Most people have experienced it at some point in their life… you lay down to sleep and then the brain controller gets completely the wrong idea and decides you should be planning the next day at work. Or where to go on holiday (or where not to go on holiday, maybe). Either that, or you start to obsess over some totally unimportant concept or situation, or even something somebody said during the day.
Then, of course, the inevitable happens. You start trying to go to sleep, and the ‘law of reversed effort’ suddenly kicks in – that is that the harder you try, the less likely you are to succeed.
There are actually countless articles about sleep problems all over the internet, and loads of books giving pretty much the same, but expanded, advice about sleep hygiene, avoiding coffee, avoiding too much alcohol, not watching TV, room temperature, and so on.
So, this article is not about those things – instead, it’s about two different techniques for getting off to sleep, and one or both should work every bit as well for you as they have for so many of my therapy clients over the years.
Method One
This is the easiest one and always works for me when I need it (which is not unusual, because my brain often decides to get determinedly busy as soon as my head touches the pillow).
Imagine you are getting into a lift on the top floor of a skyscraper and you see an LED indicator showing ‘Floor 300’ just above the doors as they close. In your mind, think of yourself saying ‘three hundred’ as you press the button to go down to the ground level. Then imagine that as you feel the lift go down, you say each floor number fully in your mind as the LED indicator changes… ‘two-hundred-and-ninety-nine… two-hundred-and-ninety-eight… two-hundred-and-ninety-seven…’ and so on.
If you lose count – and you probably will – just start again at any number higher than the one you’re currently thinking of. You almost certainly will have gone off to sleep before you get to the ground level in your thoughts, but if not, you can continue straight into the second technique, by imagining yourself walking out of the lift, along a street and through a rotating door into a large store…
Method Two
In your thoughts, imagine as vividly as you can that you’re in a busy department store. You quickly realise there must be a sale on because there appears to be hundreds of people, all hustling and bustling, and carrying things above the heads of the other shoppers as they struggle towards the payment area.
It’s hot, sticky, very noisy and rather smelly in here and you struggle to find the way out… but you’re somehow carried along, pushed this way and that by the jostling crowds, until you suddenly find yourself at the top of an escalator going downwards and you gratefully step onto it, steadying yourself on the moving handrail as you go.
You step off the escalator when it gets to the bottom and are delighted to notice that it is a lot quieter down here and though it is still busy, there’s hardly any shoving or shouting, just a kind of gentle meandering melee of people seeming to wander rather aimlessly amongst the display counters. You wander aimlessly along with them not particularly caring where you’re going, just pleased to be away from the mayhem of the floor above.
After a while you find yourself in front of another downwards escalator that for some reason you don’t understand seems somehow inviting, and as you step onto it a sense of wellbeing seems to thread its way gently into you. When you step off at the bottom, you see that you are in the bedding department and in the same moment that you realise there’s not another single individual anywhere to be seen, you sense a kind of aura of quiet calmness, a sense that everything is just as it should be. No matter what is happening anywhere else in the world, this place is perfect, this place is a haven of quietness.
You glance around you and notice the hugest and most luxurious bed you have ever seen in your entire life, and you just can’t resist flopping down onto it. It’s so comfortable that you feel almost as if you’re floating on air and the pillow beneath your head is the softest you have ever experienced and you soon find yourself drifting off into a deep and relaxing sleep, and while you sleep, you have a dream… you dream you are in a busy department store and you quickly realise there must be a sale on because there are hundreds of people, all hustling and bustling…
In both those methods, if you notice your mind drifting, just go back to somewhere near where you were before you drifted – though at some point that drifting off will be to sleep!
Written by Terence Watts
Terence Watts is a psychotherapist, Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine, author and founder of The BWRT Institute that provides pioneering therapy that can help you tackle stress, anxiety, phobias, addictions and many of life’s challenges fast and effectively.
His latest book BWRT@: Reboot your life with BrainWorking Recursive Therapy is available on Amazon.
To find a BWRT therapist visit www.bwrt-professionals.com
