It’s happening again. Despite feeling exhausted after a long day, when you crawl into bed, you just can’t seem to fall asleep. What gives?
According to Oliver Niño — a spiritual coach and energy healer to celebs like Tony Robbins and Jessica Alba — the problem is that you haven’t had a chance to de-stress.
“Anxiety tends to build up because people carry it on from their day, and they sleep with it, and then they wake up the next day and they really weren’t able to get enough sleep, and the anxieties of the day before follow them over the next day, and it kind of snowballs,” he told The Post.
And the busier you are, the more you need to practice — as he calls it — the “nighttime anxiety detox.”
“A lot of times, people say, ‘I don’t have time to do much,'” he said. “To me, it’s reversed. The harder it is, the more you have to do it.”
Because he works with some pretty busy clients, Niño focuses on techniques that can be done in five minutes or less.
He shared his strategies in his new book, “Do This Before Bed: Simple 5-Minute Practices That Will Change Your Life” — and revealed a few favorites to The Post.
Color therapy
“Color therapy is when you’re going to bed or when you’re meditating and you’re imagining different colors coming down and filling you up,” he said.
It’s been practiced since the days of ancient Egypt, based on the belief that colors have different energies and contain healing properties.
Next time you’re in bed, Niño recommends imagining “white coming down from the sky, filling you up,” and then experimenting with different colors until you find one that brings you peace.
Geometric breathing
Practitioners of yoga are probably already familiar with the magical effects of breathwork — consciously inhaling and exhaling for a set amount of time, letting in the good and letting go of the bad.
Niño likes “geometric breathing” because it “uses patterns” — inhaling for five seconds, holding the breath for five and exhaling in five.
“And while you’re doing that, you’re visualizing — you’re inhaling positive energy, you’re inhaling love and light. You’re imagining it,” he said. “And when you’re releasing, when you’re exhaling, you’re breathing out every stress, every anxiety, everything that you held onto that day.”
Cord cutting
People can be draining sometimes — and you might not even realize how much they’re still influencing your mood even when they’re no longer physically there.
For this, Niño practices the “cord-cutting” technique.
“If someone’s affecting me, I probably have what I call an energetic cord attached from them to me — and that cord is how emotions and energy travel between two people,” he explained.
When this happens, he uses color therapy to imagine himself filled with light from the sky — followed by another visualization exercise.
“I imagine my hands are swords,” he said. Once he’s set his intention to untether himself from whoever is affecting him, he imagines slicing those cords.
Physical activity
While the mode may vary, Niño recommends doing something physical to release anxious energy before bed.
“For some people, their routine might be journaling, and after they journal or do their artwork, they feel better because they’re able to kind of express all that extra energy, and it goes through the paper,” he said.
“For some people, they’re more physical in nature, right? They want to go for a night walk, or they want to dance or shake it off or do some yoga. And that physical movement shakes off any of that excess energy.”
Other options include taking a salt bath, lighting some incense, listening to a guided meditation or sound bath or even tidying the house.
Laughter therapy
It’s a cliché, but laughter really is the best medicine — and it just might do the trick in reducing anxiety.
“Some people, they want laughter therapy, like, they watch Netflix, they scroll through Instagram, they look at something that makes them laugh or takes their mind away from it,” he said. “And when they’re laughing, anxiety can’t build up.”
Before you say anything — yes, that advice involves blue light, which we know is bad for sleep. But, sometimes, wellness is a balancing act — one where it’s best not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
“It’s not going to be perfect,” he said. “But, to me, laughter is better than anxiety, right?”