Falling asleep quickly and easily, part 1
by Mira and Charles on November 19th, 2009Do you have a hard time getting to sleep? Well, if so you know you’re not alone, but that’s small comfort. Nothing’s worse than lying down at the end of the day, and you’re dog tired, and you’d love nothing more than to drift into dreamland. But instead you find the minutes tick by, your thoughts grow darker, the sheets get more twisted, and there it is: you’re having trouble falling asleep. All you want is a good night’s sleep. If only there were something you could do that would bring on the sleep you’re longing for…..
Well, it turns out that there are lots of things we can do to help ourselves fall asleep. I heard a new one just yesterday. A woman told me that when she gets into bed she imagines that she has spent the last five years in prison sleeping on a hard cold mattress under a single thin rough blanket. And she lets herself just luxuriate in the comfort of her soft sheets and warm soft bed.
She has found a mental trick that allows herself to focus on something comforting that distracts her from what we call “trying to fall asleep.” Because, you see, that’s one of the two things you should never do: try to fall asleep. Sleep by its very nature is something that comes upon us and carries us away. We can’t make it happen. It just happens.
So the trick is to give your mind and heart something to do to distract it from the issue of trying to fall asleep.
That woman’s trick was to focus on the pleasure of being in bed, as if she were so comfortable that the last thing she wanted was to fall asleep and so be deprived of the pleasure of lying awake in the amazing comfort of her bed.
But there are lots of tricks that accomplish the same thing. The key is to find the trick that works for you. Here are some suggestions—try them but feel free to invent tricks of your own. All that matters is that it works!
– Saying a prayer over and over.
– Compiling a list, any kind of list: every person you know, every piece of furniture in your house, every song you can remember…
– Seeing yourself taking a familiar trip, such as your commute home from work.
– Trying to recreate in your mind every scene of the movie you watched before you went to bed.
– Visualizing every item of clothes in your closet.
– Telling yourself a bedtime story just like the ones you used to enjoy as a kid.
It doesn’t matter what you choose. Just experiment until you find a technique that works that distracts you from trying to fall asleep and just lets you be in bed until sleep snatches you away.
This works for most people. But sometimes it’s not enough. And that’s usually because we get an attack of night thoughts: dark, disturbing, fretful, nerve-jangling thoughts that that are really a form of torment, like a mental toothache, and that seem to render helpless any attempt to fall asleep. But you don’t have to be a victim of your night thoughts. There are great solutions that really work to squelch those night thoughts so they don’t rob you of your sleep. And we’ll show you what those solutions are in the next blog.
But for now, email us or comment here on the tricks you’ve come up with to let yourself fall asleep. I promise you: whatever you’ve come up with is something that never occurred to a lot of people but will help them very much.
And that’s what we’re here for: to help each other.
Speaking of peace of mind, one of our books that’s given a lot of people a lot of peace of mind is Everything Happens for a Reason: Finding the True Meaning of the Events of Your Life. Read a chapter every night just before going to bed and you’ll find you’ve gotten what you need to make peace with yourself and the world.
