Exploring Core Survival Needs: Creating the Space for Sleep and Defeating Insomnia
In consideration of our core survival needs, sleep ties for first with hydration, with nutrition coming in a very close second. When our sleep experience is good, life feels significantly better. When our sleep experience is bad, life feels significantly worse. When we are having trouble sleeping, nearly every other area of our life is negatively affected.
Our sleep experience is intensely linked to our quality of life and therefore is critically important to get right. Sleep is a notoriously difficult problem to solve. If there is a problem, it is imperative that we begin the process of figuring out what the issues are and how to go about solving those problems. The longer the sleep issue persists, the more obvious those problems become. If you become aware that you are feeling rundown, distracted, or are having a difficult time focusing, you may be sleep deprived. Sleep disruptions will also cause emotional issues such as anxiety, depression, and irritability to only name a few.
It seems like insomnia brings out the worst in us, and in fact, we are feeling our worst. Being sleep deprived can also cause cognitive issues like brain fog, confusion, and poor judgment, but also paranoia and delusions if the sleep disorder is severe or persistent enough. Sleep is an autonomic process like sneezing. Have you ever tried to sneeze but couldn’t? It’s a very strange feeling. Any autonomic process can be interrupted by over-thinking or circumstantial issues. Most of the time, the offending process is anxiety. Since sleep is an autonomic process, we only need to create favorable conditions for sleep to occur and then get out of its way. Regular guys get good sleep.
We can think of anxiety, generally, as the experience of being in a heightened state of physiological and psychological arousal. If you are entertaining thoughts that are of any consequence while you are trying to go to sleep, you could trigger your fight/flight/freeze sequence. A consequential thought is one that has a lot of emotional value one way or another. This might be something that you did or happened to you sometime in the past. “Remember that shameful thing you did when you were 12?”, your mind exclaims. “Please for the love of all that is holy just let me sleep.”, you desperately reply.
If you have a trauma past, this is especially true. I think most of us can relate to the experience of staring at the celling while feeling trapped in an anxious thought doom loop. Experiencing a traumatic event in our past can affect the way our nervous system reacts and responds to stressful situations in the present and future. Sometimes this can make us very sensitive to stressors that we encounter in our day-to-day life, which will affect us more than if we did not have those traumatic experiences in our past. This, in turn, will force us to fixate, obsess, and ruminate in the times that we are supposed to be relaxing into sleep, if we are not careful. We do this because our minds beg us to understand these stressors and attend to them. If we hit the snooze on discovery and planning for these challenges, our minds will continue to send reminders our way in the form of panicky thought-feelings, especially when we are trying to go to sleep.
If our bodies need sleep so critically and that process is highly valued and prioritized, then why the heck will our minds bombard us with consequential and anxiety provoking thought-feelings at the very moment we are trying to relax into sleep? This is because we consciously or unconsciously distract our minds with stimuli in various forms to keep troubling thoughts at bay. This process of avoidance distraction is understandable when our coping strategies are mainly concerned with avoiding emotional discomfort in the moment. The problem with short-term coping strategies that are born from our unconscious is that they may work well for getting through the moment, but the underlying cause for that anxiety remains unresolved. If we huddle over our phone and doom scroll for hours on end, we can avoid thinking about the fact that we have no idea how we are going to pay rent this month. However, the end of the month will come, and when we are lying awake in our beds and sleep elude us, the message our minds have been pushing, that we have been avoiding, will become very apparent when all our distraction techniques are out of reach. It is in those moments that our minds are flooded with the litany of stressful thoughts. The dam bursts and we are hit with the deluge of procrastinated loose ends. Once we can no longer avoid these realities and we come face to face with them, our stress response system will be activated, and sleep will become highly unlikely.
People come up with a wide variety of distraction methods to engage instead of creating the space for sleep to happen. The most common distractions come in the form of visual entertainment like keeping the television on and or spending time on our phones. Our brains keep track of the time of day and expect light exposure and intensity to steadily decrease as day turns to night. If we arbitrarily keep our light exposure high, especially in those critical moments before bed, we can inadvertently send our mind mixed signals that can disrupt or circadian rhythm. These temporal context cues called zeitgebers are critical to factor into our approach to our sleep hygiene. To be very specific, the type of stimuli does matter quite a bit. While it is usually ideal to eliminate most of the sight and sound stimuli, novel stimuli will be more arousing than familiar or static stimuli, which are less agitating. For instance, an emergency vehicle siren will cause more of a disruption for us compared to the washing machine droning on in the background.
While you are discovering your ideal stimuli landscape, it is okay to have something on the television or to have one of your devices playing music but consider choosing something you have watched and or listened to several times and are very familiar with. Make sure that what is playing is not too triggering in terms of what would get the average individual going. Keep the crime dramas and soaps for your day time viewing pleasure. Sports (except golf), social dramas, things you are watching for the first time, and other highly stimulating entertainment are not recommended for bedtime. Calmly spoken documentaries, movies/shows you have watched dozens of times, shows about animals/nature, and other lightly stimulating entertainment are better choices for sure. However, the best set of circumstances would be to do your best to eliminate all light and sound stimulation to the best of your ability.
The worst offender for distraction stimuli is arguably our smart phones. Much has gone into the design and development of these devices to make them difficult to put down and easy to engross our attention. Not only that but the type of light emitted by many of these devices will disrupt our sleep space. When your bedtime approaches, be deliberate with the last thing you do on your phone and do your best to leave it be until morning.
Alcohol consumption is another common habit people get locked into when it comes to their sleep routines. Many assume that due to alcohols hypnotic effect, a nightcap is exactly what we need to help us drift off to sleep. However, it has been shown that alcohol can significantly disrupt our circadian rhythm and greatly diminish our sleep quality. Make sure that you are limiting your alcohol consumption later into the day so that you can avoid disruptions to your sleep quality.
One other great habit to practice is to view the sunrise and sunset, even if it is just a video. Observing dawn and dusk’s transition is a powerful zeitgeber that can help us regulate our circadian rhythm and keep it regulated.
When you feel like you have created the space for sleep to happen by going through your sleep hygiene checklist and you are still struggling to go to sleep when you would like to, the following intervention can help you sort your thoughts sufficiently so that your mind feels comfortable enough to go to sleep. If anxious thoughts are keeping you awake there is a process to deal with them. When you realize that you have encountered a situation where you are locked into an anxious thinking-feeling loop you can perform a self-awareness check-in. Our working definition of self-awareness is knowing in the moment what we are thinking, feeling, and doing. Self-awareness is also your primary coping skill that can help you intervene in those critical situations. You might be thinking about something that happened earlier in the day, your week, or something that happened years ago. You might be worrying and ruminating over something in your near or far future that you feel like is insurmountable.
Once you are aware that you are stuck in an anxious thought loop, write down a summary of what you are thinking about down on paper. Make sure to get the important points down. Putting this in a bulleted outline form can be helpful to organize your thoughts. For each point, see if you can come up with a solution even if you must wait till tomorrow or another day to engage that solution. The solutions you come up with in that moment should be brief and act as a place holder for deeper thought work you will engage during the day. After that, write this, “I have attended to this, there is nothing I can do about it now, but I will work on it tomorrow. Now go to sleep.” Every time your intrusive consequential thought sneaks back in through the window, repeat your intervention mantra in your mind and show it the door. Watch as your intrusive consequential thoughts are dismissed assertively and respectfully. Watch yourself toss them out if you need to a bit more forcibly. The reason this is a helpful strategy is because we are making an effort to create a plan for the problem we are considering.
Due to the nature of anxious thoughts and their ability to trigger our stress response, coming up with a plan as an intervention satisfies the whole point of anxiety in the first place, which is to beg us to pay attention to a problem our deep minds feel like we haven’t paid enough attention to. When we look at anxiety that way, we can in time learn to appreciate it for the critical service it provides. What we must do is avoid hitting the snooze button on our anxiety system and do the work to attend to the issue so that we can give that part of us the all clear signal.
After you complete your intervention, perform another self-awareness check-in to see where you might be storing stress tension in your body. Do a head-to-toe scan and see what you find. A Progressive Muscle Relaxation script can be very helpful to externalize the physical stress tension where you find it. It is very common for physical stress tension in your body to accompany the cognitive-emotional component of anxiety. Usually, all three are a package deal. Deep-Breathing can also be very helpful to bring your other systems under control such as your respiratory system which should in turn calm your circulatory system. You control your breathing to control your heart rate, you control your heart rate to control your nervous system.
When you deploy this hands-on approach to sorting through your anxious thoughts; coming up with a brief plan to solve the problems, showing your deep mind that you have attended to the threats they are alerting you to, and working to relax your body, you will find that you have cleared the space for sleep to occur. While it is often not enough to just avoid thinking about something, come up with a list of safe, non-consequential things to think about while you are headed toward sleep. These really can be anything you can come up with that are emotionally benign or simply pleasant.
You can imagine walking through your favorite trail, conjure up a memory that makes you feel good, or imagine yourself doing anything that can bring you comfort. Imagine thinking and feeling about what is going right in your life instead of only fixating on what is going wrong. Appreciation and gratitude work can go a long way to help us feel comfortable enough to go to sleep. That way you can approach something relaxing to think-feel about while you avoid retreading ground you have already been through.
Your mind may take some repeated convincing that you have attended to the issues. There will be a period of time where you are building credibility with your limbic system, which is the part of your nervous system that is partially responsible for threat detection. When you go through this intervention process, your pre-frontal cortex (one of the other responsible parties for threat detection) can collaborate with your limbic system to give these problems their due diligence and afford your body the right to stand down and relax.
Regular guys walk toward the fire, not away from it. Attending to our worries is a strength-based approach to problem solving that requires bravery and courage. However, this is our task, and we are all up to it.
