Note: Please remember, as mentioned in my sitewide disclaimer, I’m not a doctor or otherwise qualified to provide medical advice. This is simply my experience that lead to sleeping better.
I used to have a very hard time falling asleep. I could spend hours laying in bed not sleeping. Sometimes, I just wasn’t tired. Other times, my mind just didn’t want to stop thinking. And when I was younger, it was truly annoying having a bedtime, because the fact was, I was not going to sleep anytime soon.
Eventually, I decided I wasn’t going to strictly abide by a bedtime anymore. Certainly, I would head to my room at the appropriate time and be appropriately quiet. But I got a feel for what volume the TV could be on without anyone hearing outside my room. I listened for when my parents went to bed so I could turn my light on and read. Then, I would play video games, read, and watch TV until I couldn’t hold my eyes open anymore. Then, it was an easy matter to fall asleep. My body just didn’t want to be awake anymore, so it was going to sleep whether I liked it or not.
I liked it way better than trying to sleep on my own. So, for me, the first step was simply to stop trying to sleep when I wasn’t tired. But it wasn’t the end. After all, becoming exhausted in order to fall asleep does get old after awhile, and doesn’t lend itself well to the scheduled lives most people lead. I still had to wake up for school after all.
However, staying awake until I couldn’t anymore had another effect. After falling asleep quickly and easily for a long time, I learned what happens when I go to sleep. Not in a way I can explain, but rather I could observe how I felt going from awake to asleep as I kept just sleeping easily after staying awake for far too long. After seeing how that worked, I eventually learned to just do it whenever I become tired and wanted to sleep. Now, when ever I feel tired and would like to sleep, it’s a simple matter to lay down, close my eyes, and shut down within a few minutes. It’s not perfect mind you. I still get overly stressed and start thinking too much sometimes when I’d rather just get some shut eye. But most of the time, it really is just time to lay down and go to sleep.
So, in short form, if you want to try this:
1) Start staying awake until staying awake is a struggle.
2) Lay down, get comfy, and go to sleep quickly due to being extremely tired.
3) Eventually, after many repetitions of steps one and two, learn to put yourself to sleep by noticing how you go to sleep quickly when extremely tired. This should happen subconsciously.
Naturally, sleep deprivation is considered a bad idea in the medical community, so it would be wise to consult a medical professional first. I wouldn’t expect something horribly bad to come of this so long as you’re smart about knowing your limits (protip: don’t drive after being awake for 24 hours straight), but getting a professional opinion on the matter can’t hurt and could possibly help a lot. It could also catch any issues that might be specific to you if you have any health complications that too little sleep might adversely effect.
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So, awhile back, I wrote a piece about casting spells, how to do it, and how I think it works, along with a couple other ideas on how other people think it works. However, I left out how people who don’t believe in magic think it works. This is the piece that presents their ideas on what is at work.
Say what? People who don’t believe in magic have no reason to think it works, right? Well, right, but they also know that some people do think it works, and sometimes remarkable things happen or seem to happen. So, they’ve studied it and come to some of their own conclusions. Whether or not they’re right about all paranormal effects resulting from these phenomena, you definitely want to know about their insights, because they are all real effects observable in other areas of study, and they are things that you can do to trick yourself into thinking you’re performing some paranormal activity when you aren’t. By no means is this list complete, but it should give you something to think about.
1) Confirmation Bias
This is when you subconsciously pick and choose your evidence. The time you nail the exact card being drawn from a deck of cards sticks out in your mind more than all the times you get the wrong card. That one part of one dream you had (and wrote down), then it happened sticks out compared to all the dreams you had that have never come true. Forcing eight heads in a row to come up out of ten coin tosses, even though most of the time you end up with four to six. Unfortunately, this really doesn’t mean anything, because statistically speaking, that one time is insignificant compared to all the times nothing happened.
Wikipedia’s Article on Confirmation Bias
2) False Memories
Ever have a dream, then something happens just like what happened in the dream, and that causes you to remember the dream you had? If you didn’t write it down, what may have happened is you constructing a false memory instead. It’s actually very common for us to construct false memories, because our memories aren’t anywhere close to perfect. It’s just how we are. Anytime you have a vision, dream, or other prediction of the future, but don’t write it down before the future event happens, it could be you creating a false memory of predicting the event instead.
A News Story on Meta Religion about False Memories
3) The Placebo Effect
Technically speaking, this is something that happens when you think you should be healing, so your body activates systems designed to induce healing. In most clinical trials of new drugs, there are two groups of people told they are receiving the new drug, but one group is given a placebo pill, which is just a capsule containing sugar, milk, and/or other inert substances that don’t provide any medical benefit. And sometimes, people taking placebos show just as much improvement as those taking the real medication on trial, and it’s simply the act of taking a pill causes the body to use it’s own healing systems to take care of the problem.
Now, the first area to look for a placebo effect is in energetic healing. When people go to see a healer, if they fully believe the healer can help them, they actually might. However, the way it happens would be by inducing a placebo effect in the patient which causes their bodies to heal themselves. Obviously, placebo effects don’t cure everything, but they can hit a lot of common ailments that aren’t too serious, and even some serious ailments. To be clear, this is not to say placebos could replace real medicine, however, they are a real effect shown to exist and they are scientifically explainable.
Another area where you might see a “placebo effect” is in general energy manipulation. I put it in quotes because it’s not truly a placebo effect, but a lot of people seem to believe it’s a similar response. Basically, you expect to feel subtle energy, so your body obliges you and provides a tingling sensation to simulate the feeling of subtle energy. Heat, cold, wind, and tingling are all common perceptions to energy manipulators, which makes sense, because people commonly associate these feelings with energy of some kind.
Read about the placebo effect at Science Daily
In Conclusion
The point of this isn’t to say the paranormal does not exist. If you read my site, you know I do believe in paranormal things. Rather, the point is to air some real science that explains at least some of what seems paranormal, and to remind everyone that just because it seems paranormal doesn’t mean it is. In general, people interested in the paranormal are far more easily swayed than those who don’t, because those who are interested are inclined to believe things like “anything is possible” and “you can’t know for sure”. While both of these things are technically true, they are not license to throw out all the knowledge we have, and doing so can lead to problems. So just remember to keep your head about you, and don’t be too quick to label things as paranormal when there may be another explanation.
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Tags: Paranormal, Science