Music. Welcome to Mr. and Mrs. Therapy, the podcast that empowers you to transform life's challenges into opportunities for personal growth and healthier relationships. We're your hosts, Tim and Ruth Olson, licensed marriage and family therapists and trauma experts. As experienced therapists with backgrounds in addressing trauma and mental health disorders, we believe there is hope and there certainly is healing.
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Hey everyone, welcome back to Mr. and Mrs. Therapy Podcast. We're so glad that you're here with us today. In the last episode, we talked a little bit about the pink elephant and how if there's a problem or there's something you want to stop thinking about, it's not helpful to keep reminding yourself to stop thinking about it, right? So we talked about the pink elephant and how if I said, hey, there's a pink elephant, don't think about it. And for two minutes, I set a timer.
And the whole time I was like, hey, don't think about the pink elephant. It has a tutu, it has sunglasses, stop thinking about the pink elephant. How that's really not helpful at all, because all we end up doing is thinking about the thing we want to stop thinking about. So instead of running from something or forcing yourself to stop thinking about something, you want to think about something else.
So today we're going to talk about a technique that could help you sleep, but it's also so useful throughout the day as well. And we wanted to do this back to back with the pink elephant because the pink elephant reminds me of sometimes when you're sleeping and you wake up in the middle of the night and you think, oh my gosh, I can't go to sleep. And you look at the time and that's frustrating and how people will just keep
looking at the watch or keep saying, I can't sleep. Why can't I sleep? I need to sleep. And then it reminds me of just that idea of counting sheep, how really you're thinking of something totally different rather than sleep. you're not trying to force yourself to go to sleep. You're distracting yourself with something else. And so this technique isn't counting sheep, but it is an excellent technique that will help your mind to think about something else and not think about what the problem is.
And in doing so, it'll help you get back to sleep. It'll relax you. It'll take your mind away from the problem. And so whether you have trouble sleeping or you know someone that has trouble sleeping, make sure that you share this technique with them. Make sure you share this episode with them so that we can all get a good night's rest. Now, one of the things I want to say about counting sheep, I think, is that it's a little bit too simplistic.
And because it's too simple, it's easy for your mind to simultaneously count your sheep, but then also think about something else. And so I've definitely tried this technique in the past. And me, my personality type, I'm a J. And so I think, oh, what happens if I get to the end and then I'm not asleep yet? So if I go from 100 to 1 and I'm still awake, then what am I going to do? Now, an obvious easy answer is you could just start over again.
For my mind, just even thinking about it's like, oh, I'm able to think about these two things at the same time. So ultimately, what's happening is the technique isn't really accomplishing what we needed to accomplish, which is taking all those thoughts that you were just saying there, Ruth, and being able to push them outside of our mind to be able to take our focus and completely set it on something else.
And I remember hearing somebody talk about sleeping and worrying, just like you were saying about trying to fall asleep and then, oh, I need to sleep. Oh my gosh, I'm only going to get so much sleep if I fall asleep now. I need to fall asleep now. And then you're thinking all about that. And I really liked a little bit of the reframe that they did where they just said, hey, listen, just start telling yourself, it's okay, I might not be sleeping, but I'm resting my body.
I'm still getting rest, I might not be getting, it might not be as good as sleeping, but it's better than being up and running around and doing a bunch of stuff. And so it tries to work down some of the anxiety on that. But what we're going to do is we're going to be taking you even a step further, what we're going to be doing is trying to help you completely eliminate both those swirling or intrusive thoughts, as well as reducing or eliminating the feeling of anxiety when it comes to sleeping.
And essentially, this is how this technique goes. And I'd seen this on a video a couple weeks ago, and I thought, oh, that's really interesting. And so I wanted to test it one night. And so I was laying in bed, not that I was necessarily having a hard time falling asleep, but I was like, let me try this technique. I'm curious about it. And so I sat there and I did the technique for a little bit. And then I realized, I was like, oh, I was doing it for five or six minutes or something.
I was like, oh, man, I feel actually wildly relaxed. And I was actually very shocked by it. Now, what you essentially do is you think about the alphabet and you just pick one letter in the alphabet. And so let's say I pick the letter S. And then what I'm going to do after I pick that letter S is then I'm going to pick a word associated with S. Because I'm thinking about sleep, I'm going to go with sheet. And so I'm thinking about sheets.
And when you think about that word, you're going to stop and you're going to visualize that word. Okay, S is sheets. I'm going to see sheets in my mind. And then what you're going to do is you're going to go down that word and each letter in that word, you're going to pick a new word associated with that letter.
And so we have s for sheet and then now we're going to go on to h and so then i'm going to go on to h and with h i'm going to think hippopotamus and then i'm going to stop and i'm going to visualize a hippopotamus in my mind and then i'm going to go on to e and i'm going to stop and i'm going to think about an egg i might think about a chicken egg or quail egg or duck egg or whatever egg you can kind of think about and you just keep
going through each letter of the word and you pick a new word associated with that first letter and when you're stopping and you're taking that time to visualize and you're thinking about, okay, what was my original word? Okay, what's the next letter? Okay, what's the next word I'm going to associate with that letter? It takes up so much more brain power than just counting backwards and thinking about sheep.
And because it takes so much more brain power, it makes it way more difficult to think about anything else other than that task that you're currently working on. And so then as a result of you not thinking about worrying about falling asleep or thinking about any worries throughout the day, you are just sitting there in focusing on this task.
Now, one of the things, and I thought this when I first started, I thought, man, it's going to require so much brain power that's actually going to keep me up and make me stay awake trying to work on it. And I think I had gone through about three words before I kind of paused and I had stopped. And that's when I had realized like, oh, I actually feel way more relaxed.
Now, I didn't fall asleep in the process of doing it. But going through this process caused my brain to be in a much more relaxed state. And then after I had finished the process, process that's when shortly after I stopped doing it like I don't remember anything I just fell asleep probably within a minute of me finishing this technique. So I can hear some of the listeners probably saying okay after I got through all of sheet now what do I do?
And the simple answer is just pick another letter go through it until you get that relaxed feeling at the end where you stop and you're like oh I feel quite relaxed and then at that point then it's just close your eyes and then try to fall asleep.
You can also use this throughout the day. Like I said in the beginning, that if you are having thoughts or you just cannot stop thinking about a problem and you're ruminating on it, that you can also use the same technique and not necessarily go to sleep. But to help you refocus your mind and get away from the thing that you're trying to stop thinking of. And so this goes along with the order of operations that we were talking about in the last episode.
If you're anxious or upset about something or there's a problem you need to solve and you don't know how to solve it, first you got to deal with and manage your emotions. And this is a great technique that you can use basically anywhere where it's like, hey, I am struggling a little bit. I can't manage my emotions. Okay, I'm just going to pick a letter in the alphabet and then pick a word associated with that letter. And then work down each letter of that word all the way through till the end.
And I'll just keep doing that until I feel a sense of calm at the end. And again, this is a pretty simple technique, but it is something that can be very powerful with helping you to manage some levels of anxiety. I would definitely say this probably wouldn't be terribly effective with a panic attack because you're a little bit too far down the anxiety train for that.
But for normal levels of worry or anxiety, This can be a very powerful thing to just really help your mind move away from something that you're stuck on thinking about.
And even if it's not an anxious thought, even if you're just thinking about something that really is kind of holding your attention, you're like, man, I'm having a hard time falling asleep because of that last episode of the show I just watched or because of this last chapter of this book that I just read and it's really engrossed me and I can't get my mind off of it. It can help you to address those types of thought also.
And it's actually really interesting. A part of the reason in this video that they gave for why this is effective, I'm pretty sure this is their theory behind it, but a reason why it was effective was that they said that this kind of mirrors how your brain operates when you're sleeping, where your brain comes up with and has images. And a lot of times it can be kind of random images or things that are kind of stuck into scenes that don't necessarily make a lot of sense.
And so as you're going through and you're you're choosing a word based on each letter, you're getting very random or very different images that you're then coming up with. And so then it helps kind of mimic that sensation that your brain has when it's sleeping. And so your brain then goes into this more calm and more relaxed state. All right, guys, that's about all the time that we have for today. Thank you so much for taking the time to listen to our podcast today.
And we want to remind you that your mind is a powerful thing. Thank you so much for tuning in to this episode of Mr. and Mrs. Therapy. We hope that you enjoyed today's episode and found it helpful. If so, would you take 30 seconds and share it with a friend? Also, we'd love for you to leave us a review on Apple Podcast. Podcast. It lights us up to know that this podcast is helping you. If you have any questions or a topic you'd like discussed in future episodes,
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