Quality sleep is necessary for everyone. It allows us to recharge and wake up fresh and alert. However, it’s not uncommon for people to go to bed and find themselves tossing, turning, and overthinking rather than drifting off to slumber. Psychotherapist, Terence Watts, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine. He assists people when it comes to handling anxiety, stress, addictions, phobias, and similar challenges. He has shared two methods that should lead to a restful slumber.

The Importance of Quality Sleep

Sleeping every night is a necessity as it helps the human body recharge and maintain proper functioning. It’s beneficial for one’s immune system and ability to stave off diseases. After a proper evening’s rest, our brains become alert and ready to process at normal speeds once more. Poor sleep can lead to irritability and drastically affect people’s moods. There isn’t a single system that sleeping doesn’t have an effect on, which is why we need to do our best to provide ourselves with quality slumber every night.

Battling a Restless Mind

For many people, sleeping isn’t always as easy as it sounds. Once the head makes contact with the pillow, it becomes difficult to get your brain to calm down and stop thinking. One might start recounting all the things they must accomplish at work the following morning, obsessing over unimportant situations, or worrying about something someone said that day. For some people, a restless mind can keep them up for hours. According to Watts, there are methods to combat this.

The First Method

Visualize that you’re getting into an elevator in a skyscraper and the display shows floor 300. Press the button for the ground level and imagine the sensation of the elevator starting to move downward. Imagine seeing the numbers on the display going down as you count down along with it in your mind. By the time you’ve reached the ground floor, you will likely already have drifted off to sleep.

The Second Method

If the elevator trick didn’t work, try to visualize being in a crowded department store. There are hundreds of people carrying items around you, carrying items to the register. The atmosphere is noisy and hot, and you want to get out of there. You push your way through the crowd to an escalator and step onto it to go down. The lower floor has fewer people. It’s calmer with less shouting and shoving. You wander for a while until you step onto another downward escalator as a sense of calm washes over you. The floor you arrive at is empty and peaceful, with one luxurious bed waiting for you to lie down in and drift off to sleep.

If you’re a regular social media user and you enjoy adding the occasional beauty filter to your photos or videos, you know that there are two versions of you. The one with the regular nose, normal skin, probably some blemishes and/or redness, not-so-perfect hair… and the other one with exceptional eyelashes, smooth skin, and perfectly plump lips. You may not see it as a bad thing, but many have stood up to say these filters are a problem.

What’s the Problem with Beauty Filters?

This ‘future you’ that seems super hot, although the changes have been very slight, is just not you. It’s not something you can accomplish with better skincare or spending a ton of money on skin specialists and other beauty treatments. The beauty filters provide an illusion people enjoy. Yes, it saves you time from doing your makeup, maybe even going for lash extensions and such, but using filters to get “decent pictures” has led to many young women seeking plastic surgery to transform their faces because of the way a filter makes them look.

Anxiety Caused by Over-Filtering

Anxiety in young women has increased over the years, due to the fact that they can’t be this ‘future hot self’ the beauty filters show them. Women understand that this is technology and it’s not real but the beautiful face that’s staring right back at them makes them want to be that person. To have perfectly smooth skin, dreamy lashes, fuller hair, and everything else that a computer has decided makes a person look more attractive.

Looking at oneself under a filter will inevitably make you feel bad about yourself. Looking at yourself without a filter will also make you feel bad. You enter a situation where you can’t win. Many would say that even doing your hair and makeup very nicely will feel good just for a moment. After that, you can still be left with the feeling of not being good enough and a lot of self-doubts.

White, Wealthy, and Thin

It looks like a lot of the beauty filters are following the same ideal – to make the users look whiter, wealthier, and thinner. Users with a darker skin tone have said that the filters that are supposed to smooth out the complexion are actually making their faces appear whiter. Like the filters are following a specific beauty standard, which is not a message we want to send to younger generations.

“This Is Not How I Look”

A lot of creators on Instagram have made Reels and posts about how much the filters change their facial features and advocate for using them less because overuse can be really unhealthy. However, all the posts regarding the fakeness of the beauty filters are still perfectly planned and executed. And for now, the filters are here to stay and will probably keep on modifying the way we see beauty in real life.