Want to Fall Asleep Faster? Try Gaslighting Your Brain

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.

                                                                                     Getty Images. Oprah Daily.

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/

Why Your Brain “Dreams” Even When You’re Awake

From neurosciencenews.com 

Summary: We usually think of wakefulness and sleep as two separate worlds, but new research proves the boundary is an illusion. Using an experimental setup inspired by Thomas Edison, researchers analysed 92 participants drifting into sleep and found that “dreaming” isn’t exclusive to the night.

By identifying four distinct mental states, including a “bizarre” dream state, the team discovered that these experiences occur across all levels of alertness. Whether you’re fully awake or in light sleep, your brain can flip into a “dream narrative” at any moment, suggesting that the content of our thoughts is independent of our state of vigilance.

Key Facts

• The Edison Technique: Following the legend of Thomas Edison, participants held a bottle that would drop as they drifted off, waking them at the precise threshold of sleep to report their immediate “hypnagogic” thoughts.
• The Four Mental States: An unbiased AI algorithm identified four distinct clusters of thought:
  • C1: Fleeting, isolated recollections.
  • C2: High connection to the external environment (street sounds, room temperature).
  • C3: The “Dream State”, bizarre, vivid, and spontaneous (e.g., “aliens” or “ants on crossword puzzles”).
  • C4: Goal-oriented, voluntary control (planning tomorrow’s schedule).
• The Major Finding: All four states, including the bizarre C3 dream state, occurred while participants were fully awake, in sleep onset, and in light sleep. You can “dream” while awake and “plan” while asleep.
• Neural Fingerprint of Bizarreness: The dream-like C3 state has a specific brain signature: reduced long-range connectivity between the frontal (reasoning) and occipital (visual) regions. This essentially allows the visual brain to “run wild” without the logical brain’s oversight.
• Paradoxical Insomnia: The study offers a breakthrough for insomnia patients who feel they “didn’t sleep a wink” despite clinical data saying they did. Their brains may simply be spending too much time in the “environment-connected” C2 state, making sleep feel like wakefulness.

By convention, wakefulness and sleep are regarded as physiologically distinct states. It is therefore tempting to assume that the images, sensations, and ideas that cross our minds while we are awake are fundamentally different in nature from those we experience while we sleep, and especially while we dream.

“Yet this is far from obvious. Being awake is not synonymous with being attentive, fully aware of one’s surroundings, or able to act and think rationally,” explains Delphine Oudiette, co-leader of the DreamTeam.

“We now know that there is a continuum between wakefulness and sleep, with intermediate states such as mind-wandering or mind-blanking, during which certain regions of the brain may be asleep. What remained to be determined was whether the content of our thoughts also varies independently of our state of vigilance.”

To answer this question, the researchers chose to study sleep onset, the transitional stage between wakefulness and sleep.

“Sleep onset allows us to capture, within a very short time span, fluctuations in our state of vigilance, from wakefulness to sleep, and to observe the mental experiences associated with them,” says Nicolas Decat, a PhD student at the Paris Brain Institute and first author of the study.

“As we drift toward sleep, sensations, visions, and snippets of speech unfold—what are commonly called hypnagogic experiences. Tracing the evolution from ordinary thought to dream-like narrative can help us understand how a dream emerges.”

Nap experts to the rescue

To explore the transition between wakefulness and sleep, the team conducted a study with 92 participants who were accustomed to napping and trained to report the content of their thoughts upon interruption.

The researchers used an experimental setup inspired by Thomas Edison. According to legend, the inventor had a habit of falling asleep in his armchair while holding a heavy object, the fall of which would wake him at the threshold of sleep; he would then make use of the whirlwind of creative ideas that flooded his mind during this critical moment.

After each interruption of their nap—either by dropping a bottle held in the hand or by an alarm—participants were asked to describe their mental experience of the previous ten seconds, then rate it on four dimensions: bizarreness, fluidity, spontaneity, and perceived level of wakefulness. In parallel, their brain activity was continuously recorded with an EEG cap.

The researchers then let the data speak for themselves, applying a clustering algorithm that imposed no preconceived categories.

“This data-driven approach was essential for us, because in research, there is no consensus on what hypnagogic experiences actually are. It was important not to bias this exploration with our own definitions or beliefs,” says Nicolas Decat.

A brain signature of dream-like states

The analysis revealed not the two mental states one might expect—dreaming and waking thought—but four. The first (C1) was characterized by fleeting recollections (“An image of my dad crossed my mind”); the second (C2), by a high level of connection to the surrounding environment (“I was listening to the street sounds”); the third (C3), by its bizarreness (“I saw images of small aliens”); and the last (C4), by a high level of voluntary control (“I was thinking about what I would do tomorrow”).

Each of these four mental states appeared across all three vigilance stages measured: wakefulness, sleep onset, and light sleep.

“This is the major finding of our study. The mental states traditionally associated with dreaming can arise just as well when we are asleep as when we are awake. In other words, the content of our thoughts does not follow the boundaries between waking and sleep!

“One of our participants, while awake, reported seeing ants crawling on her body against a backdrop of crossword puzzles. Conversely, another participant mentally went through his schedule for the next day while he was fully asleep,” adds the researcher.

The team then went further, searching for neurophysiological markers specific to each mental state. By analysing the complexity of the EEG signal, its spectral power, and the functional connectivity between brain regions, the researchers identified distinctive signatures.

They show that there is a specific brain signature for the “bizarre” C3 mental content—that is, the dream-like state. It is characterized by reduced long-range connectivity between the frontal and occipital regions of the brain.

“This signature may well be the correlate of what we feel in such a state: lucid reasoning is overtaken by a whirlwind of vivid sensations characteristic of dreams,” suggests Nicolas Decat.

Mental activity and introspection

If dreaming is not specific to sleep, why do we have the impression that extravagant mental content occurs only in the depths of the night, when we are oblivious to the world around us?

“This preconception probably stems from a memory bias. We mainly remember dreams that come with strong emotions or those to which we attach particular meaning. Yet it is just as common to dream that we are working!” notes Nicolas Decat.

“Conversely, some people report that fanciful daytime thoughts—elusive, like fragments of a dream—sometimes surface during their everyday activities. Because these thoughts are seen as incongruous, they may well be more frequent than we imagine, but we tend to dismiss them.”

Potential applications for sleep disorders

We are generally not very good at judging our own level of vigilance or describing the content of our thoughts. As a result, some people suffering from insomnia regularly complain of spending entire nights without sleeping, even though polysomnographic measurements taken in sleep clinics indicate otherwise.

This is what we call paradoxical insomnia: a mismatch between the patient’s experience and clinical observations based on conventional sleep-stage criteria.

“These criteria are probably inadequate. Our study proposes a new one—mental content— which may be better aligned with what these patients actually experience. Through this lens, some of them may spend an unusually long time in an alert state (C2), hyperconnected to the outside world, or, conversely, very little time in a dream-like state (C3), blurring the line between their waking and sleeping lives,” explains Delphine Oudiette.

“Beyond giving patients’ reports the weight they deserve, this approach paves the way to identifying objective markers of insomnia.”

Key Questions Answered:

Q: If I’m “dreaming” while awake, why don’t I notice it?

A: We often dismiss these flashes of “bizarre” thought as mind-wandering or simple distractions. Because they are fleeting and lack the heavy emotional weight of a 3:00 AM nightmare, we tend to filter them out of our memory.

Q: Can I use this “Edison method” to be more creative?

A: Yes. The transition state between wakefulness and sleep is a “creative sweet spot.” By catching yourself right as you drift off, you can access the C3 bizarre state where the brain makes unusual associations that your logical, waking brain would normally reject.

Q: Does this mean “daydreaming” is actually dreaming?

A: Scientifically, yes. This study suggests that the brain’s internal narrative doesn’t check your “vigilance status.” If the connectivity between your frontal and occipital lobes drops, you are technically in a dream state, regardless of whether your eyes are open or closed.

https://neurosciencenews.com/dream-continuum-wake-sleep-consciousness-30637/

You were asleep but swear you weren’t: what is paradoxical insomnia?

From uk.style.yahoo.com

By Shayla Love

In 2018, Hannah Scott, a sleep researcher at Flinders University, waited for a woman to fall asleep.

This can take time when the subject is connected to equipment measuring brain activity, eye movement, heart rate and muscle activation. But about 30 minutes after the woman closed her eyes, Scott saw the tell-tale signs of sleep from the electroencephalogram, or EEG: a shift to lower-frequency brainwaves.

The woman progressed into deep sleep, and “was there for quite a while”, Scott said. Then, the woman suddenly woke up, saying she had to go to the bathroom. As Scott detached her from the machines, the participant apologized, saying she felt terrible she hadn’t been able to fall asleep yet.

“She was absolutely adamant that she hadn’t slept,” Scott said, who had just watched her sleeping.

When a person is sleeping, but doesn’t know they are, this is called sleep state misperception. If woken up, a person will say they were awake the whole time.

It’s a frequent issue in insomnia, said Matthew Reid, a neuroscientist and sleep researcher at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. An insomniac may say they have barely slept, but when tested in a sleep lab, they might actually be sleeping a normal number of hours per night. This leads to a conundrum: how does someone feel rested when they are sleeping enough – but just not realizing it?

This experience, which afflicts a significant number of insomniacs, has had various names: paradoxical insomnia, subjective insomnia, sleep state misperception and, most recently, subjective-objective sleep discrepancy.

By any name, the phenomenon reveals that we don’t always know when we’re asleep or awake, and that our beliefs about sleep influence how rested we feel. At the same time, researchers are finding that people with paradoxical insomnia may not be entirely wrong; there may be something real that lies between sleeping and wakefulness.

                                                ‘We have just been overlooking this aspect of sleep.’ Illustration: Guardian Design

What is paradoxical insomnia?

Paradoxical insomnia is a subcategory of insomnia. People with it report that they only sleep a few hours a night and don’t feel rested. But sleep studies show they are getting more sleep than that – sometimes even a typical amount.

People with insomnia seem to suffer from straightforward problems: trouble falling asleep, staying asleep and getting enough sleep to feel rested. Their sleep issues make them tired during the day; they have difficulty concentrating, and feel irritable and grumpy.

But total sleep time doesn’t always differ by much between healthy sleepers and people with insomnia. On average, according to one meta-analysis, insomniacs sleep just 23 minutes less per night than healthy sleepers. If time asleep isn’t the whole story, what is?

Of course, some people need more sleep than others. But it turns out some people don’t perceive their sleep accurately. They do not seem to remember that they did sleep. They may sleep a full night, but not feel rested. These studies revealed that insomnia can be a more complex experience than it appears.

In 1959, French doctors first described a patient whose observed sleep time didn’t match up with how many hours she thought she slept. The doctors named the condition fausse insomnie or false insomnia, and believed it was caused by her being overly worried about sleep. Since then, many sleep doctors and researchers have noticed that insomniacs’ sleep complaints don’t always align with the amount of sleep they are observed to get.

Researchers don’t have a unified estimate of exactly how prevalent paradoxical insomnia is because it has multiple names. But it’s far from rare, Reid said. By some accounts, about half of people with insomnia sleep less than six hours a night, while the other half sleep more than six hours, an amount comparable to good sleepers’ sleep time.

Who experiences paradoxical insomnia?

Many people – even good sleepers – may think they’re still awake in the early stages of sleep. But people with paradoxical insomnia are more likely to think they’re awake after the first two hours. They are also more likely to report feeling awake during REM sleep, when almost all good sleepers will report accurately that they were sleeping. In serial awakening studies, people with insomnia who are woken up multiple times throughout the night will report being awake when they had actually been asleep more often than good sleepers.

Thomas Andrillon, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Paris Brain Institute, has a hunch that awareness during sleep is more nuanced than previously believed. In experiments about memory and learning during sleep, he would see someone sleep, confirmed by their brain activity in real time. Afterwards, they would insist they hadn’t slept. Andrillon realized he had experienced this himself, and that plenty of others did, too – such as his students, who would fall asleep in class, but have no idea they had drifted off.

Most people have gone through this, even if they’re not insomniacs. For instance, when I’m trying to sleep before an early morning flight, I usually feel like I haven’t even slept an hour. Yet I can recall a dream about, say, sleeping through my alarm, which tells me otherwise. I’ve sat next to a family member on an overnight flight who peacefully passes out, only to arrive at our destination and complain they didn’t sleep.

“You think you got zero sleep the entire night, and something reminds you that’s objectively not true, like somebody tells you: ‘Oh, you were snoring,’” Reid said.

Why does paradoxical insomnia occur?

Until recently, many researchers thought that people with paradoxical insomnia were incorrectly reporting their own experience. But brain imaging done by Andrillon and his colleagues is suggesting that insomniacs with discrepancies between their sleep and wake times might not be entirely wrong. Instead, they might be noticing a unique altered state of consciousness.

Sleep researchers determine someone is sleeping when they lose awareness of the world around them, and when their brain activity shifts to high-amplitude, low-frequency oscillations. EEG readouts will feature sleep signatures like slow waves and sleep spindles, or specific bursts in activity.

But commonly used observational techniques might miss the nuances of brain activity during the transition into sleep, or the moments between sleep stages, Andrillon said. The technology might not be sensitive enough to capture “wake-like” brain activity that could explain the feeling of being awake while sleeping. Andrillon said that when other researchers have studied deeper areas of the brain, they found signs of arousal, even when people seemed asleep.

“The fact that they look like they’re sleeping is true only at a superficial level,” Andrillon said. “When you dive a bit more in the details of the brain activity, you see signs of wakefulness that you will typically not see during normal or standard sleep.” Experts are now shifting to the term subjective-objective sleep discrepancy, or SOSD, rather than paradoxical insomnia or sleep state misperception.

In a study from March, in a group of more than 800 people with insomnia, 24% had subjective-objective sleep discrepancies. Andrillon and his colleagues found differences in the physiological profile between the two kinds of insomniacs. People with SOSD didn’t wake up very often, but when they did, their waking state was tainted with signatures of sleep, which could influence their judgment about not sleeping well or not having slept, he said. Conversely, the sleep of insomniacs without SOSD had wake-like features, meaning their sleep was of a lesser quality.

Are there solutions for paradoxical insomnia?

CBT-I, or cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia, is a well-researched and effective way to improve sleeping habits. It seems to help people with SOSD, too. In a study from last year, Scott and colleagues found CBT-I had no difference in positive outcomes for people with regular insomnia, compared with those who had SOSD. Other studies have shown that CBT-I can improve issues related to SOSD.

It won’t be useful to become overly worried about whether you’re getting the perfect amount of sleep, Scott said. There is an association between SOSD and anxious or worried thoughts about sleep, so try not to pile on additional worries. “People who have [SOSD] tend to have certain thoughts, very often involving rumination about worries of the day, worries of not sleeping, not being able to sleep,” Andrillon said.

Instead, a helpful tool for paradoxical insomnia could be a strategy called paradoxical intention, which encourages poor sleepers to stop trying so hard to sleep.

Previously, people who could not tell they were asleep were perceived to have flawed judgment. Actually, SOSD is a reminder that we don’t know everything about what it means to be asleep, and to know that we have slept. “We’re going back to it and seeing that it’s actually pretty real,” Andrillon said. “We have just been overlooking this aspect of sleep.”

https://uk.style.yahoo.com/were-asleep-swear-weren-t-174712976.html 

How personality traits shape sleep quality

From las.iastate.edu 

According to research by an Iowa State University psychologist, how well you sleep may depend as much on your personality as it does on your habits.

Zlatan Krizan, professor of psychology, has spent more than a decade studying how personality traits affect both the perception and quality of sleep. His work suggests that people who are more emotionally unstable and less conscientious not only feel like they sleep poorly – they actually do.

“Personality differences explain a lot of why some people are more anxious or depressed than others,” Krizan said. “Those same emotional differences also show up in sleep behaviour.”

A natural link between personality and sleep

Recognising the central role of emotional regulation in both sleep quality and personality traits, Krizan identified a natural connection between the two domains.

Krizan’s 2019 study titled, “Personality and Sleep: Neuroticism and Conscientiousness Predict Behaviourally Recorded Sleep Years Later,” published in the European Journal of Personality, showed that individuals high in neuroticism and low in conscientiousness not only perceived poorer sleep but also exhibited fragmented sleep.

The research utilised self-reported sleep diaries and actigraphy – a method that uses wearable devices to track sleep patterns through movement-based monitoring.

This dual method approach allowed researchers to assess whether personality traits such as neuroticism and conscientiousness correlated with actual disruptions in sleep beyond mere self-reports.

“We wanted to see whether personality was just influencing people’s impressions of how they sleep, or if it also affected how they actually sleep,” Krizan said. “And it turns out the connection is very real.”

When sleep feels worse than it is: Paradoxical insomnia

Krizan’s research also explores the idea of “paradoxical insomnia,” or “sleep state misperception,” where people believe they are sleeping far worse than they are.

This misperception, he found, is more common among individuals with high emotional instability, as distressed individuals tend to overestimate the extent of their sleep disruption. This further supports the idea that personality traits can shape sleep behaviour and how that behaviour is interpreted.

“Some people might wake up once or twice and think they’ve been awake all night,” Krizan said. “That disconnect between perception and reality often comes down to how sensitive someone is to emotional or physical changes.”

Genetic and developmental links: Twins

Collaborating with colleagues at the University of Minnesota – particularly in their twin studies – Krizan examined genetic foundations of the sleep-personality link and whether certain personality traits and sleep disturbances share the same genetic roots.

In a 2023 article published in the Journal of Sleep Research, Krizan and his co-authors explain connections among middle-aged twins to identify whether inherited traits could underlie chronic sleep problems.

Beyond genetic influences, Krizan examines how sleep and personality shape each other over time. Poor sleep in childhood may affect emotional development and long-term personality traits – and whether early personality characteristics can set children on a path toward sleep difficulties.

Sleep, law, and public health

In addition to foundational research, Krizan explores the intersection of sleep and law. His work connects how sleep deprivation affects behaviour in high-stakes environments such as police interrogations and crisis situations.

While mentoring graduate and undergraduate students at Iowa State, Krizan also partners with researchers from other institutions. His work utilizes publicly available data from sources like the National Institutes of Health, allowing for representative sample sizes.

“There’s growing recognition that sleep isn’t just a health issue – it’s a psychological one, too,”

Krizan said. “Understanding the personality side of it can help us find better ways to promote
well-being across the lifespan.”

https://news.las.iastate.edu/2025/06/09/how-personality-traits-shape-sleep-quality/

The 1 Counterproductive Trick To Fall Back Asleep If You Wake Up At 3 AM

From uk.news.yahoo.com

By Amy Glover

You may already know that “clock-blocking” and getting out of bed can be surprisingly helpful if you keep waking up in the middle of the night and are unable to go back to sleep.

It’s a situation I find myself in often, so I thought I’d tried every trick going.

But reading about “paradoxical intention” for sleep ― in other words, challenging yourself to stay awake for as long as you can so you remove the pressure to fall asleep, thereby counterintuitively helping yourself kip ― was a new one to me.

Some research seems to suggest it works, but I couldn’t wrap my sleep app-addled mind around the idea.

So, I thought I’d reach out to experts (like Jessica Meers, a psychologist focusing on insomnia; Dr Maya Weir, a clinical psychologist and the founder of therapy business Thriving California; and James Lloyd, a psychotherapist at Ceangail Psychotherapy) about whether the trick seemed legit.

And?

Calling the method a “well-established technique,” Lloyd told HuffPost UK: “When someone tries too hard to sleep, they create pressure and worry that paradoxically keeps them awake. By flipping the script and intentionally staying awake, [paradoxical intention] can help break that anxiety-driven cycle.”

Dr Weir agreed, saying that those suffering from insomnia should try to use a range of tools to help them sleep. “Paradoxical intention is an interesting strategy and is worth trying,” she said.

Meers, meanwhile, wrote that “It can work really well to relieve a little bit of the self-imposed pressure to sleep.”

So, all of the experts thought it was worth a try ― though the pros differed slightly on when they thought it should be applied.

Dr Weir recommended trying the method for any type of insomnia (chronic or one-off), while Meers thought it was better for once-in-a-blue-moon cases.

Lloyd thought it was best used for cases of “psychological insomnia,” or sleeplessness not caused by health conditions like sleep apnoea.

How do I do it?

“It works best in a quiet, low-pressure environment,” Lloyd told HuffPost UK. “The person using the technique should understand that it’s about reducing effort and anxiety, not actually staying awake all night ― instead of trying to force sleep, they can lie there calmly with the mindset of staying awake.”

You can also busy yourself with low-stimulation tasks like reading or laundry.

Dr Weir shared that you can tap into your parasympathetic nervous system to max out the process too.

“I recommend pairing it with an activity that regulates your nervous system (putting you into your parasympathetic nervous system),” she shared. “For example, try rhythmic breathing (inhaling to a count of three and exhaling to a count of six) while telling yourself you don’t need to try to sleep.”

Meers, however, revealed that “If insomnia is happening more than once in a while, cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) is going to be much more effective with longer lasting results.”

If your sleep (or lack thereof) is interrupting your daily life and changing your sleep hygiene along with other lifestyle factors doesn’t work, it’s worth reaching out to a professional.

If you want to try the counterintuitive trick for one night, though, well, you won’t be alone ― I’m definitely giving paradoxical intention a try next time I’m kept up.

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/1-counterproductive-trick-fall-back-155730238.html