Staying awake – when you really want to sleep!
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It was on one of our NLP Master Practitioner Programmes and we were exploring the NLP process of ‘modelling’.
NLP Behavioural Modelling is a quite complex process but, in essence, it involves identifying precisely how a person does something. And we don’t just model the person’s physical actions when they do something. We also examine the part played by their thoughts and their emotions.
On this occasion we began looking at how people manage stay awake when they really want to be asleep. How they ‘do’ insomnia, in other words!
The ‘skill’ of insomnia
We decided to model how participants were able to ‘do’ the skill of insomnia. Incidentally, in NLP we consider everything we do, whether we do it voluntarily or involuntarily, as a ‘skill’. If someone has an appealing and desirable skill we might model it to be able to teach it to others and/or learn it for ourselves. If someone has a not-so-desirable skill, such as insomnia, we model it to discover how they can change their behaviour and achieve a better result such as, in this case, a sound night’s sleep.)
In the group last week we discovered that one of the things which those who were really skilled at insomnia had in common was an ability to accurately calculate the number of minutes of not sleeping they experienced!
They would wake up and immediately check the clock to calculate how much sleep they’d had. And how much sleep they were now missing out on. And this clock-checking would usually continue until exhaustion set in and they fell asleep again.
Insomnia and NLP Anchors
By the way, this was a confirmation rather than a surprise for me – I’ve been teaching people stress management skills for about 30 years and I know that not getting a good might’s sleep is a major source of stress in many people’s lives. And it’s not just the lack of sleep that is stressful. In fact, if anything, the lack of sleep takes second place to the worrying about the lack of sleep and the worrying about having to spend another night trying desperately to get to sleep.
There are three main types of insomnia which people experience:
- Having trouble getting to sleep when they go to bed
- Waking up during the night and then having difficulty in getting back to sleep
- Waking up much too early and being unable to get back to sleep
What they have in common is worry about lack of sleep. People can become quite obsessive about it to the point where they dread going to bed. For them being in bed has become what in NLP we call a negative anchor. Bed becomes associated not with sleep and warmth and cosiness but with anxiety and anger and sleepless tossing and turning and, yes, clock watching.
Manage that clock-watching
One of the single most useful ways of overturning this habit is to put clocks out of sight and out of reach (they can still set the alarm to ensure they awake on time, of course). Yet, so fixated do these people become on checking how many minutes of sleeplessness they experience each night that only a few will actually put those clocks out of reach…
… so the old maxim ‘if you always do what you’ve always done you’ll always get what you’ve always got’ applies.
We have a more comprehensive article on insomnia here.
More about negative anchors or hot buttons:
The Swish Technique is one of the best way of defusing a negative anchor
How negative anchors operate in families and close relationships
Why ‘positive thinking’ doesn’t work with negative anchors
NLP and anchors in the supermarket…
An NLP technique for regaining your sense of perspective
Negative anchors – they are not our fault
Other articles related to NLP Anchors
Negative anchors and self esteem
Poor weather can be a negative anchor for some people
Anchoring and brands – how marketing uses anchors
Insomnia: the part anchoring plays in staying awake instead of being asleep