80 | Stop Scrolling Before Bed and Try This Simple 3-Night Sleep Challenge

What do you want your brain to be thinking about while you sleep? That might sound like a strange question, but think about it, because there's real research behind this.

Sleep scientists have found that your brain does not treat everything you took in during the day the same way while you sleep.

Information that feels emotionally loaded, meaning it stirred something in you, it upset you, maybe it alarmed you or excited you, that tends to get prioritized for processing overnight more than information that felt neutral or unimportant.

So in other words, whatever felt most emotionally charged right before you fell asleep tends to get more attention from your brain while you rest.

Here is a simple way to picture what research means by this.

So I want you to imagine your brain has a nightly sorting job to do, like somebody's going through this stack of papers at the end of the day and deciding what goes into the permanent file and what gets tossed.

The papers with something dramatic written on them, something that made you feel a strong emotion, they tend to get pulled to the top of the stack, and your brain treats them as urgent, as worth holding onto, simply because they carried a strong feeling when you first took them in.

It doesn't matter whether that feeling was fear or anxiety, envy or excitement.

Strong emotion is the signal that your brain uses to decide what is worth keeping.

Now, think about what that means for the last 10 minutes before most of us go to bed.

I imagine that we are not all closing our eyes after reading a calm devotional or simply reflecting on our day.

Chances are, at least a few times a week, we are scrolling through a stranger's argument in a comment section, or somebody else's vacation, or a news story that has been designed to actually alarm us, or a video engineered to make us feel something fast.

And then we hand all of that over to our brain for the next seven to eight hours of processing.

Think about how many of those things are actually built to trigger a strong emotional reaction on purpose.

That outrage post is sometimes not an accident.

The comparison-inducing vacation reel is not neutral.

The alarming headline was chosen because alarm keeps you watching.

So night after night, we are handing our brain the most emotionally charged content of our entire day, right at the exact moment that it's preparing to file away what matters the most.

And most of that content has nothing to do with our actual life, our actual family, or our authentic walk with God.

I'm gonna tell you, that reframes the whole idea of a bedtime scroll for me.

It is not neutral.

Scrolling is not simply winding down.

It might actually be loading your mind with raw material that has nothing to do with your life, and then asking your brain to sort through it all night.

I think about Psalm 63, where David writes that on his bed, he remembers God.

He thinks of him through the watches of the night.