This is part two of a series on how to sleep better. In my last post, I discussed how many people who complain of poor sleep are, in fact, already better sleepers than they think. I discussed how this was important to understand for two reasons: 1) because insomnia is often a self-perpetuating anxiety issue (we don’t sleep well and then start to stress about not sleeping well, which leads to not sleeping well, which leads to more stress about not sleeping well, and so on), and 2) because research indicates that just thinking you are a poor sleeper can in and of itself lead to feeling more tired and less focused during the day. I also promised that I would soon start giving some tips on how to actually sleep better. And I will. In a coming series of blog posts. But first, I really need to hit this point about anxiety a little bit more. Because, until you learn to stop stressing about your poor sleep, it’s going to be much harder to overcome your poor sleep.
To this end, once I’ve reviewed a patient’s sleep patterns to see if they are in fact really having as much trouble sleeping as they think they are, the very next thing I do is teach my insomniac patients two rules. I call the first one the “Golden Rule” of sleep. And I call the second the “Joe Dimaggio Rule.” Let me teach them both to you now.
Dr. Fischer’s golden rule of sleep can be concisely summarized as follows:
You cannot force yourself to fall asleep; nor can you stop yourself from falling asleep when your body is ready to.
The golden rule contains two crucial concepts, and you must understand both fully.
The first concept is that you cannot force yourself to fall asleep. Many people spend hours in bed, tossing and turning, beating themselves up mentally over their difficulties falling asleep at night. This accomplishes nothing, other than reinforcing sleep anxiety. The reality is that you can never force yourself to sleep – if you are wide awake, trying to fight it is going to fail, every time.
To really hammer home this point, imagine that somebody put a gun to your head right now and told you they would kill you if you don’t fall asleep in the next five minutes. Your life literally depends on your falling asleep. Despite this, I can guarantee you that you will fail at the task and not be able to fall asleep.
The second concept is perhaps more important: your body WILL fall asleep when it’s ready to, and there’s literally nothing you can do to stop it. Sleep is an absolute biological necessity, and everybody sleeps at least a little bit. Some people sleep well and feel refreshed by their sleep, and others sleep poorly and wake up feeling exhausted, but outside of an exceedingly rare disease called Fatal Familial Insomnia, a human who never sleeps does not exist. You WILL fall asleep at some point, and you wouldn’t even be able to stop yourself if you tried.
Don’t believe me? You’ve doubtless heard of somebody who fell asleep while driving and got into an accident as a result. Or of somebody who overslept their alarm clock and missed an important meeting or job interview as a result. Did these people want to fall/stay asleep at those moments? Of course not. But when your body is tired enough, it will sleep and you won’t be able to do a damned thing to stop it.
So beat this rule into your head, and once you’ve done so, remind yourself of it every time you are having trouble sleeping.
The corollary to the “Golden Rule” of sleep is another rule I give my patients, which I call the “Joe Dimaggio” rule of sleep.
When my kids were younger, I used to help coach their little league teams. You needn’t be a baseball fan to follow what I’m about to say. Just know that hitting a baseball is considered one of the hardest things to do in sports. Even the greatest hitters of all time – Hall of Famers like Willie Mays, Jackie Robinson, Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, and Joe Dimaggio – made out many more times than they got a hit during their careers. Joe Dimaggio for example had a lifetime batting average of .325, meaning that on average for every 1,000 times he came up to bat, he had 325 hits, and 675 outs.
What does any of this have to do with becoming a better sleeper?
I used to coach the kids on my son’s team to focus not on whether they got a hit, but on whether they took a good swing. “Go up to the plate and take a good swing, and the rest is not up to you,” I’d tell them. This is the mentality of hall of fame baseball players, and it’s the mentality that kids need to learn as they develop in the sport.
It’s also the mentality that you need to start developing about your sleep. You CANNOT guarantee that you will get a good night of sleep on any given night, and in fact it’s a virtual certainty that, at least occasionally, you will have a bad night of sleep.
Accept the above, and focus instead on the process of setting yourself up for the best sleep possible.
By focusing on the process instead of the result, and by not taking it personally when the occasional bad night or bad stretch of sleep comes, you will become much less stressed about your sleep. This is the foundation for treating your insomnia.
I will go on in my next few posts to give some high yield tips for how to sleep better. But before I do so, make sure that you have internalized the key points of these first two posts. Namely, that you are probably not as bad a sleeper as you think you are, and that while you can develop habits that will improve your sleep, you are never in control of whether you fall asleep or not.
