How I Fixed My Sleep Problems

Well, “fix” might be a strong word.

If you sit across from me in a therapy session, I will probably ask you what your sleep is like and how your sleep is doing. We all know that sleep is directly correlated to mental and physical wellness but I’ve found that many people just aren’t paying that much attention to how they feel during a given period of time when compared to how well they sleep or don’t sleep. Granted, people who sleep well can still have mental health problems but people who don’t sleep well are always standing on shaky ground.

Skip the sleep hacks, gift yourself the privilege of rejuvenating rest.

Sleep and Mental Health

Over the years I’ve seen people struggle with anxiety and worry when their sleep is bad in the best-case scenarios. In the worst-case scenarios, people who have poor sleep are paranoid, angry, aggressive and detached. They can also experience some really nasty hallucinations as well. Go a few days without sleep and you will start to think the walls are on fire or you might start thinking that you’re seeing some dead relatives.

Over the years I have encountered many people who have claimed that they can help you hack your sleep so that you can train your body and your mind to live and function off less sleep. A platform that I have never understood. In my world, that’s playing with fire. Why would any rational person that is concerned about their own health and wellbeing pursue this?

If you ask this mental health professional, your mind and your body need and I mean really need that time each day to unplug, decompress, mend and rest. When you sleep well, your train is far more likely to stay on the rails. It’s just simply good for you in more ways than can be counted or listed. Skip the sleep hacks, gift yourself the privilege of rejuvenating rest. In a modern era of stress, information overload and crushing personal expectations, you should give yourself the badly needed breaks.

When people tell me that their sleep is a struggle, I really empathize. My life story in a nutshell right there. Insomnia has been a constant companion. Even now, it’s extremely rare for me to sleep the entire night without medication. On a bad night, I will wake up and it will take me hours to fall back to sleep and what always makes it rougher is those who have no understanding of what this is like. “Go for a run, that will make you feel tired.” This is just one of the frustrating suggestions that people give when they don’t have sleep problems. Being tired isn’t the problem. I’m always tired. I just can’t fall asleep.

Time To Try Something Different

Early 2019 brought a set of stressful circumstances that caused me to feel exhausted around the clock and so sleeping became that much more important to me and in the process of wanting and needing more sleep, my insomnia became worse than it had ever gotten. That was about two months ago when I found myself unable to sleep and in the process, ironically, I mentally hacked my sleep. I didn’t hack my sleep so that I could try to function with less of it, I hacked it so that my sleep was better quality and I would get more of it.

The older I get and the longer that I have worked in mental health the more I become more and more convinced that the mind is far more powerful than is generally regarded. I am convinced that if you change your thoughts, you change your life.

Mind Over Matter

When we’re young and haven’t grown up we mentally function first through mood that determines our mind which decide our actions. Children function this way: Mood determines mind, mind determines behavior. As we grow older it’s important to understand that we can swing some big and I mean big changes in our life by changing the equation. Mind determines mood which determines behavior. If you believe, as I do, that mind rules over matter, then you can hack your brain into better sleep and that’s what I did.

I will tell you exactly how I did it and exactly what really helped, but first you have to understand the mindset of how attachment and neediness has a tendency to repel. I got to the point where sleep basically became the center of my life. My life, my routines, my mood and my attention revolved around sleep. I realized that I was becoming obsessed with it.

During the day I’d focus on how frustrated and discouraged I was with it. I’d worry about the consequences of not getting sleep. I obsessed over being tired. I’d cancel plans and avoid anything that might interfere with my sleep time. It was almost like sleep and I were fighting like an old married couple. I was going to bed earlier and earlier and earlier but my sleep continued to decline and when I decided to sit down and figure it out, this is what I decided.

I can’t make myself sleep any more than I can make a person love me or make myself like water chestnuts. (Seriously, how can people eat those things?!) Sleep, almost like painting a masterpiece, isn’t something that you can dig out of ourself. It has to come out of you, naturally, from a state of flow and letting go. It’s a matter of learning to surrender. When I realized that I was chasing sleep like an obsessed stalker, I knew I had to do something different so I tried an experiment and it totally worked.

See, I started playing hard to get. I ignored sleep, I pretended that I didn’t need it. I started treating it like it needed me more than I needed it. I stopped caring whether or not I’d get enough sleep or be tired. I stopped trying to make myself sleep and allowed sleep to come to me when I felt ready for it. If you’d like to try my experiment, follow these steps.

1. Don’t think about sleep — Seriously, don’t let it occupy your thoughts. Keep yourself and your mind busy and occupied with anything and everything else all day. Go to work, have some fun, be social, get some exercise; enjoy every aspect of your life. When you notice yourself thinking about sleep or bed in any way at all, just notice it and put your attention into something else. This is the hardest and most important step. I had to let go of my need to control it and allow it to just do its thing.
2. Change your attitude towards sleep — I did this by slowly and deliberately changing my thoughts about it. I had to talk myself through it. Talking out loud definitely helped. “It’s okay if I’m tired tomorrow,” “I’ll be fine,” “I’ll get through it,” “I don’t need it as badly as I think I do” and so on. If you sit down and decide that you’re going to consider a different perspective on sleep, or anything really, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll be able to do it. If you change your perspective, you’ll change how you think about it and how you feel about it.
3. Treat it like a cat — Cat’s are always drawn to the person in the room that wants them the least. It’s just one of the bizarre phenomenons about life that we can’t really explain but I think that in this way, cats teach us something interesting about living. If you chase the cat and insist that it cuddle with you, it’s going to run away from you. A lot of things are like that, apparently, and I have found that sleep is one of them. If you ignore it, it tends to come to you easier.
4. Engage your mind in relaxing things — I like to lay down somewhere that I find extra relaxing. When the weather is warm enough, that place is my hammock in my backyard. I will read a book, or put on something that I can just listen to with my eyes closed. And when I realized that I was sleepy enough, I allowed myself to think about sleep and think about bed.

Human beings have control issues and so many of us fail to grasp the paradox that the more control you attempt to exert, the more control you lose.

Within a couple of days of using these strategies, I was already seeing major improvements but there’s actually more to the story. I had to deliberately stop making my life revolve around sleep. I started making plans into the evening instead of cancelling them. I just had to change my priorities. I went from thinking about sleep and being in bed and obsessing over making sleeping conditions right to just letting it all go. Ever since I adopted these practices my sleep has drastically improved. Is it perfect? No, not at all, but it’s so much better than it was.

If you’re reading this, I hope you’re understanding that while this turned out to be an effective formula for improving sleep, it’s much more than that. It’s an effective formula for getting more of what you want out of life. Human beings have control issues and so many of us fail to grasp the paradox that the more control you attempt to exert, the more control you lose.

Hell, even those of that have grasped that concept keep struggling with trying to control things that we just can’t control. And just like my sleep, the more I tried to force it to do what I wanted and the more I tried to make it happen, the more I suffered for it. That is true for most things in life.

Sweet dreams.