Today I had an interesting conversation with a client and a practice you could say emerged out of it. A practice that I myself have been doing in certain circumstances that I’ll tell you about in just a few moments, which I thought would be useful for them as well. It’s probably best to begin by talking about the circumstances in which you would want to engage in this practice, and then I’ll tell you about it.

Quite a few of us wake up in the middle of the night, either because we had a bad dream, or because we’re getting up to use the bathroom, or get a drink of wate,r or we’ve got a body pain that maybe we need to see to or stretch, or something like that. As you get older, these sorts of things are more common, but sometimes we’re also woken up by our own active minds, perhaps worrying, being anxious, mulling over things.

I know that myself, even though I realized it was completely irrational, the night before the beginning of a new semester where I had classes particularly face-to-face classes, that I would be teaching to a new crop of students, even though I’d been teaching for quite a while, sometimes I would wake up and not be able to fall asleep, and it would undoubtedly be because I was anticipating this new situation that I was going to be in.

So I was talking with this person and they said that they have been waking up like that, not regularly, but off and on for a number of years in the middle of the night and then having some difficulty getting back to sleep. And I think this is very common, or at least we read that many people struggle with this sort of thing.

You’re now awake, you’re lying in bed and your mind is working and it keeps you from being able to drift back off into sleep. Why? Because there are emotions that are associated with what it is that you’re thinking about. And I won’t say that these are all necessarily what we would call negative emotions. But I will actually use a term that the Stoics preferred for the pathē, the emotions that are troubling. They called them, among other things, perturbationes.

And the singular for that is pertubatio. And it means something like being shaken up, being upset, being steered around. They talked about these emotions as being perhaps contrary to reason or disobedient to reason. And they’re things that we feel. And so why do we feel them?

Well, we could be thinking about the day that happened before or even the week and And it could be the totality of it or it could be a particular incident. And we’re ruminating on it and thinking: Oh, I should have done this instead of that. Or when I was in a conversation or a conflict with this person, I should have said this, or it wasn’t right for them to say that. Or we might even think about our own mistakes that we made, and feel embarrassed, or ashamed, or guilty about them.

So that is the aspect of the past, probably the immediate past. Although sometimes people wake up in the middle of the night and they’re troubled by something that they did or something that somebody did to them years and years ago. But it’s more common that it’s something fairly immediate.:

The other thing that people might be thinking about instead of the past is the future. What is coming up ahead? And it could be the day that is facing them and some of the challenges that they are anticipating running into. It could even be things that we think are going to be good, but we’re not quite entirely sure about and we could worry that things are not going to turn out the way that we want them to, even though we’re anticipating something that would be pleasant or even joyful the future could also just like the past extend off

Quite a ways we could be worried about our finances, worried about our job situation, worried about the economy as a whole, worried about our eventual demise. All sorts of things can figure into that. We can be concerned for people other than ourselves as well, both past and future oriented.

And you could even be focusing on the present. You could be thinking about: Well, what am I? What kind of person am I right now? Maybe you’re not entirely happy or content with who you are and how you evaluate yourself, and you think that you should be somewhat different than you actually are. That’s going to be upsetting to you. And that might keep you awake.

I myself have been woken up in the middle of the night with thoughts like these and tried to struggle against them. And there are some things that I have found useful. Usually it’s not going to be going into a detailed analysis about what I think and feel about the past, and untangling all the different threads that are tied together, and seeing which ones are true and which ones aren’t, are false, and which I’m not quite sure about, or looking to the problems ahead.

I suppose if I were better off perhaps, engaging in premeditatio malorum in the middle of the night would be helpful for me. But that’s usually not where I myself am, although I’m perfectly fine at doing that during the daytime. Instead, I will typically do one of several things.

I don’t do the proverbial visualization that they call counting sheep where I suppose you imagine sheep jumping over a fence. That’s usually how it’s done in cartoons. You count them and eventually in the act of counting you doze off. When I was a kid,I tried doing that, and I found it didn’t work for me, even though the adults suggested it.

What I do though is sometimes visualize myself as floating in a deep subterranean river that is cool, and I’m not drowning. As a matter of fact I don’t need to breathe, and I’m just being carried along by the current in a dark place. Sometimes that helps me slip off into sleep.

Another thing that’s similarly a visualization exercise I’ll do is I imagine my cat companion, Sassy, who we lost some years ago, but who I was very close with, cuddled up in my arms or lying against my back or putting her paw on me and rearranging my arms into the configuration that she wanted them in. She slept next to me nearly every night. And I imagine being with her and the good feelings that we had together, the love, the companionship. Eventually that helps me doze off. And it also has the added benefit of letting me keep her alive in my heart, which is an entirely different story.

But the other things that I actually find quite helpful for putting my mind on other objects than those worries about past, future, or present is to effectively create a new present in which my mind is examining something. And I do it myself with two kinds of literature.

I like to read a lot of speculative fiction, as probably quite a few of you know. So I will take a plot from something that I’ve been reading and kind of explore it. Get into all the nooks and crannies of it and think about what did happen, what didn’t happen, what could have happened, the different characters. and how they could interact. And before too long, I find myself drifting off to sleep because that takes a lot of brain work at a time when I’m not really up for all that much of it.

The other is I will also take philosophical texts and thinkers that I’ve engaged with before in the past, and I’ll bring to mind some things that they said that I found interesting and think my way through them.And similar to playing around with a plot, I’ll do, you might say, some variations on them.

So I might think about Aristotle and his conceptions of moral virtues, and the things that he said in the Nicomachean and Eudemian Ethics among other places, and then muse a bit about who actually has these, and circumstances in which they would be displayed, and what mitigating factors there might be in saying that somebody is virtuous, or just on the way, or self-controlled, or lacking self-control. or vicious. And again, before too long, my present has been occupied by some complex, coherent thoughts.

And I find that that enables me to get the rest that I know that my body and my mind actually need ,and it allows me to drift off and then wake up in the morning ready to do more thinking of different sorts. So I don’t know what you would call this practice, but it strikes me that it could be something quite useful for a lot of people. And I thought I would set down my own experience, and thoughts, and recommendations that you could easily, I think, turn into your own version of this.

And it doesn’t have to be literature and it doesn’t have to be philosophy. You could imagine, if you’re a gearhead, an engine, and how you would take it apart and put it back together. You could imagine, if you’re culinarily inclined, the steps in putting together and producing a dish. I think there’s a lot of different possibilities for this, but it could be quite helpful for a lot of people, and it’s using the mind that you’ve been given to put it in somewhat of a better condition.

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Gregory Sadler is the founder of ReasonIO, the co-founder of The Stoic Heart®, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.

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