Welcome! I’d love to hear your comments on how metaphors have helped or hurt you. Your most common metaphors can change your brain, through visualization and by controlling your attention. Take control of your metaphors, and have fun while doing it! – Brain Coach Brad

How to Beat Insomnia Naturally

In my line of work, I’ve come across many people who suffer from insomnia or other sleep issues. In some cases these sleep issues may be caused by a medical condition that should be checked out by a doctor. However, research shows that in many cases, insomnia is a learned behavior which can be unlearned.

Let me say that again – insomnia can be unlearned! With a little understanding of how the brain works and a few simple strategies, you can beat insomnia for good.

I recently appeared on AMNW (see video above) to share 6 tricks to re-train your brain and get a good night’s sleep.  The first few may sound familiar, but I bet you never even thought about the last three. Here they are:

1. Measure, measure, measure. It is hard to change anything that we don’t measure, especially sleep. There are now lots of options. Use a smart phone app (many work by being placed under your mattress), a device that measures your brain waves, or just a good old-fashioned sleep diary. Start today by keeping track of your hours in bed, any information available on how long you slept, and information about your evening and your thoughts.
2. Start good “sleep hygiene.” Make it a priority. Eliminate or reduce evening caffeine, alcohol, and stimulating activities. Studies show that up to 90% of insomnia sufferers engage in stimulating activities within an hour of bedtime, with TV being the most common. Create a habit of relaxation for the last hour, with steadily decreasing exposure to light, especially TV and computer screens. Use relaxation, meditation, warm baths, and keep your bedroom dark.
3. Get out of bed! What? Yes, most insomnia sufferers actually spend too much time in bed …… doing things other than sleeping. Train your brain to associate your bed to sleep only, and to break the associations to other activities such as thinking, reading, watching TV, arguing, etc. (You can make an exception for sexual activities.) It is especially important to get out of bed whenever you are have been “trying” to sleep for more than 20 minutes.
4. Control your mind. Your thoughts can be the most stimulating element in your environment. In addition to writing down your sleep related thoughts in your sleep diary, and challenging their truthfulness, there is a strategy you can use during the night. Instead of focusing on the content of your thoughts, just focus on the speed and volume of your internal voice. Practice speeding up and slowing down your internal monologue until you can easily control its pace and volume. Then turn it all down! Keep talking to yourself in your head, but make the inner voice slloooowwww and soft. This sends a message to the brain that it’s time to sleep.
5. Fool your brain. Sometimes nighttime visits to the bathroom spark a pattern of wakefulness that goes on for hours. You can prevent this by a simple “charade” of sleepiness. No matter how awake you actually feel, act as if you are so tired you aren’t sure you can even make it to the bathroom and back. Move slowly and sluggishly, and rest often on your way. This silly sounding behavior can trigger brain patterns that support putting your body back to sleep.
6. Optimize your brain!  Brainwave Optimization helps balance your brainwave activity that can be contributing to insomnia. When your beta frequencies soar when your eyes close, it can be hard to sleep. When the brain is able to “hear” those that over-activation, it can balance it and sleep becomes the natural process it was meant to be.

Maintain hope. Be a “scientist” in your own life, and slowly make changes and keep track of the results. You can get the sleep you need!

If anyone you know is experiencing insomnia, try these out and let me know how they worked for you.

You are rewiring your brain every day, whether you know it or not. Your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors leave an impact on your brain, and affect your ability to reach and maintain peak happiness and performance – in your life, job and relationships.

In February, as our thoughts turn to Valentine’s Day, and relationships, it is important to know how our unhelpful thought patterns and our old brain “wiring” can sabotage our current and new relationships and what to do about it. Here are six hints for February:

1. If you are in a relationship, avoid the “couples counseling position.” Too many couples have been in counseling, or heard about it, and are convinced that it is healthy to sit down opposite one another, stare into each other’s faces, and give a list of criticisms and grievances. This conditions the brain to associate the other’s face to the pain that is being caused, creating brain “wiring” that brings up the negative emotions whenever they look at each other. Bad idea.

2. A good idea is to do exactly the opposite. “Anchor” in positive emotions by regularly taking the time to talk about past positive memories, vividly remember them, and then gaze at each other’s faces, look in each other’s eyes, etc. It just deepens the good feelings and brings them back into the present at a glance.

3. Expand this idea. It is healthy even for couples who have been together for a long time to keep creating new examples of “our song,” or “our place,” or pet names. These are ways to quickly pull up positive feelings, and then make them stronger every time they are experienced. It is especially powerful to create a private gesture, like a gentle touch of the face, that is only done when there is a strong positive feeling, or when there is conflict and a need to reconnect.

4. If you are in a relationship, the research shows that one of the most important predictors of the relationship continuing is whether or not you give each other the benefit of the doubt. If she/he is late, what does that mean? Is it thoughtlessness, or just probably bad traffic? Are you angry, or just concerned? Focus on positive interpretations, the way you did at the beginning of the relationship.

5. What about for people not yet in relationships? Is it true that you can attract the person of your dreams just by imagining them?

The best way to attract the person of your dreams is to become the kind of person that they are dreaming about! After you imagine them, ask yourself, what kind of person would I need to be in order to be attractive to a person like that? If you are imagining that they are patient and compassionate, do you think that they would be attracted by those characteristics themselves? Then practice those behaviors and emotions.

6. What about for people being affected by bad relationship memories, whether currently in a relationship or single?

Memories of a bad relationship can haunt a new relationship, or make people reluctant to even try again. An easy visualization exercise can be very effective in reducing the power of old memories. Whenever the memory comes up, just imagine the picture fading away, turning the colors to black and white or gray, making the picture dim and fuzzy, and pushing the image off to the horizon. You will be surprised how the emotions will fade as well, allowing you to replace the image with a positive memory or hopeful picture of the future.

Remember that your brain is easily conditioned by repeated thoughts. Take action to make sure that when you think about future love, or you look into your lover’s eyes, you are reminded of the good times, and you let the bad times fade away!

See Brad’s previous appearance on AMNW, talking about the brain and New Year’s Resolutions.

The problem with most people’s New Year’s resolutions is that they don’t reflect how our brains work. What can we do to “re-wire” our brains to make this New Year different from all the rest?

First, throw out the term “New Year’s Resolutions!” Our brains are wired by the experience of previous years to associate “resolutions” with failure. We start out not believing we are really going to follow through!

This year, let’s make “New Year’s Promises!” This fires off our brain wiring that is associated with keeping promises, and feeling good about it. To keep those promises, we need to focus on four areas:

1. Manage our language: We want to make sure that the promise is about the behavior, and not the goal. “Work out 3 times a week” is fine, but “lose 20 pounds” is not. Promise what we can control. Also, frame all of our language in a positive manner, that allows our brain to create an image of what we want. To the brain, “I don’t want to be fat,” and “I want to be fat,” both call up the same image – fat!

2. Get support: Promises and commitments are made to someone, often someone other than ourselves. This introduces an element of accountability that is absent in New Year’s resolutions. Make your New Year’s promise to someone, or preferably several “someones.” Be clear about your commitment, and ask them to hold you accountable. If you really want motivation, consider including in your “promisees” that annoying co-worker or relative who will be sure to rag you about it all year if you don’t “keep your promise.”

3. Maximize the repetitions: Lots of people fail on their New Year’s resolutions primarily because they just don’t do it long enough to make it a habit. They also don’t stop doing their other habits which interfere with their new habit. Focus on the next 21 days, making sure that you take at least one action each day that specifically supports your promise. As you take the action, focus on the fact that you are doing this action because you are committed to keeping your promise.

4. Involve visualization: Vivid visualization actually fires off many of the same neurons as the activity itself. This is a great way to increase your repetitions. On your non-workout days, you can visualize successfully navigating the most difficult part of the process for most people – getting out of the house and heading for the gym! (For a different promise, like stopping smoking, the difficult part might be a particular time of day.)

Here is a daily framework that incorporates all the elements. Every day:

• Write your promise again, while visualizing what you will feel like when you have kept it.
• Write down one action you will take that day to move you toward the promise.
• Have someone hold you accountable to the daily commitment, someone to whom you will report every day on whether or not you completed that one action.

Follow these steps to use your brain for a “Happy New You!”

The next step in being successful in keeping a resolution, or a promise, is that we have to maximize our repetitions. Lots of people fail on their New Year’s resolutions primarily because they just don’t do it long enough to make it a habit. They also don’t stop doing their other habits which interfere with their new habit.

There has been lots of publicity about the 21 day period for changing your brain. The publicity is well deserved, even if there are subtleties not captured by the concept. 21 days allows for the benefit of neurogenesis, with the assignment of newly grown neurons to the rewiring neural net. It also allows for the repeated firing of the set of neurons, which supports their strengthened wiring.

How do we get 21 days of repetition, especially for behaviors that can’t happen every day? Let’s use our example from before, a new commitment of working out three times a week. How can we make this into a 21 day process?

When we begin to look carefully at this commitment, we can realize that there are lots of elements beyond the actual three days per week when we will work out. We can assign these across the 21 days. These can include actions like:

Get a gym membership
buy gym clothes
schedule the three days a week on the calendar
Find a “gym buddy”
Etc.

Additionally, once we realize the importance of taking some action to support our promise every day for at least the first 21 days, we can figure out sets of supportive actions. For example, we might decide to stretch on the days when we don’t work out. Or, we could add a brief core workout on the alternate days, and take only one day a week off from some form of a workout. The important factor is not what we do, but how we do it. Every one of the daily actions should be taken while thinking about the three day a week promise. We should link the daily action to our fulfillment of our promise! We should be thinking about the promise, and how we are doing this action because we are a person who keeps our promises. In our mind, and in our brain, we are wiring the new identity every day. Thus we benefit from the “21 day principle” of managing our brain.

I want to comment just for a moment on some exceptions to the 21 day principle. We have all experienced that sometimes we can create a habit with just one powerful experience. This is the basis of trauma, as well as “love at first sight.” Sometimes experiences are so strong that we seem to “get it” after just one repetition, or at least in much less than 21 days.

You can think of the underlying principle as “duration times intensity.” Average intensity repeated over a duration of 21 days is one way to create a habit. If you want to do it in a shorter time period, you have to increase the intensity of the experience.

Let me give you an astounding example of how this works in the brain. Most people realize that people who have been blind from birth have differences in their brain. This wasn’t always accepted. Some of the first studies to be able to measure the activity in the visual cortex of blind adults expected it to be atrophied from lack of use. To the contrary, they discovered that the visual cortex in blind people has been reassigned to other activities. Their visual cortex is active during tactile activities, in particular the reading of Braille, and contributes to peripheral hearing, and both tactile and auditory memory. With more brain areas dedicated to these activities, they are able to use them to navigate better without vision.

The astounding fact is that this can happen much more quickly than most people realize. If you took a random selection of sighted individuals and put them in an environment with absolutely no light, it would take between three and five days for their brain to begin to reassign the visual cortex to tactile and auditory functions! If there is any light at all no change would happen, but in absolute darkness the brain quickly changes to respond to the intensely different demands. And it doesn’t take 21 days. Our brains are capable of amazing change.

We have to be careful to understand this correctly when we apply it to our New Year’s Promise. The temptation could be to want to increase the intensity of the experience by making the first workout four hours instead of just one! This is not the same kind of intensity. That is actually just practicing something different than we really want to develop. The important intensity is emotional intensity. That is what is captured in the “linking” I mentioned earlier. We increase the intensity of each of the seemingly insignificant steps by linking it in our imagination to complete promise, and the feelings we get from being someone who keeps our promises.

In my last post I talked about the importance of the brain’s wiring, and using language that taps into wiring that supports our desired behavior. We want to manage our language by making “New Year’s Promises!”

We also want to make sure that the promise is about the behavior, and not the goal. “Work out 3 times a week” is fine, but “lose 20 pounds” is not. That is the goal; the promise should be about behavior that is designed to accomplish the goal. If we fulfill that promise, but didn’t get the goal, then we can make a new promise, with the new information. Importantly, we will have demonstrated to ourselves that we are going to do what we say we will do. It is important that the promise be only things that we have control over. This is helped by calling it a “promise.” Here is a sports metaphor. In baseball, a batter that goes to the plate with the focus on hitting a home run, or even getting a hit, is doomed from the beginning. There are too many factors outside of his control, and the focus on the outcome prevents him from focusing on the process. However, if he focuses on the elements of the at bat that will most likely, over time, result in the most hits, then he is good shape. He can make a commitment to himself, and his coach, to do that, and it can be measured.

This brings us back to our New Year’s “promises.” Promises and commitments are made to someone, often someone other than ourselves. This introduces an element of accountability that is absent in New Year’s resolutions. Make your New Year’s promise to someone, or preferably several “someones.” Be clear about your commitment, and ask them to hold you accountable. The brilliant Tony Robbins suggests a variation for the strong of heart – make your commitment to two different kinds of people. First, to those who are going to support you and cheer for you, and second, to those who are going to hope you fail, and who will be sure to rub your face in it. Include in your “promisees” that annoying co-worker who will be sure to rag you about it all year if you don’t “keep your promise.” This is a way to increase the awareness of the consequences, and to activate another very powerful neural net – one that can give us lots of motivation.

Here is another variation. The wonderful business mentor Keith Cunningham says that you can change your life any time of the year, in three steps. Here is a modified version of his recommendations.

Every day:

1. Write your promise again, while visualizing what you will feel like when you have kept it.
2. Write down one action you will take that day to move you toward the promise.
3. Have someone hold you accountable to the daily commitment, someone to whom you will report every day on whether or not you completed that one action.

This process incorporates the next two steps in managing change in a “brain optimized” fashion, repetition and visualization. I’ll cover those steps tomorrow. Until then, use your brain for a new you!

Welcome to the Lifetime Optimization Blog! We are kicking off the blog with the announcement that I (Brad) will be on the KATU show AM Northwest on Monday January 9. The show starts at 9:00 AM. My topic will be: New Year’s Resolutions and the Brain!

I will be sharing related content about New Year’s Resolutions here in my blog for the next few days, and then posting the AMNW segment after Monday.

The problem with most people’s New Year’s resolutions is that they don’t reflect how our brains work. Our brains are set up for change, and therefore support us in new actions, but how we go about it really matters.

As recently as 30 years ago the consensus in neuroscience was that people’s brains didn’t change after early childhood. Now it is recognized that our brains change everyday, that we are constantly rewiring our brains. This is called “neuro-plasticity.” “Plastic” means “changeable.” This is the good news for resolutions for behavior change – our brains are already changing in response to our daily thoughts, emotions, and actions. The bad news for behavior change is the way our brain manages that rewiring. Our brains’ neural nets, collections of interconnected neurons, are self-organizing systems. That means that they are developed in response to input, and then new inputs are processed through the wiring created by the old inputs. This is what can make it difficult to move to new paradigms, new beliefs, and radically new behaviors ……like New Year’s resolutions.

The brain actually changes, almost imperceptibly, in response to every thought, emotion, and action. The neuroscience manta is “neurons that fire together wire together,” and this “wiring together” has a particular purpose. The brain is preparing to be able to better handle what it expects in the future, and its expectations are based on the past. Whatever it has experienced leaves a trace, so that the brain can do it better the next time. Thus every time we have a thought, we contribute to the path for that thought, so that it is easier to do the next time. Similarly, with emotions and actions – they all prepare us to do it the same way in the future.

The problem with New Year’s resolutions in particular is that we have a well developed neural net that has been formed by our understanding of New Year’s resolutions. We have fired off a particular set of neurons many times around the New Year. When we make a New Year’s resolution, we are making a “resolution” that we already don’t expect to keep! Let me give you an example to make it clear. Let’s suppose that on May 1 you decide to start going to the gym, and work out 3 times a week. You buy the gym membership, you tell your spouse about this new commitment, you put it on Facebook. You go to the gym on May 1, and on May 2, and then you don’t go again. By the end of that first week, your spouse is going to be saying, “hey, don’t you need to go one more time this week?” In the second week, or at least the third week, your Facebook friends, those few who actually pay attention to your status updates, are going to be saying, “hey what’s going on with the new workout plan?” By the end of the month your spouse might even say, “you’re wasting your money on that gym membership,” or even, “why did you say you were going to do that if you weren’t going to?” Compare that to a New Year’s resolution. You go on January 1, and maybe January 2. Nobody pays attention on Facebook because everybody is making resolutions and nobody is reading anybody else’s very carefully. By the end of the first week, when you don’t go the third time, you may already be joking with your friends about who gave up on their resolutions fastest. But nobody is upset with you, not even your spouse, because, “hey, it was a New Year’s resolution!” Nobody, not even you, really believed you were going to do it!

So, what can we do about this, if we understand how our brains work?

First, throw out the term “New Year’s Resolutions!” Our brains are wired by the experience of previous years to associate “resolutions” with failure. We start out not believing we are really going to follow through.

This year, let’s make “New Year’s Promises!” This fires off our brain wiring that is associated with keeping promises, and feeling good about it. To keep those promises, we need to focus on four areas:

They are:

1. Manage our language
2. Get support
3. Maximize our repetitions
4. Involve visualization and imagination

Check back tomorrow to hear about how we can manage our language to best use our current neural nets and rewire our brain for results!