What keeps you up at night? Other than your teething baby or the neighbor’s cat? Like, what’s the soundtrack in your head that will not stop?

Bills? Your Mother-In-Law? That first-world crisis where you can’t figure out which heels to wear to your best friend’s wedding on Saturday?

(Y’all, I’m plagiarizing the idea for this post from church. It’s for a good cause, so that’s totally ok, right?)

On Sunday the minister gave us post-it notes and told us to write down all those night worries. Then we posted them on the wall. And the staff pulled them all together into one of those word cloud things. So we could see all the BIG worries and small worries. (Small worries are still worries, right?)

Apparently, lots of us are worried about CHILDREN. Because that word was extra, EXTRA large. Totally makes sense if you’re a momma or poppa (or aunt or uncle or teacher or babysitter or lover of humanity…)

Your happy challenge

Here’s my challenge for you this week. Instead of a worry wordle, let’s flip it into a wordle of HAPPY.

Every night before bed, set a timer for two minutes and write down all those things that plagued you during the day — those crazy large and crazy small things that laugh in your face when you think you’re about to drift off to sleep.

Now’s the fun part. Set the timer for another two minutes and make one of those gratitude journals. List everything you’re thankful for. Then do what I do with my kids every night: Note all the things that just plain make you happy. I bet once you get started with the “happy” list, you’ll want to keep on keepin’ on even after the 2-minute deadline.

The best part of the “happy” list is that it’s not tied to the activities of a specific day.

So if day three of this challenge is sucky, and your “worry” list is off the hook, you don’t have to scrounge around for “thankful” things from the day. You can just start writing: ice cream — dark chocolate — the beach — snowflakes — dogs — crayons — unspillable sippy cups — singing — electricity — dogs who eat Cheerio crumbs — strawberries — donuts — sushi — laughter — sassy strappy sandals — hot chocolate …

Set the lists aside til the end of the week. So on day two, don’t review the lists from day one. That might influence your lists for day two.

Make some wordles – and reflect

At the end of the week, create a bunch of Wordles. You can use wordle.net or other world-cloud creators.

Then spend 30 minutes exploring the results. Any patterns emerge? Anything surprise you? Are your happy Wordles longer or shorter than your worry Wordles? Any worries bigger than you expected, or smaller than you thought? Anything JUMP out for you from the happy Wordles?

Maybe dark chocolate is SUPER HUGE, so you should just go buy a Costco-sized ton of it and eat it whenever one of those BIG worries creeps into your mind. It’ll be your secret anti-worry weapon: Nobody better steal my chocolate, nobody better steal my happy.

Then reflect on the week. What was the impact of acknowledging your worries before bed? Did you take their power away?

Sometimes worries just jump up and down, screaming for you to notice them. (Like small children.)

And what about the exercise of focusing on happy things before you finally turned out the light? Did you sleep better? How did you feel the next morning?

How often do you take the time to pause and examine what’s going on in your head, what’s really keeping you up at night?

Use this week as a test. You might even find that some worries are super easy to fix: Car needs an oil change? Get ‘er done! Then you can check those off your list.

And the lovely happy lists? These are treasures. Keep them in your arsenal when things get tough. Maybe even commit to reviewing one happy list a night before you fall asleep. That just might be the sweet balm you need to bring on the sweet slumbers.

Share your happy challenge stories below or on Facebook at MothersRest.

Photo credit, featured image: Mi Pham from Unsplash.com

ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS

I’m excited to share that the Greensboro News & Record featured this story on their site.