Dr. Michael Grandner

You feed it the pattern of sleep is difficult, sleep is stressful, sleep is hard to obtain, sleep is a battle.

You feed it that over and over and over again.

Even when you are exhausted and tired and sleepy...

just getting into that mode will then wake you up.

When sleep becomes predictably stressful, think of something else in your life that's predictably stressful.

So a common analogy I like to use is that you go to the dentist's office.

I have a friend who's a dentist who hates that I use this analogy, but people know what I'm talking about.

Whatever that metaphorical dentist's office is for you, you go, you're there, nothing has happened yet.

You're already in this heightened state of arousal.

You're responding to a stimulus that hasn't even occurred because you're predicting that it's going to occur.

You're in the waiting room.

You're already kind of a little antsy.

You're delaying making the phone call to make the appointment three months in the future because you're already responding to that future stimulus that's causing you stress.

Like being in a place that's predictably stressful

You anticipate it, you can predict it.

And by predicting that stress, it creates arousal and activation.

The difference is when you're in the dentist's office, no matter how activated or stressed you are, as long as you open your mouth, they can do their job, right?

But in bed, it doesn't work that way.

If you get into bed and you are dead tired, you are exhausted, you are sleepy, you are ready, and you get into bed and all of a sudden your body's like, oh, here we go again, or is this going to be a problem?

Or whatever that automatic process starts happening, that predictable process happens, it builds activation.