Problems Sleeping? Open your Eyes
By Andy Alt / Mental Dimensions
Oct 13, 2008 – I wrote the following how-to guide as a comment on the post Sleeping deeply. As usual, I refuse to edit my comments–I already spend more time writing and at the computer than I’d like.
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I was going to write one of my “advice” columns about the following, and I may one day. For now it will languish as a mere comment (hopefully it will help regardless).
If you can’t sleep, open your eyes. I’m being serious now. I’ve noticed that if I close my eyes after I lay down for bed, depending on how tired I am, it will be harder to fall asleep, and yes, may take an hour.
This varies from time to time. For instance, sometimes I’m very tired, but very soon after I lay down, I feel more awake. On nights like those, opening my eyes helps.
What happens is they start closing naturally, without me giving it any thought. Then if I’m still alert enough to notice they’re closed, I open them again. Eventually they fall shut and before I realize it, I’m fast asleep.
The psychological reasoning behind it? As you know, I’m just a crazy theorist, not a well-educated doctor with no first-hand experience with sleeping disorders, but I’ll be bold and pretentious enough to offer my nutty hypothesis.
When I close my eyes and lay down, I’m losing visual stimulation. I stated that sometimes when I feel tired enough to go to sleep, I therefore lay down, but feel more alert shortly afterward. I think it’s because when I lay down and close my eyes, I’ve just lost visual stimulation, so mental energy that’s used for processing visual things is redirected solely to thinking.
Some might have experienced this effect while trying to stay awake while watching television. Some people have the talent to catch themselves falling asleep, get up, turn off the tv, and go to bed. Others wake up hours later with static emanating from their television.
My thoughts typically tend to run fast. When I started self-hypnosis and other relaxation techniques a few years ago (and meditation more recently) I found out very acutely that fast thinking can boosts physical energy, just as when one is physically tired it will decrease their mental energy. It works both ways.
Specifically, it was just a few years ago when I realized that I didn’t have to just lay there and let my thoughts wander when I went to bed, I learned that I could practice “stopping my thoughts,” which is something I had never learned before. It was interesting that after I had practiced this it became easier to stop my thoughts, and I’d be asleep some nights within 5 or ten minutes, whereas previously, most of my life, it had taken me about an hour to fall asleep. By decreasing my mental activity, my body followed due to the loss of the stimulation it was receiving from my mind.
I suppose some this will seem like common sense, or has already been published in papers or somewhere, but here I am laying it out for people anyway.
There are other nights when I wait until I’m absolutely over-tired and exhausted before I go to bed. Those nights it’s not an issue.
I won’t make any claim that these tips will work for everyone or that they’ll work every time.
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