Bedtime Routine: 5 Intentional Rituals For Deep Relaxation

Take reprieve from the fast-paced and overwhelming world with a mindful bedtime routine. By setting aside undisturbed alone time for self-care and reflection, you’re offering your mind-body-spirit connection the space to ground and center.

As a woman on a creative and intentional path, this centering is most crucial in manifesting the life you want.

Without this time, you may feel out of alignment with your purpose and passions (the very things that keep most of us sane).

The late evening hours offer a perfect window to decompress, reset, and set the stage for a peaceful and fulfilling tomorrow. The first few minutes of sleep are especially important: it’s the only time our minds beautifully dance with our conscious and subconscious desires.

It’s an ideal time of day to channel deep creative thought and visualize the future you want for yourself. Often, it’s easier to reconnect with our internal motivations and desires before bed.

In this post, discover five key practices that work together to create a mindful bedtime routine.

They’ll help you channel creativity, set intentions, and cultivate a sense of inner harmony. Inviting even a few of these steps into your nightly routine can wonderfully benefit your well-being.

5 Practices For A Mindful Bedtime Routine

1. Conscious Journaling: Surface Your Thoughts and Dreams

Find a quiet place to sit either in bed or in a soft comfortable chair. Grab your favorite notebook and pen, and let your thoughts fall without judgement onto the pages.

Set a timer for ten minutes or try to fill up at least one full page front and back.

Free-writing is one of the most effective ways to purge your mind of anxious thoughts, stressors, and pent up feelings.

It’s similar to therapy in that you can simply let everything go without worrying about sticking to a particular theme or thought for any given time.

Because journaling helps you process your emotions and clear your head, it’s a nice way to kick off your mindful bedtime routine.

2. Gratitude Practice: Channel Abundance Through Appreciation

Save a little time after your free-writing to make a quick gratitude list. Regularly expressing gratitude shifts your focus to the positives in your life and cultivates a mindset of abundance.

Take inventory of your day:

What went well?

Did you experience any pleasant surprises?

What positive moments or activities did you enjoy?

Write down five things, small or large, that brought you satisfaction, joy, comfort, or safety. They can be as simple as “I’m grateful for my cozy bed” or as sweeping as “thank you for giving me breath and health”.

Just like building a new habit, doing a daily gratitude list will train your brain. So, overtime, you’ll naturally feel thankful for what’s going well rather than dwell on what’s not.

3. Bedtime Meditation: Reconnect With and Center Yourself

You can incorporate meditation at any stage of your bedtime routine, either before journaling or after intention-setting. With a bedtime meditation, there’s no pressure to sit in posture for a long time.

Sometimes just five minutes of stillness and silence can be enough to foster a deep connection with yourself.

Close your eyes, relax your jaw, and let go of stress.

Focus on the oceanic sound of your breath, and the feeling of your body against the floor, chair, or bed. Allow your thoughts to come and go like clouds, simply observing them without analyzing them.

If you’d like, employ a favorite mantra to keep your mind from wandering too far away. Mala beads (like those below) can also be used in conjunction with meditation to help keep your mind centered as focused. Roll your fingers over one bead at a time as you either repeat your mantra or take a new breath.

By sitting in stillness, you make room for your being to channel your inner child, your goddess spirit, your divine creativity.

4. Creative Visualization: Imagine Your Ideal Future

Creative visualization is the perfect companion to a bedtime meditation session. (If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, read this post.)

This practice employs mantras, prayers, and imagination to conjure up the very life you’d love to lead and increasing the likelihood you work toward that life.

For example, say you’d always dreamt of writing a novel. One visualization may be that you’re sitting in your dream office, wearing a beautiful boho dress, writing feverishly as you’re overcome with inspiration.

The purpose of this practice is to turn your abstract dreams into a tangible reality you can see yourself fulfilling. It takes a vague concept (like writing a novel) and adds shape, depth, and texture to it. Have fun with this piece, and don’t shy away from the details.

And don’t worry if you drift off during this process. What better way to fall asleep than to your vision of the future?

5: Intention Setting: Prepare For A Purposeful New Day

As you prepare to drift off to sleep, set intentions for the following day.

Consider the goals, tasks, or experiences you want to accomplish and tell yourself that you’ll fulfill them.

In The Power Of The Subconscious Mind (highly recommend), Joseph Murphy invites his readers to test the power of intention-setting before bed by telling the brain what time they’ll wake up in the morning.

Many are surprised to find they wake up – sans alarm clock – at that exact time.

To further build on your goals, write them down or visualize them in your mind. (See how all of these practices tie together?)

Setting intentions when you’re clear-headed and most aligned with your inner purpose will allow you to show up successfully the next day.

Move Forward In Flow

There’s nothing quite like retreating inward after a long day, but a mindful bedtime routine will elevate the experience. Transform a little bit of every evening into sacred time reserved for reuniting with the truest essence of ‘you’.

Through journaling, meditation, creative visualization, gratitude, and intention setting, you’ll nurture an irreplaceable friendship with yourself.

And in the process, cultivate a deeper connection with your dreams and desires.

Give yourself compassion, love, and patience as you update your habits; this routine isn’t about perfection.

Start tonight and witness the positive impact these rituals have on your creative and intentional life path.

Then, you can work on building an energizing morning routine to start your days off right!