The Beginner’s Mind for a Good Night’s Sleep

Do you think you would sleep better if you approached bedtime without assumptions or preconceptions of how quickly it will take to fall asleep, how much sleep you’ll get or how you’ll feel in the morning? How about if you were to see that night as a new night, in isolation and independent of the day you’ve just had or the previous night’s sleep?

The “beginner’s mind” can help you view bedtime and sleep in a different way, helping to reduce the thoughts, worries and limiting beliefs you might hold about your sleeping ability, break out of unhelpful sleep routines, and allow for the possibility of a better night’s sleep.

Beginner’s mind is used within Mindfulness-Based Therapy and is a concept that comes from Zen Buddhism called Shoshin which means “having an attitude of openness, eagerness, and lack of preconceptions when studying a subject, even when studying at an advanced level, just as a beginner in that subject would.”

When I first trained as a hypnotherapist, I learnt an approach which was solution focused. I had spent time, energy, effort and money in learning and understanding that approach. I had beliefs, expectations and assumptions about it’s effectiveness and how it could be used with my clients. When I first started attending Continuing Professional Development (CPD) workshops, I remember judging everything that was being discussed by my previous knowledge, experience and training. I found myself closing off to certain aspects of what was being taught and on occasions, instantly dismissing it as not being of any value to me or my clients because it did not fit in with my current approach. This mindset limited my ability to learn, make use of and benefit from the techniques which were being taught. It was detrimental to both my personal and professional development.

If instead, I had gone in to those training workshops with a beginner’s mind, I would have been more open to the teachings, learnt a thing or too and gained more from the experience as a whole. Over the years things changed and I became aware of the concept of beginner’s mind and I have been applying it to all of my trainings since and it really turned the tables on my learning.

You can see how consciously adopting the mindset of a beginner would be useful to someone learning a new subject or skill but not so obvious how it can help an insomniac. When someone has been experiencing insomnia for months or even years, their thoughts become preoccupied during the day about the quality of their previous night’s sleep and what that means for them as they go through their day, and whether they will have a repeat performance the following night. Some people start to become fearful of bedtime. Many spend time searching for ways to “cure” their insomnia. Their thoughts at night might echo those of the day in addition to the usual thoughts that run through their head which made dropping off to sleep a problem in the first place. In addition to these thoughts, people who struggle to sleep often hold a number of limiting beliefs about sleep and their ability to do it, such as the need to have 8 hours, that if they do not sleep sufficiently they will not be able to function effectively the next day and that the longer they are in bed the more chance they have at sleeping. Then we have the behaviours that they fall in to as a result of these thoughts and beliefs. They might remain in bed in the morning after they have woken up if they’ve had a poor night sleep, have a nap in the afternoon, or have an alcoholic drink to help drop off to sleep. The insomniac becomes very good at not sleeping, the master of their problem and can get set in their ways. Their thoughts, beliefs and behaviours surrounding sleep become fixed which reinforces and exacerbates the problem. Their approach to getting a good night sleep is no longer working for them and as such they would benefit from learning a new way of doing things. Applying a beginner’s mind to their problem allows the insomniac to recognise where they might have developed unhelpful thinking and behaviour patterns and be open to trying something different.

“If you do what you’ve always done you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.” - Jessie Potter

When a person cultivates a mind that is willing to see everything as if for the first time, they become open to learning new ways of doing things and changing how they think about their sleep problem, how they approach bedtime, how to relax, and they can start to make changes to the quality of their sleep.

We can use hypnotherapy to help with sleeping problems and there is an increasing body of evidence to support this. With hypnotherapy, we look at all aspects of a sleeping problem. During the sessions, we look at how insomnia presents for that person as well as how it affects their life as everyone is different. I teach my clients a wide variety of relaxation techniques to help reduce stress and anxiety. We look at the thoughts, ideas and beliefs that they hold about their sleeping pattern, the quality of sleep they get and how much they think they should be getting. I encourage them to be more aware of their thoughts during the day and teach them ways to address any negative thoughts they might have about sleep and life generally so that they do not continue to run through their mind at night. We cover general sleep hygiene to ensure that they are doing everything that they can to encourage an environment that is conducive to sleep and that supports their body in its natural ability to drift off to sleep. We also look at their sleep routine and help them to change any unhelpful aspects that might be causing a problem. In addition to this, I teach my clients self hypnosis among other techniques so that they can help themselves. A beginner's mind and hypnotherapy can help the insomniac sufferer gain better quality sleep. Of course, there are some medical conditions and medication that can affect sleep so it is important to seek advice from a GP to rule out any physical causes for the insomnia.

In addition to being open to new ways of thinking and behaving when it comes to sleep, the principle of beginner’s mind can also be used to approach each night as an independent event. Bringing a beginner’s mind to each night is something that I have found incredibly useful. Each night is a new night and is different to every other night you’ve had and every night you will have in the future. Every night is different. Just because you couldn’t fall asleep easily last night, doesn’t mean you will struggle to fall asleep tonight.

“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.” - Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

We base everything on our previous experience. When we have had a problem with something we find it incredibly difficult to view it with objectivity. We lose perspective on the situation. Let’s use the example of an ex-smoker who hasn’t smoked for the last 10 years. They go out, have a drink and have a cigarette. Because they’ve had a problem with the habit in the past, they instantly assume they’ve failed, that they are now a smoker again and quite often continue to smoke. Whereas if someone who has never smoked goes out, has a drink and a cigarette, they can see it for what it is – they got drunk and had a cigarette. It’s an isolated incident. That one cigarette does not make them a smoker and they think nothing of it. We all have the occasional bad night's sleep but when we do not have a problem generally with sleep, we can see it as a one off and do not become anxious or worried about it.

A poor night sleep last night does not mean a poor night’s sleep tonight. Nor does it mean you are always going to be stuck with this problem. So treat each night as a single entity, an isolated incident. Avoid already “knowing” how you are going to sleep that night. Don’t let past experiences of bad night’s sleep influence your sleep tonight. Let go of those thoughts about how you couldn’t sleep last night and how tonight might compare to then or what it might mean for your day at work tomorrow. The past is the past and you cannot do anything about it. But you can change your experience of sleep tonight and in the future by viewing each night as a one off experience. That doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll have the perfect night’s sleep straight away, but persevere with this way of seeing things and you’ll start to feel the benefit of it. Approaching each evening with curiosity and an open mind allows for the possibility of a good night’s sleep, makes you more comfortable with not knowing what is going to happen (whether you’ll sleep or not and how that will effect you or not), and helps you to be more objective about your ability to sleep and the quality that you get.

Seeing each night in isolation also allows you to avoid the temptation of making changes to your behaviour when it comes to sleep based upon contingencies from the day or previous night. (Ong, 2017) So for example, you might stay in bed in the morning after you’ve woken up after a poor night’s sleep. I know this is something that I have done many times over the years. It is a common strategy that people often employ when they’ve not slept well thinking that they might just be able to drop off and get some more sleep but it very rarely provides good quality sleep if any at all. Carrying out ineffective sleep related contingencies like this just compounds the problem. (Ong, Ulmer & Manber, 2012)

I’m not saying that applying a beginner’s mind to sleep is easy. I know that it is something that I struggled to do at first but it does get easier and you can really start to see things for what they are. I have also found that thinking in this way stops insomnia becoming a thing that you carry around with you, that you own, that becomes part of your identity. If you see each night separately, you’re just a person who has had lots of isolated incidences of not sleeping well but tonight could be different. So go, be open to the possibilities of sleep tonight.

If you are suffering with sleep problems in Bristol and would like to find out more about how Hypnotherapy can help you, please visit my dedicated Insomnia webpage on my website.

References:
Ong, J.C., Ulmer, C.S., & Manber, R. (2012) Improving Sleep with Mindfulness and Acceptance: A Metacognitive Model of Insomnia. Behav. Res. Ther. Nov; 50(11): 651-660
Ong, J.C. (2017) Mindfulness-based therapy for insomnia

Related Articles: Guided Visualisation Helps Reduce Nightmares
REM Sleep Helps Process Negative Thoughts and Memories

Photo Credit: by el7bara

Guided Visualisation Helps Reduce Nightmares

As children, we all probably experienced what we would call nightmares at some point, perhaps about the boogie man or some other monster that lived under our bed or in the closet.

When I was a child, I often had bad dreams and I found myself in bed at night repeating to myself in my head the mantra “I’m going to have a dream”. Now as a qualified hypnotherapist, I can see that what I was doing was very solution focused and I was in fact performing self-hypnosis! By focusing on what I wanted, rather than what I didn’t want, meant that I didn’t get anxious about going to bed and having bad dreams and so found it easier to get off to sleep, but it also seemed to reduce the frequency of them.

Now these nightmares that we experience as children are different to those experienced by someone who has been through a trauma such as war veterans or rape victims, but either way the same techniques can be used to help change how these bad dreams affect us in our waking life and also reduce the severity and frequency of them.

We make use of the REM (Rapid Eye Movement) stage of sleep, where we commonly have dreams and/or nightmares, to process our day and other unresolved issues. "We take our problems to sleep and we work through them during the night," says Rosalind Cartwright, Professor of Neuroscience at Rush University Medical Center. Our worries and concerns are processed and moved from the primitive part of the brain, where they are an emotional memory, to the intellectual part of the brain where they become a narrative memory. What this means is that the emotion has been stripped from the memory and you have a better control over it – you can think about it when you want to rather than it randomly popping up in your head when you don’t want it to. You can still recall that it wasn’t a pleasant experience but it no longer triggers the same emotional response as it once did and you are able to rationalise what happened. But nightmares interrupt this process. Often, nightmares will wake us up before the emotion or issue is resolved, so it remains in the primitive part of the brain and causes the nightmare to repeat again in the future, which may explain why we have recurring dreams.

When we have a high level of stress hormones in the brain, the hippocampus, which is responsible for memories among other things, cannot perform its job as well as it should and cannot process the memories and unresolved issues effectively, causing nightmares and also flashbacks in those who have suffered a trauma. Because these memories and other issues have not been processed properly, they do not go away and continue to be a source of anxiety and stress. Guided visualisation not only helps to reframe these nightmares and flashbacks but helps to reduce your anxiety and stress levels and gets the brain producing serotonin more effectively boosting your mood. Once your anxiety and stress levels have been reduced, the brain can start to process the memories and the flashbacks and nightmares will disappear.

Dr Shelby Freedman Harris, director of the Behavioral Sleep Medicine Program at Montefiore Medical Center uses guided visualisation with her patients to assist with their debilitating nightmares. Patients use guided visualisation to transform their nightmare into a more positive context and have it become a different dream. By training the mind during the day using guided visualisation, the nightmare becomes less debilitating for them. One of Dr. Harris’ patients had recurring nightmares of being surrounded by sharks and she reframed the nightmare by imagining they were dolphins instead. Another patient who had nightmares of being chased reframed the pursuer into chocolate and ate him. The latter example just shows that what you visualise doesn’t have to be in the realms of reality – be creative; making it as entertaining and funny as you like.

We can often feel out of control when suffering from regular nightmares, but using this technique helps give you control over your nightmares rather than them having control over you.

A similar guided visualisation was used in a study of 168 women who had been the victims of rape and were experiencing recurring nightmares.(1) The study showed that the women who had used guided visualisation, or Imagery-Rehearsal Therapy (IMR), to reframe their nightmares, had fewer nightmares and of less intensity compared to the control group. The study concluded that “Imagery Rehearsal Therapy is a brief, well-tolerated treatment that appears to decrease chronic nightmares, improve sleep quality, and decrease PTSD symptom severity.”

Guided Visualisation has also been successfully used with children with night terrors and war veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan, to help reduce nightmares.

I use guided visualisation with my hypnotherapy clients to reduce their stress and anxiety levels, help them to focus on how they want things to be, and help put them back in control of their thoughts, feelings and behaviours.

REM sleep, the stage of sleep in which we commonly dream, has been found to help ease painful memories and you can read more about this in a previous blog post – REM Sleep Helps Process Negative Thoughts and Memories

Find out more about how hypnotherapy can help Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

Find out more about how hypnotherapy can help with Insomnia

References:
(1) Krakow B, Hollifield M, Johnston L, et al. Imagery rehearsal therapy for chronic nightmares in sexual assault survivors with posttraumatic stress disorder a randomized controlled trial. JAMA. 2001;286(5):537-545.

REM Sleep Helps Process Negative Thoughts and Memories

When we think negatively about events and situations in our lives, these negative thoughts and memories are accumulated and stored by our brain. I like to think of these negative thoughts and memories as being stored in a stress bucket. This stress bucket fills up with our daily negative experiences and thoughts which contribute to stress; these things can be small things like being late for work or not being able to find a parking space, or large things like losing your job or a relationship breakdown. They all add up and our head can get rather crowded by these unwanted thoughts and memories!

If you are a fan of Harry Potter, you might recall the ‘pensieve’ that Dumbledore uses. When he has too many thoughts and memories in his head, he siphons the excess thoughts into the basin using his wand. He says that "it becomes easier to spot patterns and links" in the memories when they're collected in the “pensieve”. In reality, REM sleep, or Rapid Eye Movement, is our equivalent of this “pensieve”.

At night, we enter in to REM sleep; the stage of sleep where we dream. During this stage of sleep, we re-run the events of our day and anything that might be in our stress buckets, either in clear exactly as it happened or metaphorically. These thoughts are then moved from the primitive part of the brain, where they are an emotional memory, to the intellectual part of the brain where they become a narrative memory. What this means is that the emotion has been stripped from the memory and you have a better control over it – you can think about it when you want to rather than it randomly popping up in your head when you don’t want it to. You can still recall that is wasn’t a pleasant experience but it no longer triggers the same emotional response as it once did and you are able to rationalise what happened.

I am sure that you are already familiar with how REM works, even without realising. Let’s say someone says something to you at work that upsets you. You go to bed that night and during your REM sleep your brain enters in to the process of emptying your stress bucket, changing those memories from emotional to narrative. So when you awaken in the morning, you may well have forgotten about what the person said, or you might not but you will definitely have more perspective on the event and be able to see the bigger picture, like with the “pensieve”.

Recently, BBC News Health reported that dreaming ‘eases painful memories’. Using MRI scans, Scientists were able to shed more light on how the brain deals with the memory of traumatic events and other negative, unpleasant experiences. The research carried out at The University of California showed that after a period of REM sleep, there was less activity in the areas of the brain linked to emotion (the amygdala) but instead, the part of the brain linked to rational thought (the prefrontal cortex) was more active.

In addition to emptying our stress bucket, during REM sleep there is a decrease in the neurotransmitter norepinephrine, a chemical transmitted by the brain associated with stress.

So as you can see, REM sleep is pivotal at helping to keep our stress levels down and emptying out those thoughts and memories which are no longer useful for us anymore. It is also of great advantage to those suffering with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

When our stress buckets are full to capacity or even overflowing, it makes sense that our brain would want to partake in more REM sleep to empty it. Unfortunately, this is not possible as the REM stage of sleep is restricted to approximately 20% of our sleeping patterns. So if our stress bucket is full, we never completely empty our buckets during our sleep and wake up still feeling stressed and affected by those unprocessed memories.

But there is good news! Hypnotherapy mimics REM sleep, helping to trigger a reduction in stress hormones and allowing your brain to process those painful memories and empty that stress bucket. Another great advantage of the hypnosis-induced REM state is that it doesn’t eat in to the 20% REM allowance of your sleep pattern – so you can go for a hypnotherapy session, listen to a hypnosis CD before you go to bed then still have your full 20% allowance of REM sleep, helping to process all those negative memories and thoughts and empty your stress bucket quickly and effectively.

Read the BBC News Health article Dreaming ‘eases painful memories’
Read The University of California Berkeley article Dream sleep takes sting out of painful memories

Read more about what Hypnotherapy is and what to expect from a hypnotherapy session

Read more on how hypnotherapy can help Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)