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Comment by dataflow | Hacker News Reader

> 5. Start removing thoughts from your brain. As you start thinking about something, just stop. Another thought comes in. Kill it. Just kill thoughts. You can think only about your breathing. Nothing else.

If only it was this easy!! It almost feels like a variation of "start outlining the owl... now when you have the outline, just draw the rest of the owl". :-)

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It's still helpful to know that this is the "right way" to do it. For years, my wife struggled with falling asleep, and was jealous of my ability to just stop thinking and log out.

She told me that she wasn't able to just stop thinking. She went to sleep by distracting herself with a book, TV, or tablet. Her approach was to do that restful activity until the intense thoughts of the past day and plans for tomorrow dropped off and were replaced with sudoku numbers or the TV program that were calm enough to sleep, or did those things from midnight until 3-5am when she was so exhausted she couldn't think about anything anymore and just slept for a couple hours.

The insomnia got really bad after our first kid. She tried changing diets, cutting out blue lights with tablet apps or bulbs for reading that were so warm they were basically orange-red, changing her soda habit to eliminate caffeine after noon and food after 6pm, changed mattresses and pillows, changed bedroom temperatures, blankets, and sleepwear, took melatonin, benadryl, and other sleep aids, ran white noise and fans...it didn't work.

But eventually (after seeing a doctor) the root cause was isolated to that reading/TV/tablet habit. It doesn't help. What you have to do to fall asleep per this article, the parent comment, and my wife's doctor, is to stop thinking. Meditative breathing exercises were eventually the solution we reached, but it all basically amounts to training your brain to stop thinking thoughts that aren't about your going-to-sleep process. The process, not the annoyance of your inability to sleep and the tiredness you'll feel in the morning and how long has it been and what is that clicking sound and did I forget to lock the doors and I feel a little thirsty but I don't want to have to pee. Kill the errant thoughts, go to sleep.

I've found that the approach of "killing" thoughts sets up an impossible and never-ending conflict that distracts from the goal of trying to fall asleep.

Instead I try to focus on something, e.g. my breath entering and existing my nose or lungs. Then, as thoughts arise I simply acknowledge them and 'let them go' returning my focus back to my breath.

It's perhaps a subtle distinction but it works much better for me than thinking about thoughts as a game of whack-a-mole.

The key here is that this becomes easier as you do it. It's hard fighting off those few first thoughts, but I personally find that once I do, my brain is put into slow gear and fewer thoughts come up. This has an accumulating effect and I'm asleep before I know it.

Here's a technique that works for me:

So, when I close my eyes I can "see" things. I don't know if it's light coming trough my lids or blood vessels or just my mind's eye. I don't know. But what I'll do as a last resource when I have trouble sleeping is to pay full attention to those things and find patterns in them. I even say out loud in my mind like: "oh there's a dog", "a canoe", "a cigarrette".

Then I'm dreaming in no time.

I told my wife and she says that she sees nothing when she close her eyes so, maybe this won't work for everybody.

For years growing up, I'd notice that sometimes when I had my eyes closed, there were sometimes glowing circles in the darkness. Sometimes they'd be colorful and others they were like the typical photo of an eclipse. It was usually just as I was drifting off, I'd notice them.

Years later I realized that I could make them appear at-will by wiggling my eyes around (a la REM), and that lead me to conclude that it's likely my overly-long (i'm severely myopic) eyeballs physically stimulating my optic nerves.

I don't notice it as much lately, and I avoid doing it on purpose, in case it's not healthy.

I'm not myopic and I see those too.

I see something as well. I’ll definitely give this a try, thanks.

It's more like taking steps that eventually equate to running a marathon. Drawing an owl has many different actions that you can fail to adequately describe. Here the task itself is very simple. You just need to repeat it many more times than seems reasonable to you in your untrained state.

I phrase it as its no different than exercise. You'll never get good at it if you never try. And it gets easier with time and practice, just like running a mile.

I actually can do that, but instead of falling asleep I go into a not very pleasant "meditative" state that I have to exert effort to exit (a bit like sleep paralysis).

This takes practice. Try it first for one minute, then two. It's just like physical exercise, but with your mind instead.

For many people, and myself, telling yourself to think of something is a good way to make your mind blank.

I have heard several guided meditations having an instruction like "let your mind do whatever it wants to do". Surprisingly it works very well to let the mind do nothing.

It sounds a lot like the "body scan" meditation. I expect there are scripts/videos available to follow until you get used to doing it without.

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