If you just lay there, struggling to fall asleep, then this video is for you.

In this video, you’ll discover a totally different approach for falling asleep that no one’s talking about, and 5 methods you can use to test it out tonight.

Or, if you’d prefer to read, just continue reading below.

So, it’s counter-intuitive, but the BEST way to fall asleep is to TRY to stay awake, but to do it in an exhausting way that makes it nearly impossible not to fall asleep.

Before I explain how to do this in a way that actually works, let me explain why it works — 3 Reasons why this is the best sleep advice, and how to think about it differently.

1.  The REASON just trying to fall asleep doesn’t work is that falling asleep isn’t a choice.  The more you try to fall asleep, the worse it gets.

2.  You ONLY fall asleep when your brain SLOWS down.  However, whenever you try to achieve anything, your brain speeds up to help you out.  So if you try to fall asleep, your brain actually speeds up, which is why you feel more awake the harder you try.  The science of how brain speed and sleep work is something you can research for yourself, but that’s the jist of it.

3. It counteracts the pressure you feel when you know that you need sleep to happen.  The fact is, the more important sleep is to you, the harder it is to get… and thats because theres more pressure to fall asleep, especially if there’s a time clock associated with it.  And that pressure is going to keep you awake.

As you can probably tell, you have to approach falling asleep very differently then you have been.  

The way to put yourself to sleep is to set your mind to a task that’s very difficult to maintain without falling asleep… and you undertake this task with the goal of staying awake.

There are certain activities and exercises that you can do that are interesting, yet tiring… and when your goal is to stay awake, they make it very hard to keep your eyes open.

To illustrate the concept, think of a time when you wanted to stay awake to finish something you were doing, but you found it extremely difficult.  Maybe you were trying to finish a TV show, maybe it was a chapter of a book, or maybe you were studying, or working on a project… and you couldn’t finish without dozing off.

That’s the type of activity that will put you to sleep – one that’s hard to finish while forcing yourself to stay awake.  The key is to maintain the goal of not falling asleep.

This is where the old adage “counting sheep” comes from.  And hopefully this video explains why it doesn’t work – it’s because people count sheep with the goal of falling asleep.  I’m telling you to count sheep with the goal of staying awake.  I’d say pick a # as a goal and really try to get there.

Of course, I’m just using sheep as an example – I’m not actually suggesting you should count sheep, unless that’s what you really want to do.  

So what kind of activities actually work?

Any activity that has the following 3 elements will work:
1. Has to be something that MUS
2. Has to be engaging, but not too exciting – just enough to hold your interest.
3. Has to be tedious, but not too boring – just enough to be kind of a challenge to do without falling asleep.

So let’s walk through 5 examples right now that you can use to put yourself to sleep tonight, and if your insomnia is very bad, I’ll have a follow up video really getting into the nitty gritty details of the 3 elements above so you can really become a master of this technique.

No. 1: The Point

1. “The Point” – this was coined by a friend of my named Kevin.

The point is the easiest activity and has the most widespread, first time use effectiveness.

The technique is so simple, you can try it out right now.  All you have to do is find a point to look at anywhere in the room.  If you sleep with the lights off, this might be a small point of light… if you want to try it out right now for fun, just find any small “point” or fixed spot that you can hold your focus on.

Maybe it’s the logo on a book… maybe it’s the very corner of your dresser… maybe it’s a speck on the ceiling.

Now, all you do is play a game called “how long can I stare at this for without falling asleep or losing focus”.  The key here is to make it a game by setting goals.  Maybe the first time you make it 30 seconds… and then lose focus… so the next time you try to stay focused on it for a minute, and then 2, then 3, then 5.

If you’re watching this in the middle of the day, there’s not going to be a lot that happens… but when you’re tired and can’t sleep, you’re going to find that you can’t stare at a point very long without your eyes drooping.

Once you feel your eyes drooping, you need to increase your effort to keep your eyes open and stay focused.  When you do this, it should start becoming harder and harder to keep your eyes open.  Just keep it up and try to stay awake – the important part is to stay engaged and just keep trying to stay awake.

While this technique works for many people the first time, it has a tendency to be less reliable and isn’t a great long term solution.  You’ll see why this is loses effectiveness once I start explaining the principle of engagement, but in short, it’s just really hard to stay engaged on this one.

No. 2: The Video Method

2. So, onto activity 2: the video method.  Unlike “the point”, this one is easy to stay engaged with, however the trick is to watch something that is boring enough to put you to sleep.  If you’re kept awake by endless mental chatter, this is a little more effective because the video should be distracting enough to take you out of your mental chatter.

The key is to find something that will distract you, yet still be boring enough to be hard to stay awake.  For me, it’s documentaries and interviews – particularly ones I’ve already seen before.  I’m very interested in deep topics, but since I’ve already seen the video, it’s kind of boring, which makes it hard to focus, but when I force myself to focus on the video it distracts me from my mental chatter.

The goal is to stay awake, but the trick is that you should be making it as difficult as possible.  The point works because it is a very tedious task – so you need a similar tedium with the video or show.  If you put on a show that you’re fascinated with, it’s not going to be very tedious, and that means it’s going to be very easy to stay awake.  The way to know if you’re watching the right thing is if you’re having a hard time staying awake.

The video method isn’t for everyone, and there are downfalls to using this activity.  For one, the flickering bright lights of a TV are proven to be damaging to sleep, so it’s advised to turn the brightness all the way down when using this activity.  Most shows will have too much stimuli and unpredictability to get the kind of tedium you need for this to work as well.  Like “the point”, it’s not the easiest long term solution, but instead of “engagement” being an issue, the problem with this one lies with the principal of “tedium” that we’ll discuss next… but in short, it’s usually just not tedious enough.

It’s generally not good to watch anything that’s unpredictable.  This is why I recommend watch video content you’ve already seen – because if you’re trying something new, it might be too interesting to you, which will make it too engaging and not tedious enough, which is a balancing act we’ll have a look at shortly.

But if you like the idea of this activity, I would strongly recommend the next activity, because it is very similar and yet it solves most of these problems…

No. 3: The Audiobook Method

3. The Audiobook method.  Similar to the video method, but the advantage is you don’t have to deal with the light from the TV.  Unlike reading a book, you don’t have to keep the light on or deal with holding a book, which can make it very difficult to end up actually falling asleep.  Personally, this is my favorite method and any time I am having trouble falling asleep it is my “go to”.

Like picking a TV show, the book you choose is important.  Don’t pick your favorite author’s new book – it’s going to be too hooking.  Like I was told as a kid – no ghost stories before bed.  You need to choose something tedious to force yourself to focus on, so it’s hard to stay awake… but at the same time, it should be distracting (so it’s got to be sort of interesting.) 

For instance, I’m not going to put on an audio-textbook teaching me calculus – I’d have no idea what they’re talking about and it wouldn’t distract me from my own mental chatter at all.  But it’d probably work pretty good if I put on something something like “Charlie and the Chocolate factory”, because honestly, I’m just not all that into it… but I’m sure I’ll find kind of interesting, at least enough to distract me if I was forcing myself to stay awake listening to it.

No. 4: The Meditation Method

4. The meditation method.  This is a little more advanced and takes time to master, since meditation is a skill that is acquired with practice. 

The advantage with meditation is that you can almost directly slow down your brainwaves.  When you’re trying to stay awake and you’re meditating to slow down your mind, you can pretty much put yourself to sleep on command.  I’ve done it successfully many times, even falling asleep in under a minute once or twice… but I have to admit, it does take a lot of discipline, which can be almost impossible when you’re really tired.  When I was really curing my own insomnia, I was practiced enough to do it a lot, but these days I’ve fallen out of practice so I usually just use an audiobook if I’m having trouble.

Once you learn how to slow down your brainwaves, you get to a point eventually where you don’t even need an activity any more.  These days, if I’m being lazy, 99% of the time I can just lay down and I’ll be asleep within a few minutes.  But that’s after years of knowing this stuff.

Anyway, back to meditation – the idea here is to set an end goal of completing the meditation without falling asleep.  Since there needs to be a goal of completion, it’s best to have a way of achieving the goal.

Let’s take one of the most basic meditations – focusing on the breath.  In this practice, your goal is to get as focused as possible on the sensation of your breathing, and when you get distracted you simply refocus your attention on your breath.

For this to put you to sleep, you might have a goal of how many breaths you can count in a row without losing track.  Once you achieve the number, you can then set a higher number to achieve and start over.

There’s a lot of mediations and I cover this a lot more in follow up material, but if you’re skilled at meditation already or want to learn it, it’s a great way to fall asleep using this technique.

No. 5: The Medical Hypnosis Method

5. The Medical Hypnosis Method.  Hypnosis is very similar to meditation, and contains the same benefits of directly slowing down your brainwaves. 

The difference with medical hypnosis is that you’re listening to an audio track done by a medical professional that is skilled at putting people to sleep.

From my many years of helping insomniacs, my observation is that this is the single most effective activity of them all.  No method works for everyone, but this one seems to work in the majority of cases.  Most serious insomniacs find that it stops working if they don’t know the rest of the technique that we’re about to get into… and it is very important to pick the right professional, as half the products out there have a tendency not to work. 

I’ll probably do a review on some medical hypnosis products in a future video, but for tonight you might want to just start with “The point” or “The audio book” methods – they’re the easier to try out, and both work good the first time around.

That being said, NONE of these techniques will work if you end up trying to fall asleep, and there’s a lot more to be said about how to get the principles of engagement and tedium right. Without understanding the principles under-pinning this method, it’d be kind of like trying to cook while following a recipe that is missing the amounts of each ingredient. If you’ve ever cooked something with way too much salt, you know how easily it can be to mess up a recipe.

So, I will be coming out with a follow-up article/video in a week to get more into the nuts and bolts of this one if enough people are interested in that. If that’s something you’d like to see, please subscribe and let me know in the comments below.

Thanks for reading!

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.

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.

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.

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.

Did you know that there’s ONE single source for all insomnia problems?

No matter what issues you have with sleep, it all comes down to fragmented sleep.

Fragmented sleep happens when your mind starts racing. It’s this increased brainwave speed that prevents and/or causes damage to your sleep.

In good sleepers, brainwave speed is very smooth throughout the night, only having slight variations in a their regular sleep cycle patterns.

By comparison, an insomniac’s brainwave speed exhibits sudden large variations that happen all night long, like gigantic 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 are the real cause of your insomnia problem.

So to cure your insomnia you need to answer the question, “What’s causing these fast variations in my brainwave activity and how do I stop them?”

The #1 Reason Your Brainwaves Rapidly Speed Up — Causing Fragmented Sleep

When you see an iceberg, you are only seeing the very tip that’s above water. Likewise, when you can’t sleep, most of the problem lies below the level of your consciousness. That’s why sleep often seems so mysterious.

Have you ever tried taking a sleeping pill to help you sleep?

Most likely, you answered “Yes”… yet it didn’t work to your satisfaction… because there’s something deeper.

That’s why most sleep experts teach you techniques for controlling your sleep rather than simply sending you to a doctor for a prescription.

These techniques may help you control problems like anxiety, depression, stress, endless obsessive thinking, anger, fear, frustration, feelings of loneliness, and others that seem to be disrupting your sleep hormones, but they’re often missing a critical piece of the puzzle.

Have you ever been told that to fall asleep, you need to fix one of these problems… but you found yourself thinking, “Well… if I slept better, I wouldn’t have this problem in the first place?”

Many insomniacs are told they need to manage their anxiety better, and their sleep will take care of itself.  Or that they need to work on their depression if they want to sleep. This is frustrating because they say, “I CAN’T get rid of anxiety – it’s there because I know how miserable struggling to get sleep is!”  Or, “I CAN’T get rid of depression, because insomnia is the reason my life stinks!”

There seems to be something missing from the equation… some other reason you have insomnia.

Most who try advanced techniques without knowing about the deeper, unconscious problem find that they STILL won’t work, or they stop working after a short period of time.

I remember the experience of lying down, trying so hard to make a technique work for me… and only feeling more awake, less comfortable, and that much further from falling asleep.

It seemed as if my efforts were working against me… even when I was SURE I was doing everything right.

To figure out how this happens, I need to expose a downward spiral, going on deep within your subconsciousness. It’s caused by a mechanism that serves you well during the day, but backfires when it’s time to go to sleep. 

To show you what I’m talking about, think about something really important or urgent, like an upcoming meeting, a serious problem, or something you have to attend to. Take a minute to get focused on this thought before continuing.

Got something IMPORTANT in your head? Good…

Do you notice how it piques your interest?

Do you feel tense or anxious?

Do you have these kinds of thoughts frequently?

Do you notice any feelings, emotions, or other strong sensations?

Okay… now observe how all of your answers to these questions reflect FASTER BRAINWAVE ACTIVITY.

With everything we do during the DAY, with all the important things in life, our unconsciousness speeds up to help us out, by firing up our brainwaves so we can so we can achieve that task.

Re-stated – if something is important, our mind prepares for it, which UNCONSCIOUSLY AND AUTOMATICALLY SPEEDS UP OUR BRAINWAVES.  It’s hard to even notice that its happening.

Why is that so crucial?

Because your unconscious-mind automatically prepares for action. It is aware of how important getting sleep is, so like any other important matter, it speeds up your brainwaves, making you feel wide awake no matter how exhausted you feel.

This importance you’ve associated which sleep (which good sleepers do not have or need) speeds up your brainwaves all night long.

Even if you feel incredibly tired, you’re unconsciously thinking that sleep is very important!

When you struggle to get some sleep, you only end up making it worse.  The harder you try, the more you speed up your brainwaves, and the more elusive sleep becomes.

It’s like being lost in the woods and not knowing what direction to go in. Moving around just gets you even more lost, making you feel even more helpless.

That’s why it’s crucial to take a minute to judge how important getting sleep is to you. Notice what negative thoughts or behaviors are revealed by the following questions that would make getting sleep very important on a subconscious level…

What are the consequences going to be tomorrow if you don’t get enough sleep?

What have you been giving up in your life? How much did you value those things?

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?

Do you see how the questions above – or any problems you have because of insomnia – cause you to unconsciously view getting sleep as important?

Do you think these things may be unconsciously causing your brainwaves to SPEED UP as soon as you even think about going to sleep, causing a storm of fragmented sleep  throughout the night?

It’s been scientifically proven that if you goto bed with stress, that stress will stay with you throughout the night, fragmenting your sleep.

You can probably see why it’s so hard to fall asleep, why you wake up several times throughout the night, and why you wake up feeling extremely tired like you barely slept at all!

To add insult to injury, all the pills, tips, techniques, and anything else you’ve tried to fall asleep often only make the problem worse. Without fixing this fundamental problem FIRST, they only confirm the importance of getting sleep, speeding up your brainwaves even more, and causing you to feel even worse…

That’s why sleep “remedies” often don’t work or stop working after a while instead of giving you the quick sleep and refreshing mornings they promise.

No matter how long you’ve had insomnia, you’re stuck in this downward spiral:

The best way to reveal how this is happening for you is to just think about a time when sleep was particularly important for you, and falling asleep or staying asleep became impossible. See if you can think of a time like this.

Let’s say you lay down, and knowing that sleep is very important, you lay down and try to get comfortable. You may have even gone to bed extra early or done other things to *make sure* sleep happens. But in doing all this, you’ve made sleep very important, and so your mind speeds up to help assist you in falling asleep.

That’s when things take a turn for the worse. Now that you’re losing sleep, it quickly becomes even more important to get sleep, especially if you’re worried about tomorrow.  This fear or anxiety creates pressure that makes your brain speed way up.

I’m sure you’re probably familiar with this experience, and if so, you know what comes next. The more serious it gets, the more inexplicably wired you feel… and no matter how exhausted you may be, you feel wide awake. The more sleep you lose, the more important it gets, and the more frustrated you become. That’s why it’s a downward spiral.

And unfortunately, that’s just the spiral showing itself – normally, this is all happening unconsciously while you’re asleep. The problem is “below the radar” — this cycle normally HELPS you defeat your problems, so it’s only NATURAL that you’ve been using it… but when it comes to falling asleep, it backfires and speeds up your brainwaves, having the exact opposite effect you need for sound sleep!

Go figure – Sleep is the one thing in life that we should NEVER consider to be important, and right now, it’s one of your most important problems.

Like being lost in the woods, even though you think walking around will help, you end up right back where you started: Lost, and more desperate than ever.

If you simply had a compass, you’d be able to walk straight out of the woods.

Fortunately, I have a “compass” for you. I made a video called “The Best Cure For Insomnia” to address the many requests I’ve gotten over the years and it’ll tell you exactly what to do to start reversing and unraveling this downward spiral of insomnia. You can view it by clicking here.

Thanks for watching, and as always, if you liked this video please help me out with a like and go ahead and subscribe and ring the bell below for a steady supply of free, high quality sleep advice!