Reframe your insomnia

I have a category on this site with the label reframe your experience because it’s such a vital thing to do if we want to heal from all the conditioning society and the psychiatric system dishes out. I also did an article that highlights links to some of the best posts that highlight reframing: About reframing: embrace your experience

And for the topic at hand I also have an article that includes a collection of links on how to cope and heal from insomnia. It has the very same title Shinzen Young used for the above article and thus this post. HELP FOR INSOMNIA

Love this reframing that Shinzen Young is doing:

Difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep is a very common complaint. Mindfulness can help but one must first radically revision the nature of the problem.

People tend to get into a negative feedback loop with insomnia: Not getting to sleep leads to worry, leads to further difficulty sleeping, leads to more worry, leads to…. What to do? One possibility is to start thinking about the night in a different way. This is a conceptual reframing, a profoundly different paradigm regarding the issue of sleep.

The normal paradigm is:
“I have to get a good night’s sleep or I’ll be a mess tomorrow”.

The new paradigm is
“If I get a good night’s rest, I’ll be fine tomorrow”.

Amazingly, it’s possible to get a good night’s rest without necessarily sleeping much or at all. Two things are required:(more shinzen here)

Shinzen does a really great job articulating something I’ve been working on in my own quest to re-establish my sleep architecture that was so badly iatrogenically damaged. It helped me to read the above post as it is said so well by a teacher I greatly admire. I’ve been learning to reframe my sleeping patterns for a good long while now. It’s a process given all that we’ve been taught. See: Insomnia? Or is your body just asking to sleep like our ancestors did?

More Shinzen Young on Beyond Meds

You can also find Shinzen delivering dharma talks on youtube.