Thomas Merton was a Trappist monk, author, and one of the most influential spiritual voices of the 20th century—a man concerned with solitude, silence, and the demands of the interior life.
He is best known for his spiritual autobiography, The seven-story mountainwhich traces his restless youth and eventual conversion to Catholicism.
As I mentioned in last week’s Odds and Ends, I recently re-read this book and enjoyed it. It is full of interesting intellectual ideas. But I also caught something else that Merton mentioned: a simple, practical trick for falling asleep.
Thomas Merton’s trick to falling asleep when you can’t sleep
Merton discovered the technique during his undergraduate years at Columbia University in the mid-1930s. He was doing what many students do: trying to find himself. He dabbled in Marxism and jazz. He also read hundreds of texts on what he loosely called “Oriental mysticism,” or what we now call Eastern philosophy.
While Merton came to regard most of this phase as shallow and misguided, one thing he took away from it stuck with him for the rest of his life: a trick to fall asleep when you can’t sleep.
In The seven-story mountainMerton describes the process as follows:
You lie on the bed, without a pillow, arms at your sides and legs straight, relax all your muscles and say to yourself:
“Now I have no legs, now I have no legs. . . without legs. . . without knees”.
Basically, you imagine your body disappearing, starting at your feet and slowly working your way up. You imagine that every part of your body “turned into thin air and disappeared” – shins, knees, thighs, hips, abdomen, arms, hands, shoulders, repeating the absence of each part to yourself until you really feel that it is “gone”. You continue to raise your body until you fall asleep.
Merton noted that this technique usually worked for him, unless he had fallen asleep by the time he reached his head. when this happened, “In an instant, chest and stomach and legs and feet came back to life with the most irritating reality.” Fortunately, normally he would have been crushed until his torso “disappeared”.
Because imagining your body disappearing can help you sleep
Merton thought the technique worked because it was a type of autosuggestion or plain old muscle relaxation. When you’re nice and relaxed, you usually fall asleep. He wasn’t wrong.
Most insomnia is not a physical problem. It’s a brain problem. Your mind latches onto something (like a work email, a conversation that didn’t go well, whatever) and starts ruminating on it. The harder you try to stop ruminating, the louder the mental chatter becomes.
Merton’s technique solves this with a kind of cognitive methodology. It gives your brain something specific and repetitive to do. “I have no legs, no legs, no legs.” The task is engaging enough to engage the part of your mind that wants to escape, but boring enough not to set you off. You crowd out rumination without replacing it with something that requires real thought.
There are a few variations on Merton’s technique that you can also try.
I have long since done a version of this method that comes at it from a related but opposite angle.
When I was a kid, I used to watch a show called Under the umbrella tree. One episode featured Gloria the Gopher having trouble sleeping. Her solution: she went through her body parts one by one, saying goodnight to each one. “Time to sleep, leg. You’re getting heavier and heavier.” I was impressed and started doing it, and have been using this trick ever since.
I find that imagining each part of my body getting heavier and heavier becomes easier to grasp than imagining each part disappearing. Although I’ve had the same experience as Merton: while I usually drift off to sleep until I reach my torso, if I reach my head, any relaxation I’ve achieved is instantly reversed and I’m wide awake.
You can also try the method taught to Navy aviators in World War II, which may solve the problem Merton and I had. With this technique, you imagine that every part of your body is completely relaxed and relaxed, starting with your head instead of your feet. you first relax your scalp, forehead, jaw, even your tongue, lips and eyes before you start moving below your body.
All of these approaches get you to the same place that induces sleep: a relaxed body and mind. Experiment and see what works for you. you’ll be sleeping with the wonderful quiet of a monk in no time.
