The Jack of all trades, except one.

A while back Jack came to me as a client with a problem that he had been trying to solve for 30 years with no luck whatsoever. A bit of background about Jack, he was a self-made man, he started his own business, and succeeded in a field in a way that few people could. He was focused, determined, and would do anything and everything to learn how to do something, you can say he had an obsession with becoming better.

He decided to do the same with sleep, so he read books, listened to e-books, watched youtube videos, worked hard to DISCIPLINE himself, but nothing worked. He used to ask his parents to wake him up, then later on his partner, but the thing is when he was woken up, he was quite the JACK-ass and had a very moody day. And if they didn’t wake him up he just laid there like a lumberjack. His goal was to become a member of the 5 AM CLUB, but all he could be part of was the noon club.

Frustrated with his lack of success, he called me and we had a few sessions, I guess they were around 5. We tinkered around a few things around what he did late in the evening before he slept, where his focus was, and how much effort was spent on thinking processes right before he went to bed. It helped him a bit, he started being woken up by someone with less of a hassle, but still, he was not getting what he wanted. On the call before the last, we were having a chat, and I asked him, “What’s it like just before you go to sleep?”, to which he replied, “Well I’m a night person, you know, when I LOOK at my watch, if it’s still around 11 pm I say to my self, JACK you still can do a lot in the next two hours, you can sleep at 1!”. My response was, “Just add 2 hours to every single watch you have access to, and let’s see what happens. I’ll see you 10 days later.”

10 days later, Jack came in with a very different mood. He had been waking up consistently at 7 am for the past 10 days, for the first time in his life. He couldn’t believe that it worked, I didn’t expect that quick of a change either.

This worked because Jack’s decision strategy for sleeping or waking up was primed by what he saw. He saw the time was early in the evening, he delayed sleep for 2 hours. He saw the time early in the morning, he snoozed his alarm and slept some more.

P.S.: This won’t work for everyone, this worked in that context given the specific strategies, beliefs, and behaviors that were present. To change your habits, notice how you make your decisions.