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I know I spend a lot of time educating you all on how physical deficiencies and dysfunctions can lead to sleep issues. And although I think it's really important to focus on those things because there's not a lot of awareness around the fact that gut dysfunction, hormone imbalances, mineral deficiencies, etc. can lead to sleep issues, I also want make sure that I'm not neglecting how important your mind is when it comes to getting a good night's sleep.
Today, I want to talk to you about how a negative sleep mindset may be perpetuating your sleepless nights.
Your Mindset Can Impact Your Sleep
Let's face it: not sleeping sucks.
It impacts your mood, your energy, your ability to concentrate, enjoy time with loved ones… but you know what sucks even more? Obsessing about your lack of sleep.
I know I obsessed about it when I wasn't sleeping well. The first thing I would think to myself when I woke up in the morning was, “Oh geez, I was up again at 3:00 AM. I only got about five hours of sleep and my day is going to be a total disaster.” Then when I saw my husband in the morning, that's the first thing I said to him; I started to complain to him about the fact that I got very little sleep the previous night and it began to occupy so much space in my mind, that the fact that I was thinking about my lack of sleep increased my suffering.
The Negativity Bias
I'm sure if you're not sleeping well, you're experiencing the same thing. How many times a day do you think you complain to either yourself or a friend, a co-worker, or loved one about your lack of sleep? I bet you it is multiple times a day, and that's normal for us to do as humans. We have what we call negativity bias. It’s estimated that we have something like 50,000 spontaneous thoughts a day and 80% of them are negative. And the reason they are is because it stems back to the caveman days when our environment was dangerous and we were constantly on the lookout for something that was going to cause us harm. These days, we are inundated with a lot of stimulus, and most of the things that are coming our way aren't life threatening. So this negativity bias just starts to foster a state of anxiety.
Cortisol: the Alert + Stress Hormone
As I’ve talked about before, anxiety leads to cortisol production, the “alert hormone” or “stress hormone”, and it's that excessive amount of cortisol that leads to most sleep issues. This cortisol build-up can be caused by anxiety, but also physical imbalances, which I talk about in my other blogs (like these: Gut Dysbiosis: The Sleep Disruptor That Lives In Our Gut and 5 Simple Ways to Reduce Your Cortisol to Improve Sleep).
But today, we're focusing on your mindset.
Adopting a Neutral Mindset
Let’s talk about why a negative sleep mindset can be continuing to sabotage your sleep and the different things that you can do to improve your mindset so that you can get back to sleep once and for all.
For example, if you're telling yourself, “I am a bad sleeper, I just don't sleep well.” Well, that might be true. You might not be sleeping well right now, but a way to swap that is to tell yourself instead, “I have slept well in the past and my body knows what to do. Right now, I’m in the process of figuring out why I’m not sleeping and I’m working on it, and I’m confident that I’m going to sleep again.”
Fostering a neutral sleep mindset isn’t going to happen overnight. It’s going to take some practice — and notice I say neutral. I don't want you to think that you're going to have to be positive about your sleep because that's especially hard when you're not sleeping well. What I really want you to focus on is just. being. more. neutral.
3 Ways to Turn Negative Thoughts Neutral
1. Start with Awareness
The first step is to just become aware of all of your negative sleep thoughts and those messages you're telling yourself and others.
What I want you to do for a couple days is to jot down (in your phone notes app or on a piece of paper) every time you think negatively about your sleep. You will be astonished at how often it comes up in conversation and just in your internal dialogue.
2. Analyze
Once you’ve jotted down your thoughts around sleep and have become aware of them, I want you to sit down with these thoughts and start to analyze them.
First ask yourself, “Is this 100% true?” Chances are, it's not.
For example, if you're telling yourself, “I didn't sleep at all last night,” chances are, you probably did sleep, but you probably didn't sleep as much as you would've liked to have slept. So instead of saying, “I didn’t sleep at all last night,” to yourself, I want you to turn that thought into something more neutral. This is where Step 3 comes in…
3. Neutralize
The thought, “I didn’t sleep at all last night,” now becomes, “I did sleep last night, I got a good five hours of sleep, and you know what? That is better than nothing.”
Another thought that typically comes up when you don't get enough sleep is that the lack of sleep will affect your performance the next day. The anticipatory stress of that thought is usually what keeps us up at night; we're awake in bed, we start to stress out about how we are going to feel the next day and how it’s going to impact our daily life.
But the reality is — chances are, when you get bad sleep, you still get through the day, right? You are still able to do your job. You're still able to connect with your family. You're still able to spend time with your spouse. You're still able to live and you get through it. Yes, you probably aren't performing at the level you want to perform we're at, but you are going to survive.
So when you start to fortune-tell and feed yourself all these negative things about how your lack of sleep is going to impact you, I want you to remind yourself the next day of all the nights where you didn't sleep well and you still had a decent day thereafter. It doesn't have to be a good day, just a decent day. You still got through the day.
Now, if you're analyzing your thoughts and you tell yourself, “Well, this thought is true. This is a negative thought. And it is true.” What I want you to do next is ask yourself, “Is this thought helpful? Is thinking this going to help improve my sleep? Or is it just going to keep me in this negative cycle?” If the answer is that the thought is not helpful (and chances are that it isn't), then I want you to swap that thought with something more neutral.
The Importance of Changing Your Mindset
The first reason why it's important to focus on your thoughts if you want to sleep well is because, as we talked about earlier, negative thoughts cause anxiety. And when we're anxious, our body produces cortisol, the alert hormone. And if we have an excessive amount of cortisol throughout the day in our bodies, it's going to be hard to down-regulate that hormone at night to a level that will allow you to sleep. Especially if you jump into bed and you start becoming anxious about the fact that you may not fall asleep.
Or you may wake up, and that action alone is going to cause your body to trigger a cortisol response. We want cortisol to be nice and low at night. What’s more? If you wake up in the middle of the night and you initially start to panic that you're gonna be up for hours again, your body's going to release cortisol, and then it's gonna make a normal wake up turn into a two-hour wake up because guess what, we all wake wake up in the middle of the night.
We wake up about five times throughout the night in between sleep cycles. So next time you wake up in the middle of the night, remind yourself that it is normal to wake up in between sleep cycles and tell yourself that you are actually sleeping. It's this little trick that can work. A trick that’s worked well for me and my clients is when you wake up to just tell yourself “I'm sleeping, I'm sleeping, I'm sleeping.” That is going to convince your subconscious that you're actually sleeping — and chances are, you might be sleeping.
Research shows that insomniacs a lot of times confuse Phase 2 of sleep with being awake because Phase 2 is a light stage of sleep. So try to trick yourself into thinking, or remind yourself, that you're actually sleeping and see if that helps you to fall back to sleep instead of starting to panic. If you start to panic, like I mentioned before, you're going to experience a rush of cortisol.
Our Subconscious Controls Our Sleep
Now, that leads me to you. The second reason why it's really important to have at least a neutral mindset when it comes to your sleep is that our subconscious controls are sleep — and our subconscious is so powerful. Just think about professional athletes. We all know that they like to visualize their performance before they take the field and it can have a positive impact on their success.
The lemon exercise:
Here’s a good exercise to demonstrate how powerful your mindset can be:
Close your eyes and visualize having a lemon in your hands. Peel the lemon and smell the lemon and feel the lemon skin. I bet you, while you're doing this, you're gonna start tasting lemon in your mouth. Your lips will start to pucker. You’ll feel the acidity. And that's because what we visualize we become.
So it's really important to not always focus on the fact that you're a bad sleeper, because what you focus on, you get more of. Instead, focus on the fact that at one time in your life, it's likely that you slept well. And I'm sure that although your sleep is probably not where you want it to be, it’s probably not as bad as you think it is. Again, research shows that insomniacs tend to overestimate how long it takes them to fall asleep and underestimate the amount of sleep that they typically get.
And this, again, goes back to the fact that we have this negativity bias, in conjunction with how we often mistake light sleep for wakefulness. This study shows that insomniacs estimate it takes them 30 minutes longer than it *actually does* for them to fall asleep and that they also estimate they’re awake for an hour longer than they actually are.
Give It Time — You Got This
Changing your mindset around your sleep is going to take time. So don't be discouraged if you don't see a major impact overnight. Make sure that you're focusing on this every single day, because our thoughts are streaming constantly every single day — and as I mentioned before, most of our thoughts are negative. So be patient with yourself. Eventually, you are going to start becoming more neutral, if not positive, about your sleep.
If you've been doing this work for a while, and you're confident that it's not your thoughts that are sabotaging your sleep, that's when you need to definitely start investigating the physical root causes of your sleep issues. That's where my functional lab testing comes in. Be sure to check out my blog all about how functional lab testing can help you identify the root causes of your insomnia.
If you're interested in learning more, as always, you can schedule a complimentary discovery call with me below. I hope these tips translate into better sleep for you.
Read more articles on improving your sleep in my sleep blog. I have a ton of great resources and information for you just about every sleep situation. And if you can’t find what you’re looking for, tap that button above to talk with me.
My mission is to help you get the rest you deserve to be your best.
Sweet Dreams
Kelly Murray is a certified sleep coach and an award-winning pediatric sleep consultant based in Chicago offering sleep coaching services nationwide.