Outsmarting insomnia

If you’re like me, periodically you just can’t get to sleep or you’ve fallen asleep for a few hours and have woken up to spend an eternity (at least it seems like) staring at the ceiling. Even worse, sometimes you fall into a cycle, and days go by where we fall into this miserable pattern of not being able to sleep for days (nights) on end. And missing sleep is not like missing a meal or missing your favorite TV show - you are physically affected by sleeplessness. The people around you know this better than anyone; they have to put up with all sorts of unattractive behavior - from grouchiness, to sadness, to being totally unproductive. Yes, the day that follows sleeplessness is just bad for everyone concerned.

So, being afflicted with this down right crummy malady, I’ve come up with a pretty good technique for keeping the insomnia gremlins at bay. This technique will work a lot of the time, so take a deep breath and take a combined sigh of relief… here it goes.

Okay, you're lying there in bed, it’s 2:00 am, and nothing is stirring, not even a mouse - because every other living being is fast asleep! This is what I want you to do:

1. Call a late night (or early morning) meeting. This does not mean waking up your deeply sleeping spouse or the annoying neighbor who is nightly banging together his 20 (of course metal) garbage cans…. No, this meeting is for you and all of your worries to attend.

2. You’ll need to work with me here, and really visualize each and every one of your worries, all sitting together at your big conference table. What I’d like you to do is give a visual form to each of the top five or ten worries that are bouncing around in your head at night; give them an individual physical form. For me, this would include my front yard lawn (dead as a door nail); my last phone call with my ex-wife; my fulfillment storage house that burned down several weeks ago; my engineer working on the new Fireflies product, and the broken odometer on my car. This is just a sampling of the issues and worries that were bouncing around in my own head last night like an out-of-control pinball machine. Your worries and problems will of course be specific to your own ensemble of annoyances. The point is, you need to take each and every one of these problems and put them at your conference table, and give them a physical body or shape so you can tell who is what. In my situation, I have envisioned a 6-foot dead grass man, a bright fluorescent-pink cellular phone (with legs and arms as appendages), a large charred piece of wood with big eyes, my engineer (he pretty much looks like he normally does), and my car’s odometer (forever stuck at 19,164 miles) also with arms and legs.

3. Address your meeting as if you were a captain of industry. You are the CEO and the characters here are being called to the mat for their behavior. As you arrive at the meeting, assume your seat at the head of the table. You are the boss - you know it, and they know it. What I’d like you to do now is to visualize your cast of ill-begotten characters showing signs of nervousness having to attend this meeting. You may want to give a few of them a nervous habit: a twitch or something else (like the fluorescent pink cell phone pressing her own buttons when agitated).

4. Now, take the time to look at each one of these manifested worries and problems and (in your CEO boss voice) tell them that you will not tolerate their invading your slumber time. You tell them, in no uncertain terms, that they are not long for this planet and that one by one, all are going to be given their respective walking papers - the big pink slip. Tell them that you have neither time nor patience for such worries in your life, and they need to go. But until the time comes when each can be dealt with, they will agree to only surface during normal daylight business hours. Late nights and weekends will no longer be tolerated! Now, I’d like you to see your problem characters all nod their heads (or if they don’t have heads - you can have them just bend at the waist, if that works). Every ‘worry’ at the table agrees and commits to the new terms: the CEO no longer has any worries at night. They all agree. You, in turn, agree (you always have to give a little to get a little) that you will let them run a little rampant after your first cup of coffee… Now get up out of your virtual chair and storm out of the office. You can be as dramatic as you want; this is your visualization.

Well, that’s pretty much it. It’s now 2:30 a.m. and you’ve addressed your problems and they now know the rules. Close your eyes, smile, and go to sleep.

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