Now, while always keeping in mind the larger perspective we explored in chapter 1, let’s introduce some practical methods you can use for creating better sleep. All the techniques in this book are based on a single idea, which in my opinion is the single most important fact about this subject: You cannot force yourself to sleep.
You can’t will sleep. You can’t command sleep. You may have thousands of employees at your beck and call, you may be president or the queen, but you can’t make yourself go to sleep in anything like the way you can make yourself climb a stairway or memorize the multiplication tables. It just won’t work. The ancient Persian king Xerxes whipped the ocean when it refused to obey him. By trying to force it to do your bidding, are you trying to “whip” sleep?
Of course, with insomnia so prevalent, most of us have tried to force ourselves to sleep at one time or another. Now, in the daylight, there seems something comically absurd about the very idea. But it’s not funny when you’re tossing and turning night after night, demanding sleep from yourself, all to no avail.
Sleep is a natural process, and “trying” will have no positive effect. Trying will probably aggravate the insomnia, because the harder you try and the less successful you are, the more frustrating the whole enterprise becomes.
There’s a very profound reason for this: Trying is not the way nature functions. The Earth doesn’t try to go around the sun, nor does the seed try to sprout into a sapling. Nature functions with effortless ease, invariably taking the path of least resistance. This is the principle of least action and maximum efficiency, and it’s the one to use when we want to fall asleep.
Therefore, the attitude you should adopt once you’ve gotten into bed is that which I call “not minding.” The key to achieving this frame of mind is a total lack of self-consciousness. In other words, don’t watch yourself, don’t monitor yourself, don’t become a commentator on your dilemma, and, above all, don’t keep looking at the clock.
Instead, just rest comfortably, not minding, and use this attitude as a way of placing yourself in nature’s hands. Simply lie in bed with your eyes closed, not minding whether you’re awake or asleep. The mere act of remaining motionless with your eyes closed, even if you’re feeling anxious or restless, actually provides the body with significant benefits.
People are notoriously inaccurate judges of their own sleep behavior. You may be getting considerably more sleep than you think you are, or a great deal less. For example, despite the fact that you can’t force yourself to fall asleep, you may be able to trick yourself into it. You may already have done so many times without even knowing it.
Experiments have shown that individuals who have sleep problems often think that they have slept much less than they actually have, based on their EEG and polygraph measurements. This is called sleep-state misperception, or subjective insomnia. It’s so common among people who complain of insomnia that sleep-disorder clinics report fully half of all people who can’t sleep only think they can’t. These delusions are present even regarding the details of a sleeper’s misery. People who believe they were unable to close their eyes all night were actually asleep much of the time!
A study at the University of Chicago documents this phenomenon. Two self-described mild insomniacs were compared with a control group of thirty-two normal sleepers, matched for age, sex, and other characteristics.
After several nights in the sleep lab, the insomniacs reported that it took them an average of one hour to fall asleep. According to the lab instruments, however, they dozed off in only fifteen minutes. While the insomniacs did experience more wake-ups during the night than the control group, the disparity was nowhere near as great as they imagined: five and three-quarter hours of sleep compared with six and a half for the controls.
This peculiar phenomenon of subjective insomnia is one of the easiest sleep disorders to treat. And there’s no doubt that it is a disorder, since the subjects do in fact feel sleep deprived and tired all day. In some experiments, they’ve even insisted that the instruments were wrong and that they never closed their eyes all night.
The solution to subjective insomnia is to turn the clock, so often the insomniac’s worst enemy, into an ally. If you believe you lie awake night after night, see if you can prove it to yourself. Keep a notebook beside your bed, and glance at the clock occasionally—not at regular intervals but whenever the urge occurs—and write down the time. After recording several intervals ten or fifteen minutes apart, many people are startled to find that several hours have suddenly passed—and passed in sleep. This procedure should help eliminate the perception of sleep deprivation, and along with it the symptoms of fatigue the following day.
In light of the apparent determination of many insomniacs to believe the worst, it’s interesting to note a phenomenon psychologists call secondary gain. This is the notion that when a person has suffered from a problem like sleeplessness, alcoholism, or another chronic condition for long periods of time, there may be benefits built into the condition that the subject has come to depend on, even though he or she may not be consciously aware of them. These secondary gains can make the problem more difficult to resolve. For example, you might find yourself saying that you would get more done around the house if you weren’t so tired all the time from lack of sleep—but since you are so tired, the leaky faucet just isn’t going to get fixed.
There are also people who, far from using their insomnia as an excuse, see it as a source of pride and strength. A young lawyer working in a major New York law firm found himself competing against people who rarely left the office for weeks on end, sleeping at their desks only three or four hours a night. “It was impossible to keep up with those people,” the young lawyer said, “but their attitude was, ‘How can I put my need for sleep ahead of the needs of the firm?’”
According to Dr. Peter Hauri, director of the Insomnia Program at the Mayo Clinic, some patients consider their inability to sleep a sign of concern for the world’s problems: “How can anyone fall sweetly to sleep in a world as miserable as ours?”
There’s a reverse side to these misperceptions of sleep time. Some people think they’ve slept quite well when in fact they may have slept very little.
Researchers have evolved an efficient system for identifying this phenomenon. A well-rested, healthy person requires between ten and fifteen minutes to fall asleep after getting into bed at night. But a sleep-deprived person loses consciousness almost immediately—although he or she is very unlikely to sleep through the night. Indeed, a sleep-deprived person doesn’t have to be in bed to fall asleep right away. In research conducted by Dr. Thomas Roth, of Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, one hundred young adults were asked to rate their level of daytime sleepiness and were then tested for sleep-deprived behavior. Thirty-four percent of those who said they weren’t sleepy at all exhibited signs of severe sleep debt.
So, by lying quietly in bed, you may be getting more sleep, or less, than you think you are, but at least you’ll be getting the significant rest that comes from just being still. Don’t worry about whether you’ll be able to perform well at work the next day. Studies show that, at least in the short term, people can carry out everyday tasks in normal ways even though they may not get enough sleep.
Go to bed at a regular time—we’ll discuss this in more detail in chapter 4—and once in bed assume a comfortable position and don’t worry about sleeping. Let your mind wander freely. Take the attitude that you will get as much rest as nature wants you to have at that moment, as much as you need, even if you’re not actually sleeping. You are in nature’s hands. Unplug your reading lamp; turn your clock to the wall; don’t be concerned about the time. Just enjoy resting comfortably. Sleep will come naturally when it comes, and meanwhile you’re gaining the benefit of valuable rest and rejuvenation of your whole system.
Often it is quite uncomfortable to be lying in bed unable to sleep. The mind may be racing, and there may even be physical discomfort throughout the body. In that case, just let it happen. Remember that the purpose of sleep is to dissolve fatigue and stress from the system. There is an old Ayurvedic saying: Sleep is the nurse of all living beings. Sometimes repair is overdue. Perhaps a great deal of stress has accumulated and now needs to be released during the night. This repair work, or release of stress, can increase mental and physiological activity, which may be experienced as physical discomfort, racing thoughts, or feelings of anxiety. If this is your experience, you should recognize these sensations of restlessness as a byproduct of nature’s repair work and not try to resist them or be worried about them. Instead, rest as comfortably as you can with your eyes closed, just not minding at all. Allow your mind to be easily aware of your body, and let the self-repair process go on.
You may find from time to time that you have a sensation at a particular point in your body. If this happens, your awareness should move easily to that sensation. Whenever there is turbulence in your mind, there is a corresponding turbulence in your body. For every mental event there is a physical event, and emotion is nothing but a thought attached to a sensation. When you shift your attention from thoughts to sensations, you dissipate the strength of the emotion, because thought and sensation are no longer chained together. You uncouple the two. Therefore, you can contribute to your attitude of not minding by just allowing your awareness to shift spontaneously to the sensations in your body—and then spontaneously to the thoughts and ideas that accompany those sensations.
After some time, the physical discomfort will abate and your awareness will move to some other thought or other part of your body. Just allow this to happen as spontaneously as possible. This simple procedure of allowing your awareness to shift from one sensation to another—just being aware of the sensations, the thoughts that come and go—is in itself a very powerful and profound anti-insomnia technique. Before you know it, your awareness will spontaneously have moved from thoughts, ideas, and sensations to a deeper, self-referral state of sleep.
Remember that even if you are feeling quite restless, the best thing you can do is just rest easily in bed, eyes closed. Although the suggestion has been made that people experiencing sleep difficulties should read, watch TV, or get up out of bed and otherwise occupy themselves until they feel genuinely tired, I think this is a mistake. For one thing, it ignores the real benefits that the body derives just from resting quietly. Getting out of bed to read or do your taxes will interfere with the valuable process of rest and self-repair that was already taking place. Also, while getting up may provide temporary relief from the unpleasant experience of lying there awake, in the long run it is not the solution to the problem of not getting enough sleep. And, of course, it also ignores the phenomenon of subjective insomnia, which we’ve just discussed.
So “not minding” should be the attitude that you develop toward sleep. As you gain more knowledge and follow more Ayurvedic recommendations, you will find it easier to follow this first one.
Documenting your sleep patterns is an important early step in confronting your insomnia. It can be done with the aid of a simple chart, which can help you keep track of what is really happening with your sleep. The chart allows you to record the date, the time you turned out the light, the approximate times that you actually slept and awoke, and the times you actually got out of bed. You can also create a column for special comments or observations you may have about that day.
Filling out the chart each morning when you get up will not only help you document your progress but will help point up the relationship between certain activities or changes in your daily routine that may be influencing your sleep and hindering your progress. For example, during one particular week you may record that you had night classes and more stress at work, and then note the following week your sleep was more disturbed. On the other hand, you may find that as you follow the recommendations from this book you’ll be able to track which recommendations had the most powerful effect on your particular sleep problem. You should continue to fill out the chart every morning until your sleep problem has been permanently solved.
Now you’ve got a technique to use when you go to bed: rest with closed eyes and let your awareness drift from sensation to sensation or thought to thought in a nonminding attitude. The more adept you become at using this technique, the better your sleep will be.
I want to emphasize once again, however, that the real solution for the sleep problems you encounter at night lies in what happens during the day. All these time periods are related, and to focus on one without considering the other can lead only to short-term solutions. Activity and rest go hand in hand, therefore we must pay attention to what happens during the day. If the period of activity is somehow imbalanced, that will be reflected in the period of rest.
The solution to all sleep problems lies in making the period of daily activity truly dynamic and satisfying. In other words, when you’re awake, be fully awake. This is the fundamental answer to insomnia and the solution for many of the apparent problems of life as well. When you’ve learned to experience pure wakefulness, liveliness, and dynamism, good sleep will come naturally. Once you balance the activities of your life and experience the enjoyment that comes with that balance, your sleep will spontaneously become balanced.
In short, as you proceed through this book you’ll find that by solving your problem of insomnia, you’ll be solving a lot of other problems in your life at the same time.
Pick a reasonable (early) time to get ready for bed, and establish a soothing routine beginning at the same time every night.
Once you’ve gotten into bed, rest comfortably with your eyes closed, “not minding.” Let your mind be easily aware of your body. Remember: You’re getting valuable rest even if you’re not asleep.
If you’re feeling restless or fidgety, or if your thoughts are racing, recognize that even these feelings represent the process of healing that’s taking place.
If there’s an unpleasant or painful sensation anywhere in your body, focus your mind on the sensation itself. By shifting your attention from thoughts to physical sensations, you uncouple the two and dissipate the strength of any anxiety.
Each morning, use your Daily Sleep Log to record what happened during the night.
