How To Sleep Like A Baby

A technique for conquering insomnia.

Credits: Cedric Ujeneza

Another sleepless night. So many thoughts, important thoughts, problems that have to be solved. Responsibilities. Payroll, supplies, the conflict brewing between Lumber and Paint. Sometimes sleep seems like the only thing we can’t pay attention to. 7–9 hours!?! It’s too much! No time!

Do you work just to pass the time because you’re too tired to enjoy even simple pleasures. What if I told you there’s hope? That you don’t have to pop pills pointlessly while you toss and turn all night anyway. When tweaking Serotonin/Melatonin fails and the helplessness sets in so you’re so desperate you are willing to do almost anything…

5 Facts About Sleep*

Man is the only primate that deliberately delays sleep.

Sleep is a necessity like diet and exercise.

A primary cause of over-tiredness is self-imposed sleep deprivation.

People with insufficient sleep eat more.

We naturally feel tired at two different times of the day. Usually 2AM and 2PM.

* sleepfoundation.org

Oh, this isn’t a magic cure and it won’t work for everyone. Only some have the mental fortitude required to commit 2 weeks of training for incremental (though long lasting) improvement. Still others have serious medical causes in which case this system can only help in a more general sense.

Most of us are just busy people who don’t realize the chaos we’re operating under. Imagine any new job. Any new skill you ever learned. When you poked at a Piano, or plucked the Guitar. Noise to Sound…and eventually Music. We recognize this intuitively.

So what irony the moment we take on a responsible position in society…take the well being of others and their families into our care; we forget everything we ever learned about learning and exhaust ourselves needlessly trying to live up to increased expectations.

Like Most Work In The Mind; Start With A Basic Meditative Stance

Find a quiet place, close you eyes, and breath deeply for a few seconds. Pay attention to your heart beat. As it slows to what feels a comfortable resting rate let your brain do whatever it wants for a few moments. Sitting or standing. As long as it’s not distracting. Observe the flow of ideas in your mind without following them. Let the thoughts come and go.

This is where the root of much Insomnia sprouts. The mind is like a shop ready to facilitate production of any imaginable kind. Thoughts are the tools and materials we use to figure things out. It’s just chaos if not framed with some sort of language. When we place all the things we need to think about in our mind we need an effective system for keeping only the tools we need close at hand or we become overwhelmed. An internal language to organize the materials we work with toward specific problems.

When a thought presents it can seem most natural to “process” it. To extract value from it by finding creative ways to attach it into a procession of useful applications. And in there lies the problem. The proper first step is not usually to pursue the thought and cultivate it; instead it’s to place the thought into its proper place where it can be processed later along with other thoughts deemed useful within that context. You may not be able to control the thoughts but you can control the space around them.

A Case Of Directionality

An easy way to start doing this is to imagine yourself in a vast multi-dimensional world where every direction is a different place you can throw stuff and access later. We do this naturally all the time and don’t realize it. When we think about the future we tend to “look forward” and when we think about loved ones passed on we tend to “look up” and when thinking of enemies we sometimes “look down.” Reminiscing about past glories and old friends…we “look back”.

This can be done with complicated, work related thoughts as well. By identifying the activities most common in the daily grind it’s in fact possible to place stressful thoughts that drag us away from a good nights sleep. Imagine your problems always two steps away instead of one. A simple shift in order of operations and suddenly a curse becomes a blessing. Instead of being overwhelmed by tasks, each task is placed in its appropriate direction paying dividends in its proper time.

Payroll to my near left. Staff meeting to my far right. “Distance” can imply priority or nothing at all. Use the variables/metrics that works for you. Colour, size, pattern of movement. Tracking multiple projects? No worries…not anymore. Build levels. You don’t need to “see” a map of your office building do you? You know what floors have what when you need it. It’s no different inside your mind. When you really need to do some thinking that’s when you gather your thoughts and do something with them.

Next time you’re trying to sleep at the end of a long day and something interesting or pressing pops in…have a place for that kind of thought and put it there. Every time you do the training continues. With practice reach out and find the materials you need when you need them. Replace the tornado of tools with a manageable system based on a small investment of time and effort over a couple of creative weeks.

Just a few minutes a day can do wonders. Soon it’s an effortless habit. When your technique loses effectiveness from lack of practice, or you get bored of your configuration, just spend a few days tweaking like anything else.

There you have it. A simple system for sleeping like a baby. Give it a try! The results might surprise you.