“I suffered most in the dark hours after midnight, when my desire for sleep, my raging thirst for it, would drive me into temporary insanity. On the worst nights, my mind would turn into a mad dog that snapped and gnawed itself.”
These words by Pagan Kennedy in the New York Times strikingly describe her struggles with severe insomnia. She vividly describes what is a literal nightmare for those who cannot sleep; the torturous musings of their own minds which breed a cycle of frustration and anxiety.
Like so many sleeplessness sufferers, Kennedy turned to doctors for help who time and again prescribed medications that continually failed her. Her story is similar to many.
In our research into sleeplessness, we have found that the vast majority of suffers site anxiety and a ‘racing mind’ as the reason they cannot sleep.
Not finding relief in medications or attempts to lull herself to sleep with mental games and distractions, Kennedy began to imagine a machine that would ‘do her thinking for her’ so that she could sleep. From her desperation came inspiration and Kennedy took matters into her own hands.
She rigged a device to distract her brain so that she could sleep. Sound crazy? It’s not. It is exactly what she needed. Here’s why:
Racing thoughts are what is called high neural sympathetic activity, which simply means that your brain is ‘on’ in a way that keeps you alert. Some people have an incredibly difficult time turning ‘off’, which is why they lie in bed counting sheep, going over their day, and hating their own minds.
The problem with turning off one’s mind is that the mind is needed to do the work. The conscious effort of trying to turn off, keeps the switch on. Kennedy succeeded in distracting her own brain by listening to audio books that were just the right level of interesting, yet not overly stimulating. Her distracted brain was then able to drift into sleep.
In our research, we use guided tones that have been proven to reduce neural sympathetic activity. The tones are composed in real time from your own breathing. As you follow them, syncing your breath to the length and pace of the tones, they gradually slow and elongate your breath. Following the tones provides enough of a distraction that the brain remains focused long enough for it to unfocus. What makes the real-time guided breathing so effective is the prolonged exhalation. The guided tones bring your brain through the steps of disassociation from the environment in a faster and more actively distracting way than passive listening.
It’s a paradox, but it works.
As Kennedy found, distracting her brain allows it to travel down the blessed path to sleep. This is no less than lifesaving for those who consistently cannot sleep. Though most sufferers do not have insomnia to the degree that Kennedy has, even mild insomnia brings with it a host of short term and potentially long term health effects that we simply do not need.
Knowing what we do about the need to actively distract our brains, we can work to find what distractions will work best for us, whether music, books, or guided breathing and start to see the light and end of the long night’s tunnel.