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.