How Murphy’s Bedtime Technique Helped Me Pass an Exam I’d Failed Twice

Two Failures and a Wall of Doubt

The CPA exam has four sections. I’d passed three. The fourth (Regulation) had beaten me twice. The first time, I missed the passing score by six points. The second time, by two. Two points. I sat in my car after getting that second result and hit the steering wheel so hard my palm stung for an hour.

I’d studied for months. I’d used every review course, every practice exam, every flashcard app. I knew the material. My practice scores were consistently above the pass threshold. But something happened when I sat down in that testing center, my mind went sideways. My heart rate spiked. I second-guessed answers I knew were correct. I ran out of time on the simulation section because I kept re-reading questions, convinced I was missing a trap.

My third attempt was scheduled for mid-November. By late October, I was studying four hours a day and sleeping four hours a night. I wasn’t absorbing anything new. I was just cycling through the same material with increasing panic. My girlfriend told me I looked gray. She wasn’t wrong.

The Book on the Nightstand

My girlfriend’s mother, who is one of those quietly wise people you only appreciate as you get older, came to visit that last week of October. She noticed the stack of study materials on the kitchen table, the dark circles under my eyes, the way I flinched when anyone mentioned the exam. She didn’t give me a pep talk. She just left a book on my nightstand: The Power of Your Subconscious Mind by Joseph Murphy.

I picked it up out of politeness. I read the first few chapters that night while my girlfriend slept. Murphy’s central argument was straightforward: your subconscious mind accepts whatever you impress upon it through repetition and feeling, especially in the drowsy state before sleep. It doesn’t argue. It doesn’t evaluate. It executes.

“Just before you go to sleep, give your subconscious mind something definite to work on. Whatever you impress upon it before sleep will be expressed in your life.”

– Joseph Murphy

Murphy described a specific technique: as you fall asleep, repeat a simple phrase that assumes the outcome you want. Not a wish. Not a plea. A quiet, confident statement, repeated until you drift off. He called it “the bedtime technique,” though it’s really just a method of programming the subconscious through repetition during that suggestible twilight state.

What I Actually Did

That night, I lay in bed and chose my phrase: “I passed. I passed the exam.” I didn’t say “I will pass” or “I hope to pass.” Present tense. Done. Completed.

I repeated it slowly, quietly, in my mind. “I passed. I passed the exam.” Over and over. I tried to feel what it would feel like to see a passing score on my screen. The relief. The disbelief. The way my shoulders would drop. I let that feeling infuse the words.

The first night, my mind fought it hard. After maybe thirty repetitions, an internal voice said: you’ve failed twice, why would this time be different? I didn’t argue with the voice. I just went back to the phrase. “I passed. I passed the exam.” I fell asleep somewhere around what I’d guess was the fiftieth repetition.

I did this every night for two weeks. Some nights I fell asleep quickly and the session lasted maybe five minutes. Other nights I lay there for twenty minutes, gently repeating the phrase while my anxious brain tried to hijack me with worst-case scenarios. I kept returning to the words. I passed. I passed the exam.

What Changed Before the Exam

By the end of the first week, something was different about my study sessions. I can’t point to a single moment. It was gradual. I was calmer. I wasn’t frantically reviewing every possible topic. Instead, I found myself drawn to specific areas with an almost intuitive focus. I’d think, “I should spend extra time on like-kind exchanges today,” and I would, even though my study plan said to review penalties.

My sleep improved dramatically. Before the bedtime technique, I was waking up at 3 AM with my heart pounding, mentally running through tax codes. After a week of the technique, I was sleeping through the night. My girlfriend noticed before I did. She said I’d stopped grinding my teeth.

I also noticed a shift in how I felt about the exam itself. The first two attempts had been dominated by dread. This time, there was a quiet confidence that I couldn’t explain and didn’t fully trust. It wasn’t arrogance. It was more like a deep-seated okay-ness. Like something in me had already accepted the result before it happened.

Exam Day

November 14th. I drove to the testing center and parked in the same lot where I’d hit my steering wheel three months earlier. I expected the panic to hit. It didn’t. Not fully. There was nervousness, my palms were slightly damp, my stomach tight. But the spiraling, the catastrophic thinking, the conviction that I was going to fail? Absent.

I sat down. The exam started. And something remarkable happened: I could think. Not in the frantic, second-guessing way of my first two attempts. Clearly. I read questions once. I answered them. When I wasn’t sure, I made my best choice and moved on instead of agonizing for five minutes. I finished the simulation section with twelve minutes to spare. On my previous attempts, I’d run out of time.

When I submitted the exam, I felt something I hadn’t felt either of the other times: quiet certainty. Not hope. Certainty.

The Score

Results came three weeks later. I opened the portal on my phone while sitting in my car, the same parking lot, actually, though I didn’t plan that. My score was 81. The passing threshold is 75. I’d passed by six points. Not a blowout. Not a miracle score. A solid, clear pass.

I sat there and cried. Then I called my girlfriend. Then I called her mother. I told her about the book, about the technique, about the two weeks of falling asleep to “I passed.” She laughed and said, “I know, honey. Why do you think I left it there?”

“Your subconscious mind does not argue with you. It accepts what your conscious mind decrees. If you say, ‘I can’t afford it,’ your subconscious mind works to make that true. Decree something better.”

– Joseph Murphy

What I Believe Happened

I don’t think Murphy’s technique magically put answers in my head. I already knew the material, my practice scores proved that. What the technique did was disarm the anxiety that had been sabotaging my performance. By spending two weeks telling my subconscious “I passed” instead of “I’m going to fail again,” I showed up to the exam in a fundamentally different mental state. I could access what I already knew because my brain wasn’t in fight-or-flight mode.

Maybe that’s the whole explanation. Maybe there’s more to it than that. Honestly, I don’t care. I’m a CPA now. The letters are on my business cards. That’s real regardless of the mechanism.

My Practical Tip

If you’re trying this for an exam or performance situation, here’s what I’d suggest: keep your phrase in the past tense and keep it short. “I passed” is better than “I am going to pass the November CPA Regulation exam with a score above 75.” Your subconscious doesn’t need details. It needs conviction. Say it slowly. Feel the relief of it being done. And don’t stop studying. The technique works with your preparation, not instead of it. Think of it as removing the mental block between what you know and your ability to use it when it counts.