Insomnia Self Help Treatments Part 1 -- Laying the Foundation

Before you begin your insomnia self help program, you should understand these basic ideas that form the foundation of my most effective techniques.

Idea One: Establish the right primary goal in your mind.

So what is your first goal? What is it that you want to accomplish with a self help program? I'm guessing - and this is just a really wild guess - that your first goal is to sleep better and get over your chronic insomnia.

Am I right? Wow, I must be psychic!

OK, it's pretty obvious that your first goal in combing through this site (and putting up with my lame comments) is to get over your insomnia.

Unfortunately that's the wrong answer. That cannot be first goal. I'm so sorry, you'll have to start again at Square One.

Why? Because that's not how the game works. Remember the Golden Rule about getting over insomnia. If you want to sleep better you must accept the idea that you must NOT pressure yourself to sleep.

Step One in any insomnia self help program is to take the pressure off. You need to assure yourself constantly that even though you will soon be cured of chronic wakefulness, it's OK to have it a little while longer while you adjust your thinking and behavior patterns. There is no urgency to sleep. You will do fine with less than your desired amount of sleep for as long as it takes to change.

So your first goal in any insomnia self help program is to change your habits of thinking and behavior in regard to sleep. Then you can work on all the other things that are keeping you awake at night.

Idea Two: Focus on Sleep Time

The second most important idea in any insomnia self help program is to focus only on sleep time - that part of the 24-hour cycle where you would normally be asleep if you didn't have insomnia. For most of us that is nighttime. For all you night-workers out there, just substitute nighttime for whatever portion of the day you lie in bed trying to sleep.

Why is this a main key to an insomnia cure? Because your ultimate goal (not your first goal, as mentioned above) is to sleep better. You don't need to solve all your life problems in order to do that. Although it's always a good thing to make positive changes in your life, it's impractical to try to do them all at once.

You will just become overwhelmed and discouraged if, say, you believed you had to get rid of all your lifelong anxiety and worrying... or all your physical insomnia causes... or all the various problems in your life... just to sleep better.

You don't have to achieve a high level of mental or physical health to overcome sleeplessness. And you don't need to solve all your life problems.

I certainly didn't. I still had all my old problems and disorders... but I managed to prevent them from interfering with a good night's sleep. And that's what you need to learn.

You may find that the techniques you learn in this insomnia self help program are very useful for solving other daytime problems plaguing you. If so, that's a nice benefit. But that doesn't have to be your main objective. One step at a time is a common-sense and effective approach.

So in my "stress anxiety insomnia" tutorial, I give you techniques to "move" your stress and anxiety to the daytime hours - when you can actually do something about them. This is basically a shuffling of priorities in your daily schedule. And that leads me to the third foundational idea of an effective insomnia self help program.

Idea Three: Sleep is most likely to come to you when you feel, on all levels, that your day is "done." ...and on the flip side, insomnia is most likely to result when you feel that you did not "finish" your day.

When you lie down at bedtime, and you feel within yourself that you have done all you could to accomplish what you needed to do... and whatever you didn't do can very nicely wait until you get up again tomorrow morning (or whenever you do get up)... you are most likely to sleep soundly.

Although it may seem like I'm referring to specific accomplishments you did or didn't do during the day, that's not the case.

It doesn't really matter what you actually "did" with your day. All that matters is how you feel about it.

And whether you literally "finished" something isn't relevant at all. It's simply the feeling inside you - usually not even conscious - that you have done all you could with the hours available to you... and now it's time to let go of your day and rest.

Any insomnia self help program that ignores this basic human need to feel that the day is "done" before going to sleep just doesn't get to the root causes of insomnia.

My tutorial will offer tips for giving yourself permission to have this feeling... because that's what it usually boils down to. We are often plagued with the feeling of unfinished business at night when we want to sleep... because we don't know how to let go of the day. This will be the most significant habit to change.

Of course, I'm not a sleep expert nor a psychologist. I am simply a person with a long case of chronic insomnia who managed to work her way out of it. And this foundation is the foundation I used to cure myself.

I encourage you to try it out to see how it works for you!

To go back to the insomnia self help tutorial homepage for the next step and specific tips you can use, click here.

To start Day 1 of the Insomnia Self Help Tutorial, click here.

Return to Insomnia-Free homepage.