You cannot sleep and it is really affecting your mental health.
The frustration of not being able to fall asleep or stay asleep really gets the mind going into a very negative state.
Of course, how can you think positive when you are exhausted, have a lack of energy and not an ounce of enthusiasm to do anything.
I am always on the lookout for anything that can help with sleep.
And that includes both helping physically and mentally.
One technique that I really like is affirmations.
You know – where you say positive things to yourself even if you don’t believe it.
When I first heard about doing affirmations, I thought it was kind of hokey.
I was a disbeliever, a skeptic.
And then I studied Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and really got to see how powerful re-framing can help with how you think about yourself. Literally mind blowing for me and how I could shift the beliefs I had about myself. It really gave me the tools to see how much I was getting in my own way with my negative thoughts and beliefs.
What do you believe about yourself?
This is a very important question when attempting to do affirmations.
I believe that affirmations can help especially when it comes to sleeping.
After I started sleeping, I kept calling myself an insomniac. And guess what, I continued to have bouts of bad sleep. I was going to bed worrying that my sleep issues would come back. And yes, sometimes they did. I realized one day that I was talking myself into a bad night’s sleep. So I started working on affirmations that I am a sleeper. And that does the trick for me.
Recently, however, I read something interesting that has me rethinking about affirmations.
There have been some studies that researched to see if affirmations actually work. And the results are showing that they work if the person already had a high self-esteem. Now the studies were testing self-esteem. There seems to be some indication that if the person doesn’t believe what they are saying, not only is it not helpful but it might even be harmful.
What – affirmations harmful? How so?
What happens is the person feels worse or might think there is something wrong with them when it doesn’t work. They find fault with themselves. So if the person is feeling worse about it, that is not something that is going to help.
This made me re-think how to coach people to do affirmations.
They must come with a caveat.
If you truly believe you cannot sleep, affirmations might not be the thing to try.
Just like I was in the beginning – a non-believer. They would not have worked for me either.
I look at getting to sleep as a journey. A process.
So if something is not working for you, then now is not the time. Maybe later.
Or if you know in your heart that sleep is possible for you, then by all means work on your affirmations. And you know that because if you used to be able to sleep, then you know you can find sleep again.
Do you believe you can sleep or do you believe you will never find sleep again?