Why do we have problems with insomnia? Many of us think about NOT going to sleep, instead of thinking about sleeping when we hit the pillow at night. Fearful thoughts of not being able to sleep trigger the fight or flight response, and the stress chemicals that are produced make us anxious and prevent us from relaxing.
As we get more and more into the habit of worrying about not being able to fall asleep, we build a strong “can’t fall asleep” neural pattern in our brain. This pattern automatically associates the fear of not being able to sleep with the very act of going to bed each night. Ready! The insomniac is born!
Most people pay little attention to the direction of their thoughts. Most people believe that you have to think any thought that pops into your brain, whether you like it or not. Could not be farther from the truth. Successful people have always known that they can choose what thoughts they want to think, and they can refuse to think about the non-conforming, self-defeating, wake-up thoughts that spontaneously gallop through their minds.
Basically, if we don’t know how we think, we won’t know why we have insomnia. People need to know the basic neuroscience of how they move from one thought to another. This type of information is important. Once you know how your brain works, you can make it work for you instead of against you.
If you haven’t given much thought to why you’re having the thoughts you’re having, you probably don’t know the difference between thinking about going to sleep and thinking about NOT going to sleep. It took me a while to understand the difference and I am a therapist. Once you open your eyes (no pun intended), you can see that the difference is subtle but huge.
If the dominant thought in your mind is that you can’t fall asleep, it will be very difficult to do so because the brain always follows the direction of its most current dominant thought. Going to sleep is a particular neural pattern that the brain naturally follows, but not if fearful thoughts become dominant over your natural neural pattern for sleep. Then, of course, it triggers the fight or flight response and stress chemicals flood the brain, making sleep as impossible as 10 cups of strong coffee before bed.
When you exercise a muscle, you make it stronger. When you exercise a thought, you make it dominant. You exercise a thought by thinking it over and over again, repetitively.
The trick to falling asleep is to deliberately, as an act of will, choose neutral, calm, boring thoughts on a repetitive basis and make them dominant, replacing the fearful dominant thought that you can’t fall asleep. Over time, you can rewire your brain out of its pattern of insomnia.
You can build a new neural pattern that automatically activates when you get into bed. In fact, you can build a neural bridge, with neutral thoughts and mental exercises, that automatically links you to the natural neural pattern of falling asleep.
My experience is helping people rewire their brains to get out of depression. But I began to notice that these same techniques that worked to rewire your brain to get out of depression also worked for insomnia. As people age, they wake up more often at night, and these exercises can also help them get back to sleep.
These are some examples of mental exercises for insomnia. The first is called “Making the problem the solution”. Suppose you’re trying to fall asleep and a faucet leaks, or there’s noise outside, or someone snores. You can turn the annoying noise into a meditation or mantra to help you fall asleep.
Just close your eyes and relax your body. Then he says to himself: “With each sound of the dripping faucet, I fall asleep more and more.” He listens to the sound and repeats the meditation. Visualize yourself feeling the sensation of falling every time you hear the sound. Falling deeper and deeper. Deeper and deeper. Repetition of this exercise can form a neural pattern to link the words “deeper and deeper” with the neurally hardwired process of falling asleep.
Another exercise is to trick the mind into thinking that you are asleep even though you are not really asleep. Just tell yourself over and over, “I’m asleep, I’m asleep, I’m asleep. Any thoughts I have are just dreams because I’m asleep. Any sounds I hear are just dreams because I’m asleep. I’m asleep. I’m asleep.”
The same goes for this exercise. You rewire your brain out of its fearful neural pattern of not being able to fall asleep by neurally bridging your dominant thought “I’m asleep” to the brain’s natural neural pattern of going to sleep. The more you practice the exercise, the stronger the neural pattern becomes.
The smart meter is another exercise.” Emotionally speaking, we have to be very smart accountants. We should never, for example, carry today’s failures into tomorrow.
As we prepare to go to bed, it is very easy to fall into remorse if we have eaten in excess. It’s easy to punish ourselves if we’ve had a terrible social failure, haven’t finished the report, or haven’t cleaned house.
As accurate as these thoughts may be, it’s just not helpful for our brain to think about them, especially when we’re trying to fall asleep. We shouldn’t take these thoughts to bed any more than we would with our vacuum cleaner or our golf clubs. These things are useful, just as thoughts are useful. But they are not appropriate for bedtime.
Thoughts of failure, for example, put our brain in touch with an infinite number of negative neural connections in our head (via learned associations) that will trigger the fight or flight response that leads to stress. Instead, we must continue to carry forward our successes, however small.
If we can’t magnify some success in our mind, we should keep repeating the little things as a kind of positive train of thought that can “thought-stuck” on those insistent negative thoughts in silence. Yeah, we may not have lost weight today, but we’ve lost two pounds so far this month. Yes, maybe we ate too much, but there was probably something small that we missed.
“Hey, I didn’t eat that third brownie. I won the third brownie. And it didn’t taste that good anyway. Maybe I’m just getting tired of junk food. I’m losing my taste for junk.” food. I think I’m starting to want to eat better, eat healthier.” It’s even kind of a victory to say, “Hey, I ate too much and now it’s over. It’s over. I am free from what I did today forever because today is over soon and thank God for that.”
Our little wins don’t have to make sense in the grand scheme of things or even the less grand scheme of our lives. They just have to be positive so that they connect with other positive thoughts in our mind by learned association. This is really a mind trick like some accounting is an accounting trick that does math, not necessarily common sense.
It is the process that is important, rather than the specific content. If we have been really low functioning, it is a victory to have brushed our teeth or taken a shower. For those of us who are high-functioning, we may not have won the Pulitzer this year, but we have finished the first chapter of our next book.
Don’t forget that our pain is exactly the same whether we are high-functioning or low-functioning. So victories, no matter how small, can bring us equal emotional relief. The inherent importance of the victories is not relevant. The process of being positive is more important than the content of positivity.
Brushing our teeth is no less positive than writing the first chapter of a book. It will have an equally positive effect, by learned association, with whatever positive mindset exists in the neurons of our brain.
Not only are we connecting to the positivity in our mind instead of the negativity that can trigger the fight or flight response, but we are rewiring another stronger positive neural pathway out of anxiety and stress with every good thought we have. This is the path to the natural process of falling asleep: practicing repetitive exercises of calm acceptance.
Even meaningless thoughts thought repeatedly will replace the stressful thought. I myself wake up every two or three hours. Usually, to go back to sleep, I just take the last two or three word sentence I thought of. Last night, for example, I was thinking about a TV show I had just watched and the phrase “the tailor will fix it” flashed through my mind. I just used that to go back to sleep. “The tailor will fix it. The tailor will fix it. The tailor will fix it. The tailor will fix it. dreams!