A Mindfulness Based Approach
Let’s look at How to Deal with Insomnia using a mindfulness based approach.
Founded by John Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D. (a molecular biologist out of MIT), Mindfulness is the art of “paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment without judgment.” Kabat-Zinn also refers to mindfulness as “falling awake.” So how is it that if we are “falling awake” and “paying attention” that mindfulness can actually help us sleep? Isn’t counting sheep (the centuries old approach to inducing sleep) a technique designed to distract ourselves, not become more aware? Isn’t Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia designed to change our thoughts, not accept them?
How to Deal with Insomnia: Counting Sheep
Actually, counting sheep is a focused activity for the mind, much like a mantra or following your breath. It aims to distract people from worrying about sleep, but may actually get them to healthily detach from worried thoughts and attach to a more rhythmic one. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia is also designed to help people detach from their unproductive thoughts so, in essence, both may embody the Mindfulness technique of letting go or detaching and not necessarily be just about distraction.
This is the irony: It seems that while Insomniacs are prone to vigilance, they may be often less aware than people who meander calmly through their day, smelling the flowers, so to speak. They can be over focused, especially on the past or the future and less focused on life in the present moment. As Americans, we tend to see the latter as spacing out or wasting time. We worry we’re not getting enough done if we stop to smell the flowers. Now the Mindfulness people are telling us to spend 20 or 30 minutes sitting, doing nothing but following our breath? Come on! Aren’t we going to feel better and be less worried if we accomplish more?
How to Deal with Insomnia: Mindfulness
Not necessarily. Jason Ong, Ph.D. studied a new treatment for Insomnia he calls MBT-I (Mindfulness Based Therapy for Insomnia). He took John Kabat-Zinn’s model of Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (an approach that has increasing use in hospitals, schools and corporations) and tailored it for Insomnia patients. In Ong’s paper “Improving Sleep with Mindfulness and Acceptance: A Metacognitive Model of Insomnia” (Behav Res Ther. 2012 November: 50(11): 651-660), he differentiates metacognition which is “thinking about thinking” from cognition, which is simply thinking or perceiving.
We can have acquired thoughts about sleep (cognition) and then we have how we attach to or relate to these thoughts (metacognition.) Because Mindfulness focuses on acceptance and awareness of thinking without getting caught up in it, it helps people become unhinged from what can be the insomniac’s internal catastrophizing. In other words, if one thinks, “What if I can’t sleep tonight? I’ll be a wreck tomorrow,” one can get sucked in by the thinking and ruin his/her chances of going to sleep. In the Mindfulness world, however, if one notices the inner dialogue of “What if I can’t sleep tonight? I’ll be a wreck tomorrow” as “thinking about sleep” (the metacognitive process) then detaches in order to come back to following the breath, there can be less engulfment or imprisonment by the cognitions themselves. Indeed, Ong’s treatment proved a successful one for Insomnia.
Mindfulness Meditation to Induce Sleep
Here are some comments from Insomniacs who have used Mindfulness meditation to induce sleep:
“Since I started the Mindfulness practice I feel more relaxed. I believe this is why I’m falling asleep more easily.”
“I’ve been meditating daily for two weeks and sleeping better as well…I don’t know why it is working, but it is.”
“Mindfulness makes me less worried. I think it’s because I’m not clinging to worried thoughts anymore. They still come in, but I let them
go. I’m sleeping better too.”
While I highly recommend reading up on and getting trained in Mindfulness Meditation to fully benefit from it, here are some Mindfulness tips in the meantime:
Mindfulness Meditation Tips
1. Choose a present focus. Many choose to follow the breath moving in and out of the body as it is always happening in the present moment.
2. When your mind wanders, notice where it goes and, once aware, without judgment, bring it back to the point of focus (the breath.)
3. Accept your wandering mind. Thoughts, feelings, physical sensations will arise and distract you from your focus. Accept the thoughts,
feelings or sensations, as well as the fact that you’ve been distracted, and then come back to the breath.
4. Have self-compassion. Mindfulness is hard work.
5. Practice 1-4 daily. You are training your mind and even your brain to function more optimally for sleep.
For more on Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction and Mindfulness Based Therapy for Insomnia, see work by John Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D. and Jason Ong, Ph.D., respectively. For therapists, Dr. Ong is coming out with a MBTI treatment manual in August 2016!
Dr. Van Deusen received her PhD in Clinical Psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology in Los Angeles in 1992. She has cultivated deep knowledge of attachment theory and stress and has worked with various populations over her two and a half decade career. Her practice is in Seattle, Washington. Buy her book Stressed in the U.S.: 12 Tools to Tackle Anxiety, Loneliness, Tech-Addiction and More here
East meets West, interesting to equate cognition ,our streams of thinking and perceiving to a kind of ‘thought breath’, that it is different than thoughts about thoughts (meta-cognition) and can be watched the same way breath can be, to assist staying in the moment.
In the East, it is the concept of attachment to what we think that creates unrestful mind and in the West , it is thinking about thinking where we lose the mindfulness practice that keeps us in the present .
Counter-intuitively, both work to counter vigilance and to calm the mind for sleep.
I enjoyed this entry.