What is the problem with our insomnia? Many people think that they will not get to sleep. Instead, we focus on getting to sleep every night. Fearful thoughts of not sleeping well can trigger the fight or flight response. The stress chemicals that result cause anxiety and make it difficult to relax.
Our brains develop an I-cant-get to-sleep neural pattern as we become more accustomed to worrying about not being able sleep. This association of the fear of falling asleep with going to bed every night automatically creates a pattern in our brain that associates sleeping well with this fear. Voila! Voila!
Many people don’t give much thought to how their thoughts are directed. Most people believe you must think what comes up in your mind, regardless of whether it is pleasant or unpleasant. It is impossible to believe anything could be farther from the truth. Successive people know that they have the power to choose which thoughts they think and that they are able to refuse to believe those self-destructive, keeping-you awake thoughts.
If we don’t understand how our brain works, then we will not know why we are suffering from insomnia. The basic neuroscience behind how thoughts are formed is essential. It is vital to have this information. This information is important because it will help you to understand your brain and make it work for yourself.
You probably haven’t thought about why your thoughts are the way they are. The difference took me some time to see, and I am a therapist. It is not difficult to see the subtle difference, but it can be very noticeable.
Your dominant belief is that it’s impossible to get to sleep. The brain follows this dominant idea all the time. The brain follows a specific neural pattern when you go to bed. However, if your fearful thoughts take precedence over the natural pattern of getting to sleep, then it may not follow that neural pattern. You trigger your fight or flight response, which floods the brain with stress chemicals that make sleeping impossible.
Exercise a muscle makes it stronger. If you think a thought is dominant, it’s called exercising it. Repeatedly thinking about a thought is how you exercise it.
To get to sleep, you need to choose calm and boring thoughts repeatedly. This will make it easier to replace the fearful dominant thought. You can gradually rewire your brain to get out of the insomniac cycle.
It is possible to create a neural pattern that will automatically activate when you enter bed. With neutral thoughts or mind exercises you can create a neural bridge that connects to your natural sleep pattern.
I specialize in helping people overcome depression by rewiring their brains. However, I noticed that the same methods that helped me get rid of depression also worked well for sleeping disorders. These exercises are great for helping people who wake up at night more frequently as they age.
These are some mind exercises to help you sleep better. This is the first. “Make the Problem the Solution.”Let’s say you want to go to bed and find that the faucet is turning on, there are people outside making noise, or someone is snoring. The annoying sound can be made into a mantra, meditation, or mantra that will help you sleep.
Just close your eyes, relax and enjoy the moment. Next, tell yourself: “With every sound of the dripping faucet I am going deeper and deeper asleep.”Repeat the process of meditation by listening to the sound. Visualize the feeling of falling each time you hear that sound. Immersing yourself deeper into the ground. Immersive and deepening. Repeating this exercise over and again can help to create a neural pattern linking the words. “deeper and deeper”The hard-wired neural mechanism of falling asleep.
A second exercise is fooling your brain into thinking you are sleeping even though it’s not. Continue repeating the same thing over and over again to yourself “I am asleep, I am asleep, I am asleep. Whatever thoughts I think are just dreams because I am asleep. Whatever sounds I hear are just dreams because I am asleep. I am asleep. I am asleep.”
It’s the exact same with this exercise. By creating a neural link from your dominant thought, you can rewire the brain to get out of this fearful pattern. “I am asleep”To the brain’s natural sleeping pattern. You will see a stronger neural pattern the more you do the exercise.
Another exercise is the Clever Accountant.” Emotionally speaking we have to be very clever accountants. We should never, for instance, carry the failures of today forward into tomorrow.
As we are preparing for bed, it is very easy to slide into the remorses if we have over-eaten. It’s easy to beat ourselves up if we have taken some terrible social belly flop, haven’t finished the report, or didn’t get the house cleaned.
However accurate these thoughts may be, it is simply not helpful to our brain in any way to think them, especially when we are trying to get to sleep. We shouldn’t take these thoughts to bed with us anymore than we would take our vacuum cleaner or our golf clubs. These things are useful, just like thoughts are useful. But they are not appropriate for bedtime.
Thoughts of a failure, for instance, puts our brain in touch with an infinite number of negative neural connections in our head (via learned association) that will trigger the fight-or-flight response that leads to stress. Instead, we should keep carrying forward our successes, however small.
If we can’t magnify some success in our mind, we should keep repeating the small things as a kind of positive-train-of-thought which can “thought-jam” those insistent negative thoughts into silence. Yes, maybe we didn’t lose weight today but we lost two pounds so far this month. Yes, maybe we over-ate but there was probably some small thing we passed up.
“It was a third brownie that I did not eat. The third brownie was my victory. It wasn’t even that tasty. It could be that I have grown tired of junk food. My taste buds aren’t as keen on junk food. It seems like I am starting to crave healthier food and a better way to eat.” It’s even a victory of sorts to say “It was a mistake. It’s gone. Because today will soon be over, I’m free to do what I want forever.”
Our small triumphs 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 so that they will connect with other positive thoughts in our mind by learned association. This is really a mind trick like some bookkeeping is an accounting trick that makes mathematical, not necessarily common sense.
It’s the process that’s important, rather than the specific content. If we have been really low functioning, it is a victory to have brushed our teeth or to have taken a shower. For those of us who are high functioning, perhaps we didn’t win the Pulitzer this year, but we have done 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 the 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 whatever positive mindsets exist in the neurons of our brain.
Not only are we connecting with the positivity in our mind instead of the negativity that can trigger the fight-or-flight response, but we are re-wiring another stronger positive neuronal pathway out of anxiety and stress with every single good thought we think. This is the pathway to the natural process of falling asleep: practicing repetitive exercises of calm acceptance.
Even nonsense thoughts repetitively thought will replace stressful thinking. I wake up every two or three hours myself. Usually to get back to sleep I just grab for the latest two or three word sentence that I thought. Last night, for instance, I was thinking about a show on TV that I had just seen and the phrase, “You can have it fixed with tailor.” happened to enter my mind. I just used that to get back to sleep. “It will be fixed by a tailor. A Tailor can fix it. T Tailor can fix it. The Tailor can fix it. Anything that isn’t emotionally charged works. It is easy to repeat and it will soon relax the mind. This leads to the natural state of falling asleep. Have pleasant dreams