According to a Princeton National Health and Wellness Survey, 37 percent of US adults reported insomnia or sleep difficulties during a recent twelve-month period. Between 40 and 60 percent of people over the age of sixty suffer from insomnia. Two million children suffer from sleep disorders. More than 10 million people in America use sleep aid medication to deal with their insomnia. Fifty-five percent of all adults report having problems with insomnia in their lifetime. More than 70 million Americans suffer from various sleeping disorders, and 60 percent of those 70 million report severe sleeping disorders.
What's going on here?
Exactly what we chatted about in the last chapter.
In large measure, what is going on is a simple, straightforward thing: our experimental brain has trouble quieting itself, even at the cost of a good night's sleep. It races on—even though we are in bed—broods about what went on today, and worries about tomorrow. Built without an off switch, it can't completely shut itself off, and one manifestation of that difficulty is insomnia.
Our brain has a job to do, to protect us, to serve us, to solve our problems and to make sense of life, and often it will continue to do that job irrespective of our wish to sleep. Our ability to think, the quality that distinguishes us from other creatures, may have evolved to protect us and to serve us, but as an unintended consequence, one that doesn't threaten our species but that plagues each smart individual, that very ability to think can keep us awake as we try to fall asleep, or it could force us awake once we've fallen asleep.
This is true for everyone, but it is especially true for smart people who possess a brain with more racing power than average. Every problem associated with a racing brain covered in the previous chapter and in this chapter is more of a problem for a smart person than for the next person for the simple reason that her brain is more powerful. If you put your foot down on the pedal of a car with a horsepower of 90, you won't produce the same speed and drama as you will if you floor a racecar. A smart person employs her brain to solve her problems and to keep her safe, and by putting it into gear in her service, she starts a powerful engine racing.
Consider the following analogy. If you knew that a campfire would keep away a pack of nearby wolves, you would learn how to keep your campfire burning throughout the night so that you could get some sleep while keeping the wolves at bay. And what if in your sleep you heard wolves approaching or the campfire sputtering? You would wake up abruptly and check to make sure that the fire was still burning. If it were nearly out, you would rebuild it. You would pay attention to that campfire because your life depended on it. That is natural, sensible, and straightforward.
What if the threat isn't wolves but a risky investment, a chronic illness, an alcoholic child, an infuriating job, a difficult choice, a vexing problem, a treacherous mate, a depleted bank account, an edict against your group, a threat to your identity, a blow to your ego, or a meaning crisis? What then? Well, your brain will feel threatened and will deal with that threat in the only way it knows how: by thinking. It can't rebuild a fire or take a shot, for there is no physical action to engage in as you try to sleep. All your brain can do is keep working—that is, race.
Our brain broods, problem solves, calculates, obsesses, stews, and races in our service. It will do that day or night; it is indifferent to the fact that we might need our sleep. It is odd that we have failed to realize the extent to which our need to rely on our thinking in order to survive naturally produces insomnia. Your brain stews, it hatches plans, it rehashes its grievances, and all that stewing, hatching, and rehashing is likely to keep you awake, just as keeping an ear peeled for danger will disturb a cowboy's sleep.
We have reached a point as a culture when our first inclination is to label insomnia as a disorder in need of treatment and head in the direction of doctors, sleep clinics, medication, therapists, space-age technology, and similar help. Natural psychology suggests that you look in the mirror first and see what sort of creature you are, what sorts of perils a creature like you regularly encounters, and the extent to which you are bound to employ your brain to deal with those perils.
Insomnia may prove a terrible affliction, but it is not strange. It is exactly the sort of thing that you'd expect to afflict a creature with a brain that races. If you are indeed being kept awake by your own racing brain, it should be clear that you are obliged to learn how to reduce your brain's racing if you are to get a good night's sleep. Applying brain awareness to the situation—that is, understanding that you are this kind of creature and learning tactics and techniques that can quiet a racing mind—is the closest you can come to possessing the off switch that nature has failed to provide.
There are organic, biological, and medical reasons for some cases of insomnia, and you want the appropriate medical treatment if the root cause of your insomnia demands that sort of attention. But before you seek medication, which may be prescribed to you irrespective of the actual cause of your insomnia, it makes sense to wonder if perhaps you are having trouble sleeping because your brain is racing. In most cases, that will prove the source of your troubles and suggest in which direction you should look for relief—that is, toward some form of mindfulness.
Techniques like mindfulness designed to quiet the mind ought to help with insomnia and may well help more than medication can. Yet in our medicate-first culture, this contention needs saying and proving. It is therefore excellent that studies like those run by Cynthia Gross and her colleagues at the University of Minnesota, which showed that after eight weeks of mindfulness training, participants who learned mindfulness fell asleep more quickly than the medication group—and had the benefits last over time—are run and reported.
You will sleep better if there are no wolves prowling your wilderness; that is, you will sleep better if you are not actually threatened. Would you expect to sleep better during a bombing raid or once the war has ended? Would you expect to sleep better during a financial crisis or after the crisis has passed? Would you expect to sleep better if your mate is abusive and a threat to you or if he no longer lives under the same roof? Threats matter, they are real, they are dangerous, and they set our mind racing.
Mindfulness techniques are extremely valuable, but equally important is threat reduction. You can meditate for an hour every morning, but if when your husband comes home, he criticizes you and then ignores you, your meditation practice probably won't prove enough to get you a good night's sleep. A divorce may be needed. If you experience your profession as meaningless, your meditation practice will probably prove insufficient. You will also need to change your life so that you feel less threatened, less sad, less anxious, less rageful, less upset with life, less self-reproachful, and so on. Then you will sleep better.
We have evolved with a brain that is supposed to handle difficult tasks—everything from fathoming family secrets to mastering calculus to maintaining meaning to counteracting shortfalls in our own formed personality—as well as outright impossible tasks, like predicting whether a profession is appropriate based on zero real knowledge of that profession and only a current enthusiasm. A smart person is even more likely to suppose that his brain is equal to the challenges he faces, even such frankly impossible ones. What a setup to send your brain racing! And what will it do when, racing, it realizes the magnitude of its challenges and the extent to which they can't be solved just by thinking? It will worry.
Rather than actually think about anything, it will start worrying.
Given that this brain of ours is confronted by difficult and frankly impossible tasks that it presumes it should be able to handle, having not gotten the message that it is evolved and not designed and that it is only an experimental model, at some point it will start to think less and worry more. It will worry in ways that produce sacrifices to the gods, runs on banks, and unfinished novels. It will worry in ways that produce superstitions, mental confusion, and cognitive distortions. Sensing the dangerousness of the world and its own limitations, it will spin like a top with worry.
It will worry—and have a Scotch, and then another.
It will worry, not being able to picture how ten tons of steel can fly, and refuse to ever take to the air.
It will worry, fearing that it is already hapless and ruined, and sink into sadness.
It will worry, certain that it can control nothing, and spend all day controlling its environment by organizing socks.
When such a brain tries to think, its worries will interrupt its thinking, just as a wild stallion will stop its galloping to sniff the air for danger. It tries to think clearly about its current situation, and after a minute, worries intrude. As a result, it thinks poorly, which convinces it all over again that it can't think well enough to handle its challenges. Might the next version of our brain worry less? Or would that make it too vulnerable to dangers? This model, at any rate, is wonderful at worrying.
How does this worrying manifest itself in a smart person's life? Here is one among countless examples, as reported by Claudia:
One of my challenges is rooted in two simple words: what if? I pester myself with those words constantly. A couple of decades ago, a therapist, visiting me at my home because agoraphobia kept me from going to her, told me to try to stop asking, What if?, all the time. I wasn't even aware I was doing it! Once she warned me to stop, I saw that I was doing it all the time.
This is how it works. Let's say I get an invitation to go somewhere fun (for work or pleasure). Instead of just saying yes and moving on, I enter into a barrage of thoughts like: Is there parking close to the entrance? I hope it's on the first floor. Can I figure out how to go alone in case I change my mind? Is there a way to go other than that road with the cattle chute lanes? It better be air-conditioned.
After much online searching about every aspect of the experience, should I say yes to the invitation, I go through a period of confidence that I can successfully go. Then, as the event nears, although I look like I am present in the real world, I am actually living half in another place where I am what if-ing in my head all the threats to my agoraphobic limitations and scheming myriad ways to get out of the commitment.
I don't share this with anyone; I internalize it and basically drive myself nuts. The only time I can get the thoughts to stop is when I get lost in something very creative and puzzle-like—and then I only get lost briefly. This way of life is exhausting and keeps me from living and from reaching my full potential. I wish I weren't still in this place, but I can't get my brain to stop its self-pestering.
The results of this predictable dynamic, that a racing brain sent off in pursuit of answers that aren't available will start attacking itself instead—results like pestering obsessions, soothing compulsions, addictions and quasi-addictions, phobias, reckless counter-phobias (like skydiving to deal with a fear of heights), anxieties, and so on—are distressing and natural, not a disease or abnormal. That as a smart person, whose brain races faster and harder than the next person's, you can't accomplish something like stopping your racing mind from worrying doesn't mean that you have a disorder or that you are a failure. Rather, it means that you are a product of imperfect nature and that nature has sent you a special challenge that may prove extremely difficult to meet.
It may require remedies and interventions that you would prefer not to contemplate. It may require that you spend real time every day using available techniques to reduce your experience of worry. In some cases, it may require chemical interventions, not because you have an illness but because chemicals produce effects and you may desperately want those effects. What it absolutely requires is that you practice brain awareness: that you understand what this particular brain model can and can't do and how it characteristically runs amok.
One unfortunate answer that smart people often employ is to settle on some rigid way of being that seems to serve them and that simplifies their thinking tasks. In effect, they let their formed personality trump their available personality. This way of being is natural and biologically economical but shrinks them and prevents them from making value-based meaning, since the activity of making meaning requires daily flexibility and daily intention. They become something—the steely prosecutor, the cynical reporter, the spiritual artist, the busy mother, the lifelong predator—and respond in rote and repetitive ways to save themselves the hard work of actually living.
What if the way you use your brain as a prosecutor isn't the appropriate way to use it when you sit down to have a chat with your son or when you go out on a first date? If it has become second nature for you to always prosecute, if that is the way your brain works when it is on autopilot, and if you are unaware or unconcerned that this pattern makes everyone you meet feel threatened and uncomfortable, you're likely to find yourself without friends, family, or loved ones. That is a high price to pay for not realizing—or not caring—that your way of handling this experimental model of a brain is to lock it into one gear.
A smart person is likely half-aware of all of this—and finds it rather humiliating. He started out with a good feeling about his brain; he likely felt smart from the beginning. For those first few moments at least, the world was his oyster. Then he experienced life and learned about life, including the life of his own brain. Out of the box, its cracks, blemishes, and shortfalls became obvious. How sad! And how humiliating.
Slavoj Zizek explained in How to Read Lacan:
Freud developed the idea of three successive humiliations of man, the three ‘narcissistic illnesses,’ as he called them. First, Copernicus demonstrated that the Earth turns around the Sun and thus deprived us, humans, of the central place in the universe. Then, Darwin demonstrated our origin from blind evolution, thereby depriving us of the privileged place among living beings. Finally, when Freud himself rendered visible the predominant role of the unconscious in psychic processes, it became clear that our ego is not even a master in his own house. Today, a hundred years later, a more extreme picture is emerging. The latest scientific breakthroughs seem to add a whole series of further humiliations to the narcissistic image of man. Our mind itself is merely a computing machine for data-processing, our sense of freedom and autonomy is merely the user's illusion of this machine.
This is a lovely summary of our current situation. These further humiliations are rooted not so much in the fact that our brain is merely a computing machine but rather that, as splendid and intricate as it may be, we are exactly what we are: this current model of human being. We are not who we might have been or who we would like to be. We are exactly who we are. This truth leads to a further painful humiliation, one that I've dubbed “the smart gap,” and that is the subject of our next chapter.