let it go. Here’s an affirmation you can follow to do exactly that. Begin by taking a slow, deep breath as you identify and acknowledge what you’re feeling and what’s causing it.

I am feeling___________[fear, anxiety, anger, stress, sadness, frustration, or any other sleep-disrupting emotion] about___________[insert the perceived cause of your inner turmoil].

Here are some examples:

•I am feeling fear about my financial situation.

•I am feeling angry about how my spouse treated me today.

•I am feeling sadness about my health challenges.

As you begin to acknowledge and name what you’re feeling, take slow deep breaths to calm your mind and your nervous system. And be patient, as it may take a minute or so to become present to your true feelings. Acknowledge whatever emotions you’re experiencing from a place of acceptance and nonjudgment. There’s no need to label your feelings or yourself as good or bad. Simply observe what you’re feeling and where it’s coming from as you relax into each breath.

The second step is to remember your primary bedtime objective—preparing your mind and body for blissful sleep—and give yourself permission to completely accept and be at peace with whatever you’re feeling. Even if what you’re feeling is unpleasant, resisting the feeling only amplifies your inner turmoil because resisting reality perpetuates emotional pain and is a form of making yourself wrong for feeling the way you do. When we resist the way we’re feeling, we not only feel bad but also feel bad that we feel bad. Instead, remind yourself that you have every right to feel the way you do, but that right now—bedtime—is simply not the time to indulge those feelings and perpetuate unnecessary stress. Try this affirmation:

Though I have every right to feel the way I do, now is not the time to dwell on a stressful state. My only objective is to prepare my mind and body for blissful sleep, so I will align my thoughts and feelings with that objective.

Give yourself grace, be at peace with whatever you’re feeling, and remember that now is the time to align your thoughts and feelings with your primary bedtime objective: to prepare your mind and body for an optimal night of sleep.

The third and final step is to give yourself permission to let go of stressful thoughts and fall asleep feeling good. Only you can give yourself permission to let go of your stressful thoughts and feel good and grateful as you drift off to sleep. Try this affirmation:

I give myself permission to let go of any stressful thoughts and feelings, and instead, I am choosing to be at peace and focus on what I’m grateful for so that I can feel blissful as I drift off to sleep.

If giving yourself permission to let go of your stressful thoughts and to fall asleep feeling good is a permission you haven’t granted yourself in a while, it may feel foreign at first. If the idea of feeling blissful as you drift off to sleep sounds impossible, understand that it’s likely just because you haven’t been doing it. But you absolutely can. Remember, it’s not about what’s happening outside of you but inside of you that determines how you feel. Stick with it until it becomes your norm.

Use Natural Sleep Aids If Needed

In case you struggle to fall asleep or stay asleep, I would be remiss if I didn’t share the sleep supplements that I used to help me overcome the agonizing six-month period when I suffered from chronic insomnia and sleep deprivation.

I went on a search for natural remedies and solutions. I began experimenting with a wide variety of sleep supplements, being mindful of every ingredient and looking for those that didn’t contain synthetic fillers and that were plant-based and organic whenever possible. I eventually called Dr. Michael Breus and asked for his expert advice. Michael was a clinical psychologist and sleep medicine expert, known as the Sleep Doctor. He responded by asking me a lot of questions about my diet, medications, and supplements, then he made his recommendations. I immediately put everything I had learned into practice.

Within a matter of weeks, I went from averaging an unbearable two to four hours of sleep per night to a much healthier six to seven hours and woke up feeling great. After searching for and trying different sleep supplements, here’s the regimen I landed on that finally worked:

90 minutes before bed . . .

•450mg organic valerian root (brand I use: Herbal Roots, available at Amazon.com)

•300mg magnesium glycinate (brand I use: Organifi. Note: Organifi is one of my podcast sponsors, so you can get 20 percent off at organifi.com/tmm)

45 minutes before bed . . .

•CBN Night Caps (brand I use: Cured Nutrition, who is also one of my podcast sponsors, so you can get 20 percent off at www.curednutrition.com/tmm.)

30 minutes before bed . . .

•3mg melatonin (brand I use: Herbatonin, available at Amazon.com)

Since I began applying this supplement regimen as part of my Miracle Evening more than two years ago, I have averaged seven hours of quality sleep each night. I have also gifted these supplements to friends who were struggling with sleep, and the results have been promising for nearly every person I’ve gifted them to. However, because every body is unique, even natural herbs and supplements can be unsafe for someone with certain medical conditions or cause unwanted side effects. I discovered that I was allergic to ashwagandha after I had been taking it for a few months, and it was contributing to the anxiety and sleeplessness I was experiencing. So, you should always consult a trusted medical professional before taking any supplements.

Also, to be clear, sleep supplements alone didn’t cure my insomnia. They were simply one component of my approach. If I had continued to eat too close to bedtime, or allowed myself to think stressful thoughts as I lay down to sleep, I don’t think the supplements would have made much of an impact.

Sleep aids may not be necessary for you, but if they are, you may find these natural supplements to be life savers.

Map Out Your Next Day

Before bed, make sure everything is out of your head that you need to do tomorrow. Whether that means you use a digital calendar or you physically write down your tasks in a journal or a planner that you keep on your bedside table, map out your schedule hour by hour (including free time). An alternative to doing this at bedtime is to do this at the end of your workday so that you don’t even have to think about it before bed. Either way, writing down what you need to do the next day helps clear your mind and reduce stress. Gino Wickman talks about this in Entrepreneurial Leap:

Every night before I go to bed, I lay out my entire next day on a legal pad. I use a legal pad because I believe in the power of writing by hand. I time-block everything I need to do: the calls I need to make, the meetings I need to attend, and the projects I need to finish. I list them all in chronological order so that my day is already charted.

If you do this, you will sleep better. You will wake up with ideas and be more creative. You’ll wake up with answers to problems and projects you need to work on the next day. That’s because your subconscious will be working on them during the night while you sleep.

Personally, I use a digital calendar, an app called Fantastical, which is similar to Google Calendar, for my schedule. I prefer a digital calendar because most of my activities each day are recurring, such as Miracle Morning / S.A.V.E.R.S. (4 to 5 AM), Writing (5 to 6 AM), Top Work Priority (6 to 7 AM), FAMily Time + Smoothie (7 to 8 AM), Workout + Prep for My Workday (8 to 9 AM), Emails (9 to 10 AM), and so on. They are already time blocked, and I rarely have to give my schedule any thought as I lay down to go to sleep. By putting your schedule in writing, whether on paper or digitally, you can rest assured that you have budgeted time to tackle all your important tasks the next day. When the next day’s responsibilities are in writing, you no longer have to give them any thought and can focus on your objective of sleeping peacefully.

Boycott Blue Light Before Bed

If you have trouble falling asleep at night, your use of electronics might be to blame. Cell phones, tablets, computers, and televisions all emit blue light. Also known as high-energy visible (HEV) light, blue light produces higher amounts of energy and boosts attention and alertness. It also limits your body’s production of melatonin, the hormone that makes you sleepy. So, if you have a habit of looking at your smartphone or watching TV too close to bedtime, it is likely disrupting the quality of your sleep.

How can we eliminate or at least minimize blue light exposure before bed? Here are a few tips:

•Avoid looking at electronics 30 to 60 minutes before bed. While avoiding blue light two to three hours before bed is ideal, start with 30 to 60 minutes. To help you do this, you might choose to set a reminder in your phone that prompts you to stop looking at your phone (I know, the irony).

•Keep your bedroom as dark as possible. Dim your lights 30 minutes before bed. You can also use red light bulbs since red light waves are less likely to affect circadian rhythms and suppress melatonin. I use a red bulb in my bedside lamp.

•Plug your phone in across the room. We addressed this tip earlier as part of the five-step snooze-proof wake-up strategy, but I think it’s important to revisit it here. In addition to emitting blue light, the content on your phone is also stimulating and can make you more alert at the time when you want to be winding down. If you have trouble resisting the temptation of your phone as you try to fall asleep, plug it in across the room or even in the bathroom. This way, you cannot absentmindedly reach for it while you’re going to sleep. And remember that keeping your alarm out of reach ensures that you have to get out of bed to turn it off in the morning, which makes it easier to stay awake.

Enter a Blissful State with Bedtime Affirmations

Letting go of stressful thoughts and emotions can be much easier when you have peaceful, calming, and empowering thoughts and emotions to replace them with. To foster peaceful thinking, I use the following bedtime affirmations, which I think to myself as I breathe deeply and slowly and drift off to sleep. I invite you to take a few moments to pause after you read each one, take a deep breath, possibly close your eyes, and do your best to really feel what you’re affirming.

To accept whatever happened that day, release any resistance, and be completely at peace, try this affirmation:

Now is not the time to worry about or try and solve my problems. My only objective is to calm my mind and body for restful and rejuvenating sleep.

To be completely present to the perfection of the moment, try this affirmation:

This moment is perfect. I am safe, and I am comfortable in my bed. I have nothing to worry about.

To express, experience, and embody gratitude, try this affirmation:

I am grateful for __________. OR God, thank you for __________.

If you currently have a habit of thinking stressful thoughts before bed, recognize that it will take a conscious commitment to replace them with peaceful, grateful thoughts. Our programmed way of thinking is habitual and mostly unconscious, so your subconscious may resist new thoughts and want to default to old ones (that’s normal and expected). Having written affirmations can be one of the simplest and most effective ways to take control of your thoughts and choose those that best serve you.

The following is a more detailed version of my personal bedtime affirmations that I created long before I ever thought of writing this book. I printed them out, kept them on my bedside table, and read them every night right before I lay down to go to sleep. Doing so helped remind me of my primary intention of relaxing my mind and body to prepare for blissful sleep. Of course, these, too, have been expanded and updated for this book.

I often see Miracle Morning Community members post about how helpful these bedtime affirmations have been to their ability to wake up effectively each morning. One member of the Miracle Morning Community said that he read them every night before bed for 48 consecutive days and never missed a single Miracle Morning. Then, the first night he failed to read his bedtime affirmations, he slept through his alarm the next day.

If you’d prefer to print a copy of these affirmations to keep next to your bed, so it’s easier for you to remember to actually read them each night, you can download them at MiracleMorning.com/resources.

Read a Book That Makes You Feel Good

As I said earlier, reading is the most immediate, surefire way to acquire knowledge and set the tone for your day, or in this case, night. I also mentioned the importance of thinking positive thoughts before you go to bed. Well, guess what? Reading can help us with this. Pick up a novel that always brings a smile to your face, a book about being happy, or anything that makes you feel good and calms your mind.

Personally, I get into bed, put my phone on airplane mode, turn on my white noise machine, and pull out a book from a rotating collection that I keep in the drawer of my nightstand. Reading for 10 to 20 minutes before bed helps me get into a positive state of mind before I close my eyes. To do this, there are two very specific criteria for what I read:

•It must be a book that makes me feel good, grateful, and/ or peaceful so that it contributes to preparing my mind for blissful sleep.

•It’s almost always a book I’ve already read and in which I’ve underlined the parts I want to reread, so I don’t exert any energy trying to comprehend or learn something new.

Although it’s not necessary to choose books that you’ve already read, this approach requires far less mental bandwidth. This is very different than the books I read during my Miracle Morning, when I usually select something new that teaches me how to improve or achieve a specific result in a particular area of my life, which takes a lot of mental bandwidth.

After reading, I am primed to begin thinking about what I am grateful for, to meditate, or to recite a mantra as I drift off to sleep.

Sleep Like a Baby

This last step is as much philosophical and spiritual as it is practical. Consider that when you came into this world, you were born into a pure, unaffected state of consciousness, with no worries, regrets, opinions, judgments, expectations, insecurities, fears, or belief systems thrust upon you by other people that told you how you were supposed to think, feel, and behave. You weren’t afraid of failure, stressed about problems, or concerned with what other people thought of you. Your mind wasn’t yet programmed with society’s invented norms, standards, and rules. You had no negative judgments of others nor any about yourself. And you certainly didn’t lay awake at night ruminating over the past or worrying about the future.

Without any effort, joy was your default state of being, which was disturbed only by occasional physical discomforts, such as hunger pains or lack of sleep. As soon as you were fed or took a nap, you were back to smiling, giggling, and observing. There’s a reason babies are often referred to as “bundles of joy.” Joy is our natural, inherent state.

But as you got older, everything changed. Your natural states of Inner Freedom and inherent joy were gradually eroded by external programming. Growing up, we are conditioned by our parents and society at large to think that joy and happiness are found in things outside of ourselves. A cartoon. A toy. Food. Praise. Accomplishments. However, none of those things actually provide us with true, sustained joy and happiness. These external stimuli produce short-lived emotional highs and states of pleasure that quickly dissipate and must be replaced by another stimulus.

It is time to get back to your inherent state of Inner Freedom, and bedtime is the perfect opportunity to start, by taking control of your mental and emotional well-being. You don’t have to lay awake at night ruminating over the past or worrying about the future. Of course, you can if you want, but that’s up to you.

Remember, the realization (and resulting decision) that took me from chronic insomnia, sleep deprivation, severe anxiety, and depression to sleeping like a baby was this: My only objective at bedtime is to prepare my mind and body for blissful sleep. That’s it. Nothing else.

What does this look like in practice? I implement every single step outlined in the S.L.U.M.B.E.R.S. And as I lay down to go to sleep, I spend a few minutes thinking of what I’m grateful for and allowing myself to dwell on a feeling of gratitude. Personally, I find it helpful to direct that gratitude toward God, thinking something like, God, thank you so much for my wife, Ursula. I am so blessed to have her in my life. Then I will breathe slowly and deeply as I think of Ursula and give myself the gift of dwelling on an all-encompassing state of gratitude. I’ll then move on to other aspects of my life that I’m grateful for, such as my children, my health, our home, my comfortable bed, and so on.

Other times, if I had a good day overall, I’ll replay the events of the day, such as thanking God and feeling grateful that I got to play a board game with my son, for the meaningful conversation I had with my daughter, the progress I made at work, and the meal that my wife made for our family.

Typically, this routine lulls me to sleep. But for the times that it doesn’t, I will continue focusing on my breathing and what I’m grateful for while reciting calming affirmations until I finally drift off to sleep, feeling grateful and at peace.

By focusing on what you are grateful for, you can enter a peaceful state of contentment before bedtime and give your subconscious the gift of a nighttime’s worth of happy thoughts. It was not necessarily easy to practice these methods at the start, and you should not expect it to be. If you’re not used to consciously focusing on and feeling what you’re grateful for, this might seem foreign or unrealistic at first. Again, our thought patterns are mostly unconscious and habitual, so it takes a conscious effort and time to upgrade our thinking. Reciting bedtime affirmations that remind you of what to focus on definitely helps. Over time, it became increasingly easier for me to think positive thoughts before bed and to prepare myself for restful sleep, until it was unconscious and automatic. Before I knew it, I went from lying awake feeling stressed every night to falling asleep feeling genuinely grateful and at peace. And not only did I fall asleep that way, but I woke up feeling the same!

Sleep is one of the most beneficial gifts we give to our minds and bodies, and with S.L.U.M.B.E.R.S., you are perfectly prepared to make the most of that gift.

Customizing Your Own Miracle Evening

Just like the S.A.V.E.R.S., your Miracle Evening routine can be adjusted, customized, and tailored to fit your schedule and preferences. Just as this book is about establishing your Miracle Morning ritual, this chapter is about designing your Miracle Evening ritual. You can implement every step outlined in the S.L.U.M.B.E.R.S., pick and choose which steps resonate with you, or start from scratch and build your own ritual. What is important is not which version you choose but that you implement some type of evening ritual that helps you relax your mind and body so that you can get a good night’s sleep and wake up feeling rested and rejuvenated.

There is certainly something to be said for keeping it simple. For example, you might simply choose to stop eating a few hours before bed and think about what you’re grateful for as you fall asleep, and that is all you need to wind down and sleep well. To help you do that, here are the essential outcomes to keep in mind when deciding on your Miracle Evening routine:

•Let go of stressful thoughts and feelings so you can go to bed feeling calm and relaxed.

•Set up your internal and external environments to wake up feeling more refreshed and energized.

•Drift off to sleep feeling grateful and at peace.

Some other strategies to consider are using eye masks and earplugs to help eliminate the possibility of your sleep being disrupted by light or sound. The use of white or brown noise can also be helpful for some sleepers. Personally, I use both earplugs and a “white noise” app that runs from across the room while my phone is in airplane mode. This helps to drown out any unexpected noises that could disrupt your sleep.

Final Thoughts on the Miracle Evening

You now have the building blocks to create your ideal Miracle Evening ritual that will complement your Miracle Morning. Remember that maintaining a new routine requires a commitment at first but can start to become automatic and effortless quickly (usually within a few weeks). So, have faith in the process and remember that the benefits you’ll experience are significant, and it will become easier and easier every time that you do it.

Remember that how you end your day may be as important as how you begin it. While your Miracle Morning enables you to start each day in a peak mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual state, your Miracle Evening routine allows you to end each day feeling grateful and at peace so that you can drift off into blissful sleep and wake up feeling good.

I can tell you from experience that, no matter how much you might struggle right now with letting go of stressful thoughts and getting a good night’s sleep, implementing a Miracle Evening ritual can be as transformative for you as it was for me. You deserve to fall asleep feeling at peace and grateful, and only you can give that gift to yourself. Follow the S.L.U.M.B.E.R.S. tonight, and may you wake up feeling rested, rejuvenated, and ready for your Miracle Morning so you can show up at your best—for those you love, those you lead, and for yourself—every single day.