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.