Abraham Low writes:
"You say you "hate to lie there fighting for sleep." There is nobody and nothing to fight, and be certain you do nothing of the kind. What you do is to work yourself up to a paroxysm of rage and fury. Against whom do you rage? Presumably against yourself. Or, it is nothing but a blind anger directed against nobody in particular. At any rate, to the original fear of not sleeping is now added this senseless anger that merely serves to accelerate the vicious cycle and to fan the tenseness to an intolerable pitch. Then the brain begins to "rattle." Do you understand that all of this is the result of fear? Fear can be remedied only by the certain knowledge that no danger threatens."
Low's recommendation for nervous patients suffering from insomnia is based on his root method of spotting tempers and applying tools. When you are having difficulty sleeping and the cause is a fearful or angry response to an event from your day, and your mind is spinning, chattering or rattling, avoid the impulse to get out of bed. This recipe is tough to swallow, but there is something to it. If you stay in bed motionless for the entire night you will achieve a measure of rest. Often you will fall asleep for part of the night. The sleep may not be comforting, complete, or fitful and it may come in small unsatisfying snatches. However, lying still and motionless is more restful, than getting up, smoking cigarettes, and reviewing your e-mails while you browse though YouTube videos.
I used to think that the key to falling asleep when focused on worry was to distract myself from the problems that bothered me. In Low's terms this is replacing an insecure thought with a secure one and is part of the answer for me. The key thing to observe is that while getting up and watching television may be distracting its also stimulating. I've found that when sleepy, and plagued by racing thoughts, that a simple exercise like counting breaths will occupy my mind in a way that intrusive thoughts are kept at bay. I count breaths starting at 10, and going down to zero, and then I repeat. I breath slowly. The intuition behind starting at 10 and going down to zero is that it is hard to track how many times you've done this, so you don't get into worrying about how long you've been awake. This is a variation of the old idea of counting sheep. Any simple repetitive mental exercise will do.
Sleep research wasn't a major area of interest when Abraham Low wrote his books. In 1953 REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep was first identified. The researchers investigating the problem woke subjects during REM sleep and found that they were often dreaming. In the 1960s sleep research started to take a foot hold, and today most major cities have a sleep clinic you can go to where they will evaluate your sleep patterns. In Hamilton there is a sleep clinic located on Frid street, they have a web site, see: http://sleep-clinic.ca/contact/
There is an excellent book titled No More Sleepless Nights written in the mid 1990s. This book is available from Amazon, the electronic edition is just $10, and well worth it, especially if you are trying to sort out your own sleep problems. It is written by a pair of doctors, Peter Hauri and Shirley Linde, who run a sleep clinic, and they describe simple things that you can do to address your sleep issues.
This book provides several basic pieces of advice that should apply to anyone having trouble getting to sleep. Among them are the following:
- Develop good sleep hygiene habits; this generally means sleeping in a quiet dark place, and going to sleep and getting up at the same time every day.
- Not everyone needs 8 hours of sleep per night. Some people need more, as many as 10 hours every night in some cases, some people need less, as few as 6. If you feel tired all the time, maybe the 7 or 8 hours you are getting isn't enough for you. Don't be concerned about what you think you ought to need, figure out what you do need.
- Be aware of how much caffeine you are consuming. Don't just consider coffee, but also count tea, chocolate, soda, and medications that include caffeine. Caffeine stays in your system for a very long time. Drinking a can of coke with dinner may be what is keeping you awake at 2am.
- Be careful about consuming alcohol before bed, especially if you believe it is helping you get to sleep. While alcohol may calm you down, it almost universally disrupts sleep, either causing people to wake up in the middle of the night, or not reach a fully restful state.
- Be careful about smoking cigarettes. While many people smoke to calm down be aware that nicotine is a stimulant. If you wake up at 4am and have a smoke to try to calm down from a bad dream and get back to sleep, this is helping less than you imagine.
While the above list just covers the basics, many people violate these simple rules. I love drinking strong coffee, however I never drink it past 1pm any more, and I try to keep my consumption down to just 2-3 cups a day. When I struggle with sleeplessness, as I still occasionally do, I dial back my coffee usage. Getting up at the same time every day, workdays and weekends, is always a struggle and its my current focus.
What I really enjoy about Hauri and Linde's book is that beyond just covering the basics in detail, it covers a wide variety of scenarios and acknowledges that insomnia has a huge array of causes. If you are depressed, that may be the cause of your disrupted sleep pattern. Hauri and Linde's book discusses depression and anxiety, while it is only one of the causes that they consider they point out that there are often several contributing factors to poor sleep. Their book has sections on relaxation techniques, stress management, diet, exercise, and dealing with your sleep clock, and how to reset it. There are also chapters on shift work, jet lag, seasonal affective disorder, how sleep changes with age, sleeping pills, sleep apnea, narcolepsy, sleep terrors, snoring, and night sweats. There are also lots of details for those who are just curious about sleep, how it works, what it does, and what we know about it today.
If you are having trouble sleeping, and you think that you may be suffering from anxiety or depression you can join our discussion group and learn some of the techniques presented in Dr. Low's books.
More Information
Does Depression have a Physical Cause?
A Place Beyond Procrastination
