You will access course content by scrolling down for the material. When you complete a lecture, you will just need to hit the button in the upper right-hand corner of the screen. I recommend that you take notes. If you wish, you can download the outline below. You can click the GREEN paperclip icon located BELOW the PDF to download it.

In my intro above, I ended by saying that we need to look at the accuracy of our thoughts. 

There are a lot of thoughts that run through our minds and which change from day to day, depending on what is going on in our lives. We are not going to prevent having thoughts on our minds.

Whether you are thinking about work-life or home-life...or...something important or something trivial, telling yourself to "stop thinking" will not lead you to turn off your thoughts. If have been practicing this approach of telling yourself to "not think about it," then I want you to consider this example: 

Have you ever been told, "Don't think of a pink elephant"? The mere act of telling yourself this tends to make the task of not thinking about a pink elephant harder. You cannot help but think of the image in your mind. 

This process of "not thinking" about something becomes exponentially harder when the topic on your mind is something that is more pressing, more important, or more relevant than a pink elephant.

Now that you know what NOT to do, let's talk about a better alternative.

A good starting place to get control of your thoughts is to be aware of your thoughts about sleep itself. 

Thoughts impact the choices we see ourselves as having, and thus, in the behaviors which we practice. We can lapse into using inaccurate thoughts about sleep, which lead us to feel worse, potentially even leading us to take actions that worsen or contribute to the problem.

Let's take a look at some popular thought errors about sleep.

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Mindset tip: 

I'll include little tips on mindset when they might be relevant to learning a topic. As you work through this section, I want you to check your internal reactions as I review sleep-related thoughts. If any of them spark a response in you, especially if I say anything to which you feel your resistance arising, be aware that it can mean that we have stumbled onto an area that is not serving you well with regard to sleep. If you find yourself making an explanation for why this thought error isn't a thought error, I gently encourage you to reconsider your assumption.

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There are lots of different types of thought errors. Take a look at the image below. Do you ever say any of these to yourself after a bad night of sleep?

Can you see how the statements highlighted are extreme in nature? They have a lot of emotional intensity behind them. That is the easiest way to spot them.

In the next lecture. let's look a little further into some real-life examples of how thought errors (thoughts that are not completely accurate) occur and see how they can show up in our lives.