In the last IR Techniques article we looked at how importance leads to anxiety, creating fragmented sleep… and discovered that our beliefs are the root of the thoughts and feelings. We discovered that it’s possible to change your unconscious mind by changing these beliefs, eventually to get to sleep is not important -> calm -> good sleep.

Now we’re going to start getting a little more into how to actually change your beliefs.

Changing your beliefs is not necessarily difficult, in fact, in some cases it is very easy.  It doesn’t change who you are, it doesn’t mean betraying your values, and it isn’t some hokey odd pseudo science.  It’s just simply having a look at what you think you know to be true, and asking questions to see if you missed any information that could redefine your beliefs to better serve you.  

Your current beliefs are defined by information you are aware of, even if you’re aware that you don’t know much about the subject.  Said another way, there’s the info that you know that you know, and then there’s the info you know that you don’t know. Belief change comes from a 3rd type of information – the stuff that you don’t know that you don’t know.  It’s this information that you’re completely unaware of – not only do you not know it, but you aren’t even aware of the fact that you don’t know it. If you stop and really think about it, it stands to reason that of all the information that exists in the world, you are probably only aware of a small fraction of it… most of the things you don’t know are things that you don’t even realize that you don’t know that.

For instance, let’s pretend that there’s a guy we know named Jeb, and let’s pretend that Jeb knows how to do a four types of mathematics – arithmetic, algebra, geometry, and trignometry.  Obviously, Jeb knows that he knows these subjects… but let’s say Jeb doesn’t know how to do a fifth type of mathematics – in this case, calculus – but that he is well aware that the subject exists.  In this case, Jeb clearly knows that he doesn’t know how to do calculus – he just knows that it’s a higher level of math that builds on top of the subjects of math he knows.  

Now let’s say that Jeb is only aware of these 5 subjects of math, and has never heard of a subject of mathematics that is on a higher level than calculus.  In this case, Jeb would think calculus is as “high up” as mathematics gets, and thereby may hold the belief, “I know how to do most forms of math.”  However, you can see how easy it’d be to change this belief… even if Jeb simply wrote into google the expression “what math is more advanced than calculus”, he’d quickly discover that there’s at least a dozen fields of mathematics more advanced than calculus, forcing him to alter his belief.  It’s the information that he isn’t aware of, the information that he doesn’t know that he doesn’t know, that could change his belief.

One book on this topic is called “Sleight of Mouth”, which is named after the “sleight of hand” tricks magicians use, but instead of visual magic, it’s about mental magic.  In this book, author Robert Dilts on the subject of changing beliefs explains: “People often consider the process of changing beliefs to be difficult and effortful; and accompanied by struggle and conflict. Yet, the fact remains that people naturally and spontaneously establish and discard hundreds, if not thousands, of beliefs during their lifetimes. Perhaps the difficulty is that when we consciously attempt to change our beliefs, we do so in a way that does not respect the natural cycle of belief change. We try to change our beliefs by “repressing”  them, disproving them, or attacking them. Beliefs can become surprisingly simple and easy to change if we respect and pace the natural process of belief change. “

The process of changing beliefs, when you do it right, is natural and easy.

The right way to modify beliefs is simply to first be open to receiving new information, open to “trying on” new ideas, getting new information that calls into question your old beliefs, and then forming a new picture based on the new information.

For example, just take that same belief “I can’t have a good day tomorrow if I don’t sleep” and consider what insights into that you can take from the 20% rule we covered at the start of the article.

When you feel totally overwhelmed by tiredness during the day, you can just try it out like a hypothesis: “Let’s say that WAS right… that would mean I COULD do the extra work since I’d only take 20% longer…” and try it out.  See if stands the test, and see if you can discover anything new.

Once you’re open to the idea, you can go out and start to collect evidence like this.  During your days, you can start to test what your real abilities actually are when you feel very tired.  See how much is your own mental blocks vs. how much is actual physical and mental limitations. I suggest you try it – you’ll probably find some surprising insights when you start really having a look for new evidence.

After some new evidence has come to light, you can then challenge old beliefs like “tiredness is crippling” and replace them with new beliefs like “tiredness only affects me by a marginal amount”.  

Personally, I think of it like this: “On any given day, I can always try harder if I need to.  If someone were to put a gun to my head and told me to work harder or die, I bet it’d be downright amazing how well I’d suddenly perform.  So , if I can give it an extra 20% right now, I should be able to compensate for the 20% I lost on sleep.”

For me, that belief has been downright amazing.  In fact, a large portion of my very best performance has been done when I was extremely tired.  On those days, I would come into work thinking “I’m exhausted, so I have no choice, I have to push myself extremely hard today.”  And the result would be getting more done than normal, even with extreme exhaustion.

While powerful, this is just one example of how information can provide insights into your beliefs, allowing you to change them.  Also, note that it’s not so much the information that matters, but rather the insights you can gain from it. In this case, the new information might be the 20% rule, but the insight is that exhaustion is not as disabling as you may have thought.

To change all your negative sleep beliefs and stop seeing sleep as being so important, you’ll need to obtain new insights fitting to each anti-sleep belief you hold.

That being said, new insights are aren’t so much about information – it’s about how you interpret it.  Said another way, it’s not the information that matters, it’s what it means to you.  In fact, most of the time, you don’t need new information at all – you can change the meaning of the information you already have and gain new insights just by getting a new perspective that allows you to interpret things differently.  

To this end, the way to change your beliefs is to have a genuinely new and eye-opening insight.

For instance, take the common insomniac perspective that “getting sleep is a struggle…”

The information behind this belief could be a lot of things that occur for you every night.  Whether it’s falling asleep, staying asleep, feeling frustrated, lonely, in agony, all of those or other things entirely, there’s a lot of difficulties you have every night.  The perspective is that all these difficulties mean that the whole thing is a struggle.

However, like many of our frustrations, this belief involves a rather narrow perspective.  If you step back, you could see a wider perspective, such as “getting sleep is a struggle… but that’s okay.”

What’s implied by changing your perspective… if struggling was okay, what would that mean?  Why would it okay?

One answer may be, “I’m used to it already, and everyone struggles at something.”  

Or, another answer to why struggling is okay is the idea that “Struggling tonight isn’t going to kill me.”  

Even if you could just gain that perspective a little bit every night, sleep would start becoming a little less important.  Because, even though you don’t want to struggle, you have a new insight that says “… but that’s okay.” When something is “okay”, it’s a little less stressful and less important to deal with than something that is “not okay”.  I’ve helped some people who found that this insight alone created a total breakthrough, because they spent every night for years fighting to end a struggle and never once considered that struggling could be “okay” or normal.

So to recap, belief change comes from new insights, which can sometimes result from new information (like the 20% rule), but it’s really all about how you interpret information and what it means to you (like that exhaustion isn’t crippling), and your interpretation is shaped by your perspective.

The branch of psychology that deals directly with how we interpret information is called Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), and the above is what they call “changing your frame of reference”, which is just a fancy term for changing your perspective.

The classic example they give is to imagine a picture of an innocent little fish, just swimming along.  Pretend that this is a small picture in a frame, and that you suddenly discover that tucked under the frame of the picture is a bunch of canvas that wouldn’t fit in the frame… so you realize that there’s more to the picture and you pull out a whole bunch of the canvas, but not all of it.  

You step back and look at the expanded picture, now seeing that there’s a larger fish right behind the little fish and the larger fish is about to eat the smaller fish.  The meaning of the picture has now changed – it’s become much more violent world for the little fish, the smaller fish is probably at the end of its existence, and there’s a bigger fish you didn’t know about.  

You dig out the rest of the picture, put the whole thing in a much bigger “frame”, and step back again, now seeing that there’s a third fish that’s even bigger, about the eat the middle fish.  Again, the meaning changes – it’s now a food chain, and you now know that the original predator is, itself, in danger.  

The idea is based on the size of your frame of reference, you can change the meaning of your beliefs.

Insomnia is one area in particular where our frame of reference always tends to start out very small, like the first fish.  Everyone knows sleep is important, so your first intuition is always to panic when you can’t get it. If you tell someone that you didn’t sleep much, they’ll immediately tell you about how they “need” to get their 8 hours.  Our world is filled with countless examples of tiny frames of reference, so there’s a lot of larger ones you need to get to work on if you’re going to make sleep less important.

On one hand, there’s a lot of information and insight that we’re missing in the countless thoughts we have about insomnia every day, but on the other hand, it’s very empowering to know that you can tweak your beliefs about the importance of sleep any time you want to just by expanding your perspective on things.  You have the opportunity to literally work on making sleep less important all day, every day.

So there you have it.  Sleep relies on not considering it to be overly important – kind of in the same way a good sleeper takes sleep for granted – and your access to making it less important is with belief modification, which allows you to gain new insights that fundamentally change beliefs, which will make sleep less important to your subconscious mind.  And keep in mind – if you could even make sleep half as important as it is now, you’d probably fall asleep twice as quickly, with double the quality.

In our next IR Techniques article, we’ll start using some specific Neuro-Linguistic Programming techniques on the common sleep beliefs and begin making permanent improvements to your sleep.

I’m not a doctor and you should not take this as medical advice, but if you want to cure your insomnia, it’s only possible if you take time in-between the articles to apply what you’re learning to your own life.  So, the action I recommend you take between now and the next article is to identify at least 1 thought, idea, or belief you have related to sleep that makes getting sleep highly important for you.  Once you have one, write a paragraph describing how it makes sleep important.  Also, write down why you believe you are right or why the idea is correct.  Then, in the next article, as we go through the neuro-linguistic programming, see if you can substitute in this this idea.

I’ve got a fascinating bit of trivia to quiz you on… and I bet you’ll get it wrong.

If you get absolutely no sleep, how much do you think that’ll affect your physical coordination in the afternoon of the following day?

Would it be,

A) 20%

B) 30%

C) 40%

or D) 50% or greater?

One such test like this that’s been done in sleep centers is the ruler-drop test. In this test, patients are recorded dropping and catching a ruler between their fingers as fast as they can. With good sleep, patients caught the ruler, on average, twenty percent faster then when they were severely sleep deprived. Even in cases where patients had gotten almost no sleep for several days, reaction time never dropped below 20% in the majority of patients. In fact, in cases with 2-3 hours of sleep, reaction time was only 10% worse than normal.

There have been many studies like this and it has been scientifically proven that the physical effects of sleep are not as bad as most insomniacs believe them to be. So what’s going on?

Well, first of all, 20% less reaction time isn’t exactly a small number. That’s something you’re going to feel quite dramatically. What’s more interesting, though, is what happens after you notice your own tiredness.

Once you notice the physical, mental, emotional, or other side effects of sleep, the lack of sleep starts becoming a bigger emphasis of your focus. The saying goes, “What you focus on, expands”, and this is an interesting example. Once you start noticing some effects of sleep deprivation, the common instinct is to further explore how tired you feel. You start noticing how hard your day is. You focus your attention on pain and fatigue in your body, mental fuzziness, and the snappy emotional reactions you are experiencing. Focusing on these factors often leads to feeling resigned, frustrated, and victimized. The effects may only be 20%, but that 20% can easily consume over 50% of your focus.

There are powerful placebo effects surrounding tiredness itself. When insomniacs direct the majority of their attention on the problem, they become almost disabled. It’s hard to focus on your work, relationships, interests, or anything when you’re consumed by your emphasis on your own tiredness.

After all, you have 20% less focus, and you can only focus on so much as it is, so if you’re mostly focused on your own tiredness, you’ll have only a little focus left for everything else. In many cases, these placebo effects of tiredness are the majority of the problem.

If you wanted to start changing your beliefs in this area, first, you’d have to be open to the new information. If, during this example, you found yourself thinking, “No, that can’t be right”, then you’re not open to a new idea.

It’s also an objective truth claim – it’s something you can test out for yourself. Simply noticing how you focus on your own tiredness after you first become aware of it will reveal to you how much of your attention ends up centering around tiredness.

As far as the 20% rule goes, I don’t know how many books on insomnia you’ve read, or how many sleep centers you’ve been to, or how many insomnia professionals you’ve talked to, but there’s a pretty good chance it’s less than me. This 20% number (or close to it) comes up all over the place.

I’ve asked a lot of chronic insomniacs this question, and most of them will pick option D every time. In fact, even when I show them the evidence, they have a hard time accepting it.

The implications here go far beyond a piece of trivia. If you’ve seen my “downward spiral of insomnia” article, you know how big of an impact it has on your sleep to consider sleep to be more important than it actually is. In short, poor sleep is a result of fragmented sleep, where the normal sleep cycles that you see in good sleepers are instead broken into tons of fragments. Chronic insomniacs consider sleep to be extremely important, which causes their mind to go into “fight or flight” mode throughout the night, causing their sleep to be broken and further extenuating the problem. As sleep becomes worse and worse, it gets more and more important, which is what prevents it from getting better. It’s a spiral, a catch 22.

So here’s the question. If in the worst-case scenario, sleep actually only has a 20% impact on your next day, but you act as though it has a 50% or greater impact, how much more important are you making sleep on an unconscious level?

The answer isn’t 2 or 3 times as much… it’s more like 5 to 10 times as much. Think about how much you give up in life when you’re tired! Just think about how much crappier your days are. Think about what other medical issues you’re concerned about. Think about the impact your tiredness has on your family and your social life. Just stop for a second and think about it.

Making sleep more important than it actually is not only limits what you’re free to do with your life, it has a drastic effect on the quality of your sleep. Easy, deep sleep is a result of slow brainwave speed. There are many sleep centers around the world that have monitored literally thousands of patients, and there is absolutely no question that for sleep to happen, your mind must slow down.

If you haven’t already seen the “downward spiral of insomnia” article, I recommend watching that before continuing this article because the rest of this article builds on that content.  In looking at the downward spiral of insomnia, you get a look into your own subconscious mind to see how it views sleep – and it isn’t pretty.  To your subconscious mind, getting sleep is extremely important, like life or death.  The problem is, this is the opposite of a good sleeper’s unconscious mind, which has very little regard for sleep – it’s a wonderful thing that’s taken for granted.

The rest of this article gets into how to start making sleep less important to your unconscious mind and is the beginning of a new line of articles following these “Importance Reduction Techniques”, which will be organized into their own “IR Techniques” playlist.

Before we can use any IR Techniques, we have to learn how to reduce importance on a unconscious level.  Right now, all we’ve explored is the conscious level – and of course, you can say things to yourself consciously like “just don’t worry about sleep” or “it’s just one night, relax”, but that’s not going to affect and real change on your subconscious mind. 

To affect your subconscious mind, you have to be able to make permanent changes to your belief systems regarding sleep.  The reason why is simple – your beliefs are the deeper source of all those conscious thoughts you have.  Just pretend you tried to think like one of those phrases we just used, like “Just don’t worry about sleep.”  Well, if you deeply believe that you cannot have a good day tomorrow if you don’t sleep, how do you think you’ll respond to a phrase like that?  I mean, just try saying it to yourself – how would you respond?

You’d probably respond with something like “Yeah, right.  Obviously I’m going to worry no matter what I do… I always worry.”  Something like that, right?  Well, that’s because your thoughts are all coming from that source that says “I cannot have a good day tomorrow without sleep.”  That belief is going to drive all you thoughts, including which thoughts you accept and which you reject.

So to begin the IR Techniques, we must start by discovering how it’s possible to modify your beliefs because that’s your ONLY access to your unconscious mind.

To be clear, ALL SLEEP SOLUTIONS don’t work as well as they should because of deeper level beliefs and behaviors that prevent sleep.  The question is, how do you change them?

There’s a book called “Secrets of the Millionaire Mind”, that sums it up pretty well.  In there, they say the following:

Imagine a tree.  Let’s suppose this tree represents your sleep.  On this tree there are fruits that never seem to grow ripe and delicious.  These fruits represent the results you’re getting with your sleep; your exhaustion.  So we look at the fruits and we don’t like them; there aren’t enough of them, they grow too slowly, they’re too small, and they don’t taste good.

So what do we tend to do?  Most of us put even more attention and focus on the fruits, our results.  But what is it that actually creates those particular fruits? It’s the seeds and the roots that create those fruits.

It’s what’s under the ground that creates what’s above the ground.  It’s what’s invisible that creates what’s visible.  So what does that mean?  It means that if you want to change the fruits, you will first have to change the roots.  If you want to change the visible, you will first have to change the invisible.

With your sleep, what you cannot see is far more powerful than anything you can see.  The way it works in nature is that if your unconsciousness is at unrest, your consciousness will not be able to rest.

To change the roots you’d have to change the parts of your unconsciousness which see sleep as IMPORTANT, because that’s what’s making speedy brainwaves happen all night long.

To get a picture of the roots you have to change, we can look at a process that many respected teachers use called the Process of Manifestation.  It goes like this:

Programming (BELIEFS) → Thoughts (BEHAVIORS) → Feelings → Actions = Results.

Beliefs lead to Behaviors,

Behaviors lead to Feelings,

Feelings lead to Actions,

Actions lead to Results.

Applied to sleep, it works the same way:

Beliefs that sleep is important lead to behaviors like worrying about problems…

Worrying about your problems leads to feeling anxiety or feeling depressed…

Feeling anxiety or feeling depressed leads to actions like trying harder, struggling to get comfortable, and trying to force techniques or pills to work…

And actions like struggling lead to fragmented sleep.

Beliefs that sleep is important

→

Worrying about your problems

→

Feelings that speed up the brain

→ 

Speedy-brainwave actions like trying harder, struggling to get comfortable, and trying to force techniques or pills to work

→ 

Fragmented sleep

Even after you fall asleep, your mind continues the struggle.  The beliefs, behaviors, feelings, actions, and results carry on.

While that sounds hopeless… it’s actually a good thing.  It means your mind never stops working for you. You just have to learn to make it work for you in a way that’s helpful.

To stop the downward spiral of insomnia… you just have to change the ROOTS.

What if it looked like this:

Beliefs that sleep is isn’t important

→

Calming, relaxing thoughts

→

Feelings of relief and comfort

→ 

Slow brainwave actions like relaxing, resting, and letting go

→ 

Solid, refreshing sleep

So, we’ll leave it there for now, and in the next article we’ll start looking at how to really get in there and start changing your beliefs.  The next article will give you powerful insights into how you can really start to examine and reframe your beliefs so that your whole world kind of flips on it’s head. 

If you want to really want to make the next article a game changer, please do a really simple exercise between this article and that article and identify one belief you have about sleep that makes it very important to you.  This can be anything that is near and dear to your heart, like “Sleep is essential to my health” or “I won’t experience quality time with my loved ones if I don’t sleep” or “I struggle with my work when I’m tired.”

Just identify anything like that, and have a look at how this plays out on an unconscious level.  What other thoughts does it lead to, and what feelings do those thoughts cause?  When you’re feeling that way, what are some actions you do that make sleep more important?  Doing this will allow you to really witness how your unconscious mind works, how it runs you, and it’ll set you up to have a powerful breakthrough with this belief in the next article.  So take some time and do that and I’ll see you next time.