Sleep is important we don't have to stress more on that, do we? The obvious thing that stands between you and your deep sleep is your thoughts. The problem is not that we don't know this fact but rather it is we don't know how to sort them. The first stage I always tell my clients is to observe and label them. There are 9 different ways in which we make our-self sleepless.
1) “Should” statements: The most common patterns that are extremely unhelpful “Should” and “shouldn’t”. They somehow compare us with a idealized Target or goal. Then we're likely to feel insufficient and disappointed in ourselves if we don't measure up. Telling yourself, I should be able to fall asleep quickly and stay asleep all night will likely lead to frustration and agitation because it is not actually reality. Observe your should statements.
2) Catastrophizing: is the worst outcome of a scenario you can or can't foresee. If I don't get to sleep, you say to yourself, I can't work, and I'll lose my job. When you've taken hold of this thinking and blown the problem into something enormous, you feel the emotional impact like the worst has already happened. Find ways to decatastrophize.
3) Labeling: Another question can be overcome by adding a negative label to a situation— or you— by making a transient occurrence a permanent feature. You might say that this is overwhelming and then describe yourself as "a despairing insomniac," that can easily result in feelings of helplessness.
4) Fortune telling Error: means that you expect things to always go badly and that your forecasts are accurate. You tell yourself I will never be able to sleep again for a good night. Ironically, if we believe that something really is true, our behavior can indeed unconsciously change in ways that actually lead to our negative predictions. A sad situation for someone who had suffered already.
5) Disqualifying the positive: Positive things in our life can be easily discounted and overshadowed through our negative beliefs. We had a good night's sleep during holidays, but we discount it like a fluke and tell ourselves "it will never happen again".
6) Mood-congruent memory disturbances arise when the current mood impacts memory. You are more likely, for example, to remember other times in your life if you feel anxious, worried or nervous, and ignore these occasions when you feel calm and comfortable. You tend to overestimate how anxious, nervous or concerned you feel about your life and allow those circumstances to describe you. This can lead to other feelings such as, I don't have any treatment working for me and I have already done it all.
7) Magnification and minimisation: arise when our own screwups are minimized and the successes of other individuals are distorted. We call ourselves "the complete idiot," if we stayed up reading Facebook too late, but if someone else does the same thing, we tell them,"Oh, you're just sucked in the satire and cute kittens of all of those stuff. Not a great deal. It can be difficult to see ourselves as anything but weaker than others if we have different standards for ourselves than for others.
8) Hall of mirror : We equate our insides with the outsides of others in a comparable way. We have no access to their thinking and understanding, but we have to do it for ourselves. Outsides of people are usually much stronger than insides as they try to put a good face on them.
9) Personalization is the form of thought that suggests that bad things happen in our lives, because we are irreparably flawed. The positive things that happen to us are therefore devalued— we give our success a chance, or are at the right place, while we believe it is because we are naturally less good that things happen to us. There can also seem to be an explanation to why events that occur to us are not as good as those that occur to others, regardless of what we do.
These are easily applied distortions in out thinking when it comes to sleep. You might be having more to it. Try to journal your thoughts if you remember them. Don't be adamant to remember them. You can come up with your own filters of distortions that you apply. Do comment below what is the most prevent thought disturbance you feel.