Optimising Your Sleep Mindset: 3 Thinking Biases That Can Impact Your Sleep
Poor sleep is a really common problem – you’re not alone. One in three adults experience trouble sleeping at least once a week and approximately 10% of adults meet the criteria for insomnia.
Various factors are involved in maintaining poor sleep and insomnia, one of which is our thoughts. Our thoughts, feelings & behaviour are interconnected, meaning your mindset might be having a bigger impact on your sleep than you realise.
In this blog post, I look at:
How your mindset & thoughts can impact your sleep
What thinking errors are
The types of thinking errors that are common in poor sleepers
Actionable tips for creating more helpful thinking patterns
Table of Contents
How can your mindset affect your sleep?
If you’ve ever woken up during the night with a racing mind, I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you the effect overthinking can have on your sleep.
When you feel tired, stressed & anxious, you may experience thinking errors. These are ways our thoughts can become biased. You may also have heard thinking errors referred to as cognitive distortions or unhelpful thinking patterns.
These types of thoughts happen automatically. They aren't always accurate or helpful and often play a role in maintaining poor sleep & anxiety.
Thinking errors happen when the brain takes ‘shortcuts’ in interpreting our experiences and the world around us.
Sometimes these interpretations are helpful, for example they may allow you to make quick decisions in dangerous situations. But often these interpretations are biased and are associated with negative mental health outcomes.
Thinking errors are common and completely normal. But when they are present in your life excessively, they may start to have a negative impact on your mood and mental wellbeing.
How do thinking errors keep you stuck in a cycle of poor sleep?
Your thoughts, feelings and behaviours are all connected. By changing one of them, you can change the others. This means that when you experience unhelpful thinking patterns this can affect how you feel and behave.
This can lead to a vicious cycle of poor sleep & insomnia, as illustrated below.
To resolve your difficulty sleeping, we want to break the vicious cycle you’re stuck in. We can do this by addressing the factors maintaining your poor sleep. One of these factors is your thoughts, including thinking errors. By addressing thinking errors and considering more helpful, balanced perspectives, you can improve your mood and your sleep.
Diagram showing the connection between our thoughts, feelings and behaviour.
The Vicious Cycle of Poor Sleep & Insomnia
Thinking errors commonly experienced by poor sleepers
There are several different types of thinking errors. From my 1:1 work with clients; I have identified three types that seem to be common in poor sleepers. Let’s have a look at them one by one and see if any resonate with you.
1 - Demands & expectations
This thinking error relates to fixed ideas of how you, or others, should behave. It usually involves overestimating how bad it will be if these expectations are not met.
You may have rules or expectations about how things should be. These expectations could be in relation to yourself, others or the world in general.
They are often inflexible and unhelpful, leaving you feeling worse. If these expectations are not met, you may struggle to tolerate the discomfort and the situation may feel catastrophic.
This thinking error can be identified by the frequent use of terms like ‘should’, ‘must’, ‘have to’ or ‘need to’ in an individual’s language.
This might sound like:
“I should be getting a full night's sleep.”
“I have to be asleep by 11pm.”
“I shouldn't get so stressed.”
“I need to fall asleep right now.”
“I should have done better.”
When we use words like ‘should’, ‘must’ or ‘have to’, this often fuels stress and anxiety, making it even more difficult to fall asleep.
2 - All or nothing thinking
All or nothing thinking is black & white with no shade of grey. Something is either perfect or terrible, success or failure, with no middle ground in between.
This thinking error can be characterised by the use of terms, such as ‘always’ or never’ and ‘best’ or ‘worst’.
This might sound like:
“I'll never sleep normally again.”
“If I'm not asleep by 10pm, tomorrow will be terrible.”
“Unless I get a perfect 8 hours sleep a night, it's hopeless.”
“If I sleep badly, my week will be ruined.”
These types of thoughts are not usually grounded in reality, despite feeling very believable. And, when we get stuck in this pattern on thinking, we may find it hard to consider a more balanced perspective. These thoughts can leave us feeling hopeless and frustrated, impacting your ability to relax & sleep.
3 - Catastrophising
Catastrophising involves predicting the future in a negative way without considering other, more likely outcomes.
Catastrophic thinking can often be identified by lots of “What if?” thoughts. You may find yourself worrying about various hypothetical future scenarios.
This might sound like:
“What if I’ve lost the ability to sleep?”
“What if I mess up my presentation tomorrow because I haven’t slept well?”
“If I don’t get enough sleep, I won’t be able to focus at work & I’ll be fired.”
Your thoughts may feel like they’re spiralling, leaving you feeling anxious and overwhelmed. It may feel impossible to stop overthinking and ‘switch off’ your mind so you can fall asleep.
Take a moment, to reflect on whether you can relate to any of these thinking errors. It’s totally understandable to experience these types of thoughts if you struggle with poor sleep or insomnia. Now let’s have a look at what you can do about them.
How can you create more helpful thinking patterns to improve your sleep?
Awareness
Automatic thoughts, such as thinking errors, are often on the edge of our awareness, so the first step is noticing them.
If you find this difficult, begin by noticing when you have a change in your mood, for example feeling more anxious or frustrated. Then consider the thoughts that were going through your head, just before you noticed that change.
Over the next week, make a note of what thoughts come up and whether they fall into any of these thinking errors.
Calm your body
When you experience racing thoughts, overthinking and a busy mind, your body responds to this.
You may notice increased tension, your heart beating faster or a feeling of restlessness.
The relationship between the body and mind is bidirectional, so by calming the body we can also calm the mind.
My guided meditation for sleep will help with exactly this. Designed to help you unwind at the end of a busy day and prepare your body & mind for sleep.
Creating distance
You might find it helpful to begin creating some distance from anxious thoughts. Over time, you can learn to observe your thoughts more mindfully and choose how you respond to them, rather than reacting impulsively.
You can start doing this by labelling thoughts. For example, “I notice I'm having the thought that…”.
This can be a helpful way of reminding yourself that thoughts are just that - thoughts, not facts.
Swap demands for preferences
In contrast to demands, preferences are more rational, flexible and helpful. Swapping demands for preferences begins to take some of the pressure off you or the situation & allows you to be more flexible.
Instead of demands, such as “I should…”, you might try:
“I would like to…”
“I’d prefer…”
“I’d love…”
Or “I really want to…”
It’s ok to still feel discomfort or disappointment if your preference is not met. Although it may be difficult to tolerate, remind yourself of your ability to cope.
Reframing thoughts
Taking some time to consider whether your thoughts are accurate or helpful can be a useful way to reduce some of the power they have on our mood.
This isn’t about making all your thoughts more positive, but about increasing flexibility and managing unhelpful thinking patterns. It helps you to practise looking at situations in a more balanced and realistic way.
You might ask yourself reflective questions, such as:
What predictions am I making?
How much do I believe this thought?
Is there any evidence for this thought? How about evidence against it?
How does this thought affect how I feel & behave?
What might I say to a friend?
Is there a more balanced way of looking at this?
Could I test this belief?
This is best done during the day, when you are feeling relatively calm & able to consider alternative perspectives.
These are skills that take practise & the space to go into more depth than I can in this blog post! If you'd like to explore this further, I invite you to get in touch. Together, let's create a tailored plan to tackle the unique factors maintaining your trouble sleeping & break the cycle of poor sleep.