Mindfulness for Worry & Insomnia

by Daron Larson

Learn how to take breaks from your story and get some rest

Most of us feel certain that we think and worry more than most people. When our minds are busy in the middle of the night when we’d rather be sleeping, it’s easy to convince ourselves that some personal flaw is to blame.

There have been many times in my life when I’ve been sure that some problem I was struggling with had a solution that would be obvious to someone else. This is especially true when I’ve had to make an important decision. The answer seems to be waiting for me to earn it through strenuous thinking, considering every angle, and weighing every possible outcome of my potential choices.

Our minds crave problems to chew on. But all that thinking can get in the way of resting. Part of what drove me to explore mindfulness more rigorously was an experience I had on vacation in New Mexico. I was hiking in a beautiful desert, soaking in hot mineral baths, and getting massages. in spite of all the delicious exogenous luxuries, my mind was busy trying to solve the challenges waiting for me back at work.

I haven’t transcended the impulse to get caught up in worse-case scenarios since that time, but over the years I’ve learned to recognize and remember that I have options. Before I was completely at the mercy of my reactions. Now when something is eating at me I can give into it and let it drive the show, I can use it as a way to get more intimately familiar with the interplay of my thoughts and feelings, or I can intentionally focus on unrelated sensory experiences while the mental and emotional waves churn in the background.

This is not because of some genetic talent. I’m a natural born worrier from a lineage of habitually anxious fretters. My people have been torturing themselves with their imagination for centuries. But just as I made a conscious decision to cultivate healthier habits of eating and exercise, I’ve decided to change my relationship to what it feels like to be alive through the consistent development of my attentional fitness.

Anybody can do this, but it will look different in each person. Some of us are driven more by our feelings while others rely on reasoning and logic. My goal is to introduce possible exercises for you to explore based on your interests and what you are most likely to practice. My other goal is to break down some of the common obstacles that convince people it’s not possible to erode these habits.

Most of these obstacles relate to having unrealistic expectations about what the exercises should feel like. People attend a meditation class hoping to feel relaxed or to turn off their thoughts. These are realistic long-term outcomes, but I’ve never found it productive to shoot for them. It’s better to focus on the exercises themselves and let the results reveal themselves in their own time. Don’t get me wrong. The results can blow your mind. But anxiously anticipating them will prevent you from experiencing them. Part of the game is simply savoring subtle shifts as we get better at noticing them.

Think of someone who has decided to quit smoking. The smoking has become a deeply ingrained habit with many negative consequences, but it provides reliable hits of short-term comfort. When people decide to stop smoking, we know that they face a significant challenge. They will experience some benefits right away, but to really impact their health, they have to learn to forego numbing of the spikes of physical and emotional urges by experiencing them without acting on them — hundreds and thousands of times.

Do you think making this kind of change is worth it in spite of the high degree of challenge? Have you experienced something like this challenge in your own life? Consider how you might advise someone who was asking for encouragement in the midst of developing new habits. Consider what have encouraged you enough to commit to something for the long haul.

Mindfulness strategies can be powerful, but they are not quick fixes. They require consistent practice. We are drawn to the promise of immediate relief. We long for a pill that can bring relief. But these interventions typically address the surface or symptoms of deeper issues. Mindfulness addresses suffering at this level — at the root of the problem. What lurks at the root stimulates the proliferation of all the compelling story problems we find so irresistible.

Mindfulness is not therapy or a replacement for therapy or other interventions. It is, however, a tool that can strengthen the potential benefit of other strategies. Therapy is concerned with the personal narrative. Mindfulness is interested in the composition of these stories, what they are comprised of: images, sounds, and feelings.

When we start paying attention to the direct experience of our lives, we start to make some fascinating observations. Without direct awareness, we unconsciously move towards comfort and certainty and away from discomfort and confusion. This happens at all levels: from relationships, careers, and deciding where to live and vacation, to the moment-by-moment experience of breathing, moving, eating, and even thinking. It’s fascinating how rarely we pause to evaluate the effectiveness of these aims.

• What’s the impact of my urge to avoid physical and emotional discomfort?
• How does my relationship to ambiguity and confusion impact the experience of my life?
• Do I feel at home in my life as it is right now or am I waiting for a future sense of well-being that is just around the corner?

Changing our relationship to worry and insomnia can lead to profound insights into these questions and begin to set the stage for experiencing the freedom that comes with having options rather than feeling doomed and trapped.

Options for Relating to Worry and Insomnia

Bringing mindfulness to any experience means intentionally modifying your relationship to it. Adult humans mainly experience their life as if it were a narrative. It feels like each of us is the main character in a story. We remember what has happened in the past and imagine what might happen next. We evaluate ourselves and the world around us. When we are practicing mindfulness, we temporarily suspend the preoccupation with interpretation and meaning.

• We notice what it is like to see instead of thinking about what we see.
• We notice what it is like to hear instead of thinking about what we hear.
• We notice what it is like to feel physical and emotional-type sensations in the body without concern about their significance.

When we realize that we are worrying, we have a choice.

1. Stay caught up in the story itself
2. Try to directly observe the components of thinking and worrying
3. Attempt to let the mental activity play out, but in the background of your awareness

When we worry, we are focused on finding a resolution. Our energy is gobbled up by the urge to solve the problem. We might even notice that our imagination is traveling in loops.

When we are trying to untangle the components of worry, we might observe that there are mental images, verbal thoughts, and emotional sensations in the body that are influencing each other. We can try to highlight one component at a time and observe it for a few seconds or we can get curious about the interplay between them.

Sometimes we’re also able to let the thoughts wind down on their own by deciding to give them less direct attention. This gets easier with practice, but is always challenging because of our taste for getting wrapped up in dramatic memories and fantasies. We can use sights and sounds around us and sometimes sensations in the body (such as the breath or relaxation) to anchor our attention leaving less left over to fuel our thoughts.

When we find ourselves alert in the middle of the night, there could be some of the same types of sensory activities occurring. In this situation, however, we have to decide whether to stay in bed and keep trying to sleep or get up and find a way to pass the time. Either way, we tend to also imagine the impact of the sleeplessness on our ability to carry out our responsibilities the next day.

This counterintuitive approach has proven effective for me and many of my students:

1. Drop the goal of unconsciousness
2. Adopt the goal of getting some rest
3. Develop the ability to notice restful states in a variety of sensory modalities

If there is a problem on your mind when you are awake in the middle of the night, jot a note to yourself with the plan of working on addressing it during the day. Then devote your attention to finding and savoring rest. The nervous system responds to this approach and you can eventually become an expert at building a momentum of rest that can accumulate in much the same way that activity can build up in the mind when we’re engaged in thinking.

With each of the following ideas, try to stick with one for ten-to-twenty minutes before abandoning it. This will help you avoid allowing the exploration to be driven by impatience and panic. If you get bored, investigate your experience of boredom for restful components to exploit.