About This 3rd Edition

Several years ago when I released the new ideas which I called 'BLIS for Insomniacs’ I expected that it would only be a matter of time before they were widely and perhaps wisely plagiarised. Unfortunately, while my ideas have been plagiarised it hasn’t been at all wisely. This is of no surprise to me. It’s because very few people in the insomnia 'industry' actually understand all of the processes that need to be in place to make the transition successfully from wakefulness to sleep. There's still an overarching effort to find a single perfect treatment. The attitudes of most people and their treatment providers are still firmly stuck with some old attitudes that I can now show are simply both wrong and limited. They're stuck with a persistent view that sleep happens to you when you stop doing things. When you have the right things done to you. So the result is the continued search for pills and supplements, for things to listen to that make you calm and that bring on the right mental and electrical states. This is all bonkers.

The app world has come up with elements of what I did with Blis. You can now get apps that pump music or sounds to each ear alternatively at about one hertz or one a second. Some have even called their sounds EMDR. And you can also get them on Spotify.

There are many problems and this is what happens when you take practices without really understanding the principles behind them and even worse try and monetise them. I showed in Blis that there are three things that need to be in place for sleep transition – the right neurochemical mix, the right mental state, and the right brain electrical state which we identified as Delta. In the effort to find chemicals, noises and electrical induction none of the creators evidence a clue about the transitions that are in effect in the shift from wakefulness to sleep. No-one seems to appreciate that sleep only happens when the gating function in the Thalamus works to shut off the external world from our consciousness. And that the function at play is vigilance, not calmness.

It’s such a mess that I decided to re-write the book entirely to address all these issues and leave you with a much more comprehensive and accurate look at how your brain goes to sleep and all the techniques you can use to make that happen. I’ve also been disappointed but not surprised at plethora of same old articles in the media. How many more times do we need articles trotting out the same old limited and plainly wrong ideas in sleep hygiene and CBT? Journos it seems either can’t get their heads around different concepts or are too lazy to pick up new ideas. My new book will be accompanied by new supportive materials and videos. In short order we’ll have videos on the new apps showing why they are counterproductive, and expose the nonsense behind the secrecy of CBT-I, what it is about rocking and lullabies that has worked for all cultures over the centuries, why spending on supplements and pills is a bad idea, and the same for music, beats, and talking apps and why playing sounds throughout the night is a bad idea.