Creating easy, deep sleep without the struggle requires 3 elements.

Previously, we looked at the basic qualities of self-therapy and how it is more of an environment or way of being than it is a technique.  We discovered that there’s a context in which other techniques operate, and that we need a very different context to make sleep techniques and remedies effective.

So now that you know what the general self-therapic method is, it’s time to learn how to use it.  To become self-therapeutic and apply this “environment” or “way of being” to the sleep techniques, you need to learn and master the 3 elements of the self-therapeutic method, they are as follows:

1. Compassion.
2. Relation To Community.
3. Mindfulness.

In this article, we’ll cover the basics of the 3 elements, and in future articles, we’ll get into each in more depth.

1. Compassion: 

This refers to being gentle, kind, and understanding, rather than critical and judgmental.  

Compassion serves two purposes.  The first is that it counteracts the kind of self-talk that keeps you awake.  It’s important to realize that in the 21st century, stress and worry come from very different things than they did thousands of years ago.  Back then, stress came from physical danger, and insomnia kept you alive.  Today, stress comes from the way we talk to ourselves and the consequences of not getting enough sleep – but our subconscious mind doesn’t care how the stress came about, and the way to stop the stress we create today is by speaking to ourselves in the opposing way.  If your current thoughts are keeping you awake, then the opposing way of thinking will prevent you from keeping yourself awake.

The other purpose compassion serves is that it creates the thoughts and feelings that generate sleep.  So if the first is compassion counters anti sleep thoughts and feelings, then the second is that it creates pro-sleep ones. Ten thousand years ago, sleep happened when you felt safe, but the thoughts and feelings that generate sleep aren’t as simple as “safety”.  See, when you feel especially safe, there’s other feelings that go along with that… a certain comfort that results from this which is sleep inducing… and you can obtain that specific comfort in multiple ways.  Feeling especially loved can cause it… strong feelings of relief, such as a going on your dream vacation can cause it… and compassion can cause it.  In line with self-therapy, you will learn self-compassion, so you can create this special, almost magical sleep-inducing comfort for yourself.

On one hand, self-compassion is harder than compassion because most people are much harder on themselves than they are on others (and you must not view it as self-pity or self-indulgence.)  

On the other hand, you have a major advantage as there’s not as much guesswork as to what you’re experiencing.  With the reduction of your inner critic, you’ll stop keeping yourself awake, and with the growth of your self-compassion, you’ll create an environment that causes any sleep remedy to work much faster, easier, and creates much deeper sleep.

2. Relation To Community: 

This refers to how related you feel to the people that make up the insomnia community at large, rather than alienated by your suffering.  

Thousands of years ago, there was safety in numbers, but when you were alone you were vulnerable, and this became a major factor in our ability to sleep.  Today, our homes protect us quite well from the elements, but if you feel alone – perhaps because you have a “unique and different” insomnia problem and you’re “not like the others” – your subconscious mind will still interpret that as a vulnerability that is a major trigger for insomnia.

While it certainly can help to go talk to other insomniacs, what we’re referring to here is how you relate to yourself – do you feel like a “lone wolf”, or do you feel that you’re just like the many insomniacs who are going through the same thing as you are?  

Therapists get to know people’s most private inner workings, and because they have many patients, they have a very good sense of how most people are the same.  They get to see everyone experiencing the same feelings, emotions, and so on, so they see what we all have in common and where you fit in.  

As an insomniac, you feel different and isolated, so this is one of the largest challenges to guiding yourself properly.  However, you are not alone, and by relating to your struggles as being normal and common with millions of other insomniacs, you can start feeling connected to the common experience and this will generate a sense of safety and comfort.

3. Mindfulness: 

This refers to holding your experience in balanced awareness, not ignoring pain nor exaggerating it.  

If you’ve ever been to therapy, you know it is a safe place where you can share the most painful experiences of your life with professional guidance.  When you do this, you experience that which you’re afraid of, but it’s often the anticipation of experiencing this pain which is the worst part, not the pain itself.

Have you ever been afraid of an upcoming experience, but then found it wasn’t so bad when you actually went through the experience?

Insomnia feeds on our anticipations.  The stress comes not from the pain, but the worry – worry about struggling at night – worry about exhaustion the next day – worry about our health and our livelihood.  

Mindfulness allows you to deal with both the worry itself and that pain which you are worried about.  It allows you to embrace and absorb the thoughts and feelings of worry and anticipation – to accept them as thoughts and feelings that you can watch and experience as they rise and fade in and out of your awareness without feeding into the obsession.  It also allows you to experience pain without trying to avoid it, which reduces and absorbs its impact, as it is the urge to avoid pain that is what really makes it so painful in the first place.

Additionally, when you stop amplifying your pain by trying to avoid and fix it, it’s less painful… and when something is less painful, we don’t worry so much about it.  In this way, mindfulness can greatly reduce the impact of insomnia’s root causes.

Mindfulness is about accepting things as they are.  A therapist naturally has a third party perspective, so they can accept things with ease and then attempt to guide their patient through their experience.  

As a self-therapist, your advantage is that you are able to witness your own experience much more directly, however your disadvantage is the first-person perspective that comes along with this.  Being “in it”, so to speak, means that you have very little leverage “over it”.  

However, with mindfulness, you can obtain the best of both worlds – you can have the first person viewpoint, but simply witness things as they are as if you were in the third person perspective.  Once you can witness your reactions instead of being driven by them, you can create the space needed for a safe, comfortable approach to the sleep technique or remedy of your choosing.

We’ll leave it there for now, but if you want to keep practicing, I’ve got a simple exercise for you to try out before the next article.  It’s actually kind of fun and can be a great way to feel better when you’re not feeling so hot.

So, the last ST Method article exercise was around the first quality – compassion.  That’s where you practiced talking to yourself like a good friend.  You totally did that, right?

Well, if not, don’t worry… some people don’t like that one and it takes time to understand why it’s so critical.  We’ll get more into that in future articles.

For the next article, we’re going to get into mindfulness, so this exercise will get you started on that.

It’s super simple.  All you have to do is, pick something that gave you some grief today or this week where you were kind of struggling a little bit emotionally, and you’re going to spend 5 minutes paying attention to the pain point.  It’s a really simple meditation, but it can also be extraordinarily insightful.

Next week, we’re going to discover that our struggling and suffering isn’t a result of pain, but rather, it’s a result of resistance. 

Just think of any time you were in pain but you didn’t care.  In fact, there’s been time in life where you liked a little pain.  This is a common one for people who push themselves hard in the gym or at work.  But when you resist pain – that is, when you don’t want pain or you just want it to stop – it gets much, much worse.

So, the exercise this time is to relive a moment of emotional pain.  Just remember the time, remember where you were, what happened, and see if you can recall the pain in your mind.  It might take a minute of thinking about it to feel it.  Once you’ve experienced the pain again, set a 5 minute timer, and spend the whole 5 minutes focusing on nothing but the experience of pain.  Accept it, explore what it feels like, embrace the feeling.  At first, it might get worse.  This is normal.  If that happens, just stay focused on the feeling, and try not to think about anything else.  If you’re able to hone your entire focus on the pain for more than a couple minutes, you’ll notice it disappears.

If you try this and it doesn’t work, don’t worry.  We’ll get more into the elements of mindfulness in the next article, but the next article will be much more valuable for you if you get to experience the powerful of mindfulness prior to learning about it.  Give it a try.

So what happens during sleep, anyway?

What exactly is the brain doing?

There are literally thousands of medical professionals and neuro-scientists that have been working on the answer to this question for a very long time. And they know many, many things about the process of sleep and what’s going on… but no one really understands exactly what the brain is doing and why.

It’s like asking “How exactly is our experience of consciousness formed?” There’s no complete answer to that. In fact, I’ve heard some of the greatest thinkers say that we won’t fully understand the human brain for at least another hundred years.

The good news is, we don’t need to know anything about what happens during sleep to know how to improve it. In fact, since sleep happens when you’re unconscious, would it matter if you knew how to do it better? Probably not.

Whatever our brain is up to when we’re asleep, we do know the key ingredient to making it work – 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, the your mind must slow down.

It’s similar to freezing water to make ice. If we lived in a time before it was understood how ice is created from lower temperatures, we’d still know the simple fact that the colder the air is, the faster the water turns to ice. With sleep, we know that the easier our brainwaves slow down, and the slower they stay, the more our brain can do it’s thing at night.

The problem chronic insomniacs face – especially those who can’t fall asleep or get back to sleep – is that whenever we try to fall asleep, we actually prevent sleep from happening. Since we’re trying to achieve a result, our brain speeds up the way it does to help us achieve anything we normally do throughout the day. Think about trying to hit a deadline at work or school, or having an important event coming up in the next hour. Whenever we get serious about achieving a result, our brain speeds up. The problem is, sleep works in the exact opposite way.

The big mistake that stops insomnia remedies from working effectively is the same thing – you’re still trying to achieve sleep, and so your brain will still speed up to assist you, especially if it’s important. Even if you’re using a relaxation technique to achieve sleep, your brainwave speed increases, and the reason that brainwave speed increases is that you’re trying to achieve a result. So, it stands to reason, if you approach anything with the idea that it’s going to create a result, you’re only going to speed up the brain even more.

This is why the self-therapeutic method is so different. Think about that word, “therapy” by the definition that’s about relieving tension and rehabilitation. As in the sentence “Relaxing on a tropical beach is therapeutic.” In this definition, it’s not about the result, it’s about the process.

Being self-therapeutic is not simply “a technique” for slowing down brainwave speed. It’s a whole approach that makes ANYTHING you do operate in such a way that brainwave speed slows down. Self-therapy needs to be viewed as more of a “way of being” or like an environment that you operate inside of. It’s a set of qualities that shape your environment.

That being said, we’re looking at a set of qualities here, so let’s not get carried away. I need to make sure you’re aware, in case you’re new to my content, that I am not a therapist or a qualified physician in any way and this content shouldn’t be looked at as medical advice, treatment, or therapy. If you want to use anything I’m saying here that way, you should consult a professional.

Okay, so imagine your sleep as it currently is as being like a greenhouse that’s setup for a very arid desert environment. Now let’s say you want to grow some humid jungle plants. In this example, the plants are analogous to the techniques you’ve tried with sleep. Imagine the plants aren’t growing well, so you get new plants, and those don’t grow well either, no matter how well you plant them or how many different species of jungle plants you try, nothing survives. Do you think you’re ever going to find “just the right” species? I suppose it may be possible, but that’s hardly the point.

The plants themselves may be what you want to grow, but they’ll only grow once you get the water and humidity right, and you can think of the water and humidity as self-therapy. Water is essential for life, but it is not life itself, and in the same way, self-therapy is essential for creating slow brainwaves, but it is not a sleep technique itself… it’s something you have to set and monitor closely as you use your sleep techniques.

It follows, then, that the first step to creating easy, deep sleep is to create a therapeutic environment.

To achieve this, we’ll start by examining how it works. The way a therapeutic environment creates slow brainwaves for sleep is by giving you a sense of feeling protected and safe.

When you think about the roots of humanity and sleep, this makes a lot more sense. For instance, ten thousand years ago, if you felt alone, trapped, or helpless, it most likely meant that you were in physical danger.

When you fell asleep, a predator could ambush you without any resistance.

It improved your odds of survival if you needed to feel safe to fall asleep… but the unconscious mind doesn’t instinctively understand physical safety… it only understands the feelings of comfort that come with it. Your unconscious mind also doesn’t understand that your house protects you, because ten thousand years ago, mankind lived in tribes of usually around 50-150 people, so your unconscious mind felt safe when you were most connected with others. When you feel alone and abandoned, sleep is light, because back then it meant that you were unprotected.

So to fall asleep safely, you had to feel safe and sound and connected with others, not agitated and alone.

Times have changed, but we haven’t, so it makes sense that today, if you can start feeling secure and comfortable, you’ll fall asleep much faster and more deeply.

For example, if you were to take a pill with a normal, judgmental spirit, you would wonder if it’s working, worry or think too much, and otherwise counteract the effects of the pill by speeding up your brainwaves.

But if you took a pill and then cultivated a therapeutic attitude, you would forget about the pill, and just focus on compassion and comfort, allowing your brainwaves to slow down and the effects of the pill to work.

The point of view is that of a healer, a listener, a comforter. It’s being your own best friend. Someone who accepts your flaws, who understands you can’t always be perfect. It might not be about protection per se, but those qualities are the same as ones in the people who protected your ancestors ten thousand years ago.

To use the self-therapeutic method, you’ll want to approach yourself, little by little, as a listener to your own mind. To be your own friend.

Sleep professional Dr. Haug talks about this methodology in his book, “I Want to Sleep – Unlearning Insomnia” He says…

“Contrary to popular belief, therapy has often little to do with finding answers and even less with analyzing unconscious causalities. It has more to do with the primeval relief of finding oneself no longer alone…”

We need someone to talk to help let go of our fears. “…Listening to the plea of your sleep-deprived, tired self and saying: I am right here, what can I do for you? Lightens the scariness of being alone as well. And that is something you can do for yourself.”

“Finding something or someone to love almost invariably alleviates insomnia: Feeling abandoned, trapped, and alone almost always brings it on.”

Before you can start using sleep techniques in a therapeutic way, you must first become therapeutic. You’ll need to discover what it’s like to be this way, and get into it to discover it for yourself. There’s a lot of material out there for doing this and I talk about it in my videos, but a good place to start would be to read up on self-compassion or to actually get coaching from a real therapist.

It’s very important because becoming more therapeutic with yourself, in general, will also deeply improves the quality of your sleep. It’s not just about making sleep happen – it’s about getting brainwave speed to stay slow and relaxed throughout the night, to prevent something called fragmented sleep, which is the real cause of all sleep problems. For more on that, watch my video on “The Downward Spiral of Insomnia.”

By using techniques in a therapeutic manner, you’ll stop judging how well your doing, you’ll take it easy, and you’ll disconnect from the result and instead start practicing the technique just for the experience and habitual thinking that it develops. In other words, you’ll stop trying to fall asleep and focus on building skills that make sleep happen. Since the secret to falling asleep is in trying to stay awake, it turns out this approach actually works better for putting yourself to sleep.

If you are confused by that last line – that the secret to falling asleep is in trying to stay awake – then there’s another piece of the puzzle you’re missing. I cover this in my video “What’s the BEST Cure for Insomnia?”, which I’ll link you to.  If you have issues falling asleep or falling back to sleep, this concept is absolutely critical and so I highly recommend checking this out.

As it turns out, the self-therapeutic method isn’t just about creating slower brainwaves – it is also a fundamental element required to make sleep less important – and one way or another, you must learn how to create slow brainwaves to create easy, deep, refreshing sleep.