Solving Sleeping Problems With Happiness And High Self-Esteem

People often compliment me on this seemingly God-given ability, since they are unable to do the same. So why can I sleep so well and they can’t? I believe many factors affect how we sleep, but personally, it just comes with a territory. I am just a happy guy! I know that having high self-esteem does not qualify me as a sleeping expert, and this post is not per se scientific, so by no means is it a replacement for common knowledge and medical advice. Still, based on my observations and studies that report happiness positively affecting virtually every area of life [1], I predict that increasing personal satisfaction will affect how we sleep. This is why:

Evidence of How Happiness Affects Our Sleep

First of all, I believe that people who can sleep deeply can do so because they are not worried about what is happening around them. Said, they have enough confidence to fall asleep knowing that they will wake up and everything will be great. Oppositely, people who had a stressful day and brought this stress to bed cannot sleep well because they don’t allow their brains to relax. All their concerns are still playing somewhere deep in their minds, maybe even subconsciously, and do not let them sleep properly. In other words, a great metaphor is that they are afraid that a saber-tooth tiger will attack them while they are sleeping, so how can they sleep if their life depends on staying awake?

Of course, saber tooth tiger no longer exists for millions of years, and modern stress is by far not related to dying in sleep. Still, our minds can focus on something negative and spin it out of proportions. Thus, no matter how trivial it might be, a negative attitude towards life can affect the way we sleep, just because the mind can experience the same level of pain towards a broken nail and a loss of something significant.

This is to say that a cure to a bad sleep (and a list of other things in life) is to have a positive attitude, which comes with knowing how to deal with negative emotions, such as stress. And while I won’t be copy-pasting my book here to answer “how to deal with negative emotions”, I will say that having a positive attitude is similar to not caring about adverse events in our lives. I mean, we continue knowing that negative emotions exist, but we are physically incapable of focusing on positive and negative events simultaneously. This is biological. In practice, it means that when we are happy, we are not negative, and we emotionally forget all these negative things that are not allowing us to sleep.

Why Sleeping Pills Don’t Work

The sleeping pills problem is that they are over prescribed and don’t have the right effect. This is because they don’t address the issue that causes terrible sleep bad in the first place. For example, if the problem is indeed psychological, pills can temporarily help us forget about the pain in the short-term, but our mind stays the same in the long-term, meaning that you need sleeping pills again. They are like coffee or drugs, meaning that you need sleeping pills again. They are like coffee or drugs, losing effectiveness, and increasing negativity the longer we consume them. Our body starts getting used to them, as starts demand them as an aid to fall asleep. We progressively develop an immunity meaning that we need to take more and more of them.

Thus, the solution seems to be psychological. Don’t try to drink your problems away. Don’t try to drug yourself. Instead, try some positive thinking, as described in the rest of the blog and my book, and you will sleep better.