I recently viewed a presentation from LPD Associates on Stephen Covey’s Circle of Influence. 

Stephen identified that people who are more reactive tend to focus on, and waste energy reacting to, things they can’t control. However, people who are more proactive focus their attention and energy on things they can control. 

This got me thinking about how this concept can be applied to sleep. As outlined in LPD Associate’s presentation, when we’re feeling stressed it’s very easy for us to focus on things we can’t control, and this is certainly true of sleep.

When we’re in bed, tossing and turning, unable to fall asleep, it becomes very easy for us to become stressed and begin to have negative thoughts and focus on things we’re subconsciously worried about. 

All these negative thoughts are hypothetical and something we can’t control in this moment. 

In his book, “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”, Stephen Covey developed this tool, Circle of Concern and Circle of Influence. The Circle of Concern would be all the thoughts generated by a situation that you can’t control, and cause your stress. For example, what if not sleeping makes me ill? What if I don’t get any sleep tonight? What if I lose my job, become a bad parent or can’t concentrate due to sleep?

The Circle of Influence would be the things we can control in this situation, to help reduce the stress. For example, if I’m tired I can get some fresh air or do some exercise to boost my energy. If I’m suffering with poor sleep I could follow a course of evidence-based CBT-i. 

To put this into practice, the first thing you need to do is to identify and write down what is worrying you and causing stress. Then, secondly, decide if there’s anything you can do about it. If not, add it to the Circle of Concern, if you can control this, add this to the Circle of Influence as an action for you to take. 

Then you can develop a clear plan of action for the things in your Circle of Influence. Remember, don’t try to do everything at once. Prioritise whatever’s causing you the most stress and make sure you put realistic deadlines on your actions when writing them down. Ticking them off when you have achieved them and celebrating your proactivity will make you feel so much better! 

Good luck!

Credit: This concept or tool was taken from Stephen Covey’s famous book and LPD Associates’ presentation on this book.