I learnt about this wonderful technology first from Dr. Judd Biasiotto's book "In Search of Greatness." He was a sport psychologist and champion weight lifter. At a bodyweight of 130 lbs, he squated 603 lbs. Pavel told the story that at a meet Dr. Judd would fall fast asleep, a few minutes before his event, his coach would wake him up, and without warm-up he would go on stage and start breaking records. I have no intention of breaking any record soon but, since learning about sleep from Matthew Walker's book, I became interested in ways to gain some control over it. Jetlags from trips between the US and China and stress from work are two obvious nuisances to get rid of or at least mitigate with better sleep. Judd described in his book how, decades ago, he learnt to induce deep muscle relaxation using a biofeedback machine at a state-of-the-art sport academy. With sensors attached to certain facial areas (e.g., the frontalis) that tighten up when one's under stress, the device could measure that tension and send out beeping/clicking sounds. The stronger the tension and therefore higher the stress level, the louder and more frequent the beeping. Dr. Judd struggled for months tenaciously and finally mastered it. In his words: I got so good with the machine that I could play the nursery rhyme "Mary Had a Little Lamb" on it by raising and lowering the clicks. It was a vulgar display of power. I kept looking out for such a device since early this year and finally got a simple one a month ago. Different from (and much cheaper than) the Dr.'s, my device has three sensors touching the forehead and a knob for sensitivity. The more touchy it is tuned, the weaker the tension the device can pick up. With some calibration, I have divided its sensitivity range into seven levels. After one week, I was able to muffle the device at level one, and after a month of training, I was close to silencing it at level two. It's hard to say how much training with the device so far has benefited my sleep. One change, though, is that it has brought awareness and helped shaping a meditation habit. Twice a day, I wound get into my car, put on the headset, and try to relax for about 20-30min. When trying to solve a problem, I found it hard to quiet the device down but normally it was helpful to lure the mind into some pre-sleep state. The sessions always left me more alert. Dr. Judd moved on to brain wave control next. I intend to follow him after mastering my device at level seven. |