I Need To Sleep

Merry Christmas everybody.  I won't be doing the usual post today, but will do as soon as I get the chance. Here's wishing us all a peaceful festive season and plenty of restful sleep.

Oops, yesterday I missed out on posting. I was busy with many other things, as most people are this time of year. Today hasn't been much different! Days 15 - 16 So how are things progressing? Last time I posted things didn't seem to be progressing much, but I have now realised that whenever I wake in the night and can't immediately get back to sleep it is because there is some insight I am not quite noticing. When I get it, then I get back to sleep. This has happened three times now. So I hope that (a) I start to notice the insights more quickly or (b) I can train my mind to save them for daytime. I guess the thing is that when we wake in the night our minds are in that borderland between sleep and wake where the barriers we erect during the day are down. So things we manage to block out at 4pm come right to the surface at 4 pm. This is the value of McKenna's theatre of the mind exercise where you ask the unconscious mind if it has something to show you so that it

Here are some beliefs about sleep that many people have. "I am a light sleeper, and always have been. It's just how I am." "I can't get to sleep quickly. It's just how I am." "If I wake up in the night, I can never get to sleep again for hours. It's just how I am." "People of my age never sleep through the night." "I can never sleep properly the first night in a hotel room." "Other people might benefit from a sleep program, but it won't help me: I'm different." "I've always been like this so I can't change." And on and on we go. Some of these stories are ones McKenna says that people are eager to tell him. Others are ones I've believed or have heard other people say. We say things about ourselves as if they are facts, and they seem so true. Immutable. The things we say feel true, but they only feel true because we believe them. And the funny thing about minds are that they

One of the rules of I Can Make You Sleep (and of most advice I've read on sleep) is get up at the same time every day. So now it's confession time: I have been slightly cheating on that in that although my alarm has gone off at the same time every day, I haven't always leapt straight out of bed. I haven't stayed longer than the twenty minutes you are allowed to be awake in bed, and it doesn't seem to have stopped me getting to sleep at nights. Today however, I fell asleep after the alarm went off, and woke half an hour later. I'm guessing one morning won't matter too much, but it's a reflection on how I feel in the mornings. Although overall I have more energy than I had before this program, that doesn't extend to mornings! Perhaps that's just because it's so dark, and once we're past the shortest day maybe that will change. I'd love to hibernate right now though! The reason McKenna and others give for getting up at the same time

The carol singing concert our younger daughter was singing in ran on 40 minutes later than expected, and our older daughter was then frantically finishing homework when she was so tired she could hardly speak let alone write, so last night was late again. Still, at least I now know that the story that I don't sleep well if I go to bed late (as mentioned in yesterday's post)  isn't true. As usual I fell asleep listening to the I Can Make You Sleep CD only to wake up as it looped back round to the warning not to drive or operate machinery. This warning always slightly amuses me, since it also says you should listen to it in bed before you fall asleep. I'm not in the habit of driving in my bed! Day/Night 12 of Paul McKenna's  I Can Make You Sleep Program There's not much to say. I sat up with my daughter, supporting her to get through the homework, just listening as she thought about what she had to write. It was well after midnight by the time she finished

This will be short today because I don't have much time. We're off out to see one of my kids sing in a school choir. We've been busy lately, as I expect many people are at this time of year, and the last four nights I've been later to bed than I'd like. I have a theory that if I go to bed late I don't sleep as well. I don't actually know if this is true, because as McKenna points out several times, those of us who have trouble sleeping have a multitude of stories about sleep that generally are not helpful. In a "Questions" section at the end of the book, he lists a question from someone who says they have always been a light sleeper. This person wonders if the system can help them. McKenna says yes, and suggests that even being a light sleeper could be the result of believing you are. It seems reasonable to assume that if I get into bed late, and then tell myself that I will sleep badly it's likely that I will. After all it creates a good

Day/Night 10. Paul McKenna does warn that not everyone (and maybe even not most people) will have a gradual improvement in their quality of sleep. For some it's no change for several nights, a big improvement and then a bad night, followed by more improvement.  I thought, at 4.30 or so this morning, that I was having one of those bad nights. But a even a few minutes later, I could see there was a purpose to my waking. It was the first time for several nights that it took me a long time to get back to sleep. My mind was too busy to sleep, the relaxation routines wouldn't work. So I tried the exercise I described in Day 5, the "Theatre of the Mind," where you invite your unconscious mind to share whatever it needs to for its tension to release. McKenna says you may or many not understand its message and that's okay, the tension will still release anyway. That hasn't quite been my experience. Both the first time and last night, it was only after I did get so

How is your internal voice? By that I mean how to you talk to yourself throughout the day? When you are running late for work - or, if you are never late for work, when you drop your toast butter side down onto the cat's back - how do you speak to yourself? Do you say things like, "Stupid idiot?" Or maybe, "I should have been more careful, what a fool?" Or do you silently whine, "Why me? Why dot these things always happen to me? Buses always drive off just as I'm getting to them. It's not fair." Or does your inner voice calmly say something along the line of, "You hate being late, and you wish you'd got up a few minute earlier and not been in such a rush. And because you are normally on time the boss will understand, so there's no need to worry." Or maybe, on different days your inner voice may be any one of these three. On Day 3 of this blog, I wrote about how Paul McKenna says to notice the tone of voice with which y

It's a week now since I started this blog. That first day I'd had about 3 hours sleep and felt exhausted. I could barely imagine then that I would ever sleep through the night again, or even have the energy to do everyday things. This is something that fascinates me in a way. Why are we so forgetful? Why when we feel tired or scared or things seem to be going wrong do we forget that we've felt like this before and it turned out to be nothing to worry about? When I feel connected to life I can see that what seem to be problems are just in fact interpretations, or more accurately misinterpretations. In her book  Loving What Is , Byron Katie writes about a person seeing a rope in the desert and thinking it is a snake. Then the person realises it's a rope. Katie says that after this the person can never again see it as a snake again. I'm not so sure. I know that I have had the experience of seeing that something I am afraid of isn't real, only to find myself lat

Paul McKenna says that one reason many people have difficulty getting to sleep is because when they get into bed at the end of the day, it is their first time to stop and think about their lives. To change that, he recommends an  exercise he calls: "Value Yourself."   On other posts I've mentioned that I read his book I Can Make You Sleep a year or two ago but for a variety of reasons I didn't do all the exercises in it and this was one of those I missed out.  It is an exercise designed to create time in the day to think about your life. I didn't do it for a number of reasons, a main one being because I thought that I already did this since I use two meditative processes, The Work of Byron Katie and The Sedona Method.   But, as I've noticed a few times rereading this book, I didn't read through the exercise properly the first time around. What I didn't notice is that it is about recognising what you want in life, and allowing yourself to go afte

This will be a short post because I have been busy with other writing today and if I want to make sure I switch the computer off at least an hour before bed time, as is recommended not just by McKenna, but every sleep expert I've read. Day/Night 6 Anyway, there's not a huge lot to say today, and yet little changes are perhaps more important than big ones. Just as McKenna suggests people make only small changes to their daily routine to incorporate more exercise in a sustainable way, I think that small changes in sleep behaviour are probably going to be more lasting. What I'm noticing is that I fall asleep at night more easily now. I have rarely had a huge problem with this, my issue was more waking up in the night and not getting back to sleep. But nevertheless, I am well used to listening to my husband snore within minutes of switching out the light while I lie awake for twenty or thirty minutes. Now my problem is that I fall asleep long before I've finished liste

I am now on Day 5 of following Paul McKenna's I Can Make You Sleep program. Last night's new exercise was on changing your story. I've written a little about this on Day 3's post, but I'll add some more now. The idea of changing your story is not a new one to me. I have been using The Work of Byron Katie for about eight years and the Sedona Method for 3 or so, and nobody could do either of these techniques for long without realising that most of what we believe has little basis in fact. We react, not to what is actually happening, but to our story about what is happening. And this story is one we have built up over years - since childhood in fact. So a child who believes she is not good at getting to sleep (and that adults disapprove of her because of this) is likely to try to force change and to punish herself for not sleeping, and to go on doing this right into adulthood. The saddest thing about this is that all it takes for beliefs to form is a misundersta

This is Day 4 of my experience of following the instructions in Paul McKenna's book  I Can Make You Sleep, which I hope will soon cure me of insomnia for good. If you'd like to read some more you can scroll down to the bottom of this blog to follow my progress so far. In each post I have also included some information about the program or about sleep issues. Day/Night 4 I can't actually remember much about last night after I switched out the light. I remember doing a relaxation exercise from  I Can Make You Sleep , where you focus on each part of the body in turn and allow it to relax. I don't remember getting to the end of the exercise, nor do I remember if I listened to the CD. From where my iPod was lying beside the bed in the morning, I probably listened to it at some time, either then or in the night. I did wake twice in the night. The first time was at 1.30 am, when the noisy neighbourhood dog barked. The second time was around 3 when my husband did somethi

As well as visualisation exercises, McKenna gives exercises that could be probably be described as aural. I have long been aware of the importance of the inner voice - the collection of thoughts that pass through our minds and form beliefs. And since I already questioned beliefs using the process known as The Work of Byron Katie, this was one of the exercises that I didn't think I needed to do the first time I read McKenna's book.  By Officer [CC-BY-SA-3.0  via Wikimedia Commons This time though, I am leaving nothing out. Some day soon I will sleep as well as the baby in this photo! Your Inner Voice Has a Tone! McKenna says that the tone of voice in which we speak to ourselves (our internal chatter) is just as important as what we say, so his first exercise to deal with internal chatter is to notice the tone with which your inner voice rambles on. Many people apparently lie awake silently telling themselves off, which doesn't help them get to sleep. (Yes, I have pr

Before I tell you how last night went I'll explain a little more about Paul McKenna's advice. His book I Can Make You Sleep covers pretty much all angles, including what to eat and how much exercise to do. A Healthy Diet for Sleep  Eggs contain tryptophan  McKenna is pretty relaxed about diet, and says that although it's important to get enough tryptophan if you eat a healthy diet you more than likely are getting enough. My diet is healthy so I am probably getting enough. He also says not to eat within 3 hours of going to bed. This advice is fairly standard in articles about sleep and I generally don't eat in the evenings anyway, so I can tick that box too. If anything, I have occasionally eaten too early and felt hungry in the night. Occasionally I have a banana or a bowl of yogurt towards bedtime if I feel hungry.  McKenna does say you should eat enough that your body has enough energy to get through to morning, but, since I am following all his rules,  from

I have insomnia. It's not constant, but it has been a night visitor on and off most of my life. Right now it's on again and this time it's affecting my health so I would like it gone for good. Two evenings ago I dug out my copy of Paul McKenna's book, I Can Make You Sleep. I tried it to follow his suggestions before, a year ago or maybe more, but it didn't work.  Or at least it didn't seem to, but at the moment I am so exhausted it seems worth another go. Rereading the book I've noticed several mistakes I made. McKenna says that most people are cured of insomnia by following his method. But some are not, so there's no guarantee. But, reading on, I discover that it turns out almost everyone who didn't get vastly improved sleep didn't follow his instructions to the letter. They missed out an exercise, or tried it a couple of times and then gave up. Just moments ago I read an article in which a journalist had tried listening to his hypnosis CD for