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Insomnia Cure with 80%+ Success Rate for Me
Old 08-30-2011, 02:10 AM   #1
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Insomnia Cure with 80%+ Success Rate for Me

When I try to sleep too much thinking leads to insomnia. Also prevents falling back to sleep in the morning. Been like that most of my life. Some comedian on a podcast talking about life on the road mentioned what works for him. Started using it 3 months and it works for me.

The technique is simple. When a persistent thought, that is one that lasts for more than a few seconds, appears I convert from thinking about it in words to using visual images. Soon the though fades away. I have no idea how I do the conversion, but it was easy the first time I tried it and most times since then.
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Old 08-30-2011, 03:05 AM   #2
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How did you first think to replace thoughts to images?

Opps! I see now
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Old 08-30-2011, 10:22 AM   #3
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Pretty amazing. So it's been working for three months? How many more hours of sleep a night do you get, on average, with this technique?
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Old 08-30-2011, 09:56 PM   #4
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Pretty amazing. So it's been working for three months? How many more hours of sleep a night do you get, on average, with this technique?
Can't say because I got rid of a bedside clock when I RE. Feels longer because I have fewer fuzzy-headed days or desperate urges to nap in the afternoon. I do know that it is now routine to be able to go back to sleep after waking in the morning.
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Old 08-31-2011, 09:19 AM   #5
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I'll try that. What I do, if I'm thinking too much, is concentrate on how comfortable the bed is, or, for example how my left elbow feels. Also deep breathing, and muscle relaxation helps.

For the first half of this year, I was sleeping great. I'd fall asleep right away, and not wake up until morning, feeling refreshed.

Then a month or two ago I started getting into a pattern of waking up around 4 AM, and struggling to get back to sleep. The full pattern was: feel drowsy around 8 PM, barely staying awake while watching TV, go to bed at 9:30, wake up once or twice in the night, and then waken at 4:30.

I attacked it by eliminating all naps, and having plenty of light on until bed time. If I feel drowsy in the evening, I get up and walk around. I very quickly got back to the desired pattern.

Check out these:

Sleep Disorders - Circadian Rhythms and Light Therapy

Amazon.com: The Insomnia Answer: A Personalized Program for Identifying and Overcoming the Three Types ofInsomnia (9780399532979): Paul Glovinsky, Art Spielman: Books
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Old 08-31-2011, 09:30 AM   #6
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That's interesting, because I have a somewhat similar experience.
When I have trouble getting to sleep (which isn't very often), my foolproof solution is to think about something physically complex. It might be a new piece of equipment I want to build for one of my hobbies, or maybe a modification to something around the house, or even just a theoretical machine that might be built.

Trying to come up with an optimal design for whatever it is (thinking visually) works every time. It takes no more than a couple of minutes of this and the next thing I know, it's morning.
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Old 08-31-2011, 11:27 AM   #7
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I'm currently trying the Spielman technique (sleep restriction), and it is helping, but I'm still tired all day because I'm currently on a very restricted window (6 hrs.). But I'm afraid to bump up the size because last time I did I started getting insomnia again.

If this thought conversion technique helps, it'd be an effective side-trick to use with sleep restriction.

I have been waking up early too from time to time in my restricted window - even when I was exhausted all day!
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Old 08-31-2011, 01:53 PM   #8
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Cutting back on caffeine, especially caffeine after noon, seems to work pretty well for me. But sometimes that diet Coke or coffee is worth a little insomnia, and caffeine always seems to creep back into my routine.
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Old 08-31-2011, 02:13 PM   #9
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I'll try that disengaging-the-left-brain technique. Last night I tried something more traditional: a neighborhood Jehovah's Witness insisted a few days ago on lending me a book that supposedly proves the existence of God, and I started reading that. Not a bad book, but it did put me right to sleep.
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Old 08-31-2011, 08:51 PM   #10
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Originally Posted by TromboneAl View Post
I attacked it by eliminating all naps, and having plenty of light on until bed time. If I feel drowsy in the evening, I get up and walk around. I very quickly got back to the desired pattern.

Check out these:

Sleep Disorders - Circadian Rhythms and Light Therapy

Amazon.com: The Insomnia Answer: A Personalized Program for Identifying and Overcoming the Three Types ofInsomnia (9780399532979): Paul Glovinsky, Art Spielman: Books
Thanks for posting this. This is my pattern also, after sleeping well most of my life. Mostly I just read classics on my Kindle when I wake up at 3 or 4, and then go back to sleep after 1-11/2 hours, but I would prefer aother solution.

Ha
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Old 09-01-2011, 11:26 AM   #11
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Reading works well for speeding me to tiredness too, but rooting out the root cause is better I think, to avoid building the habit of being awake at 3 in the morning.

Being on a diet for a while, I got in the habit of waking up hungry and getting a snack. My brain adopted this as a habit frighteningly quickly and powerfully.
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Old 09-01-2011, 04:51 PM   #12
 
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When I can't fall asleep I play computer solitare. Sometimes it may take an hour but eventually my eyes start to cross and I go to bed and to sleep. Another trick that I have is to put on a boring news show turn the sound down to where I can just about hear it and I seem to fall asleep quickly.
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Old 09-01-2011, 07:15 PM   #13
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When I can't fall asleep I play computer solitare. Sometimes it may take an hour but eventually my eyes start to cross and I go to bed and to sleep. Another trick that I have is to put on a boring news show turn the sound down to where I can just about hear it and I seem to fall asleep quickly.
That's exactly what I do. The key is boring like you said. I also set the timer on so tv goes off in 45 min. If I forget to use the timer the tv noise will actually wake me up. Anyone turn their tv on in their bedroom after waking up and thinking how loud it is? It seems like I slowly become deaf during the day and my hearing becomes very sensitive in the morning to noise.
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Old 09-02-2011, 08:52 AM   #14
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The technique is simple. When a persistent thought, that is one that lasts for more than a few seconds, appears I convert from thinking about it in words to using visual images.
Can you give an example? Let's say I'm thinking "OMG, I'm going to lose all my money in the stock market, and have to go back to work!" Do I then picture some distraught traders? A chart of the market?
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Old 09-02-2011, 10:16 AM   #15
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Can you give an example? Let's say I'm thinking "OMG, I'm going to lose all my money in the stock market, and have to go back to work!" Do I then picture some distraught traders? A chart of the market?
Guys jumping out windows.
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Old 09-02-2011, 10:21 AM   #16
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Guys jumping out windows.

Yeah, that visual would do it for me and I'd be fast asleep.
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Old 09-02-2011, 02:23 PM   #17
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My sleep aid is this..
http://www.amazon.com/Theta-Meditati...4995531&sr=1-2
Theta Meditation System - It's a CD - I like the CD called Renewal and the 2nd song I think (I don't like the other one because it sounds kind of sad.)

The song I like starts out like something out of 2001: A Space Oddyssey and changes to a music (with flute) that the hobbits might enjoy listening to (or dancing to) and then goes back and forth between the space type of music and light flute music.

This music was supposedly made as an attempt to put the listerner in Theta brain wave. They actually have Delta wave CD's (which we get into when we are having sleepless dreams) specifically made, I think, as a sleep aid, but I don't have them.

I don't know if any of you are meditators (I used to mediate, but I haven't in any formal way for years), but this CD gets you in that trace like meditative state without any effort. This music makes my mind - brain - numb, so to speak, and really really relaxed. If you are having a hard time sleeping because your mind is racing or you keep on thinking about stuff that is preventing you to fall asleep, this CD may do the trick for you. It probably won't work if you took a long nap in the afternoon, though, but I don't know.

This isn't relating to sleep at all, but a few years ago, a friend of mine dragged me to this drumming thing where everyone sat around this room with eyes closed while this woman beat on this hand held drum (I'm sure there is a name for this type of drum, but I cannot even remember what the drum looked like at this point.) and I remember it didn't even take me one minute to get into this trace like meditative zone (and I wasn't even trying to - it's all the affect of this repetitive sound/vibration that caused me to get into this state). (Just so you know, it takes some or a lot - of practice to be able to get to this state on your own without external stimuli.) This CD music does the same thing as the drum beating did (although it takes longer to get to the brain numbing zone), and this zone is very sleep friendly.
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Old 09-02-2011, 04:11 PM   #18
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I'm listening to the sample tracks now. I think you could just record them and put them in a ... into a .... .
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Old 09-04-2011, 10:06 AM   #19
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Can you give an example? Let's say I'm thinking "OMG, I'm going to lose all my money in the stock market, and have to go back to work!" Do I then picture some distraught traders? A chart of the market?
When I can't convert from thinking in words to thinking in pictures the method doesn't work, and I can't give you examples. When it works I fall asleep quickly. Next morning I can't remember what I was thinking about, let alone how I converted it into pictures. So again, no examples. Sorry.
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Old 09-04-2011, 10:19 PM   #20
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How about a hypothetical example?
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