by Brianna Cheney, M.A.
Many sleep hygiene guidelines advise readers to cover up their clocks at bedtime and to refrain from counting the hours of sleep they are about to get. Although these guidelines seldom provide the rationale for how these practices might help, my conjecture would be that seeing the time and calculating your hours of sleep may trigger anxiety-producing thoughts that are counter-productive to falling asleep. Many of us can relate to the experience of glancing at the clock and thinking that it’s already ___ a.m., meaning you’re only going to get __ hours of sleep, which may lead to a series of thoughts about how intolerably tired you’ll be the next day and reminders of all the challenging parts of tomorrow that you must be fully rested for!
Although hiding our clocks and refraining from deliberately counting our sleep hours may help to prevent this chain of negative thinking some of the time, REBT would suggest that the more elegant solution is to challenge our irrational self-talk around sleeping (after all, it may be unrealistic to avoid thinking about how much sleep we are getting). The first step is to ask ourselves what it means to us that we’re only getting x-amount of sleep. Many times we are evaluating not getting enough sleep as catastrophic. According to sleep researchers, people tend to underestimate the quality of the sleep they are getting and overestimate the effect of too little sleep on performances like taking a test. In addition, we may tend to irrationally tell ourselves that we won’t be able to make it through the day on such little sleep. Again, while we all likely agree that running on minimal sleep is unpleasant, it is certainly survivable.
So the next time you are experiencing insomnia, go ahead and cover up your clock, but also find your inner REBT-therapist and consider how what you are thinking about your sleep may be hindering your sleep!
