In his one of his many excellent columns, Oliver Burkeman offers a counter-intuitive strategy for those who have trouble sleeping: tell yourself it’s not a big deal. You’ll fall asleep when you fall asleep.
The point is that telling ourselves we must get to sleep right away—and that grave problems will arise if we don’t—is probably the number one reason we can’t sleep. That doesn’t mean sleep isn’t important, or that sleep problems are never serious, only that the more vehemently we insist we must already be sleeping, the less sleep we will ultimately get.
This strategy acknowledges a subtle but important reality about the problem: we can’t directly control when we fall asleep. We really want that control, however, and we can make the problem much worse by grasping too stridently at it. And whether we do that is something we can control.
With practice, anyway.
We can make use of a similarly counter-intuitive approach for becoming generally calmer people in waking life.
Read More
I'm David, and Raptitude is a blog about getting better at being human -- things we can do to improve our lives today.
I completely agree! The act of driving a car has become secondary to gadgets and cup holders! I still drive a manual transmission but it is getting harder to find them in cars. I miss my old Alfa and VW as you could fix them yourself and you...