Reaching your sleep goals can be hard. When you don’t succeed, it can be difficult to figure out why. Sometimes the circumstances or the situation are to blame and it’s easy to see. Other times, it’s not so easy to find the cause of your poor sleep. Have you ever wondered if it might be YOU? Could you be holding yourself back from enjoying a good night’s sleep? It’s more common than you’d think for people to sabotage themselves in this way. What’s behind it? Something called limiting beliefs.
What’s a limiting belief?
The human brain thinks in stories. Your mind holds an almost infinite number of stories about the world around you and about the people that you know in your unconscious mind. It also holds many stories or beliefs about you, some of which are healthy and some of which not so. A limiting belief is one of the latter. It’s a story about yourself that you believe, specifically one that isn’t (or shouldn’t be) true.
Everyone has limiting beliefs, yet not everyone has limiting beliefs about their sleep experience. Limiting beliefs are normal and part of being human. The number of limiting beliefs in the world is unlimited because every person is different and has different experiences and personalities. Some limiting beliefs are common, such as the fear of failure, while others might be unique to only a select few, like sleep.
Examples of limiting beliefs you might hold include things such as “I’m too old to try a new sleep strategy,” “Nobody will believe I don’t sleep well,” “I can’t work intensely because my insomnia will ruin it for me” and “Why bother trying when I haven’t succeeded to sleep well so far?” None of these limiting beliefs are objectively true, but the human brain isn’t rational, and if you hold one of these beliefs in your subconscious, your brain is going to try and make them true.
3 Categories of limiting beliefs
All limiting beliefs fall into three categories; limiting beliefs about yourself, limiting beliefs about other people, and limiting beliefs about the world. Some can be placed into more than one category, and some might move from one category to another based on whether they’re about you or other people, but these are the three basic categories.
- Limiting beliefs about yourself
Most limiting beliefs are personal. They are limiting beliefs you hold about yourself, about who and what you are, what you can and can’t do. They’re your beliefs about what your limits are and how far you can go in life. Now, while it’s true that you do have real limits -most people can’t make it into the astronaut corps, for example, and no one is going to become Batman anytime soon -most of them aren’t true, that’swhy they’re limiting beliefs.
Here are some examples: “I fail at everything I try.” “I’m no good at managing a regular bedtime” “I can’t sleep after an argument” “I’m too young/too old.” “I’m not worthy of love.”
- Limiting beliefs about other people
This is the second-largest category of limiting beliefs. These are the limiting beliefs you hold about other people -what other people are like, how they act, what they believe, etc. Again, while some of the beliefs you hold about other people are true, the limiting beliefs are demonstrably false and harm your ability to have healthy relationships with them.
Here are a few examples: “Everyone sleeps better than me.” “No one can be trusted.” “No one wants a loving relationship anymore.” “People with sleep apnea are overweight.” “Everyone’s trying to sell me something.”
- Limiting beliefs about the world
Finally, this category contains your limiting beliefs about the world and how it works. Everyone has a different worldview. Some of the things in it are real, some aren’t, and some are limiting beliefs. Here are a few examples from this category:
“You can’t succeed unless you know the right people.” “It’s too difficult to get ahead these days.” “I can’t find a job in a recession.” “There’s so much competition, why bother?” “There are no more opportunities for me here.”
The result of limiting beliefs about yourself is self-sabotage. Your subconscious attempts to make the stories it believes about you true. So, you sabotage your sleep routine, hit the snooze button repeatedly instead of changing your alarm time, or let yourself stay up late watching TV when you know you should be in bed sleeping, all in service to something your subconscious believes. It turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Unless you overcome your limiting beliefs around sleep.
What should you do about your limiting beliefs around sleep?
The first thing you must do to get over your limiting beliefs is to recognize and acknowledge them. What sleep stories are you telling yourself? Once you recognize the stories you’re telling yourself about your poor sleep experiences then you can start to address them. To start addressing your sleep stories, choose one and recognize that is just that – a story. One that isn’t true and doesn’t need to become true. Once you’ve reached this point, you need to create a new story for that story. For example, if your limiting belief is “I can’t sleep without 4 glasses of wine,” then you need to change it to “I can sleep without drinking any wine,” or perhaps you need something softer, “I can sleep with only drinking 2 glasses of wine,” and then over time change that story to “I can sleep without drinking any wine.” Repeat it over and over to yourself until you start to believe it and whenever you feel the doubt creeping in.
And if you have many limiting beliefs about your sleep experience, then address each one at a time, which can be simultaneously or you can choose the most impactful 3 and start there.
Limiting beliefs are not always easy to overcome, but it can be done. There is no need to let the negative stories about your sleep experience in your subconscious mind define you!
If you would like to figure why your sleep isn’t as good as it could be then book in a sleepwell planning call with me and we can explore what is working and what other strategies you might need to try.
