When I asked Tom what he thought about during those fitful awake hours , he was quick to answer . Self-employed , Tom would lie awake plagued by all the work he needed to do .
I saw my opening .
Tom was the kind of guy who does what he says he will . So I set him a task . I told him that while we were still learning about his particular insomnia it would be useful to harness these ' bonus hours ' – a phrase Milton Erickson sometimes used with his sleepless clients .
So what was Tom to do ? Whatever you do , don ' t try to go to sleep !
Tom was to lie in bed for around an hour , and if he hadn ' t gone to sleep he was to get up , go into a dimly lit part of his apartment , and catch up on work for 30 minutes . It was quite monotonous work , filing accounts . After 30 minutes he was to go back to bed , and if he was still awake an hour later he was to again get up , go into that dimly lit place , and do 30 minutes ' more work since he was awake anyway .
In the first week he found that he caught up on a great deal of work , but that he started feeling reluctant to get up and work after the third session .
" It ' s funny ," he told me , " I kind of want to stay awake , but I ' m feeling sleepier ." By the second week he found he had stopped worrying about whether he got to sleep at all . And , what do you know , more often than not he was falling asleep before he even got to the second work session .
By the third week he was drifting off before any of the ( boring ) work got done . By that time he ' d also caught up on his work arrears , so he was worrying about it less .
Actually doing tedious work doesn ' t tend to be as stimulating as worrying about it .
I ' d given Tom a therapeutic double bind ( catch 22 ): either he got work done , or he slept . A bind that , in his case , worked really well . When Tom started ' failing ' at getting up to work he started ' succeeding ' at getting more sleep .