Can Focusing can help with problems sleeping?

I say it can, alongside other ways of tackling this sometimes pernicious and debilitating condition.

We believe Focusing may be helpful on two fronts. For some it may be that paying attention to your felt sense of what it is that might be causing you dis-ease and sleeplessness might reveal what is at the crux of the matter. For others it might be that when your mind is going round and round, focusing in on the body may be the answer; systematically scanning the body and attending to what sensations are present in the moment. This brings sleep and the vicious cycle of tiredness can stop.

Sometimes troubling life issues can cause sleeplessness. You might be managing it well, and coping during the day, but at night you may be waking with worries and anxieties. The trouble is, you can’t resolve the issue by thinking about it. Sometimes an insight may come, but more often, there are repetitive thoughts that go nowhere.

This is where Focusing can be so helpful. The Focusing way of being with something in you that feels anxious, angry or sad, is to find out how that feeling is living in your body. How do you actually experience the difficult feeling and what does it actually feel like? You might start with an overall or general feeling of discomfort. As you stay with it, it gradually reveals more information to you. Shifts and changes happen though paying close attention in a friendly, non-judgemental way.

The process of listening to yourself in this way is the change. The very fact of bringing attention to your body and listening to it in a specific kind of way brings change. This kind of change cannot be controlled or predicted. What comes is often surprising. There is a sense of newness, or left-field. You might be saying, where did that come from? And you can tell that there is a sense of rightness about it. You could not have made it up, and yet, there is is. Focusing is a vehicle for enabling felt shifts and inner changes to occur.

If you experience a period of sleeplessness, you might try simply bringing your awareness to your body. See if you can describe to yourself how it is feeling. What words, phrases or images come to mind when you try and sense how your body feels. When you pay attention to your body in this way, you are withdrawing your attention from the thoughts that are going round and round in your head, and it has a chance to rest.