Mind Games

[groovedaddy]

My insomnia always begins with me falling asleep. I’ve been reading the same paragraph for the last five minutes — the text is suddenly impossibly dense — and I can feel the book getting heavier and heavier in my hands. Gravity is tugging on my eyelids.

And then, just as my mind turns itself off, I twitch awake. I’m filled with disappointment. I was so close to a night of sweet nothingness, but now I’m back, eyes wide open in the dark. I dread the hours of boredom; I’m already worried about the tiredness of tomorrow.

Why did my brain wake itself up? What interrupted my slumber? To understand this frustrating mental process, let’s play a simple game with only one rule: Don’t think about white bears. You can think about anything else, but you can’t think about that. Ready? Take a deep breath, focus, and banish the animals from your head.

You just lost the game. Everyone does. As Dostoevsky observed in “Winter Notes on Summer Impressions”: “Try to avoid thinking of a white bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute.” In fact, whenever we try not to think about something that something gets trapped in the mind, stuck in the recursive loop of self-consciousness. Our attempt at repression turns into an odd fixation.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/mind-games/?th&emc=th

[tinrobot]

1. Learning to meditate...

... taught me how to turn down the volume on those obsessive thoughts.

I sleep quite well these days. Didn't used to.

[BuddhaGirl]

2. I take L-Theanine

it's derived from green tea...it really helps to quiet my mind so I can go to sleep. The herb lemon balm helps too. I take it in a tincture.

Of course meditation can help too :-)

[mopinko]

3. i heard the author on fresh air, talking about his book

'how we decide'. it sounded extremely interesting. brains are weird.