Thomas Merton was a Trappist monk, writer, and one of the most influential spiritual voices of the 20th century — a man preoccupied with solitude, silence, and the demands of the inner life.
He’s best known for his spiritual autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, which 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’s full of interesting spiritual insights. But I also picked up something else Merton mentioned: a simple, practical trick for falling asleep.
Thomas Merton’s Trick for Falling Asleep When You Can’t Fall Asleep
Merton discovered the technique during his undergraduate years at Columbia University in the mid-1930s. He was doing what a lot of college 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 got out of it stuck with him for the rest of his life: a trick to fall asleep when you can’t fall asleep.
In The Seven Storey Mountain, Merton describes the process thusly:
You lie flat in bed, without a pillow, your arms at your sides, and your legs straight out, and relax all your muscles, and say to yourself:
‘Now I have no feet, now I have no feet . . . no legs . . . no knees.’
Basically, you imagine your body disappearing, beginning with your feet and slowly working your way up. You imagine each of your body parts “changed into air and vanished away” — shins, knees, thighs, hips, abdomen, arms, hands, shoulders, repeating the absence of each part to yourself until it genuinely feels “gone.” You keep moving up your body until you drift off to sleep.
Merton noted that this technique usually worked for him, unless he hadn’t fallen asleep by the time he got to his head; when that happened, “Instantly, chest and stomach and legs and feet all came back to life with most exasperating reality.” Fortunately, he’d typically be conked out by the time he made his torso “disappear.”
Why Imagining Your Body Disappearing Can Help You Fall Asleep
Merton theorized the technique worked because it was a type of auto-suggestion or just plain old muscle relaxation. When you’re nice and relaxed, you usually fall asleep. He wasn’t wrong.
Most insomnia isn’t a body problem. It’s a brain problem. Your mind latches onto something (like a work email, a conversation that went poorly, whatever) and starts chewing on it. The harder you try to stop ruminating, the louder the mental chatter gets.
Merton’s technique solves this with a kind of cognitive sleight of hand. It gives your brain something specific and repetitive to do. “I have no feet. No feet. No legs.” The task is engaging enough to occupy the part of your mind that wants to spin out, but boring enough not to fire you up. You’re crowding out the rumination without replacing it with anything that requires actual thinking.
There are a couple of variations on Merton’s technique that you can also try.
I’ve long done a version of this method that comes at it from a related but opposite angle.
When I was a kid, I watched a show called Under the Umbrella Tree. One episode featured Gloria the Gopher having problems falling asleep. Her solution: she went through her body parts one by one, saying goodnight to each of them. “Time to go to sleep, leg. You’re getting heavier and heavier.” It made an impression on me and I started doing it, and I’ve been using this trick ever since.
I find imagining that each of my body parts is getting heavier and heavier easier to conceptualize than imagining that each part is disappearing. Though I’ve had the same experience as Merton: while I usually drift off to sleep by the time I get to my torso, if I reach my head, whatever relaxation I achieved instantly reverses and I’m wide awake.
You can also try the method that was taught to Naval aviators during WWII, which might solve the problem Merton and I have encountered. With this technique, you imagine each of your body parts going absolutely lax and limp, starting with your head instead of your feet; you first relax your scalp, forehead, jaw, and even your tongue, lips, and eyes, before you start moving down your body.
All of these approaches get you to the same sleep-inducing place: a relaxed body and mind. Experiment and see which one works for you; you’ll be sleeping with the beatific stillness of a monk in no time.
