Insomnia? – Rewire your brain to get some sleep

Why do we have problems with insomnia? Too many of us think about NOT going to sleep, rather than thinking about falling asleep when we lie on the pillow at night. Fearful thoughts about not being able to sleep trigger the fight or flight response, and the stress chemicals produced in this way make us anxious and prevent us from relaxing.

As we get more and more into the habit of worrying about not being able to fall asleep, we build a strong “I can’t sleep” neural pattern 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. Clever! The insomniac is born!

Most people pay little attention to the direction of their thoughts. Most people believe that you have to think about any thought that pops up in your brain, whether you like it or not. Could not be farther from the truth. Successful people have always known that they can choose which thoughts they want to have, and they may refuse to think about the nonconformist, self-defeating, awake thoughts that come spontaneously galloping through their mind.

Basically, if we don’t know how we think, we won’t know why we have insomnia. People must know the basic neuroscience of how they move 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 rather than against you.

If you haven’t given much thought to why you think what you think, 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 myself and I am a therapist. Once your eyes are open (no pun intended), you can see that the difference is subtle but huge.

If the dominant thought in your mind is that you cannot fall asleep, it will be very difficult to do so because the brain always follows the direction of your 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 its natural neural pattern for falling asleep. 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 make it stronger. When you exercise a thought, you make it dominant. Exercise a thought by thinking it over and over, repetitively.

The trick to falling asleep is, on purpose, as an act of will, to repeatedly pick neutral, calm, and boring thoughts and make them dominant, replacing the dominant fear thought that you can’t fall asleep. Over time, you can rewire your brain to break out of your insomnia pattern.

You can create a new neural pattern that activates automatically when you lie down. 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 reconfigure their brain to get out of depression. But I began to notice that these same techniques that worked to rewire your brain out of depression also worked for insomnia. As people age, they wake up more often at night, and these exercises can also help them fall back to sleep.

Here 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 leaking, or there is noise outside, or someone snores. You can turn the annoying noise into a meditation or mantra to help you fall asleep.

Just close your eyes and relax your body. Then say to yourself: “With every sound of the dripping tap, I am falling asleep more and more deeply.” Listen to the sound and repeat the meditation. Visualize yourself feeling the sensation of falling every time you hear the sound. Falling deeper and deeper. More and more deeply. Repeating this exercise can form a neural pattern to link the words “deeper and deeper” with the hard-wired neural process of falling asleep.

Another exercise is to trick the mind into thinking that you are asleep even if you are not actually asleep. Just repeat to yourself over and over again: “I am asleep, I am asleep, I am asleep. The thoughts I think are only dreams because I am asleep. The 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 fearsome neural pattern of not being able to fall asleep by bridging your neural bridge from your dominant thought “I’m asleep” to the brain’s natural neural pattern for going to sleep. The more you practice the exercise, the stronger the neural pattern will become.

The Smart Accountant is another exercise. “Emotionally speaking, we have to be very smart accountants. For example, we should never carry today’s failures into tomorrow.

As we prepare for bed, it is very easy to fall into regrets if we have eaten too much. It is easy to punish ourselves if we have had a terrible social failure, we have not finished the report or we have not cleaned the house.

As accurate as these thoughts are, it’s just not helpful for our brain to think about them in any way, especially when we’re trying to fall asleep. We shouldn’t take these thoughts to bed any more than we would our vacuum cleaner or our golf clubs. These things are helpful, as are thoughts. But they are not appropriate for bedtime.

Thinking of a failure, for example, puts our brain in contact with an infinite number of negative neural connections in our head (through a learned association) that will trigger the fight or flight response that leads to stress. Instead, we must continue to carry forward our successes, no matter how small.

If we can’t magnify some success in our mind, we should keep repeating the little things as a kind of positive train of thought that can “block the thought” so that negative thoughts insist on silence. Yes, we may not have lost any weight today, but we have lost two pounds so far this month. Yes, we may have overeat, but there was probably some little thing that we missed.

“Hey, I didn’t eat that third brownie. I was victorious over the third brownie. And it didn’t taste that good anyway. Maybe I’m getting tired of junk food. I’m losing my taste for junk.” food. I think I’m starting to want to eat better, eat healthier. “It’s even a kind of victory to say,” Hey, I overeat and now it’s over. It’s over. I am free from what I did today forever because today is soon over and thank God for that. “

Our little 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 for them to connect with other positive thoughts in our mind by learned association. This is really a mental trick as some ledgers 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 have really been malfunctioning, it is a victory to have brushed our teeth or taken a shower. For those of us high achievers, we may not have won 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 functioning high or low. So victories, no matter how small, can bring us just as much emotional relief. The inherent importance of victories is not relevant. The process of being positive is more important than the content of 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 mindset exists in the neurons of our brain.

Not only are we connecting to the positivity in our mind rather than the negativity that can trigger the fight or flight response, but we are reconnecting another stronger positive neural pathway out of anxiety and stress with every good thought we think of. . This is the path to the natural process of falling asleep: practicing repetitive exercises of calm acceptance.

Even repeatedly thought nonsense thoughts will replace stressful thinking. I myself wake up every two to three hours. Usually to go back to sleep, I just look for 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” came to mind. I only used it to go back to sleep. “The tailor will fix it. The tailor will fix it. T Tailor will fix it. The tailor will fix it. Any word or phrase that is not emotional works. Thinking about it over and over again soon numbs the mind and connects with the natural process of falling asleep.” . Sweet dreams!