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.