Dr. Michael Grandner

The idea of stimulus control is if you're in a place where

where only a very limited number of things could possibly occur there you will predict that they will occur and you get yourself in the zone so we talked about the dentist chair but a great positive example is going to the gym right like if you're going to the training room or wherever you don't do anything else there so even if you're kind of tired or if you're in a bad mood or whatever once you start that process you can usually finish the workout at the end and then you go back to your life but when you're there you can get in the zone

And it's because being there creates the conditions that are predictably tied with doing what you're going to do.

And so when you're in a place where there's a limited number of options, those options become predictable.

On the other side of stimulus control is if you're in a place where all kinds of options exist, none of them become predictable.

So a great example of this I found is especially over the pandemic and as people are working from home more is the dining room table started also becoming where people work.

And it wasn't just a place where you eat.

So it used to be you sit down at the dining room table because all you do is eat there, you'd start getting hungry.

But if that's also where you work and it's also where you watch TV and it's also where you're socializing, you sit down, you're thinking about work and you want to put the TV on and you may or may not be hungry.

So it dilutes the ability of the place to have a response if you start increasing the number of things that occur there.

And so the way this is applied to sleep is that if in bed, if being in bed is predictably tied to sleep, you can program that association.

But if being in bed isn't predictably tied to sleep, you don't know what to predict.

So I got to...

So here's an example.

If I say bed, sleep, bed, sleep, bed, sleep, bed, sleep, I say bed, you say?

Sleep.

Correct.

If I say bed, sleep, bed, wake, bed, think, bed, wake, bed, sleep, bed, wake, bed, sleep, bed, think, bed.

Surf.

Maybe.