Most insomniacs have a big misconception.

If you have chronic insomnia, you probably believe it’s something that’s impossible to stop.

While understandable, this is simply not true.

You can get rid of insomnia if you can do 2 things:

You must be able to identify the variables that cause of your insomnia.

You must stop these variables from continuing to function.

Most people don’t know what’s causing their insomnia, and even those who do usually don’t know what to do about it.

The good news is, in most cases, you can figure out what’s causing your insomnia through the process of elimination. I’ll give you a quick rundown of the most common causes to look into. Then, once you’ve figured out what the likely suspects are, you can get to work on them by picking the right solution from the set of solutions.

First, you’ve gotta determine if your causes are mostly physical or mostly mental. If your quality of sleep is low, or you wake up over and over, that’s more likely to be heavier on the physical. If you struggle to fall asleep and struggle to go back to sleep if you wake up too early, then the larger issues for you are likely mental.

From there, let’s rule out all the main causes of insomnia.  If you inexplicably don’t sleep well and suspect one or more of these issues are the cause, you can go through a list of those causes by reading virtually ANY sleep book written by a sleep expert MD, or go see a sleep profession, to see which would likely apply to you and then go to work on those issues and see if your sleep improves. There are also medical experts specializing in sleep that can help you identify these sorts of issues, and once you’ve identified the issues, it’s pretty straightforward to solve them.

On the other hand, if you have a hard time falling asleep or going back to sleep, this likely says more about mental issues, which means that you want to focus on the things that lead to a fragmented sleep cycle.

Fragmented sleep has 3 tell-tale signs… it makes it so that:

-You feel more awake when you try harder to go to sleep.

-You wake up frequently throughout the night

-Your sleep is not deep and refreshing.

The good news is, fragmented sleep is not caused by too many things. Just see how many “yes” answers you get to the following to get a sense of what could be contributing:

-Do you get anxious about going to bed?

-Does getting less sleep stress you out during the day?

-Are you dependent on anything to help yourself sleep? This can be medication, having a new mattress, using incense, wearing a sleep mask, and a thousand other things.

-Does being tired have a significant impact on your work, school, relationships, social life, or other areas of life?

-Do you suffer from anxiety, depression, pain, exhaustion, diminished focus, laziness, or anything else that’s really bothering you because of lost sleep?

-Does the fact that you aren’t getting sleep come up over and over again throughout the day?

Are you feeling defeated or suppressed because of insomnia?

-Are you growing concerned about the impact a lack of sleep is having on your health or well being?

If you had no “yes” answers, your sleep might be fragmented, but it’s likely more due to a physical issue… but if you answered yes to any of the above, you likely have unconscious mental sleep issues at play, and even if this isn’t the case, learning the mental side of sleep can help you improve the quality of your sleep.

That’s because, scientifically speaking, easy, refreshing sleep only happens when your brain slows down. When your brain speeds up, it prevents deep sleep. Learning how to create slow, smooth brain activity at night improves your sleep, and if you have chronic insomnia, it’s most likely because without realizing it, your brain unconsciously and automatically speeds up. This happens throughout the night, and for a lot of people, it even happens when they attempt to fall asleep, which causes them to feel more and more awake the harder they try to fall asleep.

Now I know that’s all probably a little confusing right now, but the main point is, you’re keeping yourself awake and you don’t even know-how.

So, fragmented sleep happens when your mind speeds up during the night. It’s this increased brainwave speed that causes damage to your sleep.

In good sleepers, brainwave speed is very smooth throughout the night, only having slight variations, like the waves on a calm lake.

By comparison, an insomniac’s brainwave speed exhibits sudden large variations that happen all night long, like giant ocean waves during a storm.

It is these large variations in brainwave cycles that cause fragmented sleep. Sometimes this fragmentation causes you to wake up, but even when it doesn’t wake you up, the result is poor quality sleep.

That’s why you’re sometimes still exhausted even after getting 8 hours of sleep.

If you only have a problem falling asleep, it’s a good bet that your brainwave activity is too speedy, preventing it from happening in the first place. And after you finally fall asleep, large variations in brainwave activity continue throughout the night.

The source of these large variations in your brainwaves is the real cause of your insomnia problem.

The good news is, it’s not too hard to identify these causes. If you answered yes to any of the previous questions, your unconscious-mind automatically prepares for action when it comes to sleep. It is aware of how important getting sleep is, so like any other important matter, it speeds up your brainwaves, making your sleep light and in many cases even making you feel wide awake no matter how exhausted you feel. This importance you’ve associated with sleep (which good sleepers do not have or need) speeds up your brainwaves all night long.

To identify the causes of your insomnia, just look at where sleep has become overly important. To get a better sense of this, watch my video called “Cannot Sleep? The Downward Spiral of Insomnia”.

Once you’ve identified what’s creating the unconscious things causing sleep to be overly important, you can start to get to work on them.

The problem is, to slow your brainwaves and break the spiral, you have to stop seeing sleep as so important, which is all you’ve been doing lately!

The question is, “How is it possible to see sleep as something that’s not important?”

It’s a valid point. Sleep IS important!

The truth is, it’s impossible to see sleep as “not important”. Seeing sleep as “not important” is to trick yourself. That doesn’t work very well.

What IS possible is to make sleep far LESS important. Seeing sleep as “less important” is to free yourself. This works and it even gets better and better with time.

Making sleep less important is just a matter of figuring out what feelings, thoughts, and beliefs you have that are making sleep excessively important.

Let me be clear – ALL insomniacs have many thoughts about sleep that make it extremely important, whether they notice these thoughts or not. It’s totally normal, and you shouldn’t ever feel bad about valid thoughts. The problem is that these thoughts simply become irrationally immoderate; They go too far.

There’s some truth to each thought and emotion. The key is to determine what’s valid, where it goes too far, and what’s just plain wrong or misguided.

For example, take a thought like “I can’t have a good day tomorrow if I don’t sleep.”

That’s not wrong, but it’s not right either. On the one hand, not sleeping makes the next day a lot harder. On the other hand, you can still have a good day tomorrow. Just think of any time you were exhausted, but still ended up having a good day.

When you can catch thoughts like that one, you can make sleep much less important. Your brain is full of thoughts that irrationally make sleep much more important than it should be. You simply have to listen in and moderate.

If you could even make sleep HALF as important as it is now… you’d probably fall asleep twice as fast, with DOUBLE the quality, and sleeping pills and other remedies would actually do their job.

To learn more and about how to do that, I recommend watching my video on “Mental Ways to Help Sleep” where I’ll run through a variety of the most common ways that people create fragmented sleep, along with solutions you can start implementing to start changing these things right away.

Also, if you have a problem falling asleep or falling back to sleep, check out my “Best cure for insomnia” video, which is specifically designed to approach falling asleep in a fundamentally different way than you have been. This is a way of approaching the technique that gets rid of the pressure, disregards the result, and puts you at total ease.