Making associations and how it can help us to sleep
All people and even animals make daily associations throughout their whole life. We do this mostly unknowingly to better understand the world and have an easier time to go through life. Our brains constantly seek patterns and connections between different pieces of information, experiences, or stimuli. These associations help us make sense of our environment, predict outcomes, and make decisions (knowingy and unknowingly) more efficiently.
Let's go over some examples so you understand what we mean.
If we talk about movies and cinema, what food do you think about? Most of you will say popcorn. If you would walk in a cinema, and their would be no snacks and popcorn, that would feel a bit weird right? It is likely that you would feel like their is something missing.
We also make associations with events that happened around us. For example, people who were part of a traffic accident will likely have memories pop-up when they pass by the place where the traffic accident took place.
Associations don't necessarly need to be visual stimili, you can make association with smell, taste, sounds and other stimuli. For example, the smell of freshed baked cookies can remind someone of their grandma who made home-made cookies.
Last example, maybe one of the most known one. The experiment of Pavlov. When an assistent fed his dogs, he saw that the dogs were salivating. When the same assistent that fed the dogs passed by, Pavlov saw that some dogs started to salivate even though they did not get food. He wondered if the technician was a trigger which started the salivating response. To find out, he conducted an experiment. He measured the saliva output when he served the dog food. After that, he started using a sound signal when serving the dog food. He repeated this for several times. Last, he measured the saliva output when only playing the sound and not serving food. The dogs started to salivate in response to the sound alone. Pavlov concluded that if a new stimulus is present when the dog is given food, that stimulus became associated with food and the that same stimulus alone can trigger the same response as the food would (i.e., salivating).
All these examples show that associations can lead to a response which often happens unintentionally. However, associations can be created and strengtened, and responses can be learned. This is something we can use to our advantage and to improve our sleep. With stimulus control techniques, we will try to break the association between feelings of wakefulness and being in bed and create/strengthen the association between sleepiness and being in bed.
