[jurian]

My first post after 40 years of chronic insomnia. I have tried many, many things over the years, but here is a new one I have been successfully working on the past few nights.

We are all aware of the term “drifting” off to sleep. I have found that what keeps me awake at night is “thinking”. When I think, it’s impossible to go to sleep and many minutes go by before I realize I have been doing it. Thinking takes concentration. “Drifting”, on the other hand is a term I will use to describe as “random” thoughts. It is always with this process that I first fall asleep, but it has always been thinking after I wake up when I cannot fall back asleep.

This is a very subtle difference, but my thought is that perhaps this is the “gateway” to our sleep trigger, separate from out thinking process. I hope someone can investigate this idea…

Thus, I have first calmed my self through relaxation techniques and then simply let my mind slip, if I can, into this mode of random thoughts. This early morning I let my mind just focus on random numbers, allowing it to come up with various numbers until dream images started to appear. Not long thereafter I was asleep. I did the same thing with the names of colors and that too allowed it to happen.

I will keep on this track and see if I can train my mind to do this instinctively, rather than “think”. It may prove successful, we’ll see. Jurian

 

 

[jazzcat22]

Jurian, I think you are onto something, to some extent.  We all have busy, overactive “monkey minds,” so it would seem like almost anyone other than a Buddhist monk would have insomnia.  My husband claims he isn’t thinking about anything in particular as he attempts to fall asleep.  To me this is close to impossible.  I’ve learned enough about meditation to understand that the mind can’t ever be completely cleared for much time.  You concentrate on your breathing or focus on an object…and then another thought pops up.  All you can do is acknowledge it, accept it without judgment, and focus on your breathing again.

For a while, when the insomnia got really bad, I was getting stressed out about going to bed and even attempting to sleep.  All I could think about was another sleepless (or 2 hour) night.  I eventually worked through this with more meditation and ACT from Guy Meadows’ book.  I won’t say my mind is completely clear, but I can confine it to neutral thoughts that have nothing to do with sleep or anything traumatic.

What I’ve started to do is play a game called “Bubble Up.”  I wait for images to come to the surface, acknowledge them without telling a story, just thinking “Hmmm, interesting” and wait for the next one to bubble up.  I don’t try to force anything to come up or connect the dots.  It’s interesting enough to not make waiting for sleep tedious, but not so stimulating that I stay awake trying to solve anything or tell a story.  For example, I may visualize a pineapple.  A few seconds later, a lion.  And so on.  I got the idea from Yoga Nidra, where you lie and do a body scan, then a rotation of consciousness where the person in the video says images and you picture it for a second and then move on.

A psychologist invented a sleep App called My Sleep Button that does this.  He claims that the cognitive reshuffle can make you sleepy.  Supposedly it feels like dreaming. I tried a free version of it and wasn’t too impressed—I was staying awake for long periods of time and after less than five minutes, the objects were repeated, so after hearing “hat” five times, I was getting bored and fuming about how I wasn’t sleepy.  And I’d rather not be playing with electronics in bed.  Info about it:

https://www.bustle.com/p/what-is-cognitive-shuffling-this-trick-might-help-you-get-to-sleep-easier-56458

mySleepButton

 

He suggests a Do It Yourself cognitive technique, but it’s trying to come up with words that start with a certain letter—that wouldn’t be sleep inducing for me any more than counting sheep—I’d try to stay up just to prove how far I could go and it would keep my mind too active (I know that it can be good to have paradoxical intention, that you tell yourself you want to stay up, but this doesn’t always work and still is looking at sleep as a stressor, just that this time you supposedly want to stay awake rather than desperately wanting to fall asleep, but it’s intellectually dishonest and inauthentic to me.

The psychologist/Sleep Button founder explains it as:

mySleepButton is based on a recent theory about how the human sleep onset control system.

“Here are the basic concepts and postulates.

• “Insomnolent mentation” is mentation that interferes with falling asleep.
• “Counter-insomnolent mentation” is mentation that interferes with insomnolent mentation (e.g., typical meditation and progress relaxation). That is what a lot of psychological techniques involve. But this is not always sufficient to push you over the edge into sleep!
• “Pro-somnolent mentation” is thinking in a manner that signals to your brain that it is time to fall asleep.
• Whereas waking consciousness is characterized by a tendency to maintain a coherent awareness, while falling asleep thinking becomes less constrained by coherence, and the brain often produces micro-dreams, a cognitive shuffle.
• Information-processing and experience that the brain tends uniquely to produce during sleep-onset is pro-somnolent. That means that the sleep onset control system contains a positive feedback loop.

If this is true, then other things being equal, if you can engage in mentation that is both counter-insomnolent and pro-somnolent, you are more likely to fall asleep. That is what mySleepButton is meant to facilitate:

• Super-somnolent mentation = Counter-insomnolent + pro-somnolent mentation.”

Sorry that this is so long, Jurian, but it’s just so exciting to “talk” to someone who thinks like I do and is intrigued by this concept.

[Martin Reed]

This is certainly very interesting and I can definitely see how this can be helpful for those who are able to let their mind drift/wander without forcing the process or starting to worry about sleep. How are you getting on, Jurian?

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