Do you toss and turn in bed, unable to fall asleep or go back to sleep no matter what you do?
I’ve been there, and I know how frustrating insomnia can be.
It’s also detrimental to your health. Chronic sleep deficiency is linked to an increased risk of heart disease, kidney disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, and stroke. It can also impact brain function, leading to poor decision-making, difficulty with problem-solving, depression, and even suicidal thoughts.
Unfortunately, many common strategies for overcoming insomnia aren’t very effective. You’ve probably tried some of them without success.
But new research suggests there may be a different path forward…
Controlling Sleep Doesn’t Work Well
One reason natural sleep remedies often fail is that they require you to do too much when you actually need to do nothing. What does that mean? Think about it this way…
Your body knows how to sleep. After millions of years of evolution, it’s pretty good at it. If you get out of your own way and do nothing to wake yourself up, you should sleep naturally.
However, our logical, problem-solving mind is only a few hundred thousand years old. It’s great at solving problems but not at doing nothing, which is essential for sleep.
The issue with most psychological sleep interventions is that they prompt you to do too much.
Let me ask you this: If you’re half asleep and start trying to solve a problem, what happens? You wake up. Problem-solving is the mental equivalent of sprinting around the block—hardly conducive to sleeping.
So what do you do when you wake up in the night and start to worry? You try to push the worries away or convince yourself that things aren’t so bad. You treat your thoughts as problems to be solved, which only wakes you up more.
The ACT Approach: Psychological Flexibility
The Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) community offers an alternative: psychological flexibility. This means allowing thoughts and feelings to come and go, then gently focusing on what moves you in a valued direction. In the context of sleep, this means noticing the urge to problem-solve and instead doing nothing. Your body knows how to sleep; your mind does not.
Studies show that psychological inflexibility is a major contributor to sleep problems. Training people to be more psychologically flexible has been shown to reduce insomnia in those with chronic pain and chronic fatigue.
So, if you’re struggling with insomnia, what should you do?
Accept Your Experiences
Suppressing your nighttime thoughts and feelings or struggling to fall back asleep doesn’t work well. You probably already know this. If you have sleep problems, you’ve likely tried it. Has it worked for you?
Instead, try becoming more psychologically flexible. Here are three techniques to experiment with:
- Rest if You Can’t Sleep: Often, focusing on trying to sleep keeps you awake. Allow yourself to simply rest and decline your mind’s invitation to problem-solve. You’re more likely to fall asleep or get back to sleep this way.
- Just Notice: If worry is keeping you awake, just notice it. Instead of ruminating, imagine your worries as words written on leaves floating down a river. They come and go. Notice them dispassionately. Add or subtract nothing.
- Accept Your Thoughts and Feelings About Insomnia: This doesn’t mean resigning yourself to insomnia. It means being present with your reactions without trying to change them. Hold them gently, as you would a child, and let your body do what it knows how to do.
These techniques might seem counterintuitive, but what have you got to lose? Maybe some useless problem-solving time?
Next time you’re trying to sleep, get in bed, close your eyes, and do nothing at all.
Adapted from Stephen Haye’s article at stephenchayes.com