Insomnia: counting the minutes of sleeplessness
It was on one of our NLP Master Practitioner Certification Courses and we were exploring the NLP process of ‘modelling’ – learning to identify how someone does something. And one of the topics we explored was how participants were able to ‘do’ the skill of insomnia.
(In NLP we consider everything we do, whether we do it voluntarily or involuntarily, as a ‘skill’. If someone has an appealing and desirable skill we might model it to be able to teach it to others and/or learn it for ourselves. If someone has a not-so-desirable skill, such as insomnia, we model it to discover how they can change their behaviour and achieve a better result such as, in this case, a sound night’s sleep.)
One of the things which those who were really skilled at insomnia had in common was their ability to accurately calculate the number of minutes of not sleeping they experienced! They would wake up and immediately check the clock to calculate how much sleep they’d had. And how much sleep they were now missing out on. And this clock-checking would usually continue until exhaustion set in and they fell asleep again.
This was a confirmation rather than a surprise for me - I’ve been teaching people stress management skills for some 25 years and I know that not getting a good might’s sleep is a major source of stress in many people’s lives. They can become quite obsessive about it to the point where they dread going to bed, For them bed has become what in NLP we call a negative anchor. Bed becomes associated not with sleep and warmth and cosiness but with anxiety and anger and sleepless tossing and turning and, yes, clock watching.
One of the single most useful ways of overturning this habit is to put clocks out of sight and out of reach (they can still set the alarm to ensure they awake on time, of course). Yet, so fixated do these people become on checking how many minutes of sleeplessness they experience each night that only a few will actually put those clocks out of reach…
… so the old maxim ‘if you always do what you’ve always done you’ll always get what you’ve always got’ applies.