One of the best ways to detach from your thinking mind is to pretend that you are just an observer. Imagine yourself taking your brain out of your body and placing it into a stranger’s head. The stranger sits at a movie theater watching the stage. He has no ideas or thoughts about your life, he simply sits down to watch the screen. The screen is a reflection of everything that’s going on in your mind. As he sits and watches, he still has no thoughts. He’s just an observer.
Try doing this exercise as you lay down at night. It takes you out of your own life and your own concerns. It allows you to see the big picture without any reactions. This invites the flood of thoughts to move through you until they’re all gone and you fall asleep.
I believe that what keeps us up at night is not our thoughts themselves but our reactions, judgments, and replays of them. So become the observer instead of the controller, problem solver, or master manipulator and take the pressure off yourself to figure everything out.