I have insomnia. It is persistent, sometimes even chronic, and although not as near as bad as it used to be it can be relied upon to hit a couple of times per week (or more) in high-stress periods. It isn’t chemically induced (I drink mostly decaf) but more of a, “I have to get up in the night anyway and when I try to get back to bed the brain is on *just enough* to make it difficult to get back to sleep” thing.
If you live in a world where outside forces set your schedule (which is most of us), you don’t have the luxury of “sleeping in”. How much sleep you get is directly related to when you go to bed and how successfully you sleep in the window allotted. And I am an 8-hours of sleep to function person.
Over the years I have developed various coping strategies for this, but the most reliable one is what I call The First Ridiculous Thought.
NOTE: I am not a doctor of any kind in any way. This is just what works for me and how I’ve rationalized it. It might work for you.
To set the scene: it’s roughly 2:30am. You need to wake up again at say, 5am. You have clocked maybe 5 hours of sleep thus far, so every minute is precious. And you’re awake – your brain is buzzing through all of the things it wants you to be preoccupied with: how are you going to present this issue to management? How are you going to give feedback to this person? If this schedule falls through, which contingency plan are you most likely to use? Did you, in fact, remember to put the trash bins out? Is *this* the weekend you were going to go dig under the house to find that thing or was that next weekend because wasn’t this weekend that thing… and so on. Thoughts coming fast and loose, spilling over into each other, all demanding attention, and the more you give it, the longer you will be awake.
There are two ways to get to the First Ridiculous Thought. The one I recommend (that works often for me) is you build a story in your head. You can borrow heavily from favorite media (e.g., you are Indiana Jones and now you’re on your next adventure) or build your own. The point is, it has nothing to do with the bulk of racing thoughts and it resides firmly in fantasyland. However, because your brain is logic-ing and fretting away, it will want reasonableness in this fantasyland: how have those snakes been surviving all this time? You see the spider webs but where do the spiders come from? Etc. Let your brain rathole on these things. They aren’t important and they give it something to chew on.
And then you get the First Ridiculous Thought.
You’ll know it when you think it: it is Patently Ridiculous. Maybe it’s that the snakes are now space aliens or maybe it’s because they are somehow special underwater magic snakes that can survive in an oxygen-starved tomb or whatever. And then you remind yourself that underwater creatures use oxygen too for the most part and they filter out oxygen from water so saying underwater snakes can handle entombment is just Ridiculous.
Get ready, you’re about to go back to sleep.
This is because your brain has detached from this requirement of logic and fret and worry and is now goofing on some weird idea that isn’t really quite right and is Patently Ridiculous. It’s because the logic-y part of your brain has gone to sleep, and the less-than-logic-y part is taking over. The land of dreams.
You can of course talk yourself out of this, I have done so, I do not recommend it. It takes longer to get to the Second First Ridiculous Thought.
This works in other places, by the way. In waking times, at work or in a work group environment (school project, committee work) you may find yourself in an intractable kludge of worry and ratholing. You (and your team maybe) are going over the same sixteen questions over The Thing that seem just as problematic as they did the last time you talked about them, and the time before that. This can be because you are bringing up the same strategies and key points, over and over.
Detach from them. You can do these one of two ways: you can do it transparently: making a rule such as “we will tackle Just One, and we will either pursue Just One with the things we’ve said, or we will specifically say “those are not options, start thinking about different options”. ” As soon as someone points out there aren’t, point out there have to be, even if they’re ridiculous. Give yourself, and others, permission to be ridiculous. Embrace the awkward.
Opaque works too: suggest a “brainstorming” session and start seeding it with ridiculous thoughts. I mean, legitimate ones – no, you cannot ship the data on 1,000 USB sticks via elephant over the Alps, but… you could FedEx it. No, no, that’s ridiculous but… there are ways.
Is this 100% foolproof? No. But neither is it 100% foolish. And when you find yourself desperate for sleep at 2:30am, or desperate to unravel a Gordian Knot of a project, it can’t hurt.
Bobbie Conti 