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:
- Compassion.
- Relation To Community.
- 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.