I used to be a student of the modern AT for two years in the past. Insomnia was and still is a problem that affected me. Even though modern AT didn’t really help me a lot, it still seems to be suitable for the treatment of insomnia. However, I have my doubts.

I recently discovered your approach of teaching the AT and I was wondering if you think that initial AT can help in insomnia problems or that yoga or meditation would be much more effective?

I am sorry to say that I cannot answer your question in a straightforward fashion.

The first thing with so-called insomnia problems is diagnosis. There are as many different causes as they are people suffering from insomnia so it is difficult to evaluate one method against another in general, and before that, whether it is really a method of self-development that you need and not a purely medical intervention (or else to wean off an addiction to some psychoactive drug or type of food linked with the symptom).

Not all people require the same duration of sleep to renew their energy and, anyway, the more an individual can learn

  1. to replenish his energy in habitual activities (not in sleep) and,
  2. to stop engaging in energy consuming habits,

the less the “insomnia problems” will strike him as relevant and essential.

In my book, energy is not replenished in rest, leisure and relaxing breaks. It is therefore not what I will offer in my lessons. The organism responds to work defined as “movement to carry some weight during a certain time and a certain distance”: the question is how to organise the work to obtain the correct response, to expand and evolve instead of being crushed.

I can only explain to you how Initial AT, that is learning to teach yourself conscious guidance and control of coordinated actions, may change the way you react to the probable causes and also to the consequences of insomnia.

The fundamentals of initial AT are totally different from modern AT so you might expect a very different outcome than “it did not help me a lot.” The point with iAT is not to solve a problem directly, to make you less high-strung or less tense, or to eradicate the symptoms, but to have YOU think differently and overcome the present situation by organising your speech to command complex gestural reactions to concerted series of speech-orders which, at first glance, seem to be totally unrelated to your specific problem.

The power of self-speech and sensory appreciation

The first axiom of iAT in relation to self-speech is the unredeemable untrustworthiness of sensory appreciation. Learning to evaluate whether what one is saying to oneself is based on a feeling OR on a controlled measurement can make an enormous difference because the foremost energy consuming habit is the use of poorly structured self-talk. The power of speech over functioning is enormous, in both directions, that is, we can use speech to develop a better standard of functioning or to tie us more into errors and defects in the sphere of psycho-mechanics which will indoubtedly deplete our energy. If you insinuate to yourself that you are too tired to react or think properly for lack of sleep, you can bet that you are not going to be at your best because you are using speech in an unreasoned way to “program” your behaviour.

Our perception of sleep, our perception of how much one needs to sleep is often based on subjective feelings (what F.M. Alexander calls “subconscious guidance“) that we sustain by repeating a litany to ourselves (covert self-speech). It is easy to see that such a perception rehearsed in this way can become a distorting mirror which might poison what one is saying to oneself and how one is going to react to stimuli after that for a whole day.

It is not harmless to say, “I am tired. I had a sleepless night” or “I don’t feel I am going to sleep“. These sentences seem to present an effect and a cause, but they do not constitute a constructive self-speech statement. Each sentence is made of words, it has the attire of reasoning, but there is no reasoning in it. The first sentence declares true that one is “tired” on the face of a feeling, but how much is that to influence the manner of thinking, the control over negative emotions and feelings which are necessary to produce efficient work or, nearly equally, to go to sleep? The sentences are way too general to answer the questions clearly and this vacuum represents a sharp and heavy sword of Damocles which will hang there above our functioning for a long while…

Many people are defenceless against the worry habit1. As soon as they feel something “wrong”, they constantly direct their attention toward their sensations and check feelings to find cause to rehearse covertly “I am tired” or “I am not feeling asleep” as if the situation was going to stay like this for the rest of their life no matter what they think or do. Obviously they forget that what they say to themselves is going to affect their functioning. This belief in the feeling truthfulness and the constant check on feelings nourishing self-speech are the very opposite of the notion of conscious control.

It has been shown that the great majority of people has an incomplete perception of their sleep. They incorrectly assess how much time it takes for them to fall asleep, and they underestimate how long they would need to remain sleeping to be able to function at full standard. Even when there is a controlled lack of sleep time, it is fruitful to consider the amount of psychophysical stress that one can direct against and inflict oneself by anticipating with poor self-speech how the day is going to unfold because of one’s perception of sleep. What is underestimated is how much self-speech can change one’s standard of functioning, either for worst or for better. Therefore conscious guidance and control of self-speech is a great program of investigation.

Modern AT has totally discarded the question of the low-control of self-talk which plague all the efforts at change of its students. It professes that by rehearsing the same litany of inhibitory orders (“neck free to let the head go forward and up to let the back lengthen and widen”) the pupil could

  1. dispense from rebuilding the link between reasoning and coordination of movements and,
  2. instead, simply re-enact a correct use of the anatomical structure perceived during a touch-lesson.

To make matter worse, modern AT preaches the same old somatic tune, that the words should be totally disassociated from any attempt at doing them, not only one after the other (which is correct), but also altogether. It is difficult to see how the controlling mind could be given a great object lesson2 in this non-effort way, and how the self-speech secret chamber3 could be cleansed and opened to constructive and effortful thoughts.

The link between speech and action has become so faint that speech and reasoning have nothing left in common with the manner of direction of the movements which make the working of the organism as a whole. Such a somatic devolution of the technique does not help the students get more in charge of their speech to develop better thoughts structures and series of orders adapted to their stage of development of conscious guidance and control; on the contrary it makes them more dependent on supposedly “correct” feelings. Each touch-lesson press onward with the accumulation of subconscious thoughts and the executive intellectual functions—reasoning, planning, monitoring [controlling], inhibiting definite movements, etc.—are deliberately thrown out of play, that is they are disassociated from execution and performance.

Conscious guidance and control of self-speech

The second axiom is that conscious guidance and control through concerted self-speech instructions is a strategy that one has to learn and develop with concerted movements of bony parts, that is, effective coordinated actions that can be evaluated objectively. This procedure of:

  1. using self-speech (orders) to command series of concerted actions and
  2. using self-speech (conceptions) to verify that one has obeyed the orders

represent a global process that makes someone think a lot and want to know more about it, but it is fundamental to remember that iAT is about linking speech and actions.

What I would like to say, as you know some of modern AT, is that “rest,” “semi-supine non-action,” “release” are not part of my alphabet, and this is all the better because teaching someone to feel what true-rest-is cannot make you progress one bit in the correct direction of increasing your detachment, that is, in giving you the capacity to employ your speech in new disciplined ways to will some coordinated actions no matter how wrong you might feel in doing so. What is meant by coordinated actions is rest-in-action, enhanced breathing movements, dispersion of subconscious thoughts, clarity of mind, you name it, the best tools to forget about the problems of insomnia.

I prefer to tell you that, if there is one ounce of indication of a possibility of dissipating the symptoms you have in mind, it will be by requiring more actions and discipline from your part to avoid any concession to the dominance of small pleasures4 which exists because of self-speech subconscious injunctions. You could say that conscious guidance and control is conscious guidance and control of self-speech.

Modern AT has totally discarded the question of the low-control of self-talk which plagues all the efforts at change of the students. It professes that by rehearsing the same litany of inhibitory orders (“neck free to let the head go forward and up to let the back lengthen and widen”) the pupil could dispense from reasoning & commanding his actions and simply re-enact a correct use of the anatomical structure perceived during a touch-lesson. As a result of this pedagogy, the pupil’s link between speech and coordinated actions has become fainter than it was when he started his lessons, so much so that speech and reasoning seem to have nothing left in common with guiding or controlling simultaneous actions. The worst is that after a series of modern AT lessons, speech is even more linked to feelings and further from making decisions contrary to feelings.

The program of initial AT is to enter the world of coordinated actions guided by speech orders. The effect of that on the symptoms or causes of insomnia can only be indirect as sleep is not a skill or a conscious act. Nonetheless, with such a program, you would discover what it does to you to use your own mind to thinking-in-activity, to maintain in active attention a growing number of definite mental objects to organise real actions the whole day long and even into your bedtime: apart from the functional energy that this new conscious activity provides, the more one plays at this game, the less space there is available for low grade, destructive self-speech based on feelings because the mind space is not extensible without strenuous thinking: what this means is that, as soon as you occupy your mind space with a series of structured orders, you cannot be prey to repetitive toxic embodied cognition any more. This is not a little achievement to free oneself from one’s old self!

In that eventuality, the problem is not how much time one can sleep, but how to find sufficient time during the day to explore further.
All things considered, it is only in having some lessons with me that you can be certain of the effect of the application of the conscious guidance and control technique to your case in particular.

Footnotes

  1. “It is an interesting psychological fact that there are millions of highly educated people who have cultivated unwillingly what may be called the ‘worry habit.’ This worry habit is directly the outcome of the lack of use of our reasoning faculties, as is conclusively proved to me in my long professional experience by the fact that people suffering in this way worry exactly in the same degree when the cause has been removed, as when it was actually a reality”. (Alexander, F.M.; Man’s Supreme Inheritance, (Second Ed. Revised, 1918), p. 170)
  2. “Nor must it be forgotten that in this process of re-education a great object lesson is given to the controlling mind. In the very breaking up of maleficent co-ordinations or vicious circles which have become established, a new impulse is given to certain intellectual functions which have been thrown out of play. The reflex action which is setting up morbid conditions can only be controlled and altered by a deliberate realization of the guiding process which is to be substituted, and these new impulses to the conscious mind have, analogically, very much the same effect as is produced on the body by the internal massage referred to above. The old accumulations of subconscious thought are dispersed, and room is made for new conceptions and realizations”. (Alexander, F.M.; Man’s Supreme Inheritance (Third Ed., 1946), p. 174 )
  3. “She had been constructing a secret chamber in her mind, as harmful to her general well-being as an undiagnosed tumour might have been to her physical welfare. (Alexander, F.M.; Man’s Supreme Inheritance, (Second Ed. Revised, 1918), p. 72)
  4. “Bad habits mean, in ninety-nine per cent of cases, that the person concerned has, often through ignorance, pandered to and wilfully indulged certain sensations, probably with little or no thought as to what evil results may accrue from his concessions to the dominance of small pleasures. This careless relaxation of reason, in the first instance, makes it doubly difficult to assert command when the indulgence has become a habit. (Alexander, F.M.; Man’s Supreme Inheritance, (Second Ed. Revised, 1918), p. 174)