Boring mental tasks can help with insomnia

Lots of children, teens, and adults have sleep issues.

Some have trouble falling asleep — lying awake for hours before slumber overtakes them. This is called “sleep-onset insomnia.” Some wake up in the middle of the night — once, twice, or even hourly until 4 or 5 a.m., struggling for 20 minutes or longer to fall back asleep after each awakening, finally drifting into deep sleep, only to be jarred awake by a way-too-soon alarm clock blasting them into their day. This is called “sleep maintenance insomnia.” There are also those who fall asleep and stay asleep just fine, but then wake up a couple of hours before they need to, thereby cutting off much needed rest and restoration. This is called “terminal (or late) insomnia.” A person can also have “mixed insomnia,” which includes a little of all of these sleeping problems.

People sometimes have these kinds of sleep problems for just a short while because of situational stress. This is called “acute insomnia” or “adjustment insomnia” and it resolves after a few months, as one’s body adjusts to the stressful situation. Sleep issues that persist longer than three months are called “chronic insomnia” and can be caused by many different physical and emotional conditions.

Banish Insomnia

No matter what we call a sleep problem, we just want it to go away so that we can feel rested, calm, focused, and functional. There are many interventions that one can employ. Muscle relaxation addresses the fact that tension interferes with the relaxation required for the body to fall asleep. Aerobic exercise, yoga, or progressive relaxation are examples of muscle-relaxation strategies. Sleep hygiene strategies attempt to “set the scene” for sleep by establishing sleep routines and quieting protocols in the hour before going to bed. Evening journaling to release psychological stress helps clear the mind for restful sleep. Using herbs and oils or sedating foods and beverages can also help.

I want to look at the “brain wave” approach to inducing sleep. This approach involves understanding the nature of our brain waves: the beta, alpha, theta, and delta waves.

Beta is a wave associated with left-brain functioning. When our beta brain waves are dominant, we are problem-solving, remembering, analyzing, planning, and otherwise consciously awake and focused on the task before us. We can’t fall asleep when this brain wave state is dominant because it’s way too active. Those who lie awake in bed worrying about falling asleep are, ironically, keeping themselves firmly in their beta brain wave. In addition, worrying promotes the release of adrenaline — wake-up chemistry — into the bloodstream, ensuring that no sleep will be happening anytime soon.

The trick insomniacs need to learn is how to get into the alpha brain wave. This dreamy, right-brain brainwave creates a calm, relaxed, defocused state from which one can drift into the deeper brain wave called theta — the place where sleep happens. Closing one’s eyes usually makes the alpha brainwave dominant. And boring the brain usually maintains and strengthens the alpha brainwave. Therefore, when you want to fall asleep, you should do only one thing: Bore yourself into alpha. This is where the idea of “counting sheep” comes from. This unexciting activity can lull the brain into the less-awake-but-not-yet-sleeping state of alpha from whence the brain can, of its own accord, simply fall into theta, the sleeping state.

Once in theta, this drifting continues downward into delta where sleep is so deep that you won’t necessarily awaken even when your name is called.

Bored to Sleep

Understanding that we can’t go from thinking to sleeping, and that we must first get ourselves into the foggy mist of alpha, we now have a strategy that can be applied at bedtime, at every waking point in the night, and in the too-early-morning hours: We can bore ourselves into alpha. To do this, we have to stay in bed, eyes closed, sounds off, concentrating on a repetitive, mindless, boring exercise. Counting backward from 100 to 1 over and over again would do the trick, as would thinking the word “in” when breathing in and thinking the word “out” when breathing out. Any boring repetitive mental task would work.

The brain will resist the boredom, trying to drag us to something more interesting like recalling, planning, worrying, imagining, and otherwise thinking. When this happens, we have to intentionally drag ourselves back to the boring, repetitive, mindless mental task, dropping ourselves back into alpha.

In short, if we can bore ourselves successfully, our brains will fall into theta, and we’ll find ourselves blissfully asleep.

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 938)