I've written before about my ongoing efforts to hack sleep problems (I'm not positioned to dig up links, but here are all postings tagged "self-healing", and I think they're in there somewhere). The following is an especially useful trick. It's the heavy stuff.
Say you've just sold your house, your car, and packed all your belongings (those remaining after radical downsizing) into a shipper's warehouse. You're homeless, and stuck because your visa has not yet come through. You're not entirely secure in your terribly clever emigration scheme, so icy realizations keep arising that you may have steered yourself into a dead end via a plan that sounded smart on paper for cartoon-character you, but which was never real-world viable. You’ve blown up your life, the weather is freezing, you've already spent a ton of dough, and you can't escape from the mental image of one of the movers - who packed everything for you, because you sprang for the full treatment - rubbing pain ointment on his arm that he found in your medicine cabinet (you're not uptight - you're happy to help a brother human in pain, but, jesusfrikkingchrist).
Ok, great! Now: lights out and happy sleeping! Enjoy your voyage to slumberland, by which I mean endless tossing/turning with a stomach that feels like it's been pumped full of fabric softener. How is sleep even possible?
I need to note that I'm actually writing this from sunny Cadiz, Spain, where I just spent New Year's Eve with friends, having consumed this totally healthful wonder…
… in an outdoor cafe wearing a t-shirt in 70 degree weather. I have my visa (though I'm still unsure I did the right thing; after two years of ceaseless work to get to this point, I'm like the dog who caught the car). So, really, don't cry for me, Argentina. But, to continue....
Here's a trick. A hack. A re-framing. A shift of perspective to cut through industrial-strength sleepnessness:
Delegate! Every problem, issue, pain point, regret, and forgotten crucial step that comes up, simply hand it off to your nighttime assistant.
This assistant can be entirely hypothetical, but that's harder. It helps to personify it to some someone or something, however immaterial or even absurd. The ghost of your dead grandfather. The memory of a childhood pet or teddy bear. Anything that sparks a visceral feeling of connection and benevolence. It wouldn't be the worst idea to buy yourself a toy toucan, or small fern, or to paint a smiling face on a ping pong ball. Then, whenever a breath-catching, mentally captivating, gastrically-provocative mental item arises at night (perhaps because you’ve spent every waking moment vigilant for ducks out of their rows and you can’t turn off the scanner), just hand it off to the toucan or fern or teddy bear or dead grandpa. Over and over. Don't worry; toucan/fern/teddy/grandpa's got this!
You need an absolute commitment to delegate COME WHAT MAY. No exceptions. Any thought, any impulse, gets diverted. Boom, boom, boom.
Here's another route: consider your pillow a suction device for extracting and managing mental distractions. Let the pillow do its work, sucking that stuff right out of your head, trusting it to store everything for you in the morning. However you do it, that stuff is 100% off your plate. Your only job is to let go.
If this worked for me, under these conditions, it will likely work for you under less stress. You just need to earnestly trust your fern or pillow or whatever, buying totally into the conviction that absolutely everything can be shunted to your delegatee.
Don't step back and observe this process. Do it stupidly and without self-awareness. Rote and visceral. Be like an overwhelmed exec dodging calls, letting his trusty secretary handle them, one after another.
If you’re unable to turn off your self awareness, and this move leaves you feeling/seeming/looking desperate, weak, and/or childish, consider this:
Human beings spend their lives in conflict with imaginary people: mentally rearguing old arguments, worrying about faceless attackers and detractors, reliving bygone humiliations, and generally using our imaginations to make our lives a living hell.
That's considered "normal", but using the same faculty in positive ways to help us cope seems, for some bizarre reason, childish and loopy.
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