Why do we have problems with insomnia? Many of us think about NOT going to sleep, instead thinking about sleep 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 in the habit of worrying about not being able to fall asleep, we build a strong neural pattern of “I can’t fall asleep” 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 comes 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 maverick, self-defeating, and wakeful thoughts that come galloping spontaneously 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 switch 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 have the thoughts you do, 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 strengthen it. 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, and boring thoughts on a repetitive basis and make them dominant, replacing the dominant thought of fear that you can’t fall asleep. Over time, you can rewire your brain out of your sleepless pattern.
You can build a new neural pattern that is automatically activated 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 you 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 “Make the problem the solution.” Suppose you are trying to fall asleep and a faucet is dripping, or there is noise outside, or someone is snoring. You can turn annoying noise into a meditation or mantra to help you fall asleep.
Just close your eyes and relax your body. Then he say 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. Repeating this exercise can form a neural pattern to link the words “deeper and deeper” with the neurally wired process of falling asleep.
Another exercise is to trick the mind into thinking that you are asleep even though you are not actually asleep. Just tell yourself over and over again, “I am asleep, I am asleep, I am asleep. Any thoughts I have are only dreams because I am asleep. Any sounds I hear are only dreams because I am asleep. I am asleep. I am 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 from 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 get ready for bed, it’s all too easy to feel guilty if we’ve overeaten. It’s easy to beat ourselves up if we’ve had a terrible social failure, haven’t finished our report, or 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 with us 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 build on our successes, however small.
If we can’t magnify some success in our mind, we must keep repeating the small things as a kind of positive thought train that can “think-jam” on those negative, nagging, silent thoughts. Yeah, maybe we didn’t lose weight today, but we’ve lost two pounds so far this month. Yes, maybe we overate, but there was probably something small that we overlooked.
“Hey, I didn’t have that third brownie. I won the third brownie. And it didn’t taste that good anyway. Maybe I’m just getting sick of junk food. I’m losing my taste for junk.” meal. I think I’m starting to want to eat better, eat healthier.” It’s even a kind of victory to say, “Hey, I overate 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 in the less grand scheme of our lives. They just have to be positive for them to connect with other positive thoughts in our minds 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’ve been really low-functioning, it’s a victory to have brushed our teeth or showered. 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, however small, can bring us equal emotional relief. The inherent importance of victories is not relevant. The process of being positive is more important than the content of the 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 any positive mindset that 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 outside of anxiety and stress with every good thought we think. This is the path to the natural process of falling asleep: practicing repetitive exercises of calm acceptance.
Even repeatedly thought nonsense thoughts will replace the stressful thought. I myself wake up every two or three hours. Usually, to go back to sleep, I just grab 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” crossed 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. Any non-emotional word or phrase works. By thinking it over and over again, you soon calm your mind and connect with the natural process of falling asleep. Happy dreams!
