How to solve your problems while sleeping? To put it simply, it is your brain continuing, while you sleep, to work on the issues and problems that matter to you. Your brain performs many functions while you sleep, and productive thinking can be one of them. But in order for your brain to work in an optimal way, it has certain needs; for example, it needs to know what it’s being asked to do. You can meet these needs in a simple, straightforward way.
The extraordinary thing that brain can do while you sleep is THINK. It does this primarily during NREM (nonrapid eye movement) sleep. There are two types of sleep: REM sleep, during which most dreaming occurs, and NREM sleep, during which slower wave, higher frequency brain activity occurs.
How sleep thinking can help you
- Helping you to solve a practical problem, how to manage your time more effectively, or handle any one of the other countless problems that dominate our lives.
- It can help you to work more deeply and effectively on a creative project like a novel, painting, play, story, scientific theory, professional article, workshop presentation, or any other enterprise that requires that you access your creative potential.
- Guide in solving mental health problem (such as depression or anxiety), reduce the stress in your life, learn stress management skills, deal with psychological issues (such as mental confusion, obsessive thinking, or self-sabotaging behaviours).
- Improve your relationships (both your personal and your professional ones), learn how to communicate more effectively, be more loving, react less critically or angrily to other people’s behaviours, let go of grudges more quickly, or improve some other aspect of your relational life.
Stages of sleep
- NREM (nonrapid eye movement) sleep is further into four stages. The time between stage one of NREM sleep to the first REM sleep is called the first sleep cycle. There are usually about four or five such cycles a night, each lasting about ninety minutes.
- It is during the NREM portions of the sleep cycle, and especially during stages two, three, and four, when sleeping is deepest that thinking and problem solving occurs.
- Scientists have discovered that a large amount of high-level activity, including thinking and problem solving, occurs during these stages of sleep.
| Activity | Wake | Light sleep | Deep sleep which gives toe most productivity | Dream sleep |
| Eye Movement (EOG) | Lots, plus loads of blinking! | blinking! Less . . . slow and rolling | None | Rapid eye movements seen (hence the name REM) |
| Brain Waves (EEG) | Fast and short | Slower and a bit taller | Very slow and really tall | Fast and short, similar to Wake |
| Muscle Activity (EMG) | Lots | Less | Less | None |
Key Steps for putting use your sleep for doing your most critical jobs
- Brainstorm current issues and questions and write in your personnel diary. Put aside fifteen to thirty minutes in absolute peace and start writing key issues which you need to solve. The fifteen minutes that it takes to sit with yourself and generate a “master list” of current issues and questions is a tremendous use of your time and an activity that breaks through your defences and get imprinted in your subconscious mind. Your brain begins to make important connections, ones that it will continue to play with and work on while you sleep. It’s possible to think without a particular issue or question in mind but it’s more productive to identify issues that concern you. Then ask yourself questions about them and select one question from your list to use as your sleep thinking prompt.
- Restructure your bedtime so that you’re prepared to sleep think. Your bedtime habits, especially your habits of mind, affect how well you sleep think. How you approach sleep will affect how productively you sleep think. Fall asleep with wonder, not a worry. When you go to sleep worrying, you’re inviting anxiety dreams—or even nightmares—rather than sleep thought. An important part of the sleep productive program is learning how to enter sleep more meditatively, gently wondering about your sleep thinking question rather than worrying about some life stressor. When you master this change, you’ll also have mastered a useful stress reduction technique.
- Record your thoughts which awaken you. Sleep thinking produces thought. The brain may deliver up that thought in dreams or not in dreams, in the morning when you awake, or insistently in the middle of the night. People are not used to accepting their own night thoughts; they may find them annoying and disturbing or even frightening. So one of the tasks of the sleep productive program is to learn to accept that you may be awakened at night by your thoughts. Then your job is to get up and record them.
- Make sense of the information you receive. Sometimes your sleep thoughts will be very clear to you; you will know exactly what they mean and exactly what you’re supposed to do with them. But just as often the information isn’t obvious; it feels more like tantalizing clues that must be unravelled if you’re to solve the mystery.
In conclusions
What you learn from your sleep thinking needs to be applied to your life problems, intellectual problems, or creative problems in order to prove useful. You may learn that to change course at work you have to bring new confidence to the job, but you may have a lot of thinking to do in order to figure out how you’ll go about acting more confidently.
- Keeping track of your progress. In your sleep thinking journal, you’ll be making many kinds of entries. You’ll record meaningful dreams, issues that are present in your life, sleep thoughts, plans for change, and so on. You’ll also want to keep track of your progress as you work to solve your problems. This ongoing self-analysis serves as a record of your progress and alerts you to any new or additional work that may be needed.
- Napping in the day for continuing the thinking process. Many of the things you learn in the sleep thinking steps can be effectively applied to your thinking processes while you’re awake. You can begin to “catnap” think as you take a moment right in the middle of your busy day to frame a question, present it to yourself as a wonder, and surrender to your natural ability to problem solve. In this way, you turn the sleep thinking program into a complete problem-solving program, increasing not only your sleep thinking skills but also all of your critical thinking skills.