If you want to sleep well consistently, you need to change your thoughts about sleep. It’s not just about fixing the imbalances in your body. If you’re worried about sleep and thinking it’s not fair and asking yourself what’s wrong with you, your mind is also going to sabotage your sleep.


In this episode I give you a tool that I give all of my clients. It involves 3 simple steps to change your thoughts to change your sleep. And I’ll explain why your brain likes to focus on the negative and the surprising fact that you’re probably getting more sleep than you think you are. 


This is a replay of one of my first episodes but it’s so valuable and it’s made such a big difference for so many of my clients that I wanted to share it with you again.


If you enjoy this show, please take 1 minute to rate and review it so more people can find it and get the help they need. 


Schedule a consultation to get started with the Complete Sleep Solution program so you can consistently sleep 7+ hours uninterrupted, naturally and permanently. 


00:00 Introduction: Changing Your Thoughts About Sleep

01:06 Client Success Story: Overcoming Sleep Anxiety

02:40 Replay Episode: The Power of Positive Thinking for Better Sleep

04:22 Understanding the Impact of Negative Self-Talk

09:12 The Negativity Bias and Its Effect on Sleep

11:25 Three Steps to Change Your Thoughts and Improve Sleep

14:17 Creating Positive Sleep Mantras

15:18 Conclusion: Addressing Both Mind and Body for Better Sleep


Episode Transcript


If you want to sleep well consistently, you need to change your thoughts about sleep. It's not just about fixing the imbalances in your body. If you're worried about sleep and thinking it's not fair and asking yourself what's wrong with you, your mind is also going to sabotage your sleep. In this episode, I give you a tool that I give all of my clients.


It involves three simple steps to change your thoughts, to change your sleep. And I'll also explain why your brain likes to focus on the negative instead of the positive and the surprising fact that you're probably getting more sleep than you think you are. This is the Sleep Detective Podcast, where you will learn why you can't sleep, I'm Martha Lewis, and I've helped over 200 clients find the root causes of their sleep issues in both the body and the mind, so they can restore their health and sleep well, long term.


I have a favor to ask. If you enjoy the show, if you could please just take one quick minute to rate and review it so more people can find it and get the help they need.


I want to tell you about a client I'm working with right now. So when she started the program, she was anxious and crying all the time because she was so worried about not sleeping. She was worried that her insomnia would last forever. She was just miserable most of the time. And she had tried so many different things and gone to other practitioners and done sleep programs and nothing So she was so scared to spend more money and invest in another program. Now, as soon as she signed up, the first thing we did was focus on her thoughts and help her calm her nervous system. Even though we still had to address the imbalances in her body, I knew that changing her thoughts can make a huge difference in her experience of not sleeping better and would actually help her sleep better.


From using the tools in the program, she went from waking up every hour and only sleeping one to three hours total to consistently sleeping five hours straight in just the first month. She's still not even halfway through the program, so we're still working on the physical imbalances. So she can get to her goal of sleeping six and a half hours, but she's way less anxious.


Even her coworkers have commented on how much calmer she is. And when she has a night where she doesn't sleep as well, she's able to stay more positive and control her thoughts so that one bad night does not spiral into weeks and months of bad sleep. Now I'm going to get into this episode and this is actually a replay of one of my first episodes, but it's so valuable and it's made such a big difference for so many of my clients that I want to share it with you again.


Today I want to talk about how to change your thoughts so that you can sleep better. Because here's the truth. If you think that you won't sleep well, then you won't. It's a, it's as the Buddha says, whatever you think you become. It's a principle in most self help, personal development, uh, things that you'll find out there is that our thoughts create our reality.


And so if you are thinking, That you can't sleep, then it's going to determine what actually happens in reality. And if you think about this being true with say an Olympic athlete, if you think about breaking the four minute mile, for example, for decades, people thought that this wasn't possible, but it took one person to He had to think at first that he could do it, even before there was proof before there was evidence that anyone could do it.


He had to believe that he could do it. And he had to train that way in that belief. And then he did it. And guess what happened after that. A bunch more people did it after him. So once people saw it was possible, then they started to believe it too. But it took that one first person to believe it without any proof that it could be done.


And so I want to tell you that if you have any negative thoughts about sleep, they are sabotaging your sleep. And you know that I talk a lot about what's going on in your body that causes sleep issues, and I still truly believe that. And yes, that is a very overlooked thing that we have to address. But if you're having negative thoughts, if you're having anxiety about sleep, then it's still, then your mind can still sabotage your sleep, even if you work on everything in your body.


So if you've struggled to sleep for any period of time, and whether that's months, Years, decades, I bet you don't have any positive thoughts about sleep. Of course you to, you want to sleep, but your brain doesn't have this positive association with it. And so I hear a lot of these same phrases and I know that these were a lot of the same thoughts I had when I couldn't sleep.


Like I don't know if I'll sleep tonight or I'm so tired. We think that all day long, right? I'm tired of not sleeping. I'm so frustrated. What's wrong with me? Why can't I sleep like a normal person? I'm so sick of not being able to sleep. It's not fair that my husband, wife, partner falls asleep immediately with no problems and I can't.

What have I done wrong? I'm not going to be able to function tomorrow if I can't sleep. These are some of these negative, these examples of this negative self talk. And my guess is that you have had a lot of these same thoughts. And I'll tell you what, good sleepers don't have any of these thoughts. In fact, good sleepers don't really think much about sleep at all.


And so you. You can work on changing your thoughts so that you can sleep better. So the thoughts that make you feel anxious, out of control, worried that there's something wrong with you, desperate for a solution, aren't going to help when you know that you need to feel calm and relaxed to be able to sleep.


So psychologists call this Negative self talk determining what actually happens, the self feedback loop. So, if your negative self talk is, I can't sleep, then that is going to lead to your self image of, I'm not a good sleeper, which is going to lead to your performance. I don't sleep well, or I don't sleep, I can't sleep, which then goes back to your negative self talk of I can't sleep, and so it becomes a suspicious cycle.


Now I want to point out that people with sleep trouble tend to be the worst judges of how much sleep they're actually getting. So studies show that many insomniacs overestimate the time it takes them to fall asleep and also overestimate the time they spend awake in the middle of the night. There was one study at Stanford University Sleep Clinic that looked at 122 insomniacs in their lab and on average these individuals overestimated the time it took them to fall asleep by 30 minutes and underestimated total sleep time by one hour.


So we aren't good at knowing how much we're actually sleeping. And so you see how this can work against you and add to that negative self talk of, oh, I didn't sleep at all last night, or, oh, I only got four hours of sleep last night or whatever it is. That may not actually be accurate. And researchers think that the reason why These participants miscalculated how much they were sleeping is because when you are in the lighter stages of sleep, stage one and stage two of sleep, it can feel like you aren't sleeping, even though you are, even though an EKG would show that you're, according to your brainwaves, you're asleep.


And so even in stage two sleep, If someone were to wake you up in the middle of that stage, half the time you would say that you weren't sleeping, even though you were. I know this to be true because every once in a while I actually fall asleep before my husband, which doesn't happen often, and he nudges me and tells me I'm snoring.


And I'm like, what do you mean? I haven't even fallen asleep yet. But obviously I have if, if I'm snoring and I don't even know it. So I know that this can be true.


So just keep that in mind when you're telling yourself how little sleep you got or, and, and that really adding to your negative self talk the next day, that you might not actually be accurate in how much sleep you're getting. And Just so you know, this is normal. We as humans have what's called a negativity bias.

this means that when ten people give you a compliment and one person criticizes you, what do we always remember? Not one criticism. And this served us really well in evolutionary times because as hunters and gatherers, we needed to remember the one poisonous plant more than we needed to remember the 50 edible plants.


So we focused on that negative and that helped us survive, but it obviously doesn't help us in everything now where we tend to really focus on the negative and not appreciate the good things. and I know this happens too, with how we talk about our sleep. Um, when I wasn't sleeping well, the first thing I would do every morning is tell my husband how poorly I slept, how tired I was.


And then I go to work and tell my coworkers how bad I slept and how tired I am. And so it just reinforced that in my mind that I'm not a good sleeper. Like this is a problem. This is part of me and it felt very frustrating and helpless and out of control. And I want you to think about it too. When you're lying in bed, even if you're not sleeping, it's actually this very luxurious thing to do.


You're warm, comfortable, relaxed, nothing is expected of you. You're not missing out on anything. And this is really easy to forget when you can't sleep. Because the hard part about not sleeping is that we're worried about how we're going to function the next day or we're worried about what's wrong with us or how this is going to affect our health.


And so it's this projection into the future or what not sleeping means that brings up the anxiety. But then all that stress from the worry causes your body to release cortisol, which suppresses melatonin, which is going to sabotage your sleep.


So let's talk about how we can get out of this negative feedback loop. Now, of course, this helps if you are working on what's going on in your body that's causing your sleep problems. If there's something major going on there, if you have a pathogen or hormone imbalance or something like that, then this may not help solve the problem for you, but it is part of the solution. So here's what I recommend. Step one is to just start observing your thoughts and what you say to others about your sleep or about how you feel if you feel tired and do this without judgment. This is not to beat ourselves up. This is just really to bring awareness because that's always the first step.


You can't change anything that you aren't aware of. So just start noticing this. You can write it down in a journal or on your phone. Just make little tick marks every time you think, Oh, I'm so tired. Oh, I don't know if I'm going to sleep tonight. What is wrong with me? Or you want to. research about sleep or whatever it is.


So start keeping track of that for a few days. And then step two is once you become more aware of these thoughts, when you catch yourself thinking something negative about your sleep or about being tired, Switch those to positive thoughts or at least something neutral. So instead you could think something like, I will sleep better no matter what, or I'm figuring this out.


I've slept well before and I can do it again. No matter what happens tonight, I will still be able to function tomorrow. Something like that. Something that's believable to your brain. It doesn't need to be, I'm going to sleep great tonight. If you don't really believe it, then it's not going to help. It actually needs to be something believable.


And it can just be very neutral. Like I will be okay. This is going to be okay. I'm going to figure this out. Something like that. So yeah, every time then you notice these negative thoughts, start switching to something positive. And also I want to challenge you to stop talking negatively about your sleep to others.


So if you catch yourself telling your partner, telling your coworkers, telling your friends about your sleep, about how tired you are, then just stop and change the subject. That can make a really big difference. And when you do feel tired during the day, ask yourself what you need. Instead of just being upset because you're tired, think, what is going to help me right now?


Do you need a 10 minute break? Do you need a drink? Do you need a walk in the sunshine? Can you take a quick power nap? Do you need some food? Maybe you're hungry. And just give yourself what you need in that moment to feel better. And then step three that can really help is coming up with a mantra. So this is something that you tell yourself at bedtime or in the middle of the night, if, if you can't sleep or when you're trying to fall asleep.


And so saying, this is what I do because every night in the middle of the night, I wake up and I go to the bathroom and I go back to bed and I fall asleep, but I curl up in the fetal position and I think I love sleep. And it just sends this great feeling of love and gratitude over me. And before I know it, I'm asleep.


I've had other clients who like I'm sleeping. So getting back to that stage two, not being able to, or not knowing that you're asleep, even if you're sleeping. So telling yourself I'm I'm sleeping. This is very neutral. Um, way to, to get back into sleep. So these things can help you stay positive and relaxed so that your worry about sleep, your anxiety about sleep doesn't continue to sabotage your sleep.


All right. Well, I hope this helps with some of those negative thoughts about sleep and Yes, we still have to address the things going on in your body, but we also have to address this mental part. Because if you're telling yourself you can't sleep, you're not going to be able to. All right, have a great week and I will talk to you next week.


If you enjoyed this episode, I would love it if you would take just one quick minute to rate and review this podcast. That way more people can find it and get the help they need.

Listen and follow: Apple Podcasts · Spotify