From oprahdaily.com
Psychologists explain why telling yourself to stay awake can have the opposite effect
If you’ve ever lain in bed desperately willing yourself to sleep (me on most nights!), you’re familiar with a cruel irony: The harder you try to force sleep, the more awake you feel.
When you can’t drift off, panic sets in, and your insomnia feels like a high-stakes problem that needs solving ASAP. After all, sleep supports our metabolism, immunity, and mental well-being, while offering our bodies much-needed time to repair and reset. But the more you try to make it happen, the harder it is to achieve. That’s because sleep is a biological process that “collapses under pressure,” says Shelby Harris, PsyD, a clinical psychologist, sleep specialist, and the author of The Women’s Guide to Overcoming Insomnia.
Fortunately, there may be a simple solution to this type of sleeplessness. It’s called “paradoxical intention,” or pretending you want to stay awake—even when you definitely don’t.
We asked sleep experts about the surprising science behind paradoxical intention, and how you can try it at home.
When Trying to Sleep Backfires
Under normal circumstances, your body builds sleep drive (your natural need for sleep) throughout the day simply by being awake and active, says Colleen Carney, PhD, a professor and director of the Sleep and Depression Laboratory at Toronto Metropolitan University. By the time you get into bed, you should have accumulated enough to drift off easily. But when you lie there willing yourself to conk out (because you’re worried about being well rested for tomorrow’s presentation, or you want to make up for a bad night earlier in the week), that mental effort creates arousal that overrides your sleep drive. Suddenly, you’re wide awake and exhausted.
Over time, this issue can create a cycle of sleeplessness. “The more you try to make sleep happen, the more anxious you get, and the harder it is to attain,” says Aric Prather, PhD, a sleep scientist at the University of California, San Francisco, and the author of The Sleep Prescription. And the more bad nights you have, the more stressed you get about sleeping, which only amplifies your issues.
Many people then try to double down on their sleep efforts: reaching for an eye mask, downloading a white noise app, or going to bed an hour earlier, says Carney. But each of those fixes reinforces the idea that there’s something wrong with you, which only worsens your stress about getting a good night’s rest. “Trying to sleep is like trying to fall in love—it’s not going to work,” she says. “Sleep has to unfold naturally.”
The Simple Magic of Paradoxical Intention
Essentially, paradoxical intention is treating your brain like a petulant child: Ask it to do something and it will do the opposite. In this case, instead of fixating on falling asleep, you lie quietly in bed with your eyes open and try to stay awake—without turning on lights, reaching for your phone, or otherwise engaging your brain. Shifting your mental effort away from sleep in this way can reduce arousal and allow your natural sleep drive to take over, says Carney.
“One of the fears in insomnia is that you’ll lie awake all night long, and paradoxical intention directly faces that fear,” adds Carney. When you’re actively trying to stay awake, you no longer brace for the thing you dread—insomnia—and this reduces the sense of threat around sleep. Threat averted, your brain can relax…and conk out.
This may sound like a TikTok hack, but paradoxical intention is a legitimate technique developed by renowned psychiatrist and neurologist Viktor Frankl to treat anxiety and phobias. It was later adapted for insomnia in the 1970s by psychologist L. Michael Ascher, says Carney, and there is some evidence to support its efficacy.
In professional settings, paradoxical intention isn’t widely used as a stand-alone treatment, Carney says. But it may be included as part of a more comprehensive cognitive-behavioural therapy for insomnia (CBT-I), a structured, evidence-based approach that addresses the thoughts and behaviours that interfere with sleep. “CBT-I is the treatment of choice for chronic insomnia,” Carney says.
Who Can Benefit from This Technique
Paradoxical intention tends to work best for people with sleep-onset insomnia (those who struggle to fall asleep at the start of the night) rather than people who wake in the middle of it, says Carney. It’s especially useful when anxiety about sleeping is part of the problem, adds Prather: not just difficulty sleeping, but stress and worry about that difficulty.
The technique may be less effective for other sleep struggles, says Prather. For example, if you fall into rumination—repetitive, intrusive thoughts that are hard to shut off—lying awake can sometimes give those thoughts more room to spiral. In those cases, strategies that gently redirect your attention, like listening to something calming or reading, may be more helpful. (We’ve got a whole list of ideas you can try.)
If you want to try paradoxical intention, remember that repetition matters. With practice, Carney says, you can potentially learn to trust your body to do what it already knows how to do. As Prather says, sleep is built into our biology—it doesn’t need your help. “If people can just get out of their own way, sleep will happen.”
https://www.oprahdaily.com/life/health/a71119068/paradoxical-intention-for-sleep/
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