Insomnia Coach® Podcast

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After one sleepless night around his 17th birthday, Joey began to fear the next night. Soon, thoughts about sleep followed him through the day. He stopped going out, struggled to watch films, and sat inside with the curtains drawn.He tried herbal tea, meditation, rain sounds, earlier bedtimes, and forcing the thoughts away. The more he tried to solve sleep and silence his mind, the more stuck he felt.What helped was allowing the thoughts to be there while returning to the things that mattered. Joey went back to the cinema, gym, college, sports, and nights out. The thoughts did not suddenly and permanently disappear — but Joey learned he could bring them along and still live his life.Are you ready to get your life back from insomnia? Learn more about my sleep coaching programs at insomniacoach.com

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Lu spent most of her life as a great sleeper. Then, six weeks after having her first baby, a painful mix of pressure, anxiety, and one sleepless night made sleep feel difficult for the first time.Over the years, insomnia came and went. Medication helped her through some difficult periods, but Lu still felt stuck and afraid of the part of herself that struggled at night. In this episode, Lu shares how self-compassion, a more workable response to wakefulness, and adding meaningful actions back into her days helped her build trust in herself again — and allowed her to emerge from the insomnia struggle as a stronger, more confident, and more resilient person. Are you ready to get your life back from insomnia? Learn more about my sleep coaching programs at insomniacoach.com

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Casaundra’s insomnia first showed up in college. From then on, it would come and go during periods of stress. After getting married, insomnia showed up and this time it didn’t go away. Before long, Casaundra would notice a feeling of anxiety as soon as her head hit the pillow. Nights started to feel like a battle.

In an effort to fix her sleep, Casaundra tried blackout curtains, headphones, melatonin, medication, no screens, less water, strict routines, and even six kiwis before bed. The more she tried to control sleep, the more sleep seemed to control her life.

In this episode, Casaundra shares how things changed when she started making life bigger than insomnia. As sleep got less attention, her evenings opened up. Her days opened up. She reclaimed her identity — and sleep took care of itself.

Click here for a full transcript of this episode.

TranscriptMartin: Welcome to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. My name is Martin Reed. I believe that by changing how we respond to insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it, we can move away from struggling with insomnia and toward living the life we want to live.

Martin: The content of this podcast is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. The statements and opinions expressed by guests are their own and are not necessarily endorsed by Insomnia Coach LLC. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied.

Martin: Okay, Casaundra, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to come onto the podcast.

Casaundra: Thank you for having me. I’m super excited.

Martin: Great to have you on. Let’s start right at the beginning as always. When did your sleep problems first begin, and what do you think caused those initial issues with sleep?

Casaundra: Yeah, it’s been a long journey. I feel like, you know, as a kid I slept fine for the most part, but then you get to college and I think my like first bout of insomnia was probably like stress induced, it was like I was TAing for a class, I was training for a marathon. I was trying to keep really high grades and, and doing all these things.

Casaundra: I’m like, I think I was just at the max and like it was just leading to me not being able to sleep because I was about all these things and all these projects and things to do. And so I think the stress kind of built and then that just started this like evolving journey of cycles of insomnia.

Casaundra: So it would like come in different waves. Right. I remember leading my first team at work and. Going into another insomnia cycle. And that was like the first time I ever was put on Trazodone. then, you know, it went away. I think it would kind of ebb and flow, right? Like, oh, I, I would figure it out and it would go back to normal and then it would come back. but I had some really big life changes in like 20 22, 20 23. my, my grandmother who had raised me, had, had died. I had a relationship end that I’ve been in for years. And from all that I was also moving back to my home state, Ohio. And so you cram all of those things into a month and any normal person would probably struggle with sleep, but to me it wasn’t normal. Kind of put me into like this really bad insomnia cycle, right? And so I went back on Trazodone and it was like a year on Trazodone, which is a really long time to be on something like that. Then I finally like, we, we probably can talk more about how that went and what happened in it, but it kind of resolved a little bit.

Casaundra: And then I married and I just went into like the hardest cycle of insomnia. And you know, for me it was like we didn’t live together before marriage. And so like having a person in my bed after I had just gotten my sleep, what felt like back on track was really like stressful to my body, I think. And it just was like, he could sleep anything all night long from like 8:00 PM on. And I was like trying to go to bed with him and like, you know, be married and, you know. Not stay up alone. And it just led to me trying even harder to sleep. And so those are, I think it’s been an ongoing thing, but those are kind of the most recent things.

Martin: So there were these ups and downs. Maybe then you either adapted or you pulled back a little bit and then sleep had the chance to get back on track.

Martin: But it felt like as time went on, when the sleep disruption showed up, it kind of morphed into its own thing. Like it didn’t respond quite as well to the changes that you made, the, the adaptions that you made, the efforts that you made to get things back on track. And then it soon became the main problem rather than all the actual stresses which had once triggered it.

Casaundra: Absolutely. Sleep was like the number one thing on my mind during those times in my life, despite like all the other craziness in my life which just made it even more consuming.

Martin: Was there such a thing as like an average night back then? If there was, what was it like?

Casaundra: When I had that second to last bout of insomnia, where it was after all of those life changes, it was like, that was different because I had just gotten off Trazodone, but I like stopped like. did a hard stop. I didn’t taper, which to anyone listening, please don’t do that.

Casaundra: Talk to your doctor about how to get, you know, taper down on medicine. But it kind of sent me into like, I wasn’t sleeping at all. Like there were two nights straight. I was like, did not sleep. And now I can look back at it and know it was probably the medicine. And there was probably nothing wrong with me outside of the fact that I stopped taking medicine inappropriately without tapering. But that was really hard. And so was really extreme in which the average night was like not sleeping. Where like my most recent bout was when I, you know, just got married and adjusting to living together and sleeping in the same bed. An average night was like, okay, I’m really tired. My husband’s going to bed, and I lay down and immediately just wake up. Right. It was like the adrenaline or the fight or flight. Like as soon as my head hit the pillow, I was immediately stressed and anxious about what that night was going to bring based on everything that I had experienced every night before that.

Martin: Would you find that as the night was approaching you, maybe you were downstairs watch TV or doing whatever you’re doing, and you felt like sleepiness showing up, you felt like really drowsy, really sleepy, and then you went off to bed and then suddenly you felt wide awake.

Casaundra: Yeah, and it was kind of a mix. Like I would be anxious, but I could feel tired, like I knew I was getting sleepy. Mm-hmm. But as soon as I felt sleepy, I got anxious, and as soon as I felt like I could go to bed, I put down my head on the pillow and it was, yeah. Complete anxiety about sleep and stress.

Martin: It was like that problem solving brain just fires up and it starts to predict what the night is gonna bring or it starts to prepare you for the battle or the struggle that experience tells you is about to show up.

Casaundra: Battle is such a good word for that. That is truly how it felt like so many nights.

Martin: Anyone listening to this is gonna be all too aware that insomnia isn’t just a struggle that happens at night, and it also affects the days as well. I’m curious to hear from you when you found yourself in this struggle, what, what were the days like for you at that time?

Casaundra: I think the biggest issue for me during the days was actually like the anxiety and like consuming thoughts around sleep. So for me, I like, I think I was like in such a high fight or flight and like high adrenaline mode that I didn’t feel tired, like I felt wound up despite not even, you know, consuming a ton of caffeine or doing anything crazy.

Casaundra: I felt on edge all day and like I kind of looked at it like a blessing, like, thank God I can get through my days, but my mind was constantly consumed with researching sleep. What else could I do? What are people, what’s the new fad for getting to sleep and how could I adjust to make sure that I could go to sleep that night?

Martin: A phrase associated with people struggling with insomnia is tired but wired. So it’s like you feel a real sense of tiredness or fatigue during the day, but at the same time you’re, you’re just completely wired, really alert. And like you shared, it can help get you through the day and in other ways it can also work against you perhaps if you kind of harness that energy to engage in ongoing problem solving and research, which is completely understandable ’cause you’ve identified a problem that you want to fix. But as we’ll probably explore a little bit more as the conversation progresses, it ends up consuming your attention and the focus of your day is no longer on doing the stuff that matters.

Martin: It becomes on fixing this problem.

Casaundra: And that’s exactly what happened to me. So it started with just those consuming thoughts, but then it completely changed what my evenings looked like and what I did and how I prepared to do all those things that I was researching.

Martin: So connected to that. Moving on from that, what kind of things did you try in an attempt to get sleep back on track to deal with all these thoughts and these feelings that were showing up?

Casaundra: I really feel like I did everything, and I’m sure you know, someone said something different, but I truly felt like anything that I read or someone told me, I was like. Open to try anything. Like I was so desperate that I would do anything to get my sleep back on track. And so it started with like environmental changes, right? The blackout curtains. Very expensive noise canceling like headphones for sleep because I lived in an apartment and I swore, well, like if something, just like, if I couldn’t hear anything and nothing could wake me up, then for sure I would sleep. And you know, it started with melatonin, but I had been on Trazodone before and eventually after that, those like sleepless, like absolutely sleepless nights, it led to Ambien after going to a sleep doctor and specialist. And oh my gosh. I feel like one of my coworkers was like, Casaundra, have you ever tried Kiwis? Like my boyfriend, he eats Kiwis before bed, like six Kiwis, and makes him go right to sleep. I’m like, oh my gosh. Kiwis must be magical. No. It turns out they just have like, they, you know, help you produce melatonin. And after I knew that, I’m like, I shouldn’t even waste my time because melatonin does nothing for me. But there was like several nights I ate six Kiwis every night. I have not had a Kiwi since. I, I’ve tried different foods, not eating before bed, phones for like, no phone, tv, anything screen related for like three hours before bed. It was to the point where I literally would stop drinking water at 6, 6 30 so that I wouldn’t have to get up to use the restroom during the night because I swore that was keeping me up. Right. If I didn’t have any more water, then I would, you know, not struggle to go to sleep. And then, you know, I was. also impacted my social life, right? I had a bible study that we would meet on Wednesdays starting at seven, which even now, like even after all of this, I don’t love late plans, but I really got anxious about anything starting at seven because that’s when my nighttime routine needed to start. That’s when I needed to like settle and not be excited.

Casaundra: So the fact that I went and get home until 10 and showered and ready for bed until 11 was really stressful for me. So yeah, if, if you can name it, I tried it and you know, in that first bout where I wasn’t sleeping at all, I did like a CBT-I app. But it kind of missed the mark on the control piece or like how you’re thinking about it. Like they obviously had some pieces of that, but it was just still felt more like controlling you know, just knowing that sleep will eventually come and the more I try to control it, the less it’s going to work.

Martin: There’s something, all of those things that you just share with us, they all have something in common, right? And it’s just this understandable attempt to control sleep to make a certain amount or a certain type of sleep happen. And that completely makes sense because you identified sleep as a problem.

Martin: You are a problem solver. You wanted to fix it. So you put effort into trying to fix it. And where it sounds like you noticed you were getting stuck was no matter what you were trying, no matter what you were doing, it just wasn’t having the desired result. So that just led you to doing more, doing more, trying harder, trying harder, and your actions just became dominated by serving sleep rather than serve you and the life you want to live. So not only did you find the actions were creating more struggle, they were also kind of pulling you away from who you are and who you wanted to be and the life you wanted to live.

Casaundra: Absolutely. I felt like a different person even, and especially that being like the first year that I was, or like first few months of being married, like I’m sure my husband was like, Who did I marry? Because everything we did, everything I ate, everything was about how could I sleep? And, you know, he slept like a rock. And I know it’s this cruel thing that, you know, all of us just marry someone that, you know, can sleep when we can’t sleep. he would, you know, be sleeping in bed and he’s the type of person that nothing bothers him. He could be woken up and go right back to bed. And so, like there were nights where I would just wake him up, just sobbing, right?

Casaundra: Just absolutely sobbing and so frustrated and so angry, like so, so angry that I couldn’t sleep and he would just scratch my back and, you know, try and help me get back to sleep. And, and two minutes later he’d be asleep and I would still be awake. And it was just all consuming my whole personality. My whole church group knew about it.

Casaundra: Like I was just the insomniac.

Martin: It’s like it takes over your identity, your sense of self, who you are.

Casaundra: Absolutely.

Martin: I’m, I’m curious to know, did you ever ask your husband at that time, like what he did, like what his secret was to just sleeping in the way he did?

Casaundra: You know, I, I never really asked him then because it was just like, he just went to sleep. Like no matter what, he would just, you know, be on his phone, do whatever, and he just went to sleep. But now, like, after your course, someone’s like talking to me about sleep or telling me to try something, you know, if we’re talking about my history with insomnia, and I’ll be like, well, like, you know, you sleep well.

Casaundra: Like, what do you do? Sleep? So I didn’t ask him, but now I ask people that all the time when they’re like recommending something, because a lot of times they’re like, oh, I don’t do anything. I just, you know, go to sleep. And so. But it was something like, through your course, I, I realized so much. I’m like, oh my gosh, the kid’s doing nothing and it just comes to him and he’s not a kid.

Casaundra: He’s a six seven grown man. But yeah, it was infuriating, also hopeful. Like I knew if he could sleep doing nothing and I could sleep. just wasn’t, which really made me feel like something was wrong with me for the longest time until I worked through a lot of things in this course.

Martin: That’s the insight right there, isn’t it? If we do know someone who is a fantastic sleeper. When we’re struggling with insomnia, it often tends to be a, a bed partner or a, or a spouse if we’re in that situation, and you just kind of get a, a blank look when you ask someone who doesn’t struggle with sleep, like what they do to make that sleep happen, because the answer is they don’t do anything.

Martin: And that can reveal opportunity and a new way forward if we feel like what we’re doing at the current time is keeping us stuck or not working for us.

Martin: I think you touched upon it a little bit earlier, but I’m curious to know, you know, as you were doing all this problem solving and trying all these different things to get your sleep back on track, especially these things that you, you know, read about online that is shared with such confidence that this is the thing that will fix your sleep. When you tried those things and it just wasn’t working for you, what was that experience like?

Casaundra: For me it was really difficult because I’ve always been like happy and you know, optimistic and able to look at things like with a glass like half full. with sleep, it was the first time I had some of those really dark thoughts. Like I felt not only alone, but hopeless, but also like. A different length, like level of anger that I’d never felt before.

Casaundra: But part of that like came to a head and like literally wishing I was in the hospital or wishing something so bad would happen to me that I had to go to the hospital to be like put to sleep. And, you know, it’s amazing what a lack of sleep and all this trying and all these things that you’re doing when they don’t work make you feel when you can’t get to the result that you’re wanting.

Casaundra: Like I had never been more desperate in my life. And, you know, as someone who loves your life and, and wants to live it to the fullest and was really scary to have those thoughts of, well, if I could just put an end to this whole not sleeping thing. And that was really eye-opening too for me. Like, I was like, wow, like I, I need some help and I need a way out of here.

Martin: It is really difficult and it’s. It’s not just about the problem of sleep, not happening as you want it to. It’s about all the stuff that gets added on top. You know, all the, all the trying to fix the problem and that, that repeated experience of, I’m trying this, this isn’t working, I’m trying this, this isn’t working.

Martin: You can just feel as though you’re completely out of options and that there’s no way out. It feels just, it just feels like you’re trapped.

Casaundra: Absolutely. And everything else in my life, I’ve been able to work hard enough, right? hard enough at school, get the scholarship, work hard enough at X, Y, Z, like get the promotion, like in life. So many things in life, like you’re able to control that way. And it was really hard for me for this to be. Something I couldn’t control. So it was, it was a lot of growth there for me as well, which I’m sure we can talk about later in terms of just kind of this being a process in which learning that control isn’t the best option in every situation.

Martin: Since you had already tried so much at this point, when you came across my website or my work, what made you think that there was something different here or something worth trying?

Casaundra: I can remember finding your podcast on Spotify. Like any person, like struggling to sleep. I was like, let’s get a puppy. And so, you know, I had a puppy. I wasn’t sleeping even more because of the puppy, and I was taking him on a walk and was just searching on Spotify for insomnia, you know, solutions.

Casaundra: And I, I found your podcast and I had already done the other like CBT-I app before this. And so I kind of recognized some of the things that you were talking about within that. But then there was this like resounding piece that everyone who shared their stories was sharing and it was this like relinquish of control. Like it doesn’t have as much weight on my life. And that felt really like encouraging and like hopeful because it was consuming so much of my life that I’m like, this seems different.

Martin: First of all, it felt different, but it was also in that context of, here are people talking about my experience, they’re describing the kind of things that I am going through, that I’m struggling with. So if this is something that these people found useful, maybe it’s something I’ll find useful too.

Casaundra: Yeah, and it was like, oh my gosh, like I felt like I found like the Disneyland of people who struggle with insomnia, and it was like the first time I saw heard actual stories of people working through insomnia that. It sounded so much like myself, right? And you find like certain episodes and you’re like, wow, this person’s so much like me and like my story.

Casaundra: And on those bad days I would just like replay it, right? And now to this day, you know, it’s amazing how quickly you forget. But I can’t remember the name of that podcast, but I remember the hope that it gave me on my really hard days that there was a way out and people just like me found that.

Martin: What showed up for you when you identified this theme of relinquishing control? Because after all, you were so invested in trying to fix this problem, and now you’re hearing, well, maybe the way to fix it is to give up this control. Like what did that feel like as, as an option or as a suggested way forward?

Casaundra: You know, it was actually so hard, like as the person that’s used control, not in a negative way, but just in a, hey, in our circle of control in our lives, we can get to places we’ve never been, accomplish things we’ve never done, escape generational cycles, and I had done all that, right? And so for me, this idea that if I just stopped controlling it kind of scary, right?

Casaundra: Like it, it was just born to the brain for me at least, right? It was something I’d always, I just always worked hard and if I, I work hard, it, it, it gets the result that I need. But then there was the second piece of it, right? So the first piece was like a shift from how I usually think. the second piece was, what does that actually mean?

Casaundra: Like, I think part of me was kind of like angry, like, okay, like. Just stop trying to control it. Sounds really easy, except when you consider the human brain and how we focus on things that are important to us and, and how we want to improve it naturally without even realizing it when it’s negatively impacting us or how our body wants to protect us, right?

Casaundra: So this thought of, oh, I’ll just stop controlling it frustrating because I’m like, but how, do I control, how do I stop, you know, controlling this or trying to control? So a lot of mixed emotions.

Martin: The two big ones being hope and fear at the same time. You raise a really good point. How do I do this? Like, how do I put this into action? How do I relinquish control? What do I do instead? Because I have to do something. I can’t just do nothing. So I’m curious to hear from you what kind of things you did to put this whole idea of relinquishing control or moving away from resistance.

Martin: How did you put that into action?

Casaundra: It takes a long time, right? And that’s something like even by the end of your course, I wasn’t like, healed, right? It was like I wanted to be, heck, week one. I wanted to be. But it’s just not how it works because I just had to keep doing little things each week to make my life outside of sleep bigger than the sleep issue. And so like, that’s what it started to feel like to actually stop trying to control it, was to build up my life outside of sleep so that it just got less attention. And by giving it less attention, it got less control and sleep could kind of move in. And so, know, a few things, you know, mindset was huge, right?

Casaundra: Just realizing and hearing and seeing the facts about like, I’m not gonna die because I’m not sleeping like I will survive. Like, that was a big one for me. Like, just hearing that and knowing like, I’m gonna be okay. Like all of these, you know, statistics that I’m seeing like does not mean that I am not going to be well, and plenty of people live long healthy lives without, you know, eight, nine hours of sleep.

Casaundra: And so that was part of the mindset, like realizing it wasn’t going to hurt me and so I, I didn’t need to fix it. realizing I could just. Go about my days, right? Like I didn’t need to think about it like sleep was going to come. That that simple sentence of our bodies are going to sleep when they need to provided so much rest for me it, I no longer was like, I’m not going to sleep. I’m like, well maybe it’s not tonight, but it will, it will come eventually. Like I can’t this up forever and so it will come. And so those were a few things or a couple things that stuck out to me in like the mindset shift and then you get into like what actions, right?

Casaundra: So the mindset kind of made room for new actions to come into play for me which sounds like trying to sleep, but it was like all actions to actually stop trying to force sleep. Like, so the first one I think that gets introduced is the sleep window, right? And this was like life changing for me, right?

Casaundra: And I had done sleep for, I just, I hadn’t had that mindset shift, so it didn’t mean anything, you know? And so you can first have that mindset shift, then these things can come in and actually be effective. And so the sleep window, like I remember the first night was like excited, right? Like I was like, I have so much time to get stuff done.

Casaundra: Like I’m a maximizer, right? And that goes into the problem solving all this stuff. And so the idea that, you know, I could cook and clean and do a hobby and take my dog Teddy on a walk, and I could just keep doing all these things until like 9:00 PM because I didn’t need to start a bedtime routine at like 6 30, 7, whatever time it was that night. so. That sleep window gave me more time in my day and I felt like, wow, like this is exciting. And, you know, started doing more yoga in the evenings afterwards and I had more time for my Bible study reading and shows if I, you know, wanted to stay up and watch it. ’cause I was actually allowed to, like, there were no rules, like everything before was, you can’t do this and don’t spend any time in your bedroom.

Casaundra: Like, I loved my bedroom. Like, it was so aesthetic and pretty, and I would never spend any time in it because of all these rules I had in place around the, you know, they say like, the bedroom can only be for three things. And that’s like, you know, sleep, we can all use our imagination on the second one and then sickness, right?

Casaundra: And so now I could just hang out in my bedroom. I could sit on my bed, I could watch a show if I wanted to, if I was really like just really needing to rest because other people did that, right? Like my husband could literally be on his phone, watch a horror film, like the craziest things before bed, and then like fall asleep. So like I could now, I had permission to do that. so the first action was kind of that sleep window, right? And it gave me a lot of freedom and just like time and what I could do and when I could do it. And also just, I wasn’t spending three hours trying to go to bed. Like part of the thing with getting married to my husband is that he likes to go to bed early, which I do too, but like he is an extreme degree of like. Eight 30, he can get in bed. And for most of us, that’s not good. And if we still to this day, like he’ll be like, I’m so tired, I’m gonna go to bed. I’m like, I’m gonna read because I am not tired yet. And I know that if I try to go to bed before I’m even naturally sleepy, like it’s probably not gonna be a good thing for me, even though I don’t say I struggle with insomnia anymore. So that was kind of all things into the sleep window. And then, you know, I dropped all the behavioral and environmental things.

Casaundra: Okay. I have, I lied a little bit. I still like use the earplugs, but only because now it’s just like a comfort thing. I don’t feel like I need them. If I forget them, it’s no big deal. It’s just like. I kind of imagine like a kid with a stuffed animal, it’s just like, oh. It’s like, okay, bed. so it’s like there’s no attachment to needing those, but I don’t take melatonin. Or I didn’t then. Right. It’s part of the change of knowing it wasn’t helping. Don’t take any of the harder, like Ambien that I was prescribed, and I just, I don’t have to eat six Kiwis and that’s really nice. So a lot of things have kind of let up on the behavioral and environmental changes and I can hang out with my friends, like, what a blessing in life. And so that’s kind of the environmental, behavioral and then you get to just like, well, everything wasn’t just fixed, right? And so what happens when I’m still awake at night and I can’t sleep even after that wake window ends and I’m allowed to, you know, go to bed. And there came in like. The just experiencing being awake. And so I, I took pieces from everything, right? I would go back to the mindset of sleep’s eventually going to come, I could use any of those, you know, tools or hobbies that I used to kind of relax during my sleep, like before my sleep window started. So I could do that if I wasn’t sleeping. But I could also just let the thoughts be and thank them for being there without them being so infuriating, right? I was no longer angry about being awake. I could just be awake. And I, I think one of my favorite things too, from the course was like, so much freedom in how you do these things. Like you would say, Hey, you can stay in bed if that’s comfortable still. And I love that because I hate getting outta bed when I am cold or it’s like. I don’t know. I just love being cozy in bed. So like the permission to just staying in bed as long as that’s still serving me mm-hmm. Really went a long way.

Casaundra: So those were a few of the things. I think there were definitely other things but those are some of the big things that impacted my recovery.

Martin: Something that really stood out for you. I think one of the first things you said was, which kind of encompassed everything that you shared, I started to make my life bigger than sleep. Those actions that we were talking about earlier, that when they’re so focused on serving sleep, serving insomnia, you took them back.

Martin: Those actions started to once again serve you. So you were, you know, reading more, you were doing yoga, watching tv, doing your Bible studies. The sleep window helped with that because it was one of those actions that moved you away from the chasing after sleep. You recognized that the amount of time you were allotting for sleep each night wasn’t really serving you.

Martin: It was kind of setting you up for long periods of being awake in bed during the night. So by compressing that down and more closely matching it with the amount of sleep you’re currently getting, there was more opportunity for you to do these things that mattered. It opened up all this additional time that you had available to do things that served you and the life you wanted to live, and that in turn helped reduce the influence of sleep in your life.

Martin: It was still there, like sleep or insomnia was still there, but now it was one of many things rather than the only thing. And like you touched upon that didn’t mean that suddenly there was this miraculous transformation and that sleep was happening exactly as you wanted it to, or the, all these difficult thoughts, difficult feelings, stopped showing up.

Martin: But it’s got you started on this new way forward where you were reclaiming your life, where life was becoming bigger and opening up again. And I’m curious to hear a little bit more about how you were addressing all the thoughts and the feelings that show up at night. You know, especially when sleep isn’t happening as you want it to happen.

Martin: You said that something changed there, where you kind of gave permission for those thoughts to exist. You even thanked them for showing up and that in turn kind of reduced how they were affecting you.

Martin: What would you say to someone that might be sitting here listening to this thinking I can’t possibly open up or accept those things ’cause they’re really difficult. And it’s just the idea of opening up to them in itself is really scary.

Casaundra: It is really scary, right? Because you’re like, I have fought this so hard, like, why would I, and, you know, invite them in. But it, it takes the power away, right? And, and they can’t hurt you, right? The more you let them in, the less they actually hold over you. I, I, I remember my thoughts would just kind of swirl and ruminate and, and keep going, but when I would actually like. Let them in and observe them and see what they were telling me, which is that sleep is important. And of course I have important things coming up in my life. Or you know, I wanna sleep for a certain reason. Telling me all these things were important to me. I could just thank them because I was like, yes, this is important.

Casaundra: Thank you for showing me that. It is important, but I’m gonna let you go now. Right. And I, I don’t remember if it was part of the course or, and I think it probably was, but I would just like imagine them like going out the window, right? Like the breeze would kind of pull them out the window. And I think maybe some people would do like, you know, flowing down water or something. And just that visual, even though it sounds really silly, helped me to just kind of watch them go, right? I let them come in, I let them stay. We had a good talk, but now they could go and they might come right back. Sometimes they just like come around the window and start knocking on the door. And you’re allowed to just do the same thing. I found like if I didn’t let them in, it actually made it worse. And I actually just kept ruminating over what I thought it was going to be. And this has helped me in like other areas of my life too, right? I can sometimes be anxious about, you know, driving on the highway, right? And what if something bad happens to me?

Casaundra: And just like recognizing, well, okay, that’s a really small chance that would happen, and what’s the worst thing that could happen, right? I go to be with Jesus and my family’s taken care of because all the things I’ve put in place, okay, that’s actually not that bad, right? And so it’s helped me in other ways too, of like not just insomnia, knowing, oh yeah, I’m gonna be fine tomorrow.

Casaundra: Like no matter how tonight goes, I’m going to be fine. I’m gonna do all the things that I need to do no matter what.

Martin: It sounds like you found it helpful to recognize that your brain wasn’t working against you. That all these thoughts and these feelings that were showing up, many of which can be really difficult to experience, don’t come from your brain working against you. It comes from your brain, like reminding you of what’s important, reminding you of what matters, looking out for you.

Martin: And that in itself just acknowledge being aware of that, that my brain isn’t an adversary can help support you in responding differently with less resistance.

Casaundra: Oh yeah. Even like to this day, you know, if I have a rough night or I’m just not sleeping as easy as sometimes I do. It’s like, oh yeah, like I’m, I was so excited about this new podcast I found, or something at work that’s happening, and so it’s like, oh yeah, like I’m excited or I’m stressed. Like this makes total sense. And you’re like, okay, yeah, maybe I don’t sleep the best at tonight, but it’s just because of X, Y, Z, not because I’m broken, not because I need to change anything or I can’t sleep. None of that’s true. It’s just the things that are now filling up my life.

Martin: The approach that you took that you found helpful, which, which to summarize, it sounds like it was, first of all, just kind of acknowledging what your brain was telling you. Maybe thanking it for looking out for you, then being more of an observer of whatever these thoughts and these feelings were.

Martin: You shared that as you did that it kind of lifted the weight of them a little bit, but you did notice that sometimes they would drift off, but then sometimes they would also come back. How did you respond to that experience of them coming back? Because I think often what can happen is when we practice this new approach of opening up, reducing our resistance, and we notice, wow, these thoughts, these feelings are losing their power.

Martin: They’re losing their influence. Oh, they’re disappearing. When they come back, suddenly it can feel like uhoh, the brain goes into alert. This is another one of those things that’s not working. Now we have to do something different. I’m just curious to hear what your experience was like with that and how you responded.

Casaundra: Yeah, I would love to say that every time I came back, I just did it all again and it worked just fine. The reality is sometimes they come back and it’s, it’s even more scary, right? Because there’s a part of insomnia that when little pieces that remind you of it come back into your life or a thought comes back up and it’s not easy. It’s like scary, right? Like you’re like, is tonight gonna be that night? Or is, you know, you start. Can start having negative thoughts about it. And so that did happen sometimes, right?

Casaundra: I didn’t spend as much time in that really dark place. Right. Which was a really scary place for me. Remember, because it’s not who I am. I was so much kinder to myself, right? It, it didn’t have as much weight. I, I didn’t feel like I was broken or that it was my fault. was just the nature of, you know, being human.

Martin: Were there any other changes that you wanted to mention or share that you found helpful on this journey of moving away from the struggle with insomnia?

Casaundra: Yeah, I think one for me that sometimes just kind of gets looped into like the sleep window thing was the buffer zone. So having that hour before bedtime to just do tasks that were not only just enjoyable and like full of life, but also more relaxing and the way of just like signal signaling to my body that I was preparing for sleep without controlling it. Right? Just doing a little bit more relax. And I honestly still use this like out of all the techniques. This idea of a buffer zone of, Hey, I know I’m a person that’s really sensitive to my environment, right?

Casaundra: My husband to this day can, you know, do what he does, but I know I need like a half an hour, an hour to just kind of relax and let my body be as it kind of prepares to feel naturally sleepy so that I am going to bed tired. so that zone or the idea that you have a window of time right before bed to just kinda relax and do things to bring you joy, really helped me.

Martin: Setting aside some time to unwind and just do things that you personally find relaxing and enjoyable rather than giving yourself a rule that I’ve gotta be home an hour before I go to bed, and I’ve gotta spend an hour making myself relax, making myself feel sleepy, and making myself have the best possible chances of making sleep happen.

Casaundra: Oh yeah, absolutely. Like now, sometimes it’s like five minutes, right? I’ll be like, well, I’m just gonna like wind down and I open the book and I’m like, oh, I am so tired. Close the book and go to bed. And other times where it’s like, oh, I’m really finding that’s enjoyable and that turns into more time, but it’s never something that has to start at 9:00 PM and it’s, you know, never something.

Casaundra: I feel like, oh my gosh, if I don’t have this, then I’m not going to be able to sleep.

Martin: And, and that’s the difference there, isn’t it? Because as we talk about any of this stuff for example, a buffer zone or like a time to unwind, where we can set the stage for struggle is with our intention. So if the intention with something like a buffer zones to make sleep happen, that might be an action that doesn’t really serve us.

Martin: If the intention with the buffer zone is to just set aside some time in the evening that might have once been filled with struggle and effort and trying to just be a period of time where we can do whatever we want, something that we find enjoyable, relaxing, pleasant, that can be productive, then that can be useful, then that can be a workable thing to do.

Casaundra: The intent changed so much for me and like not trying to force sleep and at first you, you’re gonna kind of be lying to yourself maybe for, you know, some people I, I’ll speak for myself, but at first it was like, my intent is not to sleep. Like, not to force sleep, but my intent was definitely to go to sleep at first.

Casaundra: But it, it involves and so you kinda have to lie and, you know, kind of trick your brain for a little bit occasionally to start actually believing that. And that might not be true for everyone, but as a control freak, like you might start off like just speaking a different truth over your body than is actually going on.

Martin: Something we touched upon earlier was about, you know, how in the insomnia struggle isn’t just a nighttime problem, it it, it’s a 24 7 problem. It goes into the days as well. And a change that you made with your days was to just really focus your attention on actions that served you, that were important to you, that mattered to you, rather than what might make a certain amount or a certain type of sleep happen.

Martin: Something else that can make these days more difficult too, are the thoughts and those feelings that can show up. You know, the anxieties, the worry and the time traveling that from the brain, like predicting what the night is gonna be like tonight or what previous nights were like, and that in turn could just make things.

Martin: More difficult and it makes it harder to do those things that matter. I’m curious to hear from you if you practiced anything or had this way of dealing with all those thoughts and feelings that would show up during the day. What did you find was a workable way to deal with them at that time?

Casaundra: It was kind of just like, you know, noticing and observing it. It was kind of like the abbreviated version of what I would do at night, right?

Casaundra: Like, I would observe what was happening, kind of ground myself back to my day and then just move forward. And I, I can’t remember it as much because I feel like my life was so busy, like between work and everything, the moment that I stopped you know, being so consumed about researching what could make me sleep, it gave me a lot more freedom in my days.

Casaundra: But that being said, like I definitely still had to redirect. And this is the same exercise when I was saying help me with like, being in the car and driving. It’s kind of that similar thing of like, notice what you’re feeling and let it be and observe it, and kind of grounding yourself and what’s actually happening around you.

Martin: It comes down again to less resistance. And every time you got that opportunity to practice developing that skill of reducing your resistance it kind of strips them of their power and their influence. You are better able to refocus. So you are noticing, first and foremost whatever thought and feeling was showing up.

Martin: Then you are opening up, dropping that resistance, allowing it to be with you, and then just noticing or refocusing on where you are. What you were doing or what you wanted to be doing, even when that thought is still there. So your goal isn’t to kind of get rid of it. Although sometimes when we lower that resistance, it does make it easier to flow, to come and go, but it was just to refocus your attention when those thoughts and feelings showed up.

Martin: So they didn’t kind of jerk you around so much.

Casaundra: And so many times I would be like halfway through the exercise and it would already start kinda working, right? I’d be like, oh yeah, and I’m, now, I’m gonna think about this without planning on it, right? Instead of it just like coming at me so hard with me trying to push it away, like I definitely am the person to like push away negative.

Casaundra: And so these like exercises helped a lot with me not pushing it away, but allowing it to come even though it was scary.

Martin: You make a good point there that this stuff can still feel scary. It’s not about trying to make something not scary or trying to make a thought or a feeling disappear. It’s just about acknowledging or accepting that your experience seems to suggest that these thoughts and feelings and emotions are out of your direct control.

Martin: There’s no magic switch that you can flick to turn them off. So continuing to try might be making them more difficult. So how about we respond in a different way? And that different way is really easy for us to talk about. It’s certainly a lot easier than putting it into practice, but with practice, we can develop this skill in experiencing all this difficult stuff with less of a struggle so it doesn’t have quite so much power and influence over us.

Martin: How long would you say that it took for you to get to a point where it felt like you weren’t just in this endless struggle with sleep, you know that you were out of the struggle, you could live your life independently of sleep, no matter what kind of thoughts, no matter what kind of feelings were showing up.

Casaundra: Like I said at the beginning of the call, like I wanted it to be week one, and I’m sure everyone listening is like, man, I, I hope it’s week one of this course. But for me, it, it really took like a month or two after, like, I can’t remember the exact time or date because once it stops being so big, you kind of stop remembering it, and so. For me, it was like ending the course and letting it not even be that big in my life. Right? Like there were a lot of tools I needed to learn, right? And all the videos and the how-tos, like all of those were so important and I needed to have all of those in my tool belt. But after that, I just needed more time to, to use those without a focus on it.

Casaundra: Right? And as soon as I, I didn’t have those things that I needed to watch or do every week, the less and less sleep became a big deal and the farther I got away from thinking about it as much as I was. And so I would say about a month or two, probably after I finished maybe a little bit more it really kind of start to settle and the idea of, you know, no night is ever perfect, but I really didn’t feel like I was an insomniac anymore.

Casaundra: I kind of felt just like a human with sleep.

Martin: What did progress look like for you? What were your measures of progress? What told you that you were heading in the right direction?

Casaundra: I think for me it was like the weight on me about my sleep. Like, did I wake up thinking I didn’t get enough? Or how big of an influence is this going to have? So, like early on that was really big for me. Like the progress within your course was measured by how was I feeling in my day and could I go about my day without this being bigger than the rest of my life?

Casaundra: And so that was it. And as much as I wanna say that I, you know, didn’t look at the amount of sleep I was getting as like tracker of progress, you kind of do it naturally, but it wasn’t like. I need more sleep. It was just like, huh, wow.

Casaundra: Like I slept really well last night. I didn’t do anything. So I think you kind of just notice it throughout your life anyways without putting too much of an emphasis on it. It really just also let me be a different person, right? Like my husband got back the person that he lost when we were first married, and I was struggling with insomnia.

Martin: It was interesting hearing you share what your markers of progress were because you didn’t really say in there, oh, the nights when I got like seven hours of sleep, I knew that was progress.

Martin: Or eight hours of sleep or six hours. There was no number of hours of sleep. You didn’t even describe the type of sleep. And that’s insightful because I think that for as long as we are measuring progress based on sleep, which, our experience, if we’ve been struggling with it, probably tells us is out of our control.

Martin: Then it sets the stage for that ongoing struggle. But your markers of progress, as you were reflecting were, you know, I was just noticing sleep wasn’t a big deal. It wasn’t as big a deal. It was losing some of its power or some of its influence. It was more about what, what am I doing with my life? Like, what am I doing day to day?

Martin: Are my actions serving me? Do they reflect my values? Do they reflect the life I wanna live? Are my actions moving me in the direction that I want to be heading?

Martin: I think you summarized it as well towards the end. You know, I, I got my life back, you know, I am the person that I want to be and all of those things are a ction based. They’re all things that you can control. It’s so helpful to use things like that as measures of progress rather than what kind of sleep am I getting from night to night.

Casaundra: Absolutely. And I think like, you know, even hearing on other people like them share on the podcast, it was, it was more about that too, right? Like it’s a beautiful thing of like, this is the power of not holding so much control over sleep.

Martin: One more question about progress whilst we’re on that subject. Did you find that as you were practicing these new skills, that it was like every single day or every single night was just kind of like better than the previous one? Or about the same of, did you notice there were ups and downs? I’m just curious what the journey looked like for you in terms of progress.

Casaundra: That’s probably two steps forward, one step back kind of thing. I, I, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say, yeah, it was just smooth sailing from course on out. Like, that wasn’t my experience either, right? Every, every night looked a little bit different and some made me fearful that I was starting over at the beginning.

Casaundra: But everything I learned taught me that, hey, that’s not the actual truth. Like this is normal and it will get better the more you keep working on these tools. So were definitely a lot of setbacks, but the mental mind shift, like the shift in mindset just makes it where it’s not as big of a deal.

Martin: I’m curious to know what it was that kept you moving forward when those setbacks happened, especially those, the initial setbacks early on, you know, you’re noticing the progress. Then you have like your first kind of setback, or you notice you have that awareness that you’re getting pulled back into the struggle or that you are struggling again.

Martin: How do you kind of reset or refocus and continue moving forward when that happens?

Casaundra: It always would start with like the reminders. Like I, I would remind myself, I know sleep’s coming, like I know that this isn’t the truth over my life. But then comes like the motivation of like why I keep going, right? So what gets me to keep going, but then why is, is more of a, I just wanted my life back.

Casaundra: Like, I hated being awake at night and wondering how the rest of the entire world had their lights off and were sleeping, and I just wanted to be that person with their lights off. And so I knew if I just kept putting one foot forward every day, I was bound to get there no matter if I had to go back a little bit every once in a while.

Martin: It sounds like you found it helpful to remind yourself of why it’s important for you to respond in a certain way. Why this idea of reducing resistance, focusing on workable action actions that matter to you why that’s important, why it matters, and that’s what helped you stay focused on continuing to do the things that mattered and keeping you moving in the direction you want it to be heading.

Casaundra: Absolutely.

Martin: What would you say that you’ve learned from this whole experience and in what ways do you feel that you’ve grown from it, if any.

Casaundra: Yeah, no a lot and summarize maybe two. So for me, like the perception of insomnia and, and what it actually is, and it’s, it’s shifted for me now. It’s not so much of a problem ’cause I know sleep’s going to come and if there is a disturbance in my sleep, it, it’s that, right? That word right there disturbance.

Casaundra: It’s just something disturbing my sleep instead of insomnia or this like chronic thing that can’t be overcome. And so there’s a big perception change around what insomnia even is. And, then the second thing is just control, right? I, it has really helped me not try to control other things in my life. Just like with sleep, you know, there’s other things that kind of work the same, right? Stress or, I am trying to think of another good example, but stress is kind of the only other one I can think of that’s as similar. Like the more you focus on it, the worse it might get and sometimes you just have to let it go and it’s really helped me with that.

Casaundra: Anxiety probably is another great example, honestly, better. So it’s really helped me with letting those things go and, and changing how I approach control.

Casaundra: I wouldn’t wish insomnia on my worst enemy, but at the same time, I’m like so thankful for what I found and what I learned in your course and how it’s enabled me to react so differently to things that feel so impossible.

Martin: I’m really grateful for the time you’ve taken at your day to come onto the podcast. I do have one last question for you, and then it’s this one. If someone with chronic insomnia is listening and they feel as though they’ve tried everything, they’re beyond help, that they’ll never be able to stop struggling with insomnia, what would you say to them?

Casaundra: I would say, you know, our creator God, designed sleep, and it’s going to come eventually. And the more you can relinquish control of trying to get sleep by filling your life with joy regardless of what the nights look like and the more energy you spend bringing that effort and attention to those things that fill up your life, the less you’re going to be controlling your sleep, and then the more you will.

Martin: thank you again for coming onto the podcast, Casaundra. It’s really appreciated. Thank you.

Casaundra: Thank you so much.

Martin: Thanks for listening to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. If you’re ready to get your life back from insomnia, I would love to help. You can learn more about the sleep coaching programs I offer at Insomnia Coach — and, if you have any questions, you can email me.

Martin: I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Insomnia Coach Podcast. I’m Martin Reed, and as always, I’d like to leave you with this important reminder — you are not alone and you can sleep.

I want you to be the next insomnia success story I share! If you're ready to stop struggling with sleep and get your life back from insomnia, you can start my insomnia coaching course right now.

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Today, I’m talking with Farrukh — someone whose experience with insomnia slowly began to take over more and more of his life.

At first, sleep wasn’t something he thought much about. It was just there. Something that happened naturally. But over time, that started to change. Nights became more unpredictable. Sleep felt less certain — and it began to consume his attention.

He started noticing how he slept. Then thinking about how he slept. Then worrying about how he might sleep. And from there, things escalated.

Nights became something to prepare for. Something to manage. Something to try and get right. He began experimenting with different routines, adjusting his environment, and doing everything he could to improve his sleep.

Everything he did was understandable. But instead of making things easier, the ongoing effort put more of his time and energy into sleep. It became something he had to figure out — something he had to fix.

And that pressure started to spread beyond the night. Sleep was no longer just part of his life. It was starting to shape it.

In this conversation, Farrukh shares what began to change when he stepped away from that constant effort and started bringing his focus back to living his life.

He talks about what that looked like for him and how that change in direction freed him from an ongoing struggle and got him to a place where sleep is no longer a big deal at all.

Click here for a full transcript of this episode.

Martin: Okay. Farrukh, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to come onto the podcast.

Farrukh: Thank you. Hi to you and hi to everybody i’m really excited to be here and I look forward to this conversation.

Martin: It’s great to have you on. Let’s just dive in and get started right at the beginning. When did your sleep problems first begin and what do you feel caused those initial issues with sleep?

Farrukh: The sleep issues, initially began with some other things happening in my life that I was a bit stressed about, that I was a bit worried about, and that worry creeping into sleep initially.

Farrukh: But after it creeped into sleep for one night, two nights, three nights, then the worry started attaching to sleep in itself. It almost felt like I’ve lost the ability to fall asleep and then it started to become a huge problem.

Martin: So at first there was some worries or some stresses going on in your life and when you noticed some sleep disruption, at first it felt, okay, this makes sense why I am struggling with sleep a little bit because I’ve got all these worries going on right now.

Martin: But then as the sleep disruption continued over multiple nights, the worries then became more about sleep than whatever might have first triggered the actual sleep disruption itself.

Farrukh: Exactly. I think after your brain sees multiple experiences of it happening, then it becomes a loop. And then you feel like there’s no way out. And I’ve lost the ability to fall asleep. And you ask the people, you ask your friends, you ask your father, you ask your mom, you ask your friends or whatever.

Farrukh: Because they have not experienced it. Because they have not faced it. For the most people, I would say. Like they would say things like, no, probably you were not that really tired. Or, and people say, try to fall asleep, right? So get into bed and try to fall asleep. Do your best to fall asleep and you will.

Farrukh: And then you try those things and they don’t work. And you feel like, why can they sleep well? And why can’t I sleep well? And it has been a month, it has been two months. And then you worry about your sleep and then you worry about that, oh, I’m not being able to fall asleep now I can’t do my work now I can’t exercise now I can’t earn money now I can’t study.

Farrukh: So then a loop starts over because now you’re worried about if I don’t sleep well, what would happen? And your mind started, starts attaching to that. And then the more you try to fall asleep so that you could fix those things, the more you can’t sleep.

Martin: You just encapsulated how this can all snowball so easily. There’s that trigger for the sleep disruption. And then you, as the sleep disruption continues, you find yourself trying to fix the sleep issues, which makes complete sense is completely understandable. You notice a problem, you wanna fix it, right?

Martin: And then the more you try to fix the sleep problems, the more difficult they seem to become, the more these thoughts and these feelings show up. And then it progresses, you had the worries about whatever the triggering event was, then you have the worries about the sleep, then you have the worries about the consequences of sleep.

Martin: And in amongst all that, there’s just more and more trying, more and more effort and you’re just caught in this big loop, just seems to grow and become its own kind of monster.

Farrukh: Yeah. It also does not feel good because you feel like you’re working hard, so hard for something that other people can do so easily.

Farrukh: And you feel like, why can’t I? Then you start to have that comparison. Then you start asking people and I remember every day I used to be like asking people like, how many hours do you sleep?

Farrukh: How many hours do you sleep? And then I would wake up in the middle of the night just checking my phone to see how many hours I have slept. I had to sleep eight hours.

Farrukh: I started dreading waking up at night. I hope I don’t wake up in the middle of the night because then it would be so hard to go back to sleep.

Martin: I think it’s human nature to compare ourselves to others, and there can be two sides to that, right? In some ways it may be it pushes us to be a stronger or a better person, and in other ways it can not really serve us very well.

Martin: And sleep is perhaps one of those things where that comparison often doesn’t prove to be very helpful, although it’s understandable. Because as we are gonna no doubt dig into a little bit more, sleep isn’t really within our direct control. So when we compare our sleep with others, we can then be inclined to put more effort into sleep and that tends to create more struggle and sleep just becomes.

Martin: I feel like what you touched upon there, it becomes almost like a judgment of who we are as a person. We attach it to our self-worth, there’s something wrong with me, there’s something broken. How comes these people are all getting a certain amount or type of sleep and I’m not. And that just then piles on all the pressure on all the harsh self-talk, which doesn’t usually make things any better.

Farrukh: Absolutely. And then like you said, you start to judge yourself on it and you start to look at it like somewhat of a test.

Farrukh: Okay, let me get into my bed, let me try to fall asleep and let me try my best if I’m able to fall asleep, okay, I was able to fall asleep one and a half hours, but I’m still not falling asleep for eight hours or seven hours.

Farrukh: I’m failing. So you start to feel like it’s like you have to perform and prove to yourself and it’s some kind of performance and you have to make it the best, the perfect it can be. And then that judgment comes in.

Farrukh: The harder you are working, the more you’re involving your conscious mind. I like the saying, I read a saying some weeks ago, it says that in all mental workings, effort defeats itself. And it’s not only with sleep, I’ve seen it with other things as well. It’s just if right now I try to not focus on the image of a red car and I try my best to not focus on the image of a red car, don’t focus on it.

Farrukh: That’s exactly what I would be doing. And I think it’s something similar that happens during the sleep issues. You are in your bed, you’re trying to fall asleep. If you are looking out for every single noise out there that can disturb you and wake you up, I remember I used to say to my family that I’m just closing my door.

Farrukh: Please don’t knock. Please don’t make any noise. Even like something like this would wake me up outside. So I was so worried about that there should be no sound that should wake me up because then it would be so hard to go back to sleep. And some people said some things, which helped for a day or two, but then it used to get back.

Farrukh: Someone who has faced it himself or herself and has gone out. I feel like only they can help you. Someone who has not faced it, they can never relate to what you’re experiencing.

Farrukh: And someone who’s not on the other side already and someone who has not also helped various people get over it. People like that can help but I feel like based on my experiences, people who have faced it and have got on the other side make it the easiest for you to get there.

Martin: The advice that we often get from other people is well intentioned but it often just repeats a lot of the stuff that’s already out there, which can just create more confusion, more pressure around sleep.

Martin: Like all the sleep hygiene stuff, for example. It’s, it tends to revolve around adding more, doing more in an effort to make a certain amount or a certain type of sleep happen. It takes personal experience or a really deep level of understanding to get to this point where you acknowledge that it’s that effort that is the actual problem.

Martin: And that’s probably the difference between someone who’s gone through the struggle and someone who hasn’t. But what you really encapsulate there, just the way that we can ramp up that pressure, to perform a certain amount or a certain type of sleep through effort, through creating the ideal or the perfect conditions.

Martin: And as we ramp up that pressure, just as you said, it just creates this kind of performance anxiety. The stakes just become so much higher. And that in itself just makes sleep even more difficult.

Farrukh: That is so true. That is so true. And. Judgment point is a huge thing. You judging yourself on whether it was a success, whether it was a failure.

Farrukh: I think that over judgment, and it’s not that sleep is a problem, then the next day you are all your thoughts. It’s sleep. I can’t sleep well. What if I don’t sleep well? Again, even if you sleep well, and this is something that I noticed that working, even if you’re working hard towards getting good sleep and you’re trying to lean your bed for hours and hours, and even if you get an amount of sleep, which is okay, even after you wake up, your mind would again be like, okay, I slept, but what about now?

Farrukh: What about the next sleep? Would I be able to fall asleep again? And then these thoughts all over the day became a huge problem. I wasn’t able to work, I wasn’t able to study because I felt like. I need to solve this problem. And I think there is where the issue comes. I need to solve this problem first and then do the other things in my life.

Farrukh: Once this problem will be solved, then I will be happy. Once this problem will be solved, then I will start enjoying life. So you start to see it like I’m doing something and without fixing it, I can’t do something else.

Farrukh: I did not know how to solve it. I had not watched your videos. I had not gotten in contact with you. I did not know that there was a solution.

Martin: I think it makes sense that you are gonna notice your brain focusing on sleep because the human brain is always trying to problem solve, right?

Martin: And any time it identifies a problem or even just a potential problem, it’s gonna really focus on that. And part of that does involve a lot of mental time traveling. The brain just focuses on the future, what each next night or each next day is gonna be, or what previous nights were like, what previous days were like.

Martin: It very rarely sticks to the present moment. That’s often a skill that we have to cultivate through practice. And you really highlight something, which I hear a lot, is that you just, you feel like you’re never satisfied with whatever happens, so you can have a really good night, and instead of using that as a reminder that Oh, I am able to generate sleep. Your brain immediately time travels into the future and it’s yeah, but what about tonight?

Farrukh: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. That just becomes a loop, I would say. Yeah.

Martin: If you had to describe what an average night was like for you when you were struggling, how would you describe it?

Farrukh: I think average night, I would start about it probably from the time, like two to three hours before I had to get into bed. The worry and anxiety started creeping in a lot, although that anxiety worry was there throughout the day. But when I know that, okay, two hours after this, three hours after this I have to go to bed, it was like I could feel something in my head.

Farrukh: It was something, it was like someone is trying to squeeze my brain, I’m worrying about it and stuff like that. And you feel so bad ’cause you see that the other people, they are working or doing something and then they come back home and they’re so excited to fall asleep and just rest and stuff like that.

Farrukh: And you feel like where people are finding enjoyment, you are finding like fear in that. So I think, and then when the time comes to get into bed, it’s like, it was like a constant moving around in my bed. Okay, let me try to fall asleep like this.

Farrukh: Maybe this will help. Let me try to do this. Let me try to do that. And then even you become so much conscious about it that there were times, and I’m sure you would’ve heard this a lot, that you’re trying to fall asleep and then you just notice that you’re about to fall asleep and then you wake up.

Farrukh: So you just notice that, oh, I’m going to sleep. And then you see your brain shutting down and the moment you start to see that you’re shutting down, you wake up because you once again pull out that monitoring thing on it. So I had to remember some nights where I did not sleep at all being in my bed, like all night long.

Farrukh: Some nights, like 15 minutes of sleep, half an hour of sleep, and then waking up. And then constant worry about I did not sleep well yesterday, how the next night is going to look like if I don’t sleep well, I’m not going to be. And your mind always shows you the worst case.

Farrukh: Worst case scenarios, okay, I’m not going to be able to fall asleep again at all. And when that happens, probably I’m going to even die. If I don’t fall asleep for 3, 4, 5 days, I’m going to die. And yep. A constant worry, a constant swinging around in the bed, trying to fall asleep.

Farrukh: Like a constant headache, I would say. And yep. Struggling to fall asleep. Even when you notice your mind shutting down a bit, being very conscious about it, and then it wakes you up. It’s like almost you’re looking for, just your mind is super, super alert. Like someone is going to come and probably kill you or something.

Farrukh: So you have to be very much alert what’s happening, what’s going around? Am I falling asleep?

Martin: I get this impression that at that time it just felt like your brain was working against you. At a time when you wanted to be winding down and relaxing and inviting sleep.

Martin: Instead, you found the opposite was happening. Your brain was generating more worries, more anxiety. You, it was like running through all these worst case scenarios and because you identified that as being something that’s not helpful. It can be human nature to then try to resist those thoughts or to try and fight those thoughts, get rid of those thoughts.

Martin: And then that pulls you into even more of a battle with them. And then they become even stronger and more intense just in the same way that the more you try to make sleep happen, you’re tossing and turning, trying to fall asleep, trying to make it happen. Find the perfect body position, the most comfortable body position.

Martin: And it’s like the more you’re trying, the more you find yourself struggling.

Farrukh: Absolutely. Absolutely. Like I said, it even the thoughts then you start to try hard to not have those thoughts. The more you try to avoid those thoughts, the more they come, the more strength they have.

Farrukh: I even remember like sometimes not going to work, sometimes not going to my place where I had to study ’cause my brain making the excuse that I have not slept well. So it means that I cannot work, I cannot do this.

Farrukh: So you decide not to go to work. Then the anxiety starts creeping in about your work as well. Oh, I’m not just now not sleeping, but now I’m not working. How will I work in the future? How would my earnings look like? How will I take care of my family and then instead of going to work or instead of going to your university or college or whatever it is, staying in at your home, being in your bed, and trying to like toss and turn, not only at night, but also during the day.

Farrukh: And I think there’s the concept of you feel like you have to make up your sleep. Okay. Yesterday I slept for four hours. Let me make up for the rest of the 2, 3, 4 hours or whatever in the afternoon or in the morning. And this is something that I’ve heard all my life, like eight hours sleep. And before I experienced insomnia, I never thought about it.

Farrukh: But it started impacting me after I started facing it because I was not only judgmental on how I’m sleeping, whether it’s deep sleep or whether it’s not deep sleep, I was so much judging myself on how many hours am I sleeping? Is it five hours, is it six hours? Is it seven hours? Okay. Yesterday I slept six hours, so I should sleep two more hours to make up for the last two hours yesterday.

Farrukh: And then you start to make up things like there is something that you like, there is an ideal sleep that you have to follow and you are always trying to catch up.

Martin: It just becomes more of a focus and your actions start to be more aligned with this idea that you need to serve sleep rather than your actions serving you and the life you wanna live. They’re now serving sleep, you’re chasing after it. You’re trying to create the perfect conditions for sleep. You’re trying to problem solve and troubleshoot. And that just gives it even more power and influence over your life just as you shared there.

Martin: It’s like sleep becomes a battleground. It makes sense that you notice this anxiety growing as the night gets closer, as your bedtime’s approaching because your brain is preparing for battle because it knows that there’s gonna be a struggle about to show up. Because that’s what it’s learned through no fault of your own. It is just doing its job of looking out for you. But that’s just what it’s learned. And then so you’ve got that struggle at night and then during the day, when your actions start to reflect the struggle rather than the life you wanna live.

Martin: For example, you might not go to work, and that’s completely understandable. And then at the same time, that can have the knock on effect of more time worrying about sleep. It increases the stakes. Now it’s really affecting your life. You’re not working. How are you gonna provide for yourself, for your future, for your family?

Martin: There’s more consequences, there’s more pressure. And it just perfectly encapsulates how this can so easily just take over your entire life. It’s not just a nighttime issue. It’s like a 24 7 issue.

Farrukh: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. You’re so right about it. And the point that you mentioned about sleep hygiene.

Farrukh: Now those sort of videos are good for people who are able to sleep well but are compromising their sleep. But someone who is struggling with sleep, when they start to watch those videos, that’s where the anxiety grows.

Martin: Sleep hygiene is really for those who are neglecting their sleep, who aren’t giving adequate opportunity for sleep to happen, or is for those who are sleeping really well, might just be looking to get those final opportunities to optimize the good conditions for sleep.

Martin: The thing is, people that struggling with insomnia, they are not neglecting their sleep. They are giving it a lot of opportunity to happen. They’re already clearing the stage as much as they can, putting a lot of effort in, a lot of trying. So the answer there is not usually more trying. By that point, something different is needed.

Martin: Sleep hygiene is like dental hygiene. It’s a preventative measure but once you’ve got that cavity, no amount of brushing is gonna fix that. You need something different.

Martin: Before we talk about what that different way looked like for you, what you had tried in an attempt to fix this problem?

Farrukh: The first thing, the foremost thing, I thought that the more time I spend in bed, the faster I can solve this.

Farrukh: So before I used to spend like seven or eight hours in bed. Now I started spending probably 12 hours, sometimes 14 hours, 15 hours, like compromising other things just for me to be able to fall asleep.

Farrukh: And you don’t realize that the thing that you’re doing to solve the problem is actually the cause of the problem.

Farrukh: Then I thought that the solution to this is make up to sleep, right? I have to make my sleep up. So I would avoid other things. I would not work. I would not do the things that are required of me. I stopped doing the things that I used to like, like my hobbies or things that I enjoy, thinking that I need to fix this first and only then I can reen enjoy the things that I was doing.

Farrukh: And only then, for example, at that time I was also working out. And I said that, okay, until I fix this, I can’t work out. So because I have not slept well, it means that I can’t work out.

Farrukh: Now it’s not just one problem, it’s impacting a hundred other things. And your mind is I have to solve this one problem before I look into the other things. So I think this is the stuff that I was trying to do, and then during the day, working hard to get rid of the thoughts. I should not think about this.

Farrukh: I should not focus on this trying my best, that these thoughts should not come into my mind. And just like we discussed, the more you try, the stronger it becomes as a whole.

Martin: There was a powerful statement in there that when you were describing all of these attempts to problem solve and to fix and it was something along the lines of it wasn’t just one problem anymore. As you tried to do more it upon reflection just created more problems. Now, it wasn’t about just sleep anymore, it was about the thoughts that come with it, the feelings that come with it.

Martin: The missing work because of it. Not working out, even though working out was important to you. Not doing things that you enjoy that matter to you. So it’s like there’s it, not only are you upping the stakes, but it just creates more problems. It’s not just about sleep anymore, it’s about all this other stuff on top of that.

Martin: So as you were deep into this problem solving mode. When you found my work, what was it about this approach that I share that made it feel like this could be a more useful way forward or worth experimenting with?

Farrukh: I would say that the first time I saw you, I watched two videos, three videos, and it’s like, you can relate to the things, right? And I started realizing how all the efforts that I’m doing so far are basically just feeding into the problem.

Farrukh: And then you, it’s like you hear someone talking about a more relaxed approach to sleep and someone basically talking about not giving sleep that much importance and realizing that you can be good without giving your sleep so much importance.

Farrukh: And you start to realize by doing these things or by watching and then trying that, Hey, even if I don’t sleep well, let me try to enjoy my day.

Farrukh: Let me still try to go. Let me still try to do the things that I’m supposed to do. Let me still try to work out. Let me still try to enjoy my day. Let me still work. Let me still hang out with friends despite the fact that I’m not getting much sleep. And after you keep doing this for a long time, just like sleep becomes a loop and sleep problems become a loop.

Farrukh: After you start to form this new loop and you start to realize that, hey, your brain starts to see, okay, I wasn’t able to sleep, or I wasn’t able to sleep that well. But see still I enjoyed a little more than the last week. I still worked more than the last week. I still had a hangout with my friends. I still did the things that I was supposed to do.

Farrukh: Then you start to dismantle this association of good sleep means a good next day. I was watching one of your videos with one of your clients and she mentioned a very good point about your mind attaches to a good sleep means a good next day, and a bad sleep means a bad next day. Whereas it can be the way around as well.

Farrukh: You can have a bad sleep and an awesome next day and a very good sleep and a very bad next day. And then the second thing, heavily reducing the time that I was spending in my bed.

Farrukh: And then you start feeling more sleepy. And I started to love that feeling that, hey, look, I’m starting to feel sleepy once again because my mind, my brain is now wanting sleep.

Farrukh: My mind is wanting my brain, my mind, my body is wanting to, like, sometimes it was dying to go and lay in bed, but I wasn’t doing that because I knew that only this is the time that I have to spend in my bed and that’s it. So during the time when I would go into bed, because now this is something that my mind is now dying to go to bed, whereas before it was dreading that when I go to bed, all these thoughts and stuff like this.

Farrukh: Now when I’m not giving myself that much time to rest time on my bed, my mind was like, I want rest, right? I want to lay down. Let’s just lay down for five minutes. Let’s just lay down for 10 minutes. But I won’t. I would save that for the sleep window.

Farrukh: You start to trust your natural ability to fall asleep. Your mind starts to realize that, hey, when I feel when the body needs sleep, I will fall asleep. When my body is feeling very, very tired, like when the body is very, very tired, I would go to sleep.

Farrukh: And then you would sleep for a few weeks in that sleep window and then you would realize, Hey, I’m sleeping even more so I can increase it even more. I can increase it even more.

Farrukh: I started to enjoy my day. So my brain started to get some sample size of, hey, even a bad sleep can have a good next day, can have an enjoyable next day.

Farrukh: I can still work. I can still do this. Even if I feel sleepy. I would, let’s say, have a coffee. I would have some tea, and I would still be able to work. I would still be able to enjoy it. And I realized after starting to work out, after starting to work, that, hey, my, I was wrong in letting myself know that I have not had these eight hours of sleep so I can’t work out, I can’t work. I can’t go out and hang out with friends.

Farrukh: I started realizing that I can do these things even when I sleep less. And I think that’s the breakthrough point where your brain starts attaching less importance to sleep ’cause now it’s not the most important thing in life, although it’s important, but it’s not the most important.

Farrukh: Even if it’s less you can still do what you want to do.

Martin: When you found the YouTube channel, you felt heard, it felt like your experience was understood, that it made a little bit more sense, the struggle that you were in. And that offered some reassurance and it also gave you opportunity. It revealed opportunity for a different way forward, a way to break that loop that you found yourself in.

Martin: And thanks to your own willingness to experiment, to be curious, to play around with a different approach. You started to bring things back to your life that mattered, things that you’d been withdrawing from. Because of concern about how you might feel or how they might affect sleep, or this belief that I can’t do anything that I enjoy until sleep is fixed.

Martin: You flipped out on its head. You were like, okay, sleep isn’t fixed, but I’m gonna do the things that I enjoy anyway. I’m gonna start bringing them back into my life. And as you did that, it meant that even if sleep was still the same, it was starting to lose its power and its influence over your life.

Martin: Like you got that sense of power back a little. Even if it was just a tiny bit, you got some more agency over your life again, and you noticed that the quality of your day wasn’t always a hundred percent dependent on the quality of your sleep. Like you could still have some good days or some good moments, or even just some okay moments.

Martin: Especially if you gave yourself that opportunity for those things to show up by doing the things that mattered to you by doing the things that reflected who you are, who you want to be, and the life you wanna live. And you also reduced the amount of time you allotted for sleep, which in another way we could just say you stopped chasing after sleep quite so much.

Martin: So instead of spending, say 12 hours in bed, you allotted an amount of time for sleep that more accurately reflected however you were sleeping at that time.

Martin: Something that people often share as well when they first start to reduce the amount of time they allot for sleep, it can often then become the struggle is staying awake.

Martin: Which is quite ironic because someone with insomnia will probably say they struggle with trying to sleep and now it becomes completely the opposite and I’m struggling to stay awake. And what does that mean about your natural ability to sleep? It tells you that it’s still there. We just need to maybe remove ourselves from the process. Maybe it’s all the trying that becomes the obstacle.

Martin: I think you really touched on a key point there about how this can influence your identity. When insomnia becomes part of your identity, how that can just make things so much more difficult. And one way you reclaimed your identity was doing more of the stuff that mattered to you.

Martin: And that meant that as a natural byproduct of that sleep and insomnia, although it was still part of life, it started to lose its importance. It started to lose its influence over who you are as a person.

Martin: Also with all those thoughts and those feelings that might show up during the day, there was less resistance to them, less judgment about what they meant.

Martin: You were better able to make some distance between the thoughts and who you are. I’m curious to hear a little bit more about that specifically, like how you actually put that into practice. Because these thoughts and these feelings can be really difficult to experience. They can be really distracting.

Martin: I’m yet to meet a human being who genuinely says they like experiencing anxiety and worry and frustration and fear. So how do you put this into practice? How do you stop fighting those thoughts and feelings that you do not want to experience?

Farrukh: So the first thing is out of experience. I started to realize that even if I don’t sleep well, I can still work, I can still do all of those things.

Farrukh: And then out of experiences, you realize that your mind saying, oh, what if I’m not able to sleep? Well, again, you just go back and let your brain know that yesterday I was able to sleep. And then even on days where I did not sleep well, you start to accumulate those experiences of enjoyment during the next day.

Farrukh: See how I was still able to enjoy my next day? And then these thoughts start to lose their power.

Farrukh: Sometimes I did feel like I made a mistake of always looking at where I want to be at, how exactly I want my sleep to look like, because that can always make you feel like a failure because you will always feel like, I want that, but I’m still not there. But if you realize, but if you start to look back and realize how much you have been improving over time, that will give you a lot of enjoyment.

Farrukh: So yes, look forward towards what sort of sleep you want to have in the future, but also look back at how much you have been improving. How was your sleep like one month ago, and how it has improved.

Martin: In terms of dealing with these difficult thoughts and the feelings. It’s almost like there was a direct way in an indirect way, so to speak. So the indirect way just came from the fact that your bed and sleep became less of a battleground.

Martin: There was less struggle at night. There was less pressure to make sleep happen. Being awake became less of a threat, so there was less problem solving around it. You were doing more of the stuff that mattered to you each day, so that had the indirect effect that your brain’s not identifying being awake as much of a threat anymore.

Martin: So it’s naturally gonna produce maybe fewer or less powerful of those difficult thoughts and those feelings. And then you’ve got the, perhaps the more direct way, which is. Reminding yourself that these thoughts and these feelings are okay to experience that it’s okay to have them. That they’re natural and they’re normal.

Martin: They’re not a reflection of who you are. They’re not necessarily facts. You shared that when you draw on your experience, there could often be a discrepancy between what your thoughts were telling you and what your experience was telling you. And by responding with less resistance and having some more confidence or a plan of action in place in how you’re gonna respond to these thoughts in a way that’s not just resistance, they started to again, lose some of their power and influence.

Martin: They maybe showed up less frequently. Because your strategy shifted from not trying to get rid of them, fight them, avoid them, resist them. It just became about, I’m gonna maybe acknowledge them, tell myself it’s okay, and I’m gonna respond in a workable way. I’m gonna respond by doing something that matters to me.

Martin: I’m gonna respond by bringing my focus back to the present moment, bringing my attention back to wherever I am, whatever I’m doing, or whatever I want to be doing. And the more you focused on your actions, the stuff that was in within your control, the more you notice that you were taking all that power and influence over your life back.

Martin: And so that also snowballs and means that, this is less of a problem. Your brain’s not gonna be quite so active trying to fix this for you, generating all those thoughts and those feelings, you realize that there was just less effort required. It wasn’t about doing more apart from like doing more of the stuff that matters to you, but for sleep, it wasn’t about doing more, it was about doing less and just giving sleep the opportunity to do what it wants.

Martin: Same with all those thoughts and feelings. It’s not about what can I do about them? It’s about doing less with them, just maybe acknowledging them and then just refocusing on what’s a workable way to respond.

Farrukh: Yeah that’s so true. And you don’t even realize when a time comes, when thoughts about sleep just completely go away.

Farrukh: Like you don’t realize when it happens, you start feeling like the thoughts start getting less and less and less, and there comes a time and you look back and you’re like, Hey, I’m not, they have been a few days and I’ve not thought about sleep at all. How much I’m sleeping or how my next sleep is going to look like, or any thoughts about sleep in that regard.

Farrukh: When you, when there’s that moment of realization, that moment of realization is also quite enjoyable in a sense. And I know many people worry about, I’ve seen some people on the web that have gone onto the other side, but that I have seen some people worrying about relapse. That what if it happens again?

Farrukh: What if it comes up again? For me, that was not the case because now it was like, you gave me something, now I know how to solve it. Even if it happens, I know what to do about it. So I did not experience those thoughts of what if it comes back? It’s just you never worry about what if you’re not able to, let’s say, tie your shoelaces because you know that even if you mess up, you can once again change the way you’re tying it and it’ll be fine.

Farrukh: So that started happening with me during sleep, like the thoughts related to sleep as well. I realized that now I’m having great sleep. I’m back to where I wanted. Now I’m probably enjoying my sleep even more than the other people. Even if this is something that comes back later in life because of something, it’s a very easy thing to solve based on the things like even if it comes back, I’ll still keep enjoying the things that I’m doing.

Farrukh: If I feel like I’m not being able to sleep well, I will just reduce my time a bit in my bed. So you stop fearing about what if it comes back again? Because now you know there’s a way to address it.

Farrukh: Sleep starts becoming less of a big deal. So I realize that, I noticed that I’m on the other side of it when sleep was no longer a big deal to me, so it wasn’t like I have to achieve something.

Farrukh: I moved like my country and I had some things to do. There have been nights where I’ve just gotten two hours of sleep, three hours of sleep, and I did feel sleepy the next day, but it was no longer that, Hey, it’s insomnia. I cannot sleep well again, and stuff like that.

Farrukh: Because now it was like, okay, I wasn’t able to sleep well. I will be able to sleep well the next night. And now even if a thoughts like, oh, what if I’m not able to sleep? Okay, I’ll just have some tea. I’ll just have some coffee the next morning. I’ll still do the things that I need to do. It becomes like not a big thing at all.

Martin: You feel stronger and more resilient because of this experience and because of the skills that you’ve been practicing and developing.

Martin: So even if and when nights of less sleep happen again in the future, you know a way of responding that isn’t gonna create more difficulty and more struggle, that’s just gonna keep you heading in the direction that you want to be heading.

Martin: When nights of less sleep happen, they are nights of less sleep. They’re not, insomnia has returned. You’re not adding anything more onto the actual experience. You’re just acknowledging whatever the reality was. And that’s it. I think that’s important because insomnia isn’t a night or a few nights of sleep not happening as you want it to. Insomnia is struggling with sleep.

Martin: That’s really what it comes down to. So for as long as you’re able to respond to sleep not happening as you might want it to, and all the thoughts and the feelings that can come with that, with less struggle, really insomnia can never regain that foothold in your life because you’re not struggling, you’re not engaged in that battle again with it.

Farrukh: Yeah, if I don’t sleep well it was just less hours of sleep.

Farrukh: I don’t even call it a bad night, like just less hours of sleep. Some days have more hours of sleep, some days have less hours of sleep, some days have average hours of sleep.

Farrukh: And I realized that I’m no longer worried about what if a noise wakes me up, because now even if a noise wakes me up, I’ll just rest once again. And I know my body trusts itself now that it’ll fall asleep once again.

Farrukh: And then there’s a thought that came, I’m not sure if it was an unconscious thought, I started to enjoy my rest more than my sleep. So my mind started to feel like even if I don’t fall deep asleep, at least I’m like resting in my bed.

Martin: Resting is an action, so it’s something you can control versus trying to make sleep happen, which is something that’s not in your control.

Martin: And so when your goal is, I’m just gonna rest, not only is that beneficial because rest can be quite restorative, especially versus struggling, but it can also, when you’re resting and not putting all this effort into trying to make sleep happen, it can also just naturally make conditions for sleep a little bit better too.

Martin: How long would you say it took for you to get to this point where it felt like you were free of this ongoing struggle with sleep, that you could just live your life independently of whatever kind of sleep showed up and whatever kind of thoughts or feelings might show up.

Farrukh: Sleep was something that I started to really dread during my journey with insomnia, I would say. But after I started doing the things that we just talked about, I started to feel like my emotions towards sleep, it started to improve. Like I started to feel good emotions.

Farrukh: Another mistake that I was trying to do is I was trying to fix insomnia so that when I wake up the next day, insomnia is completely gone.

Farrukh: But when you realize that it’s a process, i’m gradually improving. I’m slowly moving forward. My thoughts started to change around it I think by three months time I was at a point where sleep was no longer a big thing.

Farrukh: But you still realize that after you start to have enough sleep, you have some thoughts regarding sleep.

Farrukh: It’s good that it takes time, because see, if you could solve it in one day, it means that it can also get back in one day, right?

Farrukh: So the point that it takes time is because it takes time, because it’s long lasting, it’s going to end the rest of your life. That’s why it’s taking time.

Farrukh: You enjoy the process when you see how far you have come and you don’t just keep looking at where you want to go.

Martin: Was progress constant improvement night after night, week after week, or were there lots of ups and downs, what did it look like for you?

Farrukh: Definitely like any other thing in life, ups and downs. There are days even after you start the process where you feel like. See, I tried another thing and it also did not work right? There are some thoughts that it’s not working. Probably like Martin helps the other people out there, but it’s not for me.

Farrukh: I’m unique. My case is different, right? You still have those thoughts, but visualizing the progress. It was more like this. It was up and down. But if you see the next high was always higher than the previous high, so it was like down and then back up again. The overall movement was going upwards.

Farrukh: I would define it like that. So yeah, if you have some downs, if you have some really bad nights of sleep, you have some thoughts. There could be some days where you feel like, oh, those thoughts are back in the game and I’m still struggling with it, and all of that. That’s very normal. That’s very usual.

Farrukh: Still keep doing what you are doing and don’t just keep switching things. Okay, that’s not working. Let me try this. Okay, now that’s not working. Let me try this. Because people often just try something for one night, for one, two nights and then switch on to something else.

Farrukh: There would be days where you feel a bit discouraged, but just realize that it’s normal, it’s usual. Still keep doing the things. And you still keep moving forward.

Martin: Yeah. Those downs or those dips are really just opportunities to reflect on how you wanna respond. They can be disappointing and frustrating.

Martin: Your brain can fire up and tell you, oh, this isn’t working. You are this unique person that this is not gonna be helpful for. But really what they are just opportunities to reflect on how you wanna respond, because it’s your response that matters. Your experience already tells you that sleep itself is out of your control, but how you choose to respond is always within your control.

Martin: And just acknowledging that can be really powerful and empowering. What does an average night look for you these days Farrukh, if there is such a thing?

Farrukh: I look forward to sleep now. I look forward to having a good rest now. I look forward to having an enjoyable night regardless of whether I sleep or not.

Farrukh: It’s no longer deciding my days it’s no longer a big deal. Sleep is no longer a big deal at all.

Martin: How is your daytime life different now compared to when you were tangled up in that struggle with sleep?

Farrukh: No longer seeing yourself as a successful person or a failure based on how much you’re sleeping. Not looking back at your previous night. And looking at how many hours you slept or what happened or what did not happen.

Farrukh: During my struggle, I used to ask some people like, how many hours do you sleep? And oftentimes people don’t know because people don’t look back and that’s what you start to notice with yourself once you start to move forward, that during the daytime, oftentimes you won’t even know how much you slept because you would just wake up and you would start to do whatever is required of you instead of like looking back and having to check your phone, okay, I have slept for these many hours, or I should make up, or I should do this, or I should do that.

Farrukh: I do every other thing that I enjoy in my life. Like I’m doing my masters, I’m walking, and then I sit with my friends, like joke around, play around sometimes doing the hobbies, doing the things that I like and. Yeah, and sleep is no longer a decider into what I do the next day. If sleep happens, I do this if sleep does not happen, I do this whether sleep happens or whether sleep does not happen, I still do the same things the next day.

Farrukh: So sleep is no longer like the deciding factor of what’s going to happen the next day or what I’m going to do or what I’m not going to do.

Martin: You’ve got your life back from insomnia.

Farrukh: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. That’s the sentence that summarizes everything that we’ve talked about.

Martin: Farrukh, I’m really grateful for the time you’ve taken out your day to come on and to share your whole experience from the start of the struggle to the depths of the struggle to your emergence and your transformation.

Martin: I know it’s gonna be really helpful for a lot of people. I do just have one last question for you. And it’s this one. If someone is listening and they feel as though they, they’ve tried everything that they are beyond help, maybe they’re that unique case, that they’ll never be able to stop struggling with insomnia, what would you say to them?

Farrukh: I would say that everybody feels like they’re unique and somehow their problem is unfixable until you start to do things and stick with things for a while. So if things have not been working for you, the things that we have been talking about so far, either you might not be doing it the right way.

Farrukh: Or you have not done that enough in order to judge whether it’s working or not. Sometimes we don’t do that enough and we constantly keep switching between things. Okay, this is not working. Let me try this. Trial and error is a very good strategy, but once you try something, you need to give it time to see its effects.

Farrukh: You need to give it time to see how it’s working and once you start doing it for some time, and notice once again, whenever you judge yourself on how much you’re improving, judge yourself on how much you are improving actually, and not only on where you want to get. Because even if you’re improving slightly, even slightly, and that slightly could mean having even a very small bit good emotion towards sleep than before.

Farrukh: Or having a little bit more sleep than before or enjoying sleep or rest or whatever, a little bit more than before, or being able to enjoy your day a little bit more than before. Even that should show you that it’s working. It’s just a process that you need to follow for some time. ’cause if you keep looking for where you want to get, then you might look like then always everything will feel like it’s not working because you will always be like, okay, but I’m still not there, but I’m still not there, but I’m still not, yes, you’re still not there, but perhaps you are further from where you were when you got started.

Farrukh: And this gives you confidence. This gives you motivation, so stay on it, stick with it. This is something that’s going to make you learn a lot about your mind. This is something that once you’re on the other side, you’ll enjoy sleep even more than you used to do before.

Farrukh: And I know it’s hard to say or it’s weird for someone to sound to hear this, that it. For me, it often feels like a gift that I got and I got to learn so many things about it. Now I can sleep well as well. Now the things that I learned, I can apply to other things in my life as well. I know it feels weird to hear this once you are struggling with it, but once you’re on the other side, you start to really see what Martin means when he talks about these things.

Farrukh: So stick with it. It just takes some time, but you will get there.

Martin: Great. Well, thank you again, Farrukh, for the time you’ve taken to come onto the podcast. It’s really appreciated.

Farrukh: Thank you, man. And just before we go, I would say that I’m very, very grateful for you, for all the work that you’re doing, and I just wish you the best of luck. Just keep doing whatever you are doing.

Farrukh: I just wish your work goes out to more and more people and I hope that you keep doing this work and you keep impacting more and more lives, as many as you can moving forward.

Martin: Well, thank you. I appreciate that.

Farrukh: Thank you.

Martin: I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Insomnia Coach Podcast. I’m Martin Reed, and as always, I’d like to leave you with this important reminder — you are not alone and you can sleep.

I want you to be the next insomnia success story I share! If you're ready to stop struggling with sleep and get your life back from insomnia, you can start my insomnia coaching course right now.

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Courtney’s experience with insomnia didn’t start overnight — but when it hit, it hit hard.

Looking back, she could see some early signs. As a child, she was sensitive to her environment. New places, travel, small changes — sleep didn’t always come easily. But it wasn’t something that took over her life.

That changed in 2020.

With a new baby, the stress of the pandemic, family tension, and untreated anxiety, everything began to build at once. Then the nights started to change. She began waking up in the early hours of the morning, wide awake.

At first, it was confusing. Then it became frightening.

The moment she noticed she wasn’t asleep, panic would take over. Her heart would race. Her body would react as if something was wrong. Nights became something to fear. Sleep became something she felt she had to make happen.

She tried everything — supplements, routines, changes to her environment, and eventually medication. But nothing brought consistent relief.

Her days started revolving around sleep. Avoiding things. Planning everything around the night ahead. Trying harder, doing more — all in the hope that sleep would finally come. But the harder she tried, the more difficult it became.

What began to shift things for Courtney wasn’t another strategy — it was a different way of understanding what was happening.

A realization that nothing was broken. That her body already knew how to sleep. And that the struggle itself might be what was keeping her stuck.

From there, things didn’t change overnight. It took time. Practice. Setbacks. Learning how to respond differently to difficult nights and the thoughts and feelings that came with them.

But slowly, something began to change. She started trusting her body again. Sleep became less of a battle.

And instead of her life revolving around sleep, she was putting more of her energy into the things that mattered to her each day — and insomnia lost its power and its influence.

Click here for a full transcript of this episode.

Martin: Okay, Courtney, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to come onto the podcast.

Courtney: Thank you very much for having me on.

Martin: It’s great to have you on. Let’s start right at the beginning as always. When did your sleep problems first begin, and what do you feel caused those initial issues with sleep?

Courtney: So I think what caused the insomnia battle that I dealt with was some background things that got, had, had gone on in my life. For example my mom has always struggled with sleep, so I have wondered if there’s a genetic component to that. Even as a kid, I’ve just always been more sensitive to my environment.

Courtney: For example if I went to a friend’s house, I wouldn’t sleep very well. There was times I’d have my mom come and get me because I wasn’t sleeping. Probably get really anxious if the, if we’re traveling, I don’t sleep well, if the room is too hot, I don’t sleep well. Just things like that. Just very sensitive to shifts in my environment.

Courtney: And then in 2020 is when I began my battle with insomnia. What also added into that was just some unhelpful beliefs about sleep that I just picked up from the media.

Courtney: For example, like I feel like there’s a lot of times that they’ll do a study or they’ll release an article that doesn’t tell the full story, but is enough to cause fear in you about insomnia. So for example, if someone doesn’t get seven to nine hours a night, that could lead to whatever catastrophic thing or.

Courtney: Insomniacs are, you know, shown to struggle with, you know, fill in the blank there. So I had that kind of fearful mindset already. And then yeah, you just add in. My husband and I had our first child in 2019. Around that time I was struggling with an un untreated anxiety disorder, and I was trying to muscle my way through that.

Courtney: And then, as you know, the years progressed. We had some family and relational tension and my husband has some job changes due to the pandemic that happened, let alone the pandemic itself and the fear around that. So there was just a lot of lifestyle changes at that time that I think I had a hard time with, and I just never slowed down to kind of process that or make space for that.

Courtney: And I think my body was trying to communicate that to me through anxiety, but I just didn’t slow down to listen. And then it, it. Overflowed into a, a sleep disorder or insomnia right around 2020. And I’ve struggled with that for quite a few years and finally I’m in a better place where I feel like I can talk about it having been on the other side of it.

Martin: So it sounds like for you, concern or a focus or issues with sleep was always something that was kind of with you, maybe perhaps more in the background. It would show up every now and then, but then in 2020 around then there was lots of change going on. Lots of stresses, lots of different stuff happening and so the sleep issues resurfaced, but this time it felt different.

Courtney: Yes. There was just a few nights that I started waking up at like 3:00 AM just wide awake. And I was like, huh, this is weird. And then it started getting more and more frequent, and there was a few nights that I did not sleep at all. And what shifted was my focus on it and my fear around it. So I started becoming very fearful, like, what is wrong with me that I can’t sleep? So as that fear grew, I started to become more fearful of nighttime.

Courtney: And it was on the week of Halloween. There was a few nights that I, I didn’t sleep at all. Like, I would lay down at night and I, I lay there for maybe about 15 minutes or so, and it’s like, as soon as I was aware, oh, I’m not sleeping yet, I would instantly have a panic attack. I mean, I was sweating, my heart was racing.

Courtney: I was in full panic mode. I had my, I called my dad up ’cause he lives, you know, nearby. And my husband stayed with our son and I had him take me to the emergency room at about 3:00 AM just panic stricken.

Courtney: And I didn’t even know, I just, I needed help and I didn’t know where to go. So he took me there and I mean, I went in and I was just like, I just can’t sleep. I, I can’t sleep. And I’m sure they thought. You know, I was on something ’cause they ran a full drug screen and of course that came back clean. I was just panic stricken, severe anxiety.

Courtney: But it probably looked to them like I was taking a stimulant of some kind. ’cause how else, like, would I end up there? Not able to sleep. But unfortunately, like they didn’t really have any answers for me. I remember talking with the nurse and just telling her my story and she acknowledged, she’s like, you’ve been through a lot of life change and, you know, that can contribute to this.

Courtney: But there was no real like, help. I think they gave me two Benadryl and I think that made me doze off for an hour in the ER while I was waiting to be discharged. And I think that only came from the fact that they were treating me for something like they were taking care of me. So I feel like I could like come down a little bit and then went home and I don’t think I slept the rest of the night after that.

Courtney: The next morning I think I crashed on the couch for maybe an hour, and then the following Thursday, I ha ended up having my husband take me into the emergency room. ‘Cause we had stayed at my parents’ house that night and so they were with my son and my husband took me in and I was again just begging them to help me sleep.

Courtney: Prior to that I was able to get in with the local psychiatrist’s office and I think I went to them that Thursday and, you know, they gave me medication and they gave me an anti-anxiety medic medication. And then also she called it a heavy hitter sleep medication. I think it was Restoril, which is an older generation drug.

Courtney: And I was like, okay, this will do it for me. And she was pretty confident. She’s like, well, you know, put you on this for a very limited time, maybe two weeks. And we’ll see how that goes. So I went home that Thursday night and I took it and it didn’t help. And I, so I can’t even tell you the fear, the shame, the confusion of, they gave me a heavy hitter as she put it, sleep medication.

Courtney: And that was not enough to help me sleep. So hence, I, I ended up back in the ER and all they could do was give me another dose of that, just because I think you were allowed to take two and that was the maximum. So I, from then on, I was taking the maximum dose of that much longer than the two weeks. And so I felt completely just weak, broken alone, confu, I mean, anything you can think of in a dark season like that, I felt it because I was like, this is not helping.

Courtney: Like this is the strongest that they have and this is not enough to knock me out, like, what is wrong with me?

Martin: Well that was a really difficult situation that you were going through. And so the way it sounds like it was different, apart from the obvious in terms of the visits to the emergency room, was when the sleep issue showed up.

Martin: This time around, they, they felt different. Like you were waking up during the night and sleep just wasn’t getting back on track like it was in the past. So that led to some understandable concern ’cause you’re a human being. But then the more that concern raised. Perhaps there was like more pressure to make sleep happen, more effort to make sleep happen more trying.

Martin: And then that in turn just made it more difficult until it reached this crescendo where you’re just kind of, you can’t try any harder. And then we’re told, well, this, this is the most powerful medication we have. This will make sleep happen. And when that isn’t working, especially after you’ve been told that, then you’re feeling really alone out of options.

Martin: Confused, scared, as you said, you can feel broken and it just makes it just even so much more difficult and scary.

Courtney: Yes. And so what even made it worse was I was back in the psychiatrist’s office a few days later and I think she was very concerned that I had to take the maximum dose. And that it wasn’t helping.

Courtney: So on top of that, on top of the anxiety medication, on top of the heavy sleep medication, she prescribed a anti-psychotic, not because I was psychotic, but because it was also used off-label as a a sleep to induce sleep. So she’s like, maybe this com, you know, combined with the Restoril, will help you go back to the one pill, the one dose, and then you don’t have to take the two.

Courtney: We can get you off of it faster. Well, I wish that was the case, but I still had to take the two, I had to take the anti-psychotic and I was on it longer than the two weeks. So then that snowballed into fear of dependency on the medication. And I will say I was dependent on it because it got to a point where if I even thought, okay, maybe I can try to not take it tonight, I would instantly have anxiety.

Courtney: So. After, after, you know, the, the hospital trips and the trips to the, the psychiatrist, I, the medicine did help temporarily. There was a couple nights that knocked me out for like 10 hours. So I was taking everything that they gave me and I, I got some sleep, but it was like, one night would be 10 hours and then the next night, you know, I might get four hours and then another night I would make that up, like my body would sleep longer.

Courtney: So it was kind of like a rollercoaster of sleep. I just had the hardest time getting balanced again.

Martin: So it sounds as though you felt just really dependent on all these different medications. But at the same time you felt that this was just unsustainable, like continuing to take this much medication, especially when it wasn’t even generating consistently good sleep for you.

Martin: But as far as you are concerned, you had no other options.

Courtney: Exactly, yes. And so it was hard because the, the other feelings, it wasn’t just about the sleep anymore. So there was nights that I would get up and just go for a walk around our neighborhood at like 3:00 AM And I, I remember thinking, this is like so weird how like, physically I am up walking in the dark when everybody else is asleep and I should be asleep, but I can’t.

Courtney: And then emotionally I’m in the same place. Like I’m dealing with something that no one around me knows what to do with. I, you know, I remember talking to family and friends and even my husband just like, you know, they were telling me, oh, have you tried melatonin? Have you tried lavender? Have you tried CBD oil?

Courtney: And I’m like, yes, I’ve done all of it. But they just, they don’t know. And I remember my husband saying maybe try not to think about it. And so then I’m like, okay, maybe he’s right.

Courtney: Maybe I just need to not think so much about it. And that’s when I was, I lay down at night and I would try to control my thoughts and I would try to, I started changing my environment because I was of course researching everything, being a problem solver. And I’m like, okay, so I need to, you know, wear the blue light glasses.

Courtney: I need to not drink coffee afternoon. I need to do all, all of the things that, you know, I’m sure many people have talked about with you that you’ve discussed on your channel that other people have done. Like I did all of them, but the intention behind them was to induce sleep. So every time I did those things, it backfired.

Courtney: And I think those things are, can be helpful if you’re trying to relax your body. If you’re trying to. I was actually just talking to my dad about this. He asked me about like a, a sleep supplement. I’m like, well, if you’re trying to, you know, support your body, great, but I think it can backfire. If you’re trying to induce sleep, if the goal is to make yourself sleep, that can be very problematic.

Courtney: And that was my case. So it was just a very lonely place of people suggesting things and telling me things, and I’m like, I’ve done all of it. None of it works. Something’s wrong with me. Like I, I remember thinking my, something in my brain must have just broke. And when you look online about insomnia outside of the community that you have created, there’s not, there’s nothing that’s helpful.

Courtney: So it was just, it was a very lonely place of trying to navigate this until I came across your channel.

Martin: You made an insightful point there that all the things that you did for as long as the intention was to make a certain amount or a certain type of sleep happen. It was going to backfire because sleep is out of your direct control.

Martin: But when you were going through this struggle, was, was that insight present? Like did you realize at the time that the more your intention was focused on trying to make sleep happen the more you seemed to struggle? Or was it more of a case of I’ve just gotta keep trying, sooner or later I’ll find something that works.

Courtney: Yes. So initially I think I was just so frazzled that I was trying anything and everything, and I mean, I, it took me quite a while to come across your channel. I was looking at different, I was researching things, I was looking at different videos and for me personally, my faith is very important to me.

Courtney: So I was looking thing, looking for things through that lens. And the first thing that I came across that was even a little bit helpful was there’s, there was this guy who was talking about his struggle with insomnia, and he talked about the importance of surrender.

Courtney: And just for him, you know, he talked about just surrendering everything to God and giving up and not trying so hard. And that was enough for him. And I’m like, okay, I can, you know, I can do that. I can surrender. And, you know, I did have a night where I was like, all right, you know, if I’m never gonna sleep again, I can’t help it.

Courtney: Like, I, I give up and, you know, but for me, and that helped for a little bit. The surrender or the acceptance did help for a little bit. But for me, I just, I needed more information. I’m someone who, I, I love to know the why behind why I’m doing things. I love to, you know, learn as much as I can. And so when I finally stumbled across your channel, you explained everything with the why behind it, why in insomnia develops, why your body’s doing what it’s doing, why your efforts are failing.

Courtney: And I’m like, okay, this is, this is filling in the gaps that I have needed in order to move forward.

Martin: Mm. So perhaps it’s education, perhaps that educational component of it. A greater understanding of where insomnia comes from, what keeps it alive, what gives it power and influence just felt reassuring.

Martin: Now things started to make sense for you. Maybe you didn’t feel broken anymore. You realized that you weren’t broken, you were just stuck. And I think you made a good point too, because when we hear people talk about surrender or acceptance. That, that can be a new option that’s available to us. And like you said, you experimented with it but without that kind of understanding on, you know, why is this helpful?

Martin: How is this helpful? It can make it harder to commit to that kind of approach.

Courtney: Exactly, exactly. And so it was frustrating because like, everything that I was looking into felt like just a bandaid. And it, it, it was hard because the things that I was doing was not helping, like, it wasn’t addressing the root cause.

Courtney: And, you know, I, I did everything I could. I had, there were nights my husband would stay up with me to talk with me. I had people praying for me. I was praying about it, like trying all the supplements and nothing like, you feel just helpless. You’re like, I’m doing all the right things. And in my mind, or in the way we’ve learned in our culture is if you try harder.

Courtney: You will get results. Well, I’ve learned with anxiety and I’ve learned with insomnia, the opposite is true. The harder you try, the more your body’s like this is not gonna work very well. So it took me a while to get to that point, but I feel like once I did there was so much more freedom and I was able to take that pressure off.

Martin: One thing that you touched upon earlier was how this wasn’t just an issue at nighttime, it would also be present in the daytime as well. When you were still tangled up in this struggle, how was this affecting your days?

Courtney: It consumed my thoughts. So in the morning, okay, so for example, nowadays, like if I’m having a rough day and maybe I didn’t sleep well, I will tell my husband, Hey, you know, I’m having a rough day.

Courtney: I didn’t, I maybe slept, you know, four or five hours, just bear with me. But back then. I would get up in the morning and be like, telling everybody, oh my gosh, I only slept two hours tonight. Last night I only slept an hour. I didn’t sleep at all. I was telling anybody and everybody just desperate. And my entire day looked like cultivating the day to support the night.

Courtney: So not drinking coffee after noon, as I mentioned. Not over exerting myself because I didn’t wanna overstimulate myself to keep myself awake at night. There were times I stayed at home more often and just kind of avoided the things that I normally enjoy. I started worrying about what I was eating.

Courtney: I started worrying about like how much screen time I had. I started worrying about how much I was outside. You know, anything that you can think of. Like I was doing all of that in order to try to provide myself the best opportunity to sleep that night. And it never worked.

Martin: It’s almost like sleep or insomnia was in charge of your decisions each day.

Martin: And so all your actions were intended to serve sleep rather than serve you and the life you wanted to live. And so not only was this kind of maintaining that struggle because none of that stuff really had much influence on sleep anyway, but it was making things even more difficult because then you’re getting pulled away from doing the stuff that’s important.

Martin: Doing the stuff that matters, like through no fault of your own because you’re a problem solver, you’re trying to fix this. But it’s just a, a really clear illustration of how easy it is to get pulled into this struggle. And to find it consuming your attention, consuming your life, and just becoming increasingly more difficult the more you try to deal with it.

Courtney: Yes, exactly. And it’s, it is just, it’s crazy how you can’t, like, you can’t even help it. It’s not like you’re intentionally trying to do that. You’re just trying to survive in that moment, and that’s what happens. Unfortunately, that’s the opposite of what needed to happen. So it’s just, it’s, I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

Courtney: It is such a confusing and lonely and just disorienting space to be in when you’re struggling with insomnia to that level. And then on top of that, it took me a while to realize that like the, the brain fog or forgetfulness or irritability or whatever I was struggling with during the day wasn’t necessarily because of the sleep that I lost.

Courtney: It was because of the anxiety that was consuming me as well.

Martin: Yeah, it’s, it’s just so difficult, isn’t it? Um, You mentioned that you listened to a podcast episode where someone talked about moving away from the, trying, from trying to make sleep happen, and that kind of prompted you to explore a new approach.

Martin: So as you dove into that, and now as you reflect on that journey, what were some of the changes that you made to your way of approaching sleep and responding to insomnia and other thoughts and the feelings that can come with it that helped you move away from the struggle and got you to where you are today?

Courtney: So definitely the education behind your videos, like the, the early videos that you’ve posted. I found that so helpful because I remember it was like a big breath of fresh air when you said something like insomnia is not the same thing as sleep deprivation. Therefore it doesn’t have the same effects and.

Courtney: The second thing was your body is wise in that it will make up the sleep that you need through deep sleep. And even if you’re not getting the full eight hours that you would like to get, your body’s going to get the sleep then it needs. So it allowed me to kind of take a step back and be like, whoa, if I just, if I just let my body do what it is designed to do, maybe I can get back on track.

Courtney: And so, yeah, just the, the, the initial moments of just surrendering to that and letting go and trusting the physiologic, the physiology of my body is what helped me to kind of loosen my grip a little bit. But I will say unfortunately for, well, in my mind, unfortunately it took a lot longer than I would’ve liked it to.

Courtney: I would call that week of no sleep traumatic for me. I, I don’t use that term lightly, but I say that because I’ve come to learn that our bodies keep the score of things like they remember. And there are nights even now, you know, five years later where if I, I’ll be okay for a night or two, but if I go a little bit, you know, maybe three days more of just struggling, those, those fears start to creep back in.

Courtney: And my body, it’s almost like I’m back in 2020 and I’m like, oh, okay, are we going back here? And that’s where, you know, for me, it helps to get out of bed to kind of separate myself from that environment and then go back downstairs. And I found coloring before bed during those times to be really helpful.

Courtney: So I’ll get like an adult coloring book with like, you know, the intricate designs and I will sit there and color and that calms my body down. But allow, it also allows those thoughts to just be there, but I don’t have to pay attention to them. Something else that has been helpful is if I’m really struggling with like thoughts, I would just get my phone out real quick and I will just journal ’em.

Courtney: I will just type ’em all out and there’s been nights I can’t even finish, finish journaling before I fall asleep. So there’s different, you know, tools and things I can do now to support myself to not go back to that place. But it took me a very, very long time. And a lot of, you know, I’ve heard the term relapses or setbacks or however you look at it, you can look at it as like, okay, this isn’t just another opportunity to take care of myself.

Courtney: This is another opportunity to try to implement what I’ve learned and grow and teach my brain through behavior that I can move past this point. You know, I don’t have to go back to 2020, but it, it takes a long time. At least it did for me.

Martin: Yeah, absolutely. I always like to think of this different approach as being skills-based.

Martin: And so like with any skill, it’s gonna take time to get better at that skill, and it’s gonna require a lot of practice, a lot of ongoing practice. And there are gonna be times where it feels that that practice is useful and helpful. And there’s gonna be times when it feels like that practice isn’t doing anything.

Martin: But what matters is just continuing to get the practice in if developing this new skill. Is important to you. And I like how you shared the, the educational component of it was just so reassuring that you learned that you don’t need to intervene with sleep. Like you don’t need to do anything to make it happen.

Martin: Your body wants to take care of that by itself. So that just immediately takes so much of the pressure off, right? You don’t have to do anything anymore. With that, once you’ve got that understanding, I mean, is that, is that what that felt like for you?

Courtney: Oh, yes. And it’s interesting how like. And the health circle of things like, you know, sleep gets grouped in with like, if you want to eat healthier, do all these things.

Courtney: If you want to exercise, do all these things. If you wanna be healthier, do all these things. And then sleep gets thrown in there, like, make sure you’re getting your seven to nine hours. Make sure you’re practicing sleep hygiene and it gets grouped in there. But that’s the only thing that doesn’t work with effort.

Courtney: So it took me a long time to unlearn that, that okay, sleep’s the one thing I can just, you know, take, take my hands off of it. And I found that to be true with other people that I’ve known. It seems like the best sleepers I knew were the people that like could sleep by the, like my husband could sleep by a campfire outside, like, no, doesn’t need anything.

Courtney: And so it’s those people that don’t even try that seem to sleep the best.

Martin: Yeah. And that’s another great insight, isn’t it? Is just looking to what other people are doing. Especially those people that seem to have no issue or concern around sleep. They get great nights almost every night. What are you doing to make that happen?

Martin: You ask that question, you kind of get this dumbfounded look right as they try and figure out what they’re doing, because the answer is they’re not doing anything. They’re just setting time aside for sleep to happen, and that’s it. So perhaps all this messaging around sleep, you know, get seven to nine hours of sleep.

Martin: Maybe it should be make time for sleep, you know, make sufficient time for sleep. The issue is the people who are reading that kind of advice are the people who are struggling with sleep and then, and people with insomnia are often allotting even more time than necessary for sleep. And then setting themselves up for more wakefulness at night.

Martin: So it’s, it again, it’s just so easy through no fault of our own, to just get pulled into this struggle with the kind of messaging around sleep that is predominant.

Courtney: Yes. Yep. And then you add in the, the, like the fear behind it. Like the fear-based, if you don’t do this, this will happen. So then you feel even worse.

Courtney: Like if I don’t, if I don’t get sleep soon, something bad’s gonna happen to me. So that’s why like during that week, I remember at one point I told my husband, I’m like, I just want them to admit me to the hospital. Check me in, send me up to, you know, the mental health floor wherever I need to go, and just, can they just knock me out?

Courtney: Can I just sleep? Just to get, you know, get back into sleeping again. Because I thought if I don’t do that, I’m, my health is gonna self-destruct. Like this is harmful to my body, which puts you into fight or flight even more. And then, yeah, just the shame of, like I said, like walking out at night and looking around at the world and it’s dark and everybody’s sleeping and you’re like, what’s wrong with me?

Courtney: Like, something’s wrong with me, that I’m not like everybody else, that I can’t sleep. And so that’s a whole nother component to this is those thoughts that creep in when you do lay down at night. And for the longest time I was just trying to control them. Like, don’t think about that. Think about something else.

Courtney: Like try to be calmed down. I was trying to breathe, you know, do all the things and I learned, you know, through, you know, your resources that just letting those thoughts be there and let ’em float away, you know, just don’t get too over involved with them. That can relax your body. So you can go to. And then, yeah, another thing that was kind of counterintuitive was the sleep restriction, but that I think had the biggest impact for me is because I was trying to allot aot of time for sleep, but I was going to bed at like nine o’clock and I’d lay there for an hour and a half and that would just increase the anxiety to where I’m like, okay, what’s the minimum sleep I can get?

Courtney: And so I would go to sleep at like, or I’d go up at like 10 or 10 30 when I noticed my eyes were actually drowsy and I would lay there and some nights I would fall right asleep. If I didn’t, I got back up and came downstairs. But that is what helped me to actually be tired enough to go to bed. But again, the message is, well, you have to, you know, you have to make sure you’re getting enough sleep, so you have to go to bed early.

Courtney: And it just, it creates such a mess for people. I, ugh, I just feel bad for anyone going through it right now because I know I, I’m not too far removed to forget what that feels like.

Martin: Absolutely. And it comes down against that theme of the more we chase after sleep, the more elusive it becomes.

Martin: You mentioned that one thing that was really helpful for you was to open up a little bit more to whatever thoughts and feelings were showing up compared to trying to fight them, avoid them, resist them, control them, reason with them or anything else with them. And I think the, for a lot of us, this idea of opening up to what can be really scary, difficult, and uncomfortable thoughts and feelings can itself feel really scary, difficult, and uncomfortable.

Martin: What was your experience like with that? What showed up for you when you first heard of this approach of opening up to this, these really difficult thoughts and feelings?

Courtney: Oh my goodness. I just, I instantly flashed back to just laying there in bed with all these crazy thoughts in my head, but making time to allow that.

Courtney: And I just remember thinking like, oh my goodness, if I do this, like, I’m gonna end up even worse. Like, I’m gonna end up even further into insomnia if I allow all this, all these feelings, and I don’t do something to try to calm them down. And it, it makes so much sense because as I’ve learned with anxiety slash insomnia, it’s that the more you try to control things, the worse it gets.

Courtney: Because your anxious response is to get you to do something like it. Your body thinks it’s in danger. So the more you respond with trying to grab a hold of it and like do something, it’s gonna get worse. Where if you just kind of say, all right, I’m okay. I’m gonna lay here as uncomfortable as I am.

Courtney: This is terrible, but I’m just gonna lay here and let them be. I’m gonna let these feelings be here over time they do pass. So it took, again, it takes time. I still have to practice that, but I’m much better at it than I was. But it does take time.

Martin: it is definitely an ongoing practice. I think to get better skilled in experiencing the full range of human thoughts and feelings with less resistance making space for them to exist. I’m curious to hear from you what that first night or what the first few nights were like when you tried to practice this new approach of making space for that stuff to show up compared to that default response of resistance.

Courtney: So it was. It was very, again, I would say a rollercoaster in those hours of like, you know, 10 30 to seven or whatever, I was in bed. Like initially I would be like, okay, this is uncomfortable, but I’m gonna try this. And I would try it and I would fit, I, I would feel myself relaxed and I would calm down. And then a new thought that would really jar me would come in or a new feeling.

Courtney: And I’d be like, and then I’d have to do it again. So it was constantly, constantly grabbing a hold of those thoughts and being like, okay, you know, I’m just gonna let this be here. I don’t have to believe this, you know, this is what my body’s feeling, but my brain. And it helped for me to separate myself a little bit or create some distance between my, my identity and my brain.

Courtney: Like my brain is the one, you know, churning out all these crazy thoughts. ’cause my body doesn’t feel safe right now. And that’s okay. That’s okay. But I am safe. I’m just gonna lay here. That would work and then I’d have to do it again. So it was a lot of rep repetition over and over. It wasn’t like a one and done, like tonight’s the night, I’m gonna challenge my thoughts or allow them to be there, or you know, breathe and calm down and I’m good.

Courtney: It was repetition over and over again.

Martin: That’s where I think a lot of us can give up because we can still have that, whether it’s, maybe it’s a little bit hidden away in the background or more of a covert goal of I’m practicing this in order to get rid of these thoughts and these feelings. So every time they kind of pop back you’re like, ah, this isn’t working.

Martin: So I’m curious to hear from you with that very common experience of, I opened up to the thoughts, they felt like they were starting to lose their power. I got a little taste of how this could be helpful, but then again, another one would come in and I’ll be back to square one again. What prompted or motivated you to keep up with that practice to feel as though this was an approach that you wanted to commit to and develop skill in?

Courtney: I would see incremental progress. Like I would see little glimmers of hope that I was working my way out of this. So, for example, like I said, with the emails, like I did see through the, the email practices I was putting into place, I would see incremental progress there. And I would do that with the thoughts as well.

Courtney: And then there was a point where I, I just kept going back to, well, I can’t go back to the way it was because that got me nowhere. So there were weak moments where I’m like, I just needed, you know, I need to go back to trying harder, trying all the things, or maybe I should try different sleep medication.

Courtney: And I would be like, well that didn’t get you anywhere. That’s not getting to the. So I think I would love to say it was this big, profound moment of like, breakthrough, but it really was just incremental progress that I saw in myself. Like I’ll never forget the one night I was sitting on the couch and I was drowsy because I had implemented sleep restriction and I was color, I was doing something calming before bed.

Courtney: My husband and I had the TV on. I was just coloring and my eyes got drowsy. And I was like, normally at this time I’m getting hypervigilant. Like I’ll be tired during the day, but then nighttime comes and I’m wide awake. So when I got drowsy, that gave me hope. And so there were more things like that that happened along the way.

Courtney: And then I remember nights where the thoughts weren’t as bad and I was like, okay, here’s my next step. So I, I saw little bits of progress along the way that kept me going.

Martin: Yeah, you got like little hints that this was an approach that held some promise. You started to feel more sleepy as the night approached or as bedtime approached compared to more alert.

Martin: And with those thoughts and those feelings, they were still showing up. But every now and then, perhaps they felt a little bit less powerful or a little bit less influential.

Martin: We have to fight, we have to put effort into sleep. What medication can we explore? But you harnessed your experience. You drew on your superpower of self-reflection and your experience told you that that stuff doesn’t work. So. Your brain is suggesting that’s a route we should carry on pursuing. But you recognize it’s doing that ’cause it’s doing this job.

Martin: It’s doing its job of looking out for you. But you knew from experience that that approach wasn’t getting you closer to where you wanted to be, so you wanted to stay committed to this approach of less resistance and building that skill and experiencing all this stuff with less of a struggle.

Courtney: Exactly.

Courtney: Yes. And I think when you mentioned the struggle, like my laying, laying in bed at night had become a place of struggle and just it felt like I was battling all night with my mind. And so I tried to make a point of not making my bed that place anymore.

Courtney: So when I’m having those nights, I get outta bed and I come downstairs and I’ll journal or color or what have you, and try to do all that there, and then go back to bed when it’s calmer.

Martin: So you withdrew from the battleground when you found yourself getting pulled into that fight. And this is another thing that some people can struggle with because they’re like, should I get out of bed?

Martin: Should I stay in bed? And my answer is always, well, it’s really up to you. It doesn’t matter if you stay in bed or get out of bed. What matters is, are you engaged in a battle? And if you are, how might you withdraw from that battle? So you might want to color or read or watch TV in the living room, or you might want to do that in bed.

Martin: It really doesn’t matter. What matters is you’re awake and you’re not fighting. You’re doing something other than battling away, struggling more, making things more difficult.

Courtney: Yes. And that, you know, there’s that. I’ve read that somewhere. There’s a rule, you know, you don’t use your bed for anything but sleep because you don’t wanna create an association.

Courtney: Well, on good nights, I can color in my bed, I can watch a show. I can read and I, there’s nights I can’t even get through a paragraph and I set it down, I’m out so I can, I can do activities in my bed and not associate it with anything.

Courtney: But the night that, like you said, it is a struggle, I gotta get out of bed. I gotta go do that somewhere else. Because that is part of, I, how I think that that habit became created with insomnia is I would lay down at night in instant panic because my body was like, well this is, this is associated with the panic place.

Courtney: You know what I mean? So that was a learning curve too.

Martin: Yeah, absolutely. It, listening to you share that experience, really, you kind of just played around with some of this, this stuff, right? You gave it a try with an open and a curious mind. And with this understanding. You’re thinking, I’m just gonna see what I take from this.

Martin: What am I gonna learn from this? Because we’re always gonna learn something from what we do. And so you’ve really learned what was a helpful way forward for you, and that kind of gave you that motivation or that impetus to keep you moving in that direction. So to, to bring this together, what you, what you’ve shared as the most helpful things was the educational component.

Martin: You know, really understanding where insomnia comes from, what keeps it alive. And in short, it’s really all of our attempts to get rid of it. Ironically what keeps it alive. And you also learned how easy it is to get drawn into the struggle. And so when you are struggling, it’s not because you’re broken.

Martin: It’s just because what you are understandably doing is you’re just kind of pumping insomnia full of oxygen in effect. You know, it is just kind of feeding the beast through no fault of your own. You found it really helpful to go to bed when you were sleepy, like finding it hard to stay awake rather than going to bed based on what time it was at night.

Martin: And that led to less time awake or less time awake for potential struggle. You found it helpful to be aware or to cultivate an awareness of when you were struggling at night, when you were getting pulled into that battleground and with that awareness, you then chose to respond in a different way. So instead of putting effort into sleep fighting or avoiding thoughts and feelings, you’d do some coloring or you’d do some reading and you found it helpful most of the time to get outta bed to do that.

Martin: And you found it helpful to practice opening up to whatever thoughts, whatever feelings are showing up, even though you might not want them to show up, there they are. You’re acknowledging them and you’re just allowing them to come and go to flow, to be an observer of them. And one way you did that, that you shared was you would just journal them, you would write them down, not as a way to kind of reason with them or change them, unless I’m wrong, in which case please correct me.

Martin: But just as a way to acknowledge them. And it was almost a way that you were putting into practice this idea of opening up to the thoughts and feelings, just writing them down.

Courtney: Yes. Yep. And I will say, yeah, it was both like there were nights I would journal just to get the thoughts outta my head. ’cause then they’re not spiraling while I’m laying there.

Courtney: And there were nights that I would have old fears come back, like the old thoughts that I would write them down and then challenge them. Like for example. I feel like if I don’t sleep, I won’t be able to function tomorrow. And then I would be like, well, actually that’s not true because you have had many good days on, two hours, no hours of sleep.

Courtney: And so for example, like a month ago, I had the first all night, or I’ll call it, you know, I was all night. I haven’t had one of those nights in years, but my husband and I were leaving for the airport that morning, I think at three 30. And so I was wired from packing and tra we were getting ready to travel.

Courtney: I knew I, we had our flight we had to catch. So I gave myself a lot of compassion, like, this makes sense for you. Like, you know, this is, you’re about to travel. It’s the first time we left our boys at home. So there was a lot there. Like it made sense why my body would react that way. And yeah, you know, I, I think maybe I napped on the plane.

Courtney: I don’t remember, but I tried not to pay too much attention to it and. Again, it was the first all nighter in years that I’ve had where I didn’t sleep all night long, but it was okay. Like I, we got there, we had our full day. I think I, we came back and I did take like an hour and a half nap or something, and then we went on with our evening and that night my body made up the sleep.

Courtney: So I can have really good days, like if you’re struggling with insomnia, you can have normal days, you can function fine even if you don’t get sleep. So back to the thoughts, there was a lot of thoughts that I was able to challenge with the educational component that I found through your videos, which was very helpful.

Martin: Yeah, I’m, I’m glad you mentioned that there are still times when sleep isn’t perfect or exactly as you want it to happen, because when we’re struggling, we might have that as our goal. You know, we just have a great night of sleep every single night. But the truth is that no human being has a great night of sleep every single night.

Martin: The difference now is when sleep doesn’t go as you might want it to. It’s not this huge focus of your attention. It’s not something that creates a huge, difficult struggle and pulls you away from the life you want to live. Now it’s more like water off of a duck’s back. You know, it comes and it goes, and then you are moving on from it.

Martin: It really has just lost all of its power and influence over you. And I do want to emphasize, you used the phrase self-compassion. And I think that’s huge because when we are struggling, we can be so hard on ourselves and mean to ourselves, and that doesn’t make things any easier. So giving ourselves some grace, some kindness can be immensely powerful.

Martin: You discovered that thoughts are thoughts. They’re not more than thoughts. They’re not less than thoughts. They’re thoughts. So they’re not facts. Sometimes they might be true, but sometimes not. They’re not a reflection on who you are as a person.

Martin: They’re not always an accurate prediction for the future. They’re not always an accurate reflection of the past. They’re thoughts. And so by listening to your thoughts being more open to them, it kind of came with that bonus that you were able to recognize, Hey, some of these thoughts aren’t even true.

Martin: This thought is telling me that tomorrow is gonna be a disaster, but hang on a minute. The other day I had no sleep and I had a great day, or I had a good day, or an okay day. So you notice that with that acceptance, there’s a reminder that thoughts are nothing more or nothing less than thoughts, and you’ve got that separation too between your thoughts and your body.

Martin: One thing you shared with us a little bit earlier was that as you practiced opening up, especially at first when it feels really scary, like what’s gonna happen if I start allowing these thoughts and these feelings to come in? It feels really uncomfortable. It can feel more and more intense. Then something happens, it kind of reaches a peak at some point, and then it kind of flows back down again.

Martin: And you realize that even though it can feel really scary, really threatening your body is lying in the bed or on the couch in a safe place. So even though it feels very unsafe physically, you are safe. So with that openness and acknowledgement, you also got that reminder or that awareness that your thoughts are separate from your body.

Martin: There was that detachment there, and that in turn can reduce some of their power and influence too.

Courtney: Yes, and that’s something like I think with anxiety in general or insomnia, is like for someone like me who is, like I said, a recovering perfectionist type, the type A. You can have the bar set really high to where your idea of progress or success is.

Courtney: I will never have a rough night again. I will not struggle with, you know, scary thoughts. My thoughts will balance out. I will be peaceful all the time, and that’s just not realistic, nor is that life and so much of our anxiety or other emotions or our body just responding to life. And so life is not perfect and that would be my encouragement to anyone struggling with it is maybe lower the bar a little bit.

Courtney: I had to lower it many times to where, like I mentioned earlier, my idea of progress was just when my eyes got drowsy, like nowhere near a full night of sleep. But I was just happy with that. And so you can build on that versus trying to get your thoughts to be what you want them to be. Get your body to do what you want it to do all the time.

Courtney: Because then what if that’s your standard? What happens when you do have a rough night, a couple, you know, down the road or a couple months, a couple years, for example? How are you gonna respond to that? So I even had that challenge last night. I had, you know, some troubling thoughts pop into my head and at first I was like, oh geez.

Courtney: And I was really kind of dwelling on ’em, and I’m like, wait a minute, wait a minute. Just because I’m thinking it doesn’t mean it’s true, you know, separate a little bit. So it’s still a practice. But that I think is a huge part of insomnia is the thoughts that, that come in during those late nights when you’re, you feel like you are the only one awake in the world or in your neighborhood or wherever, and it’s dark and you are alone with the loud, intense thoughts and you just feel like you’re, you’re crazy.

Courtney: You’re nuts because you can’t move past it. And really, like you said, you’re not broken. It’s just the dynamic of the situation. But you can separate and you can challenge them or write them down and. It will peak and it will, it will pass At some point. It will pass.

Courtney: In the beginning, and I’m sure anyone who has struggled with this, can attest to this, that the beginning of anxiety is such a lonely place. And you feel so alone, like I mentioned, but then you start to hear from other people, especially on your channel. And it, it’s mind boggling to me how.

Courtney: Insomnia starts and progresses is almost like a formula. Like we’re not alone because it almost plays out identically person to person, regardless of their job, where they live, if they’re a parent or not, if they’re married or not, if they’re male, female. It’s amazing to me how similar everyone’s experiences.

Courtney: So you’re, it’s not, it’s not you, it’s the insomnia, if that makes sense. Or the response to it.

Martin: One thing that you touched upon was how we’re measuring progress as we’re on this journey away from the struggle.

Martin: Because for as long as we are measuring progress on sleep or what thoughts and feelings are showing up, we might be setting the stage for more struggle because our own experience probably tells us that we can’t directly control those things. So if we’re measuring how well we’re doing against something we can’t control there’s just so much potential to still be in that quicksand and not be free from the struggle.

Martin: Looking for action based markers of progress can be more helpful. Like, am I doing more of the stuff that matters? Are the decisions I’m making more related to what I want to be doing or how I want to be protecting sleep or preparing for sleep? There’s so many potential markers of progress out there, but focusing on action based markers of progress can be really helpful because it keeps us focused on what is in our control.

Martin: Which are our actions.

Courtney: Yes. I remember like in the thick of it, there were days where I had said that, you know, the sleep consumed my thoughts. And I, I was walking around like a zombie in this in the sense of, all I thought about was I didn’t sleep last night. I probably won’t sleep tonight. And just like feeling so jealous of all my friends and family, like they’re sleeping with no problem.

Courtney: Like, this is not my life right now. This is horrible. And now I, there’ll be nights I don’t sleep well and it’s like, oh yeah, I forgot I didn’t sleep that great last night. Okay. You know? It’s not always like that, but more often it is. And like I can look at my day and be like, oh, I had a great day. I laughed a lot.

Courtney: I had a lot of joy. The weather was beautiful. I exercised, you know, I had a great day despite what my night looked like.

Martin: There’s just so much in your life beyond sleep. Sleep is still a part of your life, but it’s not the main part or a huge part of your life anymore. It’s just one thing of many things.

Martin: How long would you say it took for you to practice this new approach of less resistance, less effort, not trying to control sleep, thoughts, feelings, to get you to a place where you felt that you left the struggle behind, that you can now live your life independently of sleep, and even in the presence of whatever thoughts and feelings might choose to show up?

Courtney: So let me see. For me, I think my full. Severe anxiety struggle was about two and a half to three years. So I had that, you know, under my belt before implementing these, these strategies. I wanna say it probably took me about six months, give or take to, to where I, I didn’t feel burdened by it anymore.

Courtney: Now I will say the nights or the episodes I would have where I would have a couple nights in a row, I would start to get a little weary again and a little doubtful and a little nervous, but I would get through those. So despite those, or setting those to the side, I would say about six months.

Martin: I’m really glad that you emphasized that there was still ups and downs along the way. It doesn’t mean that over the course of that six months, every day or every night was incrementally better than the previous ones. There were sometimes when things felt really good and other times where it felt like, oh, I’m getting pulled back into the struggle again.

Martin: But what mattered was you just kept on with that practice. You acknowledged what was happening. Maybe you were being a bit kinder to yourself when you noticed that maybe you were getting pulled back into the struggle again and just refocusing your attention on acting in a way that you wanted to act in response, acting in a way that you knew was gonna be moving you closer or in the direction that you wanted to be heading.

Courtney: Yes, yes. I remember in the thick of it too, like wondering how long it was gonna take me to feel better. And I remember hearing someone say, oh, it takes as long as it takes. And I was so frustrated by that. ’cause I’m like, I just want a number. Like, is this gonna be like a year? Is it like six months? Like what am I?

Courtney: But it does, I mean, everybody’s different. Your body handles it differently. Like mine remembers very vividly what happened. So I, that I wouldn’t say presents a challenge, but like I said, I have to be more mindful than someone else might. So everybody’s different. But yeah, it’s just keeping in mind where you want to go and keep.

Courtney: Keep going through what you’ve learned and holding close to the va, what you value about your life, and allowing the space and the compassion for the upsets or, you know, setbacks or whatever you would like to call those.

Martin: How were you able to be patient with yourself when no doubt you wanted progress to happen like immediately, which is human nature. How did you practice being patient and just staying committed to the practice?

Courtney: Yes, that was very challenging. Even with anxiety in general, I still struggle with being patient with myself initially because I do, like I said, I have unfortunately high standards for myself that I always have to lower. And so the nights of, you know, bad sleep or a really anxious day, I just constantly had to be like, okay, you know, I can’t, I can’t control this.

Courtney: I just have to accept it. I will get through this. Like this will pass. Just constantly refocusing. But yeah, it was very hard because there’s so many days, even now with different things, I’m like, man, I’m still struggling with this aspect of something, or I haven’t moved past this yet. And again, that’s the initial response.

Courtney: But then I have to, you know, kind of be mindful of that and respond with, I’m growing. Life is not perfect. Progress is not linear. And that kind of helps with the patience part. But it is very challenging, I will say that.

Martin: So it sounds like when you felt impatient you reminded yourself that you are on a journey.

Martin: You are learning that you are growing that you’re heading in the direction you want to be heading. And on any journey there’s gonna be ups and downs. What matters is just continuing on the journey if it feels like that journey matters.

Courtney: Yes. One thing that like was frustrating for me is like, I would hear different success stories and of anything, like, you hear success stories or you read about ’em, and people don’t always share that they’re still working through things.

Courtney: Sometimes it’s just like, oh, I struggle with this thing now I’m here on the other side of it, and life is great. So when you are like me and you’re still working through different things, it’s hard not to see that as a sign of failure and understand that that is the normal, it’s normal to ebb and flow and you know, like you said, sleep is not perfect.

Courtney: It can’t be controlled, so you can’t gauge your progress off of that.

Martin: Yeah, that’s a good reminder that we are never gonna reach this perfect end point moment in our life where everything is perfect for the rest of time. When we’re struggling, we often feel like, if only I can get rid of this one obstacle, then everything will be perfect.

Martin: But the reality is once one obstacle goes away at least one more is gonna show up because life is a journey and that journey involves many obstacles. Courtney, I’m curious what would you say an average night is like for you these days?

Courtney: Oh, I would say most nights I probably, I don’t know, I wander upstairs around like 9 30, 9 45, you know, and then I’ll get in bed and my husband will, I have chat real quick, and then he passes out within 30 seconds, which is amazing.

Courtney: But I will grab my Kindle, read. It depends how tired I am. Read maybe a paragraph, maybe a page, and I’m out. Around 10 o’clock, 10 30, and I get up about six or six 30. And yeah, sleep. Sleep pretty good. I would say.

Martin: I think what really stands out for me there is that there’s no kind of mention of, well, I come home I, I turn all the lights down in my house, I make sure the thermostat is set to a certain temperature.

Martin: I put on some blue blocking glasses. I drink some warm milk. You know, there’s, there’s just nothing there. It was just, I wander up to bed I talk to my husband for a bit, I read and then I get outta bed in the morning. There was just like nothing else. There’s none of that effort. None of that trying, none of the, the rules, none of the rituals.

Courtney: Yeah. And I’ll say, you know, there are a couple, you know, nights here and there where like recently I was anxious in general about different things, and I was like. Struggling with some night sweats and just feeling on edge and maybe some vivid dreams. And so I got up and came downstairs and just got some water and sat for a minute and went back up to bed.

Courtney: And those are the nights that, like I said, I just had to be more mindful that, you know, maybe through my anxiety, my body’s trying to tell me to slow down or pay attention to something. But it’s not an indication now of like, oh, something, you’re gonna go back there. You’re doing something wrong. It’s because I know most nights are like what I just told you prior to that.

Martin: You’ve got a normal human brain that’s gonna generate anxiety and all different thoughts and feelings from time to time. Now they’re just not pulling you into so much of a struggle. You’ve got that skill in your back pocket now to kind of acknowledge them to make space for them.

Martin: To be kind to yourself and to not feel as though you have to do anything with them because they are thoughts and they are feelings. And ultimately you get to choose how to respond to them.

Courtney: Yeah. And that’s something that is super beneficial about this insomnia journey is not only have I learned to how to relate to my thoughts at nighttime, but during the day, ’cause there’s, you know, during the day I’ll just be going through my day like anybody else would.

Courtney: And I’m sure anyone can relate when you get a crazy thought that pops into your head and you know, before it could really jar me and it could cause anxiety or something like that. But now I’m just like, oh, okay, that’s just a thought. Like, doesn’t mean it’s true. So the benefit I think of this insomnia journey is it can benefit all areas of your life.

Courtney: You learn some skills that can apply to everything.

Martin: As you become less of an opponent to certain thoughts and feelings, they become less distracting. So they can show up during the day. You are able to just quickly acknowledge them and refocus on where you are, what you’re doing, what you want to be doing, rather than, you know, the magnifying glass comes out and you’ve got some, a pair of tweezers and you’re kind of looking through that thought and it’s just the whole focus of your attention.

Martin: And you miss out on the whole world around you. You’re missing out on where you are and what you’re doing.

Courtney: Yes. Yep. Exactly. Same as like the insomnia monster, if you will. The more attention you give to it, the more it grows. And same with those thoughts that pop into your head. The more attention you give to them, the more they can get, they can really grab a hold of you and then you’re dwelling on them.

Courtney: I just remembered, I never shared how I was able to get off the sleep medication because that can be a huge source of shame and like struggle is the sleep medications themselves. So coming from someone who was on three and I, and that was just at one time, like there was a lot of adjustments, made a lot of changes.

Courtney: What did it for me was tolerating those uncomfortable thoughts because I told myself, okay. As I try to decrease my dosage and wean off of this, this is gonna create some really uncomfortable feelings and thoughts and I, it’s okay. This is expected. So it did. And as I expected that to happen, I was kind of prepared for it and I was able to sit with that and over time it got a lot better and I was able to challenge the thoughts that like would say, well you still need sleep medication.

Courtney: And I would be like, well no. ’cause I took half a dose last night and I slept really good. So that was huge for me, was able to get off of those through challenging and tolerating the thoughts. And thankfully I haven’t had, I haven’t had to take a sleep aid in, gosh, three or four years I think. So it’s possible if you feel completely like gripped by sleep medication, it is completely possible to get off of it and sleep well.

Martin: I’m really glad you touched upon that because we talked about so much good stuff. I feel that that kind of got a little bit lost because you were telling us right at the start that you just felt trapped in this life of medication dependency almost. It felt like you had to take this medication even though you knew it really wasn’t giving you the kind of results you wanted, but you felt like you had no alternative to it.

Martin: So was it a case that you got some practice in first with this approach of lowering that resistance to being awake at night, lowering the resistance to the thoughts and the feelings, and then as you started to feel as though you were building that skill, then you started to tackle them moving away from the medication.

Martin: Like what, what was the start of that journey like for you of moving away from the medication?

Courtney: I had enough self-awareness then to know, okay, I need to get some of these practices under my belt and be, you know, comfortable with them before I try to make a big change like that. Because as I mentioned, there were nights I would try to think about, okay, maybe I could not take that medicine tonight, or maybe I could decrease the dose and instantly I would be like panicking.

Courtney: And I was like, okay, okay, so let’s tackle this first. And then once I realized like those strategies were working and I, the one night I was feeling drowsy before I even took my medicine, that was an indication, okay, I don’t need the sleep medication to induce drowsiness. So that was the first step and then I was able to build on that later on.

Courtney: And then I think what also really helped was one of your videos talking about how or I had read, maybe you shared it, there was a study that talks about how sleep medications what on average give you 40 extra minutes of sleep or something like that. I had read, it wasn’t even anything significant and I’m like, why am I taking this medicine if I’m trying, if on average it helps you gain an extra, you know, however many minutes of sleep and I’m awake all night anyway.

Courtney: So it was just a logical, like, this is not actually helping me. So it was that combined with the, the step taking the building on each step that I took.

Martin: Was it a long process for you of moving away from the medication or did it happen quite quickly?

Courtney: It was a very gentle, slow, prog, slow process for me, and I knew it would have to be just because of how, like I, how I handled change in general.

Courtney: But especially with that, I was like, Ugh, I’m just gonna give myself a lot of grace and a lot of time and yeah. Yeah, I was able to get off of it, but for me it took a while.

Martin: Did you have that temptation as you were moving away from the medication, reducing your dose, that you’re starting to feel more confident and, yeah, I don’t need this medication to make sleep happen and then may be a really difficult night shows up and then your problem solving brain fires up and it’s like, well, we need to go back to the medication.

Martin: Was, was that something you experienced and if it was, how did you respond?

Courtney: Yes, those old thoughts would creep back in and I would be like, oh, you know, ready to go back to that. And I had to challenge that. Like, no, this didn’t help you before. You will get through this. You don’t need them, you don’t actually need them to sleep.

Courtney: So those were the thoughts that I would have to challenge. I couldn’t just, you know, write ’em down like I would actually have to challenge them. But yeah, much like my body remembers what happened, the old thoughts are very much there to, so I would have to. Re just be, make, be mindful of that, that it’s gonna be, it’s gonna take a while.

Courtney: My body remembers that, and therefore those thoughts might come back again.

Martin: You reminded yourself of that conflict that can happen between our problem solving brain and our experience, maybe like the wise mind perhaps. So your problem solving brain was like, no, we need to go back to the medication.

Martin: And it’s so easy to listen to that problem solving brain because it serves us really well in so many areas of life. But not all the time. And you drew on your experience and you reminded yourself that, you know, I’ve got this bank of evidence here that tells me that I don’t need medication to make sleep happen.

Martin: That sleep can happen without it. With less of it, I can feel drowsy. So there’s what my problem solving brain is saying isn’t always true in effect. And it was helpful for you to remind yourself of that. What does it feel like now that you’ve eliminated that medication from your life and that you are sleeping and living your life independently of that?

Courtney: Oh man. It, it’s just so freeing to be out of, out of that place. I didn’t ever think I was gonna get out of, I thought once I’m dependent on medication, like I, I don’t even know how I would be able to get out of this, this place, but I did. And also, like, it just, it’s so much more trust for my body. Like my body knows what to do and I can just, I can trust it to do that.

Courtney: So that has been cool that I don’t need to intervene. So again, a lot of freedom.

Martin: Courtney, if someone with chronic insomnia is listening to this and they feel as though they’ve tried everything, that they’re beyond help, that maybe they are the one person that’s truly broken, they’ll never be able to stop struggling with insomnia.

Martin: What would you say to them?

Courtney: Like if they’re already watching this, they’re already on your channel. Like just try to stick to these videos and drown out anything else, because that can be very confusing and you can easily fall back into, well, maybe I need to try that supplement, or maybe my sleep problems related to that.

Courtney: Like just keep it focused on the educational content here, as well as the success stories that you’ve shared on here. Because like we said, you know, it’s a common theme through everyone that has struggled with insomnia and we all have come to the same place maybe a little bit differently, but we’re essentially on the other side of that big battle that we had.

Courtney: So that should give people hopefully a lot of hope that. There’s, this is where the space is to heal from insomnia. So try to drown out other advice or articles or videos. You know, it can get very confusing and it can make you feel a lot worse. You are not alone by any means, and as many people have been where you’re at, I have as well, and I, I thought I was the exception.

Courtney: I didn’t ever think that I would be where I’m at today with how much medication I was on, how many doctor’s appointments I had to go to, how much sleep I had lost. I, I was in such a dark pit that I didn’t think I would ever get out. And if you’re willing to give yourself time and have self-compassion, you will get out.

Courtney: And, and don’t feel bad if you know you’re someone like me where you, you, your, you know, your prayer life isn’t working or you feel like it’s not working, or all the supplements you’re taking are not working. It’s not you. And. It’s okay to be there. Like it’s okay to not be okay, but you do have a lot of hope in this entire channel here that you’ve provided and the videos, the testimonies is proof that there’s hope and you can be one of the people talking about your story.

Courtney: So hanging there, it’s, it’s awful. It’s really, really hard. Like, I, I don’t want to glaze over that. I wouldn’t wish insomnia on anybody. It is a very, very dark and scary place. But you, there is so much hope.

Martin: Thanks again for the time you’ve taken out for your day to come onto the podcast and to share your experience, your insights, your journey, your transformation.

Martin: I just know is gonna help a lot of people. Courtney, so thank you.

Courtney: Thank you for having me.

Martin: I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Insomnia Coach Podcast. I’m Martin Reed, and as always, I’d like to leave you with this important reminder — you are not alone and you can sleep.

I want you to be the next insomnia success story I share! If you're ready to stop struggling with sleep and get your life back from insomnia, you can start my insomnia coaching course right now.

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Amber had always been someone people counted on. A nurse. A mom.

For most of her life, sleep wasn’t something she worried about. It just happened. Then life changed.

After her second baby — who arrived early and had some health problems — nights became more difficult. She’d lie down only to wait for the next cry. It felt easier to stay awake than to sleep.

Years working as a NICU nurse added another layer. More responsibility. More pressure to perform. Sleep felt increasingly fragile and one night she couldn’t sleep at all. Panic showed up. Heart racing. Mind spinning.

Insomnia became something to fix.

She researched. Tightened her routine. Optimized sleep hygiene. Tried teas. Tried prescriptions. Got in and out of bed. Tried relaxing harder. Tried doing everything “right.” Nothing worked.

In fact, the harder she tried, the more she struggled. Nights became lonely and exhausting. Life started to revolve around sleep.

Then, in the middle of the night, searching for help, she stumbled across stories of people who weren’t fixing sleep — they were changing how they responded to being awake. Less fighting. More flexibility. More focus on living.

It wasn’t quick. It wasn’t perfect. But little by little, Amber’s struggle loosened.

And sleep stopped being the boss.

Click here for a full transcript of this episode.

Martin: Okay. So Amber, thank you so much for taking the time out for your day to come onto the podcast.

Amber: Thank you.

Martin: Let’s start right at the very beginning, as always. Can you tell us when your issues with sleep first began and what you think might have caused those initial issues with sleep?

Amber: Yeah. For the most part I’ve been a pretty good sleeper.

Amber: However, I’ve had some points in my life where it’s become a little bit hard and I would say the first time that I noticed a significant change was that was after I had my second baby, he was early, he had some health problems. And I noticed, that I started losing my sleep then. Obviously every new mother does anyways, but I was worried about feeding him.

Amber: I was worried about him getting enough to eat. I would get him settled and then I would lay down and just be waiting for that next cry. And so it was like almost easier to stay awake in a way, but not in the long run. So that was the first time I noticed it. And then the bulk of my career I have been a NICU nurse, which also made me a little anxious about my newborns.

Amber: Sometimes I would be a little bit anxious before certain shifts. Not always, ’cause I worked for 25 years and it was great. But occasionally I would be anxious about getting to bed and in time and getting enough sleep. And so I noticed it there. And then I went back to school a few years ago to become a nurse practitioner and I probably had a little bit of a harder time sleeping during school.

Amber: I got a lot more sensitive to my husband’s snoring during that time and, very light sleeper. And then after that, when I got my first job as a nurse practitioner, I was very on edge and very anxious. And while I was orienting for that job, I did not get a lot of sleep. I still at that time wasn’t paying a lot of attention to the sleep itself.

Amber: Just aware that I wasn’t sleeping enough. Then I would say a couple years ago is where it really came to a head. I had various just normal life stresses going on with various kids and things. And one night I just could not sleep. And I started to recognize that I was having a bit of panic attack and I had some experience with panic and anxiety in the past, like mainly around that baby that I told you about.

Amber: I had learned to work through that and I really hadn’t experienced a lot of it for probably a good decade and a half, but I noticed it that night and that generated a real fear response to me. And I thought, I remember distinctly having thought, oh my gosh, is this gonna keep me from sleeping now? And that’s, that was the hallmark.

Amber: That’s what started it. And it became its own beast from that point on.

Martin: You can recall a lot of times in your life when there were some stressors going on, for want of a better word, and that impacted your sleep. But it tended to be the case that once those initial triggers were no longer present or as relevant, things tended to get back on track.

Amber: I had experienced times in the past where my anxiety was higher and I have always known that my personality goes a little in that direction, but it was manageable. I had been able to manage it and I had learned to manage it pretty well previous to that.

Amber: But this time it I think the fear that it was going to affect my sleep, I did not know how to deal with that, and that scared me on a whole new level. And so now I feel like I was dealing with two things, just, being an anxious sort and now not being able to sleep on top of that.

Amber: I value my health and I work in healthcare and so I do pay attention to details for sure.

Amber: And getting enough sleep was very important to me. I know all the health benefits of that I’ve, and so the thought of not being able to have that and trying to function without it was quite terrifying to me, especially thinking of taking care of other people’s health.

Martin: So you’ve got that added pressure to perform sleep because it’s not just about you, it’s also about all the other people you’re interacting with and caring for each day. What were you doing to try and get things back on track?

Amber: I just go right to trying to problem solve. And of course that’s an important part of my job. That’s how I’ve dealt with being a mother and any other role I’ve had is to figure out, okay, what do I need to do differently?

Amber: I need to understand this better. I’m gonna research it. I’m going to read about it. I’m gonna see what other people do and I’m gonna try all those things just, and I’m gonna, I’m gonna fix this. That’s what I thought. I’m gonna fix it. And so I did several different things. A lot of things that I’ve heard described on your other episodes.

Amber: Sleep hygiene was a big thing, and that is actually something I talked to patients about. And so I thought I need to make my sleep hygiene better and I need to make sure I get in bed at a certain time and have everyone be quiet. I can’t have my noise in my room. I need to be really relaxed, so I’ve got to force myself to be relaxed.

Amber: Try some of the sleep herbal teas. I don’t love medication, so I was trying not to go there in the beginning. Eventually I did go and try some medication. I have plenty of nurse practitioner friends that could write me a prescription for something. And so I tried various things, but only briefly I will say I, because I quickly realized that there was no medication that was helping.

Amber: It might help initially. And then very quickly I discovered that my alarm system was stronger than the medication. And I think I tried maybe two or three different things and I just thought, I’m not gonna do this anymore. ’cause I don’t really wanna be on it anyways and it’s not helping. So yeah, I tried all those things.

Amber: It was a difficult time.

Amber: There was one night where I tried Ambien. I had tried hydroxyzine, I had tried Trazodone. Those two didn’t help at all.

Amber: And one night I tried Ambien and I knew as a professional that’s not a medication that you want to take for very long ’cause it can really be disrupted to sleep. But by that point I was so desperate that I thought maybe if I took it a couple nights, it would help reset me. And that was even the term that the provider I talked to and I had was that maybe I needed a couple nights of reset.

Amber: And I, so the first night I tried it and I was really relieved knowing that I had it that night. So I think my anxiety went down quite a bit right there. ’cause I knew I had something that was going to help and I just slept like a log that night. And so I thought, great this is it. I’m gonna do this a couple nights, I’m gonna get rid of it and I’m gonna move on and be normal again.

Amber: And the very next night I took it and I slept really hard for maybe two hours and then I was up the rest of the night and I was pretty blown away that I had overpowered that medication that I knew to be pretty strong. And so from, I just threw it out at that point because I thought this isn’t working and it’s not gonna, it’s gonna, give me side effects anyway, so I don’t want it.

Amber: So yeah I was really to the end of my rope at that point. I didn’t know what else to do.

Martin: I think a lot of people will identify with at least some kind of aspect of your experience with the medication there. You’ve got that thing and it can feel like a sense of relief.

Martin: It’s almost like you’re delegating all of the effort that you might felt you had to put into sleep to try and make it happen, now it’s not your issue anymore, it’s down to whatever this thing is. So you take it and it’s that’s it. Now there’s no more effort. There’s no more trying, there’s no more pressure, there’s no more performance anxiety, and that in itself can just immediately create better conditions for sleep.

Martin: Maybe the real issue is all the understandable trying and the pressure and the effort.

Amber: Yeah that’s very true. And as you were talking, I actually was thinking of something else I tried. I had an another provider tell me to at night it was a CBT thing. It was to get out of bed when I started feeling those anxious feelings so that I wouldn’t associate my bed with that anxiety.

Amber: And I thought that makes sense ’cause I’m really struggling when I’m laying in my bed. And she told me also to pull out the Old Testament and read Leviticus ’cause it’s really boring. And maybe that would help. And I did it and it was boring. But I found after a while it, it helped a bit initially, but I found after a while that the exercise of getting in and out of bed when I was feeling anxiety was adding to my anxiety.

Amber: ’cause I was just like, oh, here I go again. I’ve, been in bed for 15 minutes. I gotta get out again. It was just something else I had to keep track of.

Martin: Did it almost feel like an additional punishment on top of being awake, this kind of obligation that I should be getting out of bed as well?

Amber: Yes, it did. Very much yeah, it was not relaxing to me.

Martin: I’ve had guests on the podcast that have found it really helpful to get out of bed during the night, and I have other guests just like yourself that did not find it helpful to get out of bed during the night.

Martin: And I think really it just comes down to what our intent is. If we are getting out of bed because we are trying to get rid of anxiety or thoughts or feelings or to get rid of insomnia, to make ourselves feel sleepy again, to make sleep happen, then we might be setting ourselves up for some struggle if our experience tells us that’s out of our control if we’re getting out of bed, just because to us, that feels like a more productive way of spending our time awake during the night.

Martin: Maybe that is gonna be helpful for you. And if your goal is to just use that time awake in a way that’s more useful, that involves less struggling, we can then see that it doesn’t matter, does it? You can do that in bed. You can do that out of bed. Because our goal is just to experience this with less struggle.

Martin: It’s the struggle that kind of adds all that extra difficulty on top.

Amber: That is very true. And that is what I had to come to. It took me a while. And I know I actually emailed you a few times about, I wanted you to tell me exactly what to do and of course you won’t do that.

Amber: Your answers are to help people search themselves to find out what they need to do because it is very individual. And I finally came to. I just need to see how I feel in the moment. If it feels better, if I want to stay in bed, then I’m gonna do that. But if the feelings of, I don’t know, anxiety or restlessness, get too much for me and I would rather do something out of my bed, then I’ll do that.

Amber: So I really ended up not having a certain way of doing things, which I think was a key.

Martin: You were giving yourself more flexibility. Whereas when we were in problem solving mode, it’s I have to do this, I have to do this, I have to do this. And they’ve got this long list, haven’t we?

Amber: Yeah, the algorithm.

Martin: Exactly. Yeah. But then when we start to ease up a little bit, don’t cling onto it quite so tightly, we can become a little bit more flexible. And that in itself can be quite freeing, right? Because

Amber: it is

Martin: now we realize we’ve got options again, and that just opens things up a little bit.

Martin: That doesn’t mean that things are just immediately gonna change, but it can just relieve some of that weight from our shoulders and help us realize that we can choose what we want to do.

Amber: It’s quite liberating actually, when you get to that point.

Martin: Just to rewind a little bit, what was an average night like for you back then, if there was such a thing?

Amber: In the beginning, just sheer difficulty. It was miserable. It was absolutely miserable. I felt very isolated and very alone because of course everyone else in my house is completely out sleeping beautifully. And I am not.

Amber: And it seemed to me like everybody in the neighborhood was sleeping great too. And I am up pacing and walking the hallways or trying to, focus on something that I can’t focus on. Having a lot of an anxious feelings. It just was awful. And then dreading the next day when I was going to be exhausted and very certain I wasn’t going to be able to perform in any of my roles the way I wanted to.

Amber: That was the beginning. As time went on, that very slowly improved, but I did still have a lot of difficult nights as I moved forward.

Martin: How was this influencing your days when you were still tangled up in the struggle?

Amber: Yeah, that was really hard. I called in sick the next day at work and I hardly ever call in sick. I think I’ve missed, gosh, two days and two and a half years. I really, but I didn’t think I could be capable of my job the next day, and I was terrified of myself and terrified of how I would let down other people.

Amber: And so I stayed home and just continued to suffer at home. And then, I mentioned my job a lot. That’s a really important role to me. But of my most important role is that of mother. And as family member to my family. And I also felt like I was not able to do a good job there. I felt like I was not quite present.

Amber: They could tell that I just wasn’t as happy or didn’t have the energy. I wasn’t doing things that I enjoyed as much. It was just really became enclosed in myself and an obsessed about how I could fix this problem, not a good way to live.

Martin: It makes sense why you called in sick to work not only for yourself, for your own wellbeing. It felt what if I might make a mistake at work because I can’t really focus. I’m so distracted. So it’s completely understandable why you would do that. And then at the same time, when you call in sick, you’re not doing that career or that job that might feel important to you.

Martin: That’s reflection of who you are. It’s all this stuff influences your actions in a way that you get pulled away from that life you want to live. And that could be your work, your home life, your family life, your identity. It just feels like your actions start to serve insomnia, sleep, all these thoughts and feelings rather than your actions serving you, who you are and the life you want to live.

Martin: And that just makes it all so much more difficult.

Amber: Yeah, that’s so true. It’s like insomnia became the boss.

Amber: I wasn’t new to the sensation of anxiety or panic. I had episodes of that in the past and I was feeling pretty confident that I knew how to handle that. ’cause it had been so long and I had moved through some really difficult things in my life.

Amber: And I did okay. So then this thing came along and it was mysterious because I’d had this confidence so I could handle anxiety and difficult things. But this was a whole new thing and it caused me to go right down to the bottom again and go, what is wrong with me? What is wrong with my brain?

Amber: Why I felt like I wasn’t doing it to myself, but I couldn’t understand how or why I was doing it to myself. So yes, very mysterious and very difficult for me to understand in the beginning.

Martin: When you came across my work, what made you think that there was something different or something new or opened up this possibility that there’s a new way forward here?

Amber: As probably most people that encounter your work it was in the middle of the night while I was on, looking for help in the middle of the night because I was just desperate. And I stumbled upon some of your, maybe one of your YouTubes, I think, and you were interviewing somebody like this.

Amber: I listened to the person’s story and I thought, oh my gosh, that sounds exactly like how I feel right now. They were really expressing how desperate they were in the beginning and how confusing all the feelings I was feeling at the time. And so that really grabbed my attention because I heard the same level of desperation in this person’s description of themself, and yet they were now being interviewed by you and having worked through that.

Amber: And so it gave me hope. And as I listened to it more, I realized that it actually was very similar to how I had learned to manage anxious thoughts or anxiety in the past. And that was to let them happen. So it was a different level of learning how to let something happen. So that cognitive understanding started coming.

Amber: The more I would listen to your things on YouTube and your podcasts, I had, I felt like it made sense. It resonated with me.

Martin: This is why I’m just so grateful that people like yourself are willing to come on because it, it can be so powerful to hear these journeys and these stories.

Martin: There’s that validation. There’s the acknowledgement that you’re not alone, and then there’s that hope, and you had the bonus of being familiar with an approach of opening up to insomnia, opening up to panic, fear, anxiety.

Amber: It’s a paradoxical thing that, that is how you get through it is by actually allowing it to happen.

Amber: So that, that was a pivotal moment for me and started my process of recovery, which certainly didn’t happen overnight. But the cognitive understanding was there.

Martin: So in terms of allowing it to happen, in a practical sense, how do you allow insomnia, for example, to happen when you really don’t want it to happen.

Martin: How do you allow anxiety to happen when you really don’t want it to happen? What does that look like in, in terms of practical action?

Amber: Yeah. That that, that was the next big hurdle was trying to figure that out. I asked that question of myself and of you, I think several times again, and it’s not something that you can figure out overnight.

Amber: It takes a lot of practice. I think ongoing practice, I don’t think that practice ever ends because there’s always a new layer of things.

Amber: One of them was to not beat myself up for things, because I realized that when I would get really frustrated and go, why can’t I do this? Why can’t I? What’s, why do I think this?

Amber: Why is my brain so busy? Why do I think I have to problem solve everything? Why? I realized that I was just throwing fuel on the fire. I was just putting more pressure on myself. Friend said to me one morning, something that stuck with me, and you actually repeated in an email something very similar.

Amber: She said I would never change your problem solving mind. It makes you who you are and look at all the things you’ve been able to do and accomplish. Because of the way your mind works and who would you be without your mind the way you were? And you had said something pretty similar to me about that too.

Amber: So from that point on, I started looking at that differently and not flogging myself for just being who I am and seeing the benefit of the way my brain works. That was a big realization for me. And then another one was to realize when I was starting to try to prob over problem solve, maybe, oh, it worked this night but this didn’t work that night.

Amber: Maybe I did it a little bit wrong. Maybe you know, I’m not following the algorithm. It was frustrating ’cause professionally, I really do have to follow algorithms a lot. And so I was having to pull away from that natural way of thinking. And not get stuck in this loop of problem solving and just letting it be, not worrying about it so much.

Martin: Step one perhaps was, not beating yourself up over something that your own experience is telling you is out of your control. If you could have made a certain amount or type of sleep happen, you would’ve, you’d be doing it, right? If you could magically and permanently delete anxiety from your mind, you would’ve done it.

Martin: But your experience tells you that’s not possible. You tried and tried. The conclusion from your experience was that’s not possible. So it sounds like part of your journey towards opening up a little bit more to this difficult stuff that you’d rather not experience is to acknowledge that it is out of your control and that your mind isn’t working against you, it’s not your adversary, even though it can sometimes feel that way.

Martin: Because anxiety generally speaking doesn’t feel good. We can see it as a negative thing or a bad thing. If only this anxiety will go away, I would be able to sleep. If only this anxiety would go away, I would be able to be the person I want to be.

Martin: But the brain generates anxiety because it’s trying to give us information about something. It’s trying to remind us of something that’s important. It’s trying to protect us. It’s trying to look out for us. It’s trying to keep us safe, and it’s gonna do this whether there’s a real threat or not, because it’s hyper cautious.

Martin: It’s focused on doom and gloom. ’cause all the good, happy, fluffy, safe stuff isn’t a threat or a concern. So the brain spends no time on that. It’s only ever gonna focus on what might happen or the worst possible outcome or the worst possible experience.

Martin: If we feel anxious that maybe we left the gas stove on. And so we turn around in our driveway and we go back in, we find out we did leave the gas stove on. Is anxiety still a bad thing when it stopped our house from exploding? It’s like what we add on top of it that is the source of so much of our struggle.

Amber: Yes, very true. I think, I started using an analogy in my head as I was figuring this out more as a NICU nurse, which.

Amber: All those years, if you’ve ever been in, in a neonatal intensive care, there’s a lot of alarms that go off all the time. And so sometimes the nurses get a sense of whether it’s an alarm that needs to be paid attention to or not. And people who haven’t been in there are really on edge because they can just, why are we not getting on top of all these alarms, but the nurses like this one, this is okay.

Amber: We’re okay. We don’t need to do anything about it. And I started to realize that’s what was probably going on in me is I, I had an alarm that had some value to it and at times I needed to, of course I need to attend to it. I don’t wanna not be fearful of anything. But it also can go off for things that are not really urgent or really emergent.

Amber: It might be a mistake, it might be like in the nicu, maybe the baby’s wiggling and setting off their alarm, and it’s not a problem. So realizing that a little more was helpful to me.

Martin: I think that’s a fantastic analogy and I love how you connected it to a real ongoing experience that’s relevant to your life.

Martin: ‘Cause that always makes this stuff so much more powerful. And yeah, there’s, these alarms are going off. Sometimes they’re helpful, sometimes they’re useful, sometimes they’re less helpful, sometimes they’re not helpful, they’re not useful. Sometimes maybe they’re more of a distraction than anything else, but what are they?

Martin: At the end of the day, they’re snippets of information and we get to decide how to respond. The alternative approach if you’re in that ward is to just be so focused on, I must not hear any alarms today. I can’t hear any alarms. That’s first of all, that’s just gonna take so much of your energy, focus and attention.

Martin: How are you gonna be able to care for your patients and do the stuff that matters when your brain is, all of its capacity is on trying to avoid hearing an alarm.

Amber: And as time went on, I think my alarm system got a little smarter. I wasn’t going off as much because it wasn’t bothering me as much.

Amber: One other thing that’s come to me while we’ve been talking that I also realized I had a few different epiphanies while going through this, and I realized, I kept realizing different levels at which I was trying to force something to happen. Initially it was trying to force sleep.

Amber: Then it was trying to force myself to relax and not have anxiety. And then when I started doing your program and going about it that way, then I was trying to force myself to be okay or maybe even being awake or be okay with the anxiety. And I wasn’t. And it took me a while to realize, oh, I don’t have to like this actually, I can acknowledge this is hard.

Amber: It is not. This is not ideal. This is not what I wanna do. This is not how I wanna feel. And that’s okay. But I can make a choice here. I do have a choice in what I’m gonna do next. I can have a choice in my discernment. And that was probably one of the bigger epiphanies that I had. ’cause that one really carried out over into other parts of my life too.

Martin: I’m glad you made that point because when we hear about this idea of reducing our resistance to something that we don’t really want to experience or to accept it, this whole philosophy of acceptance, a common reservation I guess that people have is but I’m not okay with this. How do I make myself be okay with something that I’m not okay with?

Martin: I want to be asleep. I don’t want to be awake. And that’s where we can get tripped up. Because it’s not about pretending that you are okay with it. It’s not about pretending that you enjoy being awake pretending that fatigue doesn’t exist, pretending that anxiety doesn’t make things more difficult, that you enjoy it, that it’s great to experience.

Martin: It’s about accepting that this stuff is gonna show up and it’s trying to fight it or avoid it just makes things more difficult. And it’s about, just as you touched upon, bringing your focus back to how you choose to respond to it when it shows up. Choosing to respond in a workable way, a way that isn’t going to layer on all these extra pieces of difficulty and struggle on top of it when it shows up. So I’m really glad you mentioned that because I think that is important.

Amber: Yeah. Yeah. I think that is important. I think that’s a really common misconception when someone starts back on this journey, whether it’s insomnia or trying to deal with anxiety, is then trying to figure out how am I supposed to be okay and enjoying this? And you really can’t, that’s not, that’s really not what we’re trying to do here.

Amber: It’s okay to acknowledge that it’s hard.

Martin: It might even be essential to acknowledge that it’s hard and that in itself might be part of opening up to it.

Amber: Yeah. Agreed.

Amber: I have memory of when I was young, when as a child and I’d get the stomach flu and I had to throw up. It was just a horrible thing. I did not wanna throw up. I would fight it, and my mom would come with me to the toilet, she would hold my head up and she would just rub my back.

Amber: And she would keep saying, just let it come. Just let it come. And I trusted her, and I would let it come, and I would let you know, have the release, and then I would feel better. And it’s more like that to me now. It’s I can let this happen. It doesn’t feel good right now. Might even feel worse before it’s done, but it’s not gonna stay this way.

Amber: I know that now. So that’s a different thing. And then instead of getting really frustrated with my busy brains that likes to think about everything and figure out everything. Now it’s more oh, let’s just see what’s on, what’s on TV tonight? What’s on the brain tonight?

Amber: I’m more like, wow, look at my busy brain. Isn’t that amazing? It can bounce back and forth. To this, that and the other. And it goes fast. Sometimes it’s a little fast for me, but I’m actually more grateful for it now ’cause it helps me keep track of a lot of things and stay on top of a lot of things.

Amber: So I look at that differently as well.

Amber: Another big learning point is what what I can control and what I cannot, and to, there are a lot of things we cannot control and to try to control them, escape from them, or numb yourself to them, distract yourself, it just adds to something that might already be difficult.

Amber: So letting those things be, and then finding where I can control, which is my actions, my response I went into, when I started this out, I did try some meditation, but my understanding of meditation has changed so much in the beginning. I was trying to force myself to relax. I was trying to make my really naturally busy brain not think of anything, and it just doesn’t happen.

Amber: And so that would become more and more frustrating to me. It was just a frustrating experience. I thought I’m never gonna get this down. Now. I choose to relax. I can relax my muscles and my body and I can let myself breathe. But it, you mentioned the word intent or motive in the beginning. My intent of my motive is different.

Amber: It’s not to force total relaxation and calm and quiet my brain and not have thoughts. Now it’s, I am relaxing myself to allow them, if that makes sense. And it has been that has been a real game changer for me as well, because I realize the more I do that, oh, actually, I. I don’t really feel that anxious anymore.

Amber: It’s just gotten better and better. It doesn’t mean I don’t have anxiety, but I’ve, I have a very different approach now and it feels so doable to me compared to the way it used to feel.

Martin: Would you say it’s almost like you are practicing and building skill in experiencing, I’m just gonna say anxiety ’cause that’s the last one that you mentioned.

Martin: Experiencing anxiety with less struggle. So it’s showing up, but it’s losing the more you practice experiencing it with less resistance, it’s almost like it starts to lose its power and influence. So it still shows up, but it’s not as strong, it’s not as distracting. It’s not got that power it once maybe held over you.

Amber: That’s exactly what’s happening now. The thing if I, if for example, if I go to bed and I’m worried about one of my kids or a patient I saw, and it’s leaving me with this unrest inside. I, now we’ll just realize, okay, I’m going into one of these loops where I’m thinking about this a lot, worrying about it all.

Amber: The worry in the world is not gonna change it. I’m gonna just name I’m feeling this way because this is going on, or this is happening and I’m just gonna allow it to happen. I’m gonna relax and allow it to happen. I can maybe think of some more solutions tomorrow, or I can check in on the thing. I just start coming up with things I can do.

Amber: To help it. And it really has it has more of a profound effect on me in helping me get through this.

Martin: Whilst you were talking, I was thinking back to that alarm analogy you were sharing, and I was thinking that maybe a brand new member of staff, maybe they’ve just finished their training and they’re in that ward for the first time, hearing all those alarms go off, it must be terrifying.

Martin: It feels like you’ve really thrown in the deep end, but then as you build up that experience of listening to those alarms going off nonstop choosing through experience on how you’re responding to each of one, each of them, the alarms are still going off, but they’re not having that huge effect on you, that huge physiological effect on you anymore.

Amber: Yeah, that’s exactly right. It’s very it’s very comparable to that experience.

Martin: How does this transfer to sleep then? So we’ve talked about opening up to the thoughts and the feelings. How does that get you to a place where you are not struggling with sleep anymore?

Amber: With sleep it’s really was the same thing.

Amber: The, I bring up anxiety a lot because I feel like the anxiety and the lack of sleep was just so intertwined with this experience. I did have to become more okay with being awake and that took time. And your direction on choosing values, value-based activities was very helpful to me because I’m very aware of what my values are and you know what things lead me more towards those and that type of life I wanna live and.

Amber: So I did go I went through a very sleepless period of time. I think there was one time where I felt like I didn’t get sleep for three nights in a row. Sometimes I don’t know that we’re totally aware of how much sleep we actually get, but that’s what it felt like to me. And I actually carried on.

Amber: I didn’t feel my best. Of course it wasn’t great, but I carried on very normally for those days and I was able to see, wow, I was able to accomplish, these things at work, at home. I had connection with people. I laughed with people. I had some good conversations. And so that was a big confidence builder to see that I actually really can do a lot without sleep.

Amber: It doesn’t feel, the way I like to feel, but I can do it. And so it took some of the fear out of that for me, and that was very helpful.

Martin: Maybe it comes down to exploring what we can do that might make this whole experience a little bit less difficult or a little bit less traumatic. It sounds like one way that you moved toward that goal was by committing to actions that reflected your values, living the kind of life you wanted to live, even when sleep wasn’t showing up.

Martin: And by doing that, I think a natural byproduct maybe, is that we do start to get a little bit more comfortable with being awake because it’s not having such a huge impact over our lives anymore. Even if it’s just a 10th of a percentage point better, we’ve got that 10th of a percentage point more control over our lives now.

Martin: It can snowball. So we become a little bit more comfortable with being awake. That’s not to say we want to be awake, but we just start to get a little bit more comfortable with it. We are less resistant to it. It’s not gonna pull us into quite so much of a struggle and in effect. That kind lowers it down on our list of priorities, perhaps for our problem solving brain.

Martin: Our brain’s oh, maybe we don’t have to fight this quite so hard. We don’t have to engage in this battle. And when we are not engaged in that battle conditions for sleep just become better because we’re not in the middle of a battleground at two o’clock in the morning. We’re awake. We’re experiencing all these thoughts and these feelings, but we’re not in a battleground anymore.

Amber: That’s absolutely correct. And since then, my attitude now I’ve had a couple of circumstances with maybe a teenage child that’s, been late for curfew coming home or maybe a medical issue with somebody that I need to help with. It’s late in tonight. And instead of thinking, oh my gosh, I’m not gonna get sleep now, I’m like, bring it. I can stay up and I can handle tomorrow. I’ve done it for three nights in a row.

Amber: I, it doesn’t scare me like it used to. So it’s a big shift in my perspective on that now.

Martin: That is a really big shift. I’m curious to know, as you were practicing this whole new approach that we’ve been talking about, did you find that progress was just it was kinda like this up upward curve where things just progressively got better and easier and less struggle.

Martin: Or was it more kind of ups and downs, or was it more just like someone had thrown a plate of spaghetti against the wall and it was just all over the place? What was it like for you?

Amber: I like the spaghetti analogy that it probably felt like that for a while. All over the place. I keep using the term cognitive understanding because in my head I could understand what you were saying or what I was hearing from other people.

Amber: It made sense to me. It resonated and I knew this was the way to do it, but anything else I’ve had to learn, whether it is becoming a nurse or a nurse practitioner or I used to run a lot of marathons, learning the best way to do that. Learning it in the book can make absolute sense.

Amber: And you think you’ve got it, but then actually putting it into reality and doing it experientially is an entirely different thing. And that does not come as quickly and it takes a lot of practice. And that’s exactly what happened with this. It took a lot of practice and I had a lot of ups and downs. I have a plate of spaghetti.

Martin: Yeah. And like when you’re learning any new skill there’s gonna be times when it maybe things feel easy, that you’re making great progress, you’re ahead of schedule, and then there’s gonna be times where it feels like nothing is working. You’re doomed to failure, you’re beyond help that you need to go back down that rabbit hole of looking for some something else to do instead.

Martin: I love the fact that you drew in your experience, in marathon running in your own career, the skills, achievements, they take a lot of practice, they take a lot of action, they take a commitment to action, and they also come with ups and downs, and they also come with all those thoughts and feelings that I just gave a few examples of, this isn’t working. We should give in.

Martin: If we think of where we’re most skilled in life, that wasn’t just immediately given to us, we had to earn it, and we earned it through committed action. Even if it’s just doing a little bit every day, it all adds up. It’s just continuing to do things that move us in the direction that we want to be heading.

Amber: Absolutely. And I do think when you start making that initial improvement, so when I first started to improve and I had a few good nights of sleep and I thought, oh, this is it. I’ve arrived. I figured it out. And then you have your first whatever you wanna call it, set bump, or, barrier in the road and you have another bad night.

Amber: It can be really deflating. ’cause you thought, oh, I figured this out and now this isn’t working, and what did I do wrong? You start, you catch yourself going through all of the same rabbit hole again. And so it is, there is a lot of patients required with those setbacks, they are going to continue to happen.

Amber: And I heard. I don’t remember where I heard it, but I heard someone say that they those types of setbacks come up for a reason. It’s an opportunity to practice. It just means that you need to practice again. It’s not really a bad thing, it’s just an opportunity to refine a skill. And again, changing the way I looked at those, ’cause those were pretty, they’re pretty hard, those setbacks once you start on the road to recovery.

Martin: 100%. And especially like you said early on especially if you’re really early in your journey and maybe you string some good nights together, or you have a few days where you notice you’re not completely overwhelmed with all these thoughts and feelings and you can feel really confident and motivated, yes, this is working, I’m doing really well.

Martin: And it can be so deflating and difficult when the difficult stuff shows up again. And even when you are further along in your journey, there can be lots of ups and downs and it can feel like you’re, it’s almost like your brain is, whoa, you’re back to square one.

Martin: Everything you’ve been doing up to this point was a complete waste of time, waste of effort. The truth is that it’s just your brain looking out for you. Again, the truth is you’ve just had this experience of some difficult nights or some nights where less sleep happened or some nights of no sleep, or you’ve noticed those thoughts and feelings showing up and gaining a little bit more power.

Martin: That’s what’s happened. Anything else that you are getting from that is stuff that we are understandably adding on top because we still don’t want to experience it. But what matters is identifying this is a normal part of any journey and that it is about how we choose to respond. And that’s something that we always have power over.

Martin: We have the power over our choice of actions, and it’s easy to respond in the way we wanna respond. When things feel good, when things feel easy, it’s when things feel difficult, that it’s most important we respond in the way that reflects how we wanna respond, and that’s really what counts.

Martin: How long would you say it took for you to get to a point where insomnia and all the thoughts and the feelings that can show up with it and after it weren’t creating a struggle for you that you could do things that matter, live your life, do what’s important to you, independently off sleep, and even in the presence of uncomfortable, difficult thoughts and feelings.

Amber: I think it’s hard to put a specific number on that because in the journey, I feel like I, I would go to that for quite a while and then maybe have a little, regression or whatever, and then I would go back to that.

Amber: But I will say, I think over time those regressions would get further and further apart. And so maybe six to eight months is where I started feeling like I was settling in back into my more normal self, my more baseline self.

Martin: Yeah, that’s helpful because I think it’s a reminder that really what we’ve been talking about this whole time are skills. They’re action-based skills and skills. Take time to learn, to develop, to practice. There’s gonna be ups and downs, there’s gonna be setbacks. And that takes time. We all obviously want immediate results. We wanna be able to just deal with this right now.

Martin: If I could offer that to people, I would offer it. I’d be a trillionaire. But it doesn’t work that way. It’s not easy, it’s difficult, and it requires ongoing practice.

Amber: I can honestly say that even though there were times where I just feel like this really brought me to my knees I wouldn’t change it now because of the benefit I’ve gotten from it. I don’t think there, there’s things that I don’t think I could have learned in another way. I think it’s benefited how I’m able to help others and of course my values, my roles, my role as mother.

Amber: Professionally as nurse practitioner or family member or friend, the people in my life, those are really important to me. And so this outlook and this focus of what I can and cannot control and how to allow these things to move through, to just be able to move through them and not go down the rabbit hole has been really helpful.

Amber: I’m very empathetic towards people that are going through something similar and it doesn’t have to be insomnia because so many struggles go down this road, right? They don’t necessarily have to be insomnia. And of course professionally I hear a lot about these types of things. I’m in that type of a position, and so I do, I have a lot of empathy.

Amber: I understand how things feel how difficult thoughts and feelings can fill, and I can give better guidance and direction. I can do that for my children and other people in my life.

Martin: It can be really hard to think of any positive aspects to this struggle when you are in the midst of it. It can almost sound disrespectful to think that there could be a growth opportunity, or it could have somehow have any positive impact on our lives. But a common theme that runs through so many of these podcast episodes is this sense of growth that can only come from that journey that has been experienced.

Amber: I mentioned how when I have had setbacks with insomnia or anxiety, I can see it more as an opportunity to practice. And so now when other things occur in my life that are difficult I think I can go to that maybe a little more quicker now because of that experience that here’s another opportunity.

Amber: This is happening. How can I go about handling it? What can I control, what can I not? And let myself move through it. And then I would say even just day to day, I think I take more I have more gratitude for things too, because. I’m not struggling with the battle and the calv calvary, as you mentioned.

Amber: Now I have more awareness of things around me that are important to me, or even small things like, good weather or flower. It does, it opens your eyes to other things.

Martin: These are transferable skills.

Martin: They don’t exist only for insomnia, only for anxiety. They can enrich or enhance your life in so many other ways, and that’s where you can end up coming out ahead. So like you shared, maybe now you’re finding yourself better at practicing gratitude. You find yourself better able to focus on values-based action.

Martin: Maybe you’re getting more from life because your values have just become more front and center. And so you’re ensuring that your actions reflect who you are, who you want to be and your, you focus, the focus of your attention is expanded. So maybe you are able to savor a few more of those moments that we might once have been on autopilot and missed out on.

Martin: If someone with chronic insomnia is listening. And they feel as though they’ve tried everything. They’re beyond help. They’ll never be able to stop struggling with insomnia.

Martin: What would you say to them?

Amber: Yes, I’ve anticipated that question and that’s really the reason I did this. I was a little reluctant in saying yes, but because this helped me so much, I couldn’t say no to you. Because this is doable. Even though you may be at the point where you feel like you’re completely broken, you’re completely alone.

Amber: No one understands. I’ve tried, A through Z, it’s not working. It is doable. It’s not gonna happen overnight. But it will happen. And it’s the key things that we’ve been talking about. It’s practicing, it’s being patient with yourself in the process. It’s being kind with yourself in the process.

Amber: It’s identifying what you have control over and what you do not. And, practicing those things over and over is really what will help this settle down. It’s very doable.

Martin: Great. Thank you again, Amber, for coming on. It’s just been a pleasure listening to you describe your journey and your transformation. So thank you.

Amber: Thank you.

Martin: I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Insomnia Coach Podcast. I’m Martin Reed, and as always, I’d like to leave you with this important reminder — you are not alone and you can sleep.

I want you to be the next insomnia success story I share! If you're ready to stop struggling with sleep and get your life back from insomnia, you can start my insomnia coaching course right now.

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Before insomnia entered Abbie’s life, sleep was effortless. She’d never had to think about it. She fell asleep quickly, stayed asleep, and moved through her days without giving sleep much attention at all. It was simply there — reliable and unremarkable.

That changed in the fall of 2021 after a short illness. One sleepless night turned into another, and before long, sleep became the center of everything. What started as confusion quickly grew into anxiety and pressure. Each night felt like a test. Each morning felt heavier. As the nights passed, fear took over — fear of being awake, fear of not functioning, fear that something was permanently wrong.

Like many people facing insomnia, Abbie did what made sense. She tried to fix it. She went to bed earlier and earlier. She canceled plans. She followed strict routines. She tried supplements. She searched for answers. And each attempt came with hope — followed by disappointment when sleep didn’t show up. Over time, life began to shrink around sleep, and the struggle only intensified.

Days became just as difficult as nights. Her mind stayed locked on one question: Am I going to sleep tonight? Anxiety filled the hours. Dread set in as evening approached. Even when she was exhausted, her heart raced and her thoughts refused to slow down.

What began to shift things wasn’t a new fix — it was a change in how she responded. Abbie started noticing that withdrawing from life wasn’t helping. Staying in bed wasn’t restoring her energy. And fighting her thoughts wasn’t bringing relief. Slowly, she began doing something different: showing up to her life even when sleep felt uncertain.

She experimented with staying up later instead of trying to force sleep. She returned to the gym. She made plans. She studied. She lived — without waiting for sleep to cooperate. And over time, something important changed. Sleep became less of a battleground. Her thoughts lost their grip. And trust — in herself and in her body — started to rebuild.

In this conversation, Abbie shares what it was like to move through insomnia, how her relationship with sleep changed, and why easing the struggle — not fixing sleep — made all the difference.

Click here for a full transcript of this episode.

Martin: Okay. Abbie, thank you so much for taking the time out for your day to come onto the podcast.

Abbie: Yeah, thanks for having me. Great to be here.

Martin: Let’s start right at the very beginning. When did your issues with sleep first begin and what do you feel caused those issues with sleep?

Abbie: Yeah. It was fall 2021, so like almost four years ago, which is crazy because it feels so vivid in my memories.

Abbie: But I had gotten sick, I think it was like the cold or a flu or something, just like a normal sick, and I wasn’t able to sleep which was really jarring for me at the time because prior to this sort of period of insomnia, I had been a really great sleeper. Like I, had my whole life I had basically like.

Abbie: I never really thought much about sleep. I fell asleep immediately. I stayed asleep. Yeah I had gotten sick, I wasn’t able to sleep. And then I remember the next night I was like, okay, tonight’s the night like, I have to sleep. So I was already, like putting that pressure on sleep it has to be tonight.

Abbie: And so that kind of started, I would say like the feedback loop of okay, I am stressed about sleep. The more I stress about sleep, the less I’m gonna sleep. Yeah, I think I was also dealing with just like a period of more heightened anxiety in my life at the time too. I was applying to graduate school and taking, the admissions tests for that and so maybe it was just like, kinda like the perfect storm.

Abbie: I was like, okay, if I’m gonna get better, I need to sleep. I think it was also like, this was the first time in my life I had experienced a sleepless night. And so it was just like, that was really uncomfortable, like laying there awake all night. The longer you’re awake, the more stressed you’re getting, your heart’s kind of beating fast.

Abbie: Like the whole thing was just uncomfortable and new for me. So I was like I don’t want that to happen again. I better sleep tonight.

Abbie: I feel like each night I wasn’t sleeping, I was just getting more and more anxious about sleeping. I think I was like a week in at that point and I had probably slept two hours each night and I was like, what is going on?

Abbie: Am I ever gonna sleep again? And yeah, I mean it was, I would fall asleep around four or 5:00 AM and then be back up again at 6:00 AM for work. And yeah it was just super uncomfortable and yeah, anyone who’s. Insomnia knows how stressful it is.

Abbie: It was like, every hour that passes, I’m like, okay, I gotta get up in what, in three hours, two hours, one hour. And then, just this intense desire to stay in bed in the mornings. I think to see if you’re tired and you haven’t slept, and you’re like, all I wanna do is stay in bed.

Abbie: I do think, like looking back, I think having my work routine and schedule was like really hard at the time, but really beneficial in some ways because I couldn’t just sit in bed and all day and try to go back to bed and I had to get up and get out and go to work. And that was also ended up being, I think, a good distraction.

Abbie: At least for like the eight hours a day I was working. I wasn’t thinking about sleep. I think that was positive.

Martin: What about that day, those days when you didn’t have any work obligations? Were things different then?

Abbie: Yeah, I would definitely I think early on I would definitely, stay in bed all morning, like trying to quote unquote rest or see if maybe I could eventually fall asleep.

Abbie: And just like really dreading the day because I had slept it all and I was like, Ugh, another day I’m gonna be really tired all day. It’s gonna be so bad. Like kind of those typical anxious, catastrophic thoughts of I just, I don’t wanna do the day. Like I didn’t get any sleep. So if there was, if I didn’t have work and nothing was like forcing me outta bed, I think it was, it would’ve been hard.

Martin: So at this point. Things are really difficult as you’ve just described. And when we face difficulties in life or problems in life, we look to solve them.

Martin: So what was your next step? What other things were you trying to do to get your sleep back on track and get yourself back to where you used to be?

Abbie: Yeah, I think I was trying everything. One of the things I started doing early on was like, canceling all my plans and I would get off work and, as soon as I was done with work like the dread and the anxiety about sleeping that night would kick in.

Abbie: And so I would be like, okay, I gotta go home. I gotta make dinner and I gotta get in bed. So I was like, my bedtime was becoming earlier and earlier even though I just, I wasn’t tired. And I think I was also pretty much trying every sleep supplement out there that there is like about a month in, I think I’d seen my doctor and she had prescribed me I think it was like Ambien or something, and I never ended up taking it, but I did try every over the counter supplement, magnesium, melatonin, all the things.

Abbie: And I would get like really excited like, okay, this is gonna be the thing, like this is gonna work for me. And then every time it didn’t, it was like a letdown of okay, it was like more evidence in my mind that, my sleep is broken and there’s nothing out there that’s gonna fix it.

Martin: I think a lot of people are gonna identify with that.

Martin: And all the things you shared are completely logical to try, right? If we want more sleep to happen it’s almost ground into us that we go to bed earlier, that it’s important to go to bed early get more sleep, give sleep that opportunity to show up. And there can be, it can be, it’s almost like we can become really enthusiastic or we can just try so hard that it backfires on us to the point where we do less with our lives and sleep then grows in importance.

Martin: It becomes more of a focus. So it’s almost like we’re up in the stakes. It becomes even more important for us to perform sleep and then when it doesn’t happen as we want it to. You did a great job of just describing what that’s like yourself. We can just, it feels, it can feel like a personal failure and it can reinforce perhaps this belief that there is something uniquely wrong, that maybe our sleep system is somehow broken.

Martin: But the truth of the matter is, it’s. Perhaps it’s all the ongoing efforts and the trying, which now exists when it never existed before, when we slept fine, that might be the true source of the problem.

Abbie: Yeah, definitely. And I think yeah, along the lines of just like trying everything to control sleep, I was like doing all the sleep hygiene, things like that were recommended.

Abbie: Like I was no screens before bed. Like I just, I had this whole routine of I got a no caffeine, no alcohol, blah, blah, blah. That was just like adding more and more things when, like you just said in the past I had no sleep routine. Like I was, I would pass out on the couch watching TV and go to bed.

Abbie: So yeah, I think that’s exactly right.

Martin: Often as we’re engaged in this pursuit of sleep, we end up removing things from our lives that, either give us meaning or are enjoyable. And that could be something like we, we might give up coffee altogether, for example, even though that’s something we really enjoy.

Martin: We remove that from our lives. We remove TV from our lives. We remove going out with friends late at night from our lives. And so our sleep generally stays the same because sleep doesn’t really care about any of that stuff. But at the same time, our situation has gotten worse because we’re taking all of that stuff away in order to serve sleep.

Martin: And it just makes us, it can make us just feel trapped in this just endless spiral of more difficulty and a less joy from life. More withdrawal and more struggle.

Abbie: Yeah. Yeah. I definitely think that was my experience. The more I. I stopped my usual routine. The worse, I think the worse that it got, for sure.

Abbie: Which is counterintuitive at the time I was like, I can’t be out until 10 o’clock, like I gotta be in bed. And that ended up being one of the things that I, that down the road really helped me was actually staying out late and doing things late at night and doing all these things despite not being able to sleep.

Martin: I’m curious, you mentioned earlier that you went to the doctor and they gave you a prescription for the Ambien, but you didn’t end up taking end. Curious to know why that was?

Abbie: Yeah. I was really nervous about taking it, but I think what I was really nervous about is that I, that it would work and that I wouldn’t rely on it to sleep and.

Abbie: That was like my worst nightmare. It was like, okay, I can suffer and try to sleep and all these things, and if I took this medication and it worked is that gonna be the rest of my life? Am I never gonna be able to sleep again without this medication? So I definitely was like, I think I was really tempted and really close to probably taking it after a month of not sleeping, but I was like yeah, I just wa I didn’t wanna rip the bandaid off, I guess you could say and go down this like spiral of that I felt like I, I couldn’t get back from.

Martin: And I think that’s a good illustration of how any effort or anything that we do to try and make sleep happen can so easily backfire. Because if we try something and it feels like it works. We can feel that reinforces this belief or this idea that we need something to generate sleep, that we’re incapable of generating it by ourselves.

Martin: And on the other hand, if we try something and it doesn’t work, then we reinforce this belief that we need. We still need to keep looking, that we can’t generate sleep by ourselves, that we failed at that thing or that we failed at sleep. So we’ve got this potential that regardless of the outcome, every time we try, we might be reinforcing this idea or this belief that there’s something wrong with our sleep system, that there’s something wrong with our situation, that something is broken when that’s never the case, as we’ll explore a little bit later in our conversation.

Abbie: Yeah, definitely. I think the reliance, like you said on these external things was really big for me early on and that didn’t end up being the solution.

Martin: You also made a good point too, that if we do feel like we’re reliant on something, there might be a point in the future where we don’t wanna be reliant on that thing anymore.

Martin: So if we haven’t addressed what the real root cause of this issue might be then we are gonna be having to revisit that at some point in the future. So it never really goes away. It’s always gonna be with us.

Abbie: Yeah. Yeah. It definitely felt like a short term solution and I was like, I gotta try, I gotta try something else.

Martin: People that aren’t too familiar with insomnia will usually only think of insomnia as like a nighttime problem, but when we’ve been struggling with it or we’ve got that experience of struggling with it, we know that it really is a 24 hour problem, right? It affects our nights and it affects our days.

Martin: Maybe it affects our days even more than it affects our nights. I’m curious to hear from you. How was this affecting your days? Not only in terms of like you touched upon your, those kind of withdrawal from the activities and doing things that are important to you, but the way your mind was responding. What was that experience like for you?

Abbie: Yeah, I would say it was like really intense anxiety. Pretty much from the moment I got outta bed of just these thoughts of am I gonna sleep tonight? And like I had said going to work was a good distraction, but of course I was like exhausted at work and I was like, I don’t know how many more days and nights of this like I can do.

Abbie: And you’re just spiraling. Is this permanent? Is this forever? And I think I also developed a lot of health anxiety around it, like I had all these concerns is this gonna have long-term sort of negative consequences on my health? I think, rightfully there’s so much out there about the number one thing you could do for your health and your longevity is sleep.

Abbie: And you Google sleep and there’s 15 articles about the negative consequences of not sleeping. And not to say that the science isn’t true. I just think that was like really unhelpful for me at the time of okay, not only is the consequence, like I’m tired and anxious and I, I physically feel bad, but there’s, if this keeps going this is gonna be bad for my health in the long term.

Abbie: So I don’t know. All these thoughts were like spiraling all day long. And then as soon as it. I got dark out, like as soon as the sun started to go down I would get this like intense feeling of dread. And yeah. So it was definitely, like you said, an all day thing, not just like a nighttime thing.

Abbie: I think at night it was definitely more I’m sitting in bed and my heart is racing and my thoughts are racing and the more you’re trying to sleep, the more your heart is racing. And so it’s like a lot of physical symptoms. And then during the day it was just like a lot of my mind is consumed with, am I gonna sleep tonight?

Martin: The messaging around sleep out there is very focused on sleep is very important and I would agree with that. Sleep is very important, just like breathing is very important and we’re still waiting for a study to come out that shows that insomnia causes any health problem or increases risk of mortality. But boy, when you read some of that stuff that’s online, it really does sound like a life or death situation. And when you are already putting so much importance on sleep, it can just make things so much more difficult.

Martin: Because it, again, it ups the stakes, right? And you’re gonna put more pressure on yourself to perform sleep. So yeah, I just wanted to emphasize that yes, sleep is important, but the body can generate it by itself just like it generates breathing by itself. And I think a lot of people here listening to this will really identify with how you described what your mind was doing at the time, it was problem solving for you. It was trying to fix this problem. It was brainstorming, and as it was doing that, it was generating lots of difficult feelings, difficult thoughts. It was generating anxiety to ensure that you were giving it attention.

Martin: And there’s also that fatigue, right? That sense of exhaustion. And it can just be when you combine that with your mind is just being focused on sleep and generating all these predictions or these stories it can be really hard to focus and to concentrate on doing stuff that matters.

Abbie: Yeah. Yeah.

Abbie: That, that was definitely my experience. I think, the anxiety is like enough to deal with and then you’re exhausted, and so that’s only feeding it. And you, I just remember feeling okay, if I don’t like. Die from lack of sleep I’m gonna lose my mind. Yeah, it was just a big spiral.

Martin: How did you respond to what your mind was doing at the time?

Abbie: At the time I had family and friends and a partner who were really supportive and I could confide in and that was great. But I also think unless you’ve experienced insomnia, I still just felt like very alone, in the experience.

Abbie: And finding Insomnia Coach was like huge in realizing that I wasn’t alone and that these aren’t unique thoughts and experiences in, in a good way. So yeah, I was trying to cope I think, as best as I could. I was distracting myself. Trying to distract myself at work and yeah, as soon as I realized that the withdrawing from day-to-day activities was making it worse I think that was a really good kind of switch for me in okay, if I can’t sleep, I can’t control the sleep, but I can control my response and I can control what I’m doing.

Abbie: So instead of going to bed at 8:00 PM like I’m gonna go and go to the gym. And I, with no expectation that the gym was gonna make me tired, just like I like to go to the gym and I’m gonna, if I’m up anyway, like I’m gonna study for the GRE and do my grad school application.

Abbie: So I think, yeah, as soon as I had that mindset shift from withdrawing to. Going back to my normal routine. If anything it, it was a good distraction.

Martin: It sounds like you noticed this conflict between some of the thoughts or the stories that your mind was your problem solving brain was telling you as it was trying to fix this problem for you, like you need to withdraw, you can’t do those things.

Martin: You need to do less. You need to say, no, you need to go home. All of these things. And compared to your experience, your experience was telling you well, actually withdrawing isn’t making things any better. It’s not making me feel less fatigued or more rested. It’s certainly not making my life any better.

Martin: And once you notice that conflict, maybe there was this kinda light bulb moment there that I can hear all these thoughts. I can listen to all these thoughts and stories. I don’t necessarily need to fight them. I just need to respond in a way that’s of my choosing. I get to decide how to respond to these thoughts.

Martin: I don’t have to battle with them, struggle with them. I don’t have to let them control me ultimately. I still have the power here.

Abbie: Yeah. I do think that was like the first sort of light bulb going off of okay, all of my thoughts and beliefs about anything but about sleep are not necessarily reality.

Abbie: I don’t have to believe that, I have this thought, I’m never gonna sleep again. That doesn’t make it true. Or you have this thought like, I need to go home and cancel all my plans and otherwise we’re gonna be exhausted. I was exhausted anyway yeah I do think the realization that I didn’t have to, I guess believe my.

Abbie: My thoughts was also like a really big switch for me.

Martin: What did it feel like to realize that what your brain might be telling you or what your brain might be saying might not actually be true?

Abbie: Yeah, honestly, it felt like a big relief. I and I also think I realize the worse I feel and the more negative the thoughts, the less true my thinking is and the less serious I need to take my thinking.

Abbie: So yeah, I think this big relief of there’s a whole reality that exists out in the world and I can always come back to that and whatever my thoughts, my brain are telling me, it doesn’t always match up with what the reality is. And so as soon as I gave myself like, permission to not believe my thoughts, and I still practice this today.

Abbie: Like it’s not easy, but you have an anxious thought or something and you’re like, okay, or here’s the alternative and this isn’t true. So yeah, as soon as I gave myself that permission to, to not one take my thinking so seriously and to two not trust it, especially like when I’m feeling down or bad I think yeah, that, that was a huge sort of flip for me and in my kind of journey with insomnia, but also just like my overall mental health journey.

Martin: I think it might be human nature to resist what’s difficult or uncomfortable. So for many of us. We will resist anxiety, for example, or try really hard to fight it when it shows up or avoid it from showing up in the first place. As you develop this insight or this light bulb moment that maybe the thoughts aren’t always true, did that change how you were able to respond to them?

Abbie: I think the big thing was just like not taking it so seriously like not taking every thought so seriously. And that in turn helped me take some of the pressure off of sleep because if, if I am, my brain is telling me that, if I don’t sleep tonight there’s gonna be all these consequences and blah, blah, blah, then, but if I don’t have to believe that, then it’s not so much pressure that I sleep tonight or the next night or whenever.

Abbie: I do think like getting some distance from my own thoughts was also good. Like I, you’re just, I was so in my own head and every thought that came up, I had to follow that train of thought and act on it. When I realized that I didn’t I think I had a lot more freedom to, to actually do the things that felt Right.

Martin: So when you found Insomnia Coach, at this point, you’d already been trying lots of different things. What made you think there might be something here rather than it just being yet another one of these things that you’ll probably try and not get much from? What made it feel different?

Abbie: Yeah, I think the main thing was there, this sort of like notion that there’s actually nothing to do, I think a lot of other content, like I had mentioned was like, do this, and this before better or don’t do this and this. And when I found Insomnia Coach, I just really, it was the first time I had seen the messaging like, the more we try, the less sleep will come.

Abbie: And so I think when I first found it, I was like, it’s like when some, when you’re stressed and someone tells you to calm down, you’re like, yeah, okay. Stop trying. Sure. That I think at the time seemed like pretty much impossible. But yeah, I think the, there was a lot of content in the emails that you sent that was like one, like I mentioned, making me feel like I’m not alone in this and this isn’t unique to me.

Abbie: And two. Maybe I can just let go a little bit, like maybe I can stop trying so hard. And there were some other like specific sort of techniques and things that, that you had mentioned that ended up being really helpful for me, which I am happy to talk about. But yeah, I think it was just the permission to stop trying so hard.

Martin: If we are able to remember a time when sleep wasn’t an issue or a concern, what were we doing to make sleep happen so well back then? And maybe our own experience can reveal the most valuable insight, which is that sleep was effortless. It required no effort, there were no rules, there were no rituals. It just happened by itself, and that’s really where we want to get back to.

Abbie: Yeah. Yeah. I think that sort of idea you’re mentioning about some of the most valuable information being like my own experience. I think that came up again and again it later in my journey with insomnia. Like when I would have like bumps along the road, I would go back to okay, I’ve had insomnia before.

Abbie: I pretty much didn’t sleep for like months on end. And I survived, and I. I went to work and I functioned and all these things like that is evidence for me in my mind that I can do it again. And I think what made this like first like intense bout so hard was that I, this was the first time it had happened.

Abbie: Like I didn’t have evidence that I could go back to my baseline, but as soon as I had that, like first night of like normal sleep, I think that was really powerful for me to be like, okay here’s your own experience and evidence that it’s possible to sleep. Again.

Martin: It really is a learning experience, I think.

Martin: And there’s that classic phrase that we don’t know what we don’t know but if we can approach things with some kindness that we aren’t these all encompassing, all seeing individual geniuses, that there are gonna be things that we don’t know. And we can be kind to it to ourselves about that and be curious and be willing to learn or experiment.

Martin: There is so much value there because I think that really is what gives us the opportunity to make change happen.

Abbie: Yeah, I definitely wish I had been easier on myself when things were at their peak. I think I, yeah, just like the self-talk and like the things you’re telling yourself why can’t I do this?

Abbie: My sleep must be broken. It’s all just negative reinforcement instead of positive sort of affirmations for yourself. I think that can be really hard in the moment. But yeah, looking back, I, I think that would’ve been really useful.

Martin: It’s amazing how hard we can be on ourselves when things, when we’re experiencing difficulty and struggle, because I like to believe that there’s good in all of us, and I think that most of us, if we were sitting down with a loved one and they were describing exactly what we were going through themselves, we would talk to them in a completely different way to how we talk to ourselves when we are experiencing that exact same thing.

Abbie: Yeah. That is so true. I think that’s something I, I’m still working on, like in every situation what would I tell my loved one, or my friend or my family like I would, if the roles were reversed and a friend had come to me with this insomnia problem, like I would’ve been really like concerned and worried for them.

Abbie: But of course I wouldn’t have been like. And I would be like, you’re gonna sleep again. Of course you’re gonna sleep again. And I couldn’t tell myself that at the time.

Martin: And if nothing else, again, if we pull on our own experience, we can ask ourselves, how does talking to myself in this way? Or how does acting toward myself in this way help?

Martin: Is it improving the situation? Is it making me feel better? Is it helping me emerge from the struggle? Or is it making things more difficult? And I’m a big, I’m a huge proponent of us using our own experience as our best guide, because every person is the expert on themselves. I’m not the expert of anyone other than myself.

Martin: But what I can do is encourage people to look within themselves and reflect on their own experience. When it comes to so many struggles in life maybe all of them, the answers that we need are already within us. It’s just a case of. Looking for them. And sometimes we need some kind of external influence or source to tease them out, but all the answers are already within us.

Abbie: Yeah. Yeah, that’s a great point.

Martin: Let’s get into the changes that you made, that you found most helpful. What ones would you like to share with us?

Abbie: Yeah, the most like tangible thing I did was give myself this sort of like wake window in which I couldn’t go to bed. I think I started with three or 4:00 AM or something, and I was like, I’m not even gonna attempt to sleep.

Abbie: I have to stay up until 3:00 AM and then I can get in bed and whatever happens, but like until 3:00 AM I am watching tv, I’m doing something, whatever. And I think this like definitely tricked my brain from I have to sleep, I have to sleep, I have to sleep to, I can’t sleep until this time.

Abbie: I think that was like really powerful for me. And, it wasn’t like a cure all, like all of a sudden I was sleeping, but it took probably a month when I was like slowly pushing back this sleep sort of window earlier and eventually I would, it would be like 2:00 AM and I would be like passing out to sleep on the couch.

Abbie: And I was like, okay, we’ll push it back to 1:00 AM and midnight. And that was really helpful for me. And something that I used, even once my sleep improved, if I had, a bad night or a bad week, I’d be like, okay we’re going back to this like wake window and tonight I’m up until three and we’ll see what happens.

Abbie: So yeah it was totally just a mental thing of telling yourself you need to sleep versus telling yourself you have to stay awake. Which is such a simple thing when you, when I look back, but that was like really transformative. Yeah. And the other thing, like I talked about, I think was just like really returning to my routine.

Abbie: So like I, I would hang out with friends after work. I would go to the gym, take, my roommate at the time was like a night shift nurse, so she was up anyway, so I’d be like, let’s go do something. And, I’d be out, it’d be like midnight and I’d be like, okay. That was all time in which I was distracted and not thinking about sleep.

Abbie: And then I come home and I found sleek to just be a lot easier as soon as I, yeah, sleep to be a lot easier. When I wasn’t laying in bed at 8:00 PM every night waiting for it to happen.

Martin: I think what you’ve shared is a great example of there’s no unique way of doing this that is gonna work or be appropriate for everyone.

Martin: It’s about finding what’s helpful for you with the intent, as long as the intention is workable, as long as you’re not trying to control what can’t be controlled. So for you, your intent was to move away from trying to make sleep happen. And as a way of helping you reach that goal, you decided I’m gonna make myself stay awake till 3:00 AM instead of trying to fall asleep, I’m gonna try to stay awake.

Martin: And that could be such a powerful mindset shift, right? Because then when we’re trying to stay awake. What might happen differently? What was your experience? How did things change when you went from trying to sleep to trying to stay awake?

Abbie: Yeah, I just felt like the, I had a new goal, like my brain had a new problem to solve, and the problem was like, we gotta stay up till 3:00 AM and I gotta find stuff to do until 3:00 AM.

Abbie: So that was helpful. And just yeah, taking the pressure off from and getting outta my own thoughts of okay, it’s another hour and I’m outta sleep. It’s another hour and I’m not asleep. And into just a more calm and peaceful state of mind. And then of course once that happens, like I would just, I would fall asleep.

Abbie: And even on those nights, like when I. I was trying to make to 3:00 AM and I would like doze off at two or something. I would, the next day I would be like, okay, like what did I do? Like how did I do it? And every night it was like I didn’t do anything, like my body just fell asleep and there was enough sleep drive to, to put me to sleep.

Abbie: And then, yeah, as soon as I had, like even I, like I mentioned I was really sleeping like very little. So even when I had three or four hours of sleep a night, that was again, more evidence in my mind that my sleep is not broken and it is possible. So it was that positive feedback cycle, whereas before it had been this negative feedback cycle.

Martin: When you weren’t trying to make sleep happen, you were now all of a sudden trying to stay awake. That urge to sleep just became stronger because you’re no longer putting that pressure on or putting the effort in. And that came too with the bonus of, it’s a powerful reminder that your sleep system is still there, it’s still intact, it’s not broken.

Martin: You are feeling that sense of sleepiness and a sense of sleepiness isn’t always required for sleep to happen, but it can be a nice reassuring reminder when you feel that sleepiness and the difficulty staying awake. And even if someone is listening to this and they don’t really wanna stay awake until 3:00 AM again, that’s not a requirement.

Martin: A lot of people just look to stay awake later than they have been. If they feel like they go into bed earlier and it’s not really doing much for them, then how about we just move it a little bit later?

Martin: It’s just a tool that’s there for you to practice if and when you as the expert on yourself, feel is gonna be useful.

Abbie: Yeah, definitely. We’re trying to get away from here’s the one thing that’s gonna fix everything and that’s not the case. But I do think anything that can flipped the script in your brain from sleep whether it’s distraction or whether it’s staying up later or whatever, I think can be really useful.

Martin: Yeah. And sometimes staying up later can be more appealing than going to bed earlier. If we find that when we go to bed earlier is a lot of tossing and turning and struggling and battling, it can be somewhat of a relief to give ourselves permission to stay out of bed and not go to bed until later.

Martin: Whereas on the other hand, someone else listening to this might find that time in bed quite pleasant. In which case, why not go to bed at the time you’ve been going? It really does, again, come down to the individual, but there is that potential opportunity, bonus opportunity there of being able to do something else earlier in the night rather than struggling.

Martin: The other helpful change that you’ve said that you made was reengaging in life and doing stuff for example, going to the gym which maybe you were doing less of in response to the difficulties with sleep. And I think maybe a lot of people listening to this can recognize that. Yeah I would love to do all these things that matter to me.

Martin: But it just feels so difficult to do that. It maybe, it even feels impossible to do that. I’m curious to know if you had those kind of thoughts, and if so, how did you stay committed or how were you willing to experiment with this idea of still doing some of this stuff, re-engaging in this stuff that matters?

Abbie: Yeah, I, I think early on, like fighting the urge to just go home and do nothing was so hard. Like the last thing it did, it felt impossible to think I’m gonna go do something with friends after work, or I’m gonna go to the gym or whatever. And I did kind of shy away from everything for a long time because it was so hard. But I think even like that first time that I made plans after work or went to the gym and realized like, okay, nothing bad happened I’m still just as tired as I was before. It wasn’t, I think also at this point, like my body was in such like fight or flight mode that like nothing, like I just was exhausted and nothing was making it better or worse honestly.

Abbie: And so when I realized okay, I can either. Go home and toss and turn in bed all night and feel horrible. Or I can go to the movies after work and then come home and feel horrible. I’m gonna pick the thing that at least gives me a little bit of joy for the time that I’m doing it. And yeah not to say doing any of that, like somehow cured my sleep or anything.

Abbie: But I started slowly to like care a little bit less and less that I wasn’t sleeping because it, one of the things I had been telling myself is okay, why is it so bad that I can’t sleep? It’s so bad because I’m not gonna be able to live my life.

Abbie: I’m not gonna be able to go to work. I’m gonna get fired. All these things. And when you realize that, okay, these things are not conditional on sleep, like I can still do these things. Despite whether or not I sleep, I think there was a lot of freedom in that.

Martin: What did progress for you look like? How did you measure progress?

Abbie: I definitely think early on it was still all about sleep and the quality of my sleep. And every night was like either a success or a failure. Like I either slept or I didn’t, and things were very black and white. And I think slowly over time I was able to realize, okay, maybe there’s a little bit less anxiety and a little bit less dread before bedtime because I’m excited to go out with my roommate or to go to yoga or whatever.

Abbie: Like eventually I got to the point where success, I think I, I always was gonna like care about sleep, but I definitely got to the point where success was a lot more like. What is my mental state about sleep? Am I wrapped up in this like anxious bald spiral or am I thinking and doing other things with my day?

Abbie: So yeah, I think measuring progress definitely changed. Does as time went on. And I do think measuring progress in did I sleep or did I not sleep is, was not useful for me personally.

Martin: It makes sense why we would want to measure progress based on how we’re sleeping from night to night because that’s the main problem that we are looking to solve.

Martin: And yet it can set us up for struggle ’cause our own experience probably tells us that sleep is out of our control. So I think it can be useful to dig a little bit deeper and ask ourselves. What makes sleep important to me? Why do I want to get rid of insomnia?

Martin: And on the surface it can sound obvious, but if you do a little bit of digging, we can often find that it reveals bigger insights that are often more related to, we see this as an obstacle to us living the kind of life we want to live. We don’t have freedom over our lives or power over our lives anymore, and we want that back.

Martin: And so when you uncover something along those lines, if that’s something that you do uncover. It can help you redirect your attention towards action. And maybe then your markers of progress become more related to action. And that can be so helpful because action is within your control. So if insomnia is an obstacle to you doing things that matter, or if you’ve started to do some things that matter, maybe then that’s the true progress.

Martin: ’cause it’s actually moving you closer to where you want to be, rather than trying to eliminate something which you might not be able to direct your control.

Abbie: Definitely true for me that one of the worries with insomnia was like, like I said I’m not gonna be able to go to work, I’m not gonna be able to be successful in a career or maintain my relationships, giving myself evidence that’s not true in the form of well, I’m gonna do these things anyway, was so powerful.

Martin: It’s connected to that power and influence all these thoughts and these feelings that show up alongside insomnia have over your life. So you are able to reflect on the fact that they were almost certainly still showing up maybe less over time as you’re less tangled up in them.

Martin: But I’m sure they would still show up because they’re natural, normal human feelings and thoughts, but they’re not consuming all of your energy and all of your attention. They’re more like water off of a duck’s back rather than some, rather than this huge pair of stadium speakers right in front of your face just blaring heavy metal music.

Martin: They’re just starting to lose some of that power and influence.

Abbie: Yeah, definitely. And it’s so interesting to reflect now when I have a period of sleeplessness or something like. Just how now it’s like an annoyance. I’m like that was annoying. I might be tired today. When before it was like, the world is ending, so I think the seriousness at which I view not sleeping has, is definitely definitely lessened, which is good

Martin: When it shows up it’s more like a mosquito rather than a huge black bear frothing at the mouth.

Abbie: Yeah.

Martin: As you were making these changes, was it just a case that things just got progressively better?

Martin: Or did you find there were periods when things went well and then there were like these road bumps or setbacks? Was there any kind of patterns you were noticing, or was it all over the place? What did that look like for you? What did that journey look like for you?

Abbie: Yeah, definitely was not linear.

Abbie: I think about maybe after about six months, I felt like I was sleeping okay, maybe six hours a night in my own bed. But I think sleeping elsewhere or having my partner stay over, traveling, all that stuff was like still really hard for me. And like on one pattern I noticed was like on Sunday nights I really had trouble sleeping because I was like, again, putting pressure, like this is my last night before I have an entire work week to get through. If I don’t sleep tonight, I’m gonna be tired all week. And then by the time like Thursday came, I think sleep was like a lot easier ’cause it just was like, okay, I’m at the end of the week. I’m tired.

Abbie: But yeah, I would say it was probably about like a year until I felt like I could really sleep elsewhere, like travel or stay at my parents’ house or anything, and sleep.

Abbie: There were definitely bumps along the road and about a year in I ended up going to grad school and that was just like a big change in my life and a period of kind of stress and some of the sleep issues came back and I just went right back to the things that I had worked last time.

Abbie: Like I went back to my wake windows and I think it was just so much easier when it did come back because instead of thinking like I, I mean there were some thoughts of oh no, like it’s happening again. But more so there were thoughts of I did this before, I can do it again. And I have better tools now.

Abbie: So I think looking back, it was like each bump along the road made things better in a way. ’cause it was like, again, more evidence that these things are gonna ebb and flow, but I’m always gonna return to baseline.

Martin: You can’t have those bumps in the road unless you’re moving forward on your journey.

Martin: And that’s something we can easily lose sight of. We focus on what hasn’t gone right or we focus on the setback but that wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t within that context of some kind of progress.

Abbie: Yeah, I definitely had a lot more gratitude, like going from sleeping one or two hours a night, like every next hour that I was able to sleep.

Abbie: Like I was just grateful for. And even now if I consistently will get eight hours of sleep and every once in a while I’ll be like, I need to remember to be thankful for that because there was a period in which like four hours of sleep was like the ultimate goal. So yeah, definitely a good exercise in practicing gratitude too.

Martin: I think when the difficult nights show up or when the nights when we get less sleep than usual or what we were hoping for, it’s a reminder that as human beings there are gonna be nights when we have less sleep than we want. Just there will be thoughts that show up and some of those thoughts will feel good, some won’t, some will be helpful, some won’t.

Martin: And it really is just a case, like you said, of the ongoing practice. You’ve got that experience at that point of what has helped you. It’s just a case of going back to them or refocusing on them. Because every time you practice, you also get better at them. You gain more skill In all these things that we talked about, you develop more resiliency, you become better at it.

Martin: But that doesn’t mean you can reach this ultimate peak of enlightenment when none of this stuff affects you and never shows up ever again. Life doesn’t work that way. There’s like this magnet force trying to draw us back into a struggle. But it’s a case of you’ve got that awareness now of when that’s happening, you know an alternative way to respond.

Martin: And you can focus on those action based responses to continue moving forward. As you reflect on the journey that you’ve been on, how has it changed your life? What have you learned from this whole experience?

Abbie: When it was happening I remember, like I said, just having these really negative thoughts of this is gonna change my life for the worst.

Abbie: I’m gonna have long-term, health or otherwise consequences from this. And not only has that not been the case but also I feel like it, it really has had a positive impact in that. I just feel like a lot more equipped to handle. The ebbs and the flows. There was a point in my life where, you know, thinking about having kids and traveling and all these things that were gonna disrupt my sleep, like really stressed me out.

Abbie: And those things are a little bit quieter now that I have this like trust that, that I can handle these things. And I think that extends not just to like insomnia, but other areas in my life like these thought patterns and this mentality like can be applied to any sort of like area of anxiety or just any sort of thoughts that I’m having.

Abbie: Yeah, I’ve definitely found it just like mentality shift to be useful in other areas of my life as well.

Martin: You’re not the first person to say that, and I completely agree with you. A lot of this stuff that we talk about can really powerfully impact our lives in a positive way. It’s not just a way to respond to insomnia.

Martin: The experience can be a real growth opportunity, which sounds crazy when you’re still in the struggle with it, but once you’re able to reflect back on it, what you learn from the experience can be a huge asset.

Abbie: Yeah, definitely. I think it, like you said, at the time I would’ve just like totally rolled my eyes that this is gonna be a positive thing in the long run. Okay, sure. But yeah it really has been. Given me a lot of coping skills I think that I can take into the future and into other areas of my life.

Martin: Abbie, I’m really grateful for the time you’ve taken out your day to come on. If someone with chronic insomnia is listening they feel as though they’ve tried everything. They’re beyond help. They’ll never be able to stop struggling with insomnia. What would you say to them?

Abbie: I think first I would say you are not alone. And in the nicest way possible, like your anxiety and your insomnia is not special. I remember feeling like that’s great that all these people have found these solutions, but somehow my insomnia is worse and mine is different.

Abbie: And these things like peace and returning to this baseline is not possible for me. And the funny thing is that’s what we’re all thinking. That our insomnia, our anxiety is somehow different and special. And yeah, just to say that, me overcoming this also isn’t special.

Abbie: That is possible for everybody. And yeah the path might not be linear, but I think it’s possible for everybody and we can’t control sleep, like we’ve been saying. But you can control how you respond and I think that’s the best way forward.

Martin: Thanks again for taking the time to come onto the podcast and to share your journey, your experience, all the insights you’ve picked up on the way.

Abbie: Yeah. Thanks so much. It was great to talk.

Martin: I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Insomnia Coach Podcast. I’m Martin Reed, and as always, I’d like to leave you with this important reminder — you are not alone and you can sleep.

I want you to be the next insomnia success story I share! If you're ready to stop struggling with sleep and get your life back from insomnia, you can start my insomnia coaching course right now.

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Natasha’s insomnia journey began during the long grind of the pandemic. Life was full, intense, and stretched thin. She and her husband were working and their young son needed to take school classes online. When their nanny suddenly stopped coming, Natasha brushed it off at first. But that first sleepless night turned into another… and then another. Before she knew it, she was caught in a spiral she couldn’t make sense of.

Like many people who’ve always slept well, she didn’t expect sleep to suddenly feel impossible. She tried going to bed earlier. She tried teas, essential oils, supplements, white noise, antidepressants, anti-anxiety medication — anything she could find and all the things the internet tells you “should” help. Each attempt only made her more aware of how badly she wanted sleep and how far away it felt.

Her nights became long stretches of alertness mixed with exhaustion — awake while everyone else slept — and her days were filled with worry about the next night. Over time, insomnia started to shape her choices. She avoided travel. She canceled early meetings. She relied on her husband sharing a bed with her for sleep to have any chance of happening. Insomnia slowly became the center of her days.

The turning point didn’t come from a pill or a hack. It came when every one of her “solutions” stopped working — and she realized she couldn’t keep building her life around avoiding insomnia. That moment of exhaustion and honesty pushed her to look for a different approach.

When we started working together, Natasha began noticing something important: even after a bad night, the next day could go better than she expected. And sometimes, after a good night, the day didn’t feel great at all. That simple observation helped loosen the grip insomnia had on her.

She also began changing her actions in small, meaningful ways — not to fix sleep, but to take her life back. She scheduled breakfast meetings again. She made evening plans without checking the clock. She traveled. She stopped organizing her days around sleep anxiety. And she created a calmer routine at night by watching shows she enjoyed instead of lying in bed trying to force sleep.

Today, Natasha has her life back. Sleep isn’t a project. Nights aren’t battles. Insomnia no longer runs her life. Natasha runs her own life and sleep takes care of itself.

Click here for a full transcript of this episode.

Martin: Okay. Natasha, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to come onto the podcast.

Natasha: You are welcome, Martin. Thanks for having me.

Martin: It’s great to have you on. Let’s start right at the very beginning. When did your sleep problems first begin and what do you feel caused those initial issues with sleep?

Natasha: I think it was 2022 and we were still very much within the pandemic. And so there was of course like bad news all around, but I wasn’t necessarily stressed by that. All our children were outta school in the sense that all the schools were shut down.

Natasha: At that point, my like 5-year-old or 6-year-old son, he was having to do his online classes and the day was just relentless, right? Because me, my husband, we were both working, we didn’t have any help at home. And then he had these online classes. So I had found this sort of nanny person who could help out during the day so that we could get our work done.

Natasha: And I think she basically just called in sick. And I think like now, and this is all in hindsight, but I think it was some sort of like anxiety from that. And she wasn’t being very specific about whether she was, she had COVID or whether she was just, she said, I’ve hurt my foot. And, I think it was basically the fact that there was a lot of uncertainty about when she would be back and whether she would be back.

Natasha: And I couldn’t sleep that night when she said, I’m not coming tomorrow. And, I think that was fine because the next day rolled around, but then the day after that, again, I sort of couldn’t fall back to sleep. And you know what happens when you haven’t slept one night and you feel like you have this huge day to get through the next day you try to overcompensate.

Natasha: So I think I probably try to get into bed really early and I couldn’t fall asleep. And then I think I probably still just got out and read a book and got on with it.

Natasha: So the days had been quite difficult to get through with a small child and work. I think by the third day I started noticing, I suddenly noticed the fact that I hadn’t slept very well and that I wasn’t being able to fall asleep.

Natasha: And so the third night, I just really couldn’t sleep at all because I’d become very attentive to the fact that I was having this difficulty and that I had to. And so I think that’s what set it off. I don’t think there was anything more than that. Once it got started it just became this kind of vicious spiral of crashing pretty much after two or three days of sleeping very badly.

Natasha: And then feeling slightly recovered the next day only to not be able to go back to sleep that night. And yeah, I think I started paying so much attention to the fact that I was having difficulty sleeping, that it was just getting harder and I think it, it turned into a huge full-blown problem.

Martin: I’m gonna guess that there’s been other times in your life where you might have got a little bit less sleep or a lot less sleep than normal. And then things figured themselves out and sleep got back on track. What do you think was different this time around?

Natasha: So I think a few things might have been different.

Natasha: One was of course, that I think the pressure in the pandemic was very high on productivity and just somehow getting through the day. So not just, you had a lot of things to do at work. You had very little help and I had a child and I think also because there was this idea that there was some degree of latitude with your partners.

Natasha: If for some reason you are sick, then he can pick up the slack more than what he’s normally doing. But I think he was completely slammed as well. As a family I think we’d become very aware of just how we were stretched beyond like capability.

Natasha: So I think maybe that was one like predisposing condition that it, it made the need for rest so much higher. And therefore I think there was some kind of a, psychological reaction to the fact that when you thought that you really needed to rest, you weren’t being able to. I also do think, I do think it maybe had something to do with COVID because I did get COVID early 2022.

Natasha: And I think I got, ever since then I’ve had COVID twice. And every time I’ve had COVID I’ve had a little bit of difficulty with sleep and a little bit of hyper arousal. So I, I think maybe it was a combination of these two things. But normally now if that happens, it just resolves itself because I don’t sit and, I don’t get too upset about it.

Natasha: But at that time, perhaps, maybe some sort of like the physiological part was there, and then there was this huge psychological reality.

Martin: Would you say that because it was such a stressful period it felt like maybe the stakes were higher than they were in the past. So as a result, you put more pressure on yourself to get sleep back on track.

Martin: There was more trying, more effort, more pressure.

Natasha: Yeah. I think there’s also one of the things I have realized and listening to your podcast, it’s something that I’ve observed. There are a lot of people who say that they develop insomnia. Many of them say that they were excellent sleepers.

Natasha: They were brilliant sleepers before and they could sleep anywhere, anytime. And that was me as well. I could sleep anywhere, anytime. But the other thing is also that I think there are people who say that, I can’t function without sleep. I need my sleep. I love my sleep.

Natasha: And there are others who are like, yeah, I can get on with it. It’s fine. I think you and I feel like if you’re the type who has told themselves for years that, oh, I can’t function without sleep, which is what I used to tell myself, and that’s why I used to sleep very adequately because I’d be like, oh, I need my nine hours and I need like my naps in between.

Natasha: I feel like if you’ve spent years telling yourself that you can’t function without sleep and then a stressful situation comes that requires you to compromise with sleep or where your sleep gets affected, perhaps you are more susceptible to then developing anxiety around it, right? Because you’ve told yourself that you don’t know how to kind of function without it.

Natasha: So maybe it’s also personality or like prior mindsets.

Martin: It’s like the more important we deem something in our lives, quite naturally, the more we’re gonna focus on it. And if it deviates from whatever we want it to be doing that’s gonna immediately generate a lot of concern.

Martin: And where we get trapped with insomnia and sleep is really, it’s beyond our direct and permanent control. So it, it kind of backfires, that additional effort. We might not be able to control the thoughts, we might not be able to change the fact that we see it as something important.

Martin: It’s okay to see it as something important, but it’s our actions around that. The more we try to make sleep happen the more we can end up struggling with it.

Natasha: Yeah, and I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that now there is so much literature and all the things you can do to improve your sleep, right?

Natasha: So there is this perpetuation of this illusion that somehow sleep is something you can entirely control and engineer. And I think I was doing so much of that as well.

Natasha: You go through this strange, five stages of grief or something through that period of night where, you just, at some point you’re very angry. At some point you’re very depressed with your situation because it’s also this, it is a strange experience of being wide awake when the whole world is sleeping.

Natasha: It’s different from being a night owl and it’s different from someone who’s, voluntarily working or relaxing or gaming or whatever.

Natasha: You are alert and exhausted. So because you’re alert, you can’t go to sleep and because you’re exhausted, you can’t actually do anything productive. So you’re literally just sitting awake and not being able to do anything and not being able to relax.

Natasha: And I think that in that whole process you do end up, of course you start googling feverishly and I’ve done everything right. I think over the last two years, before, before I met you, I think I’ve done everything I must have done. Like the primrose oil, the lavender, the magnesium, the chamomile tea, the Yeah, like I think the white noise and I’ve done, I think you try everything and the more things you’re throwing at it, the worse it’s getting.

Natasha: And I think every failure after you’ve tried something and that failure is even harder to reconcile. But some of that comes from the fact that you’re reaching out for answers into Google and Google is giving you some solutions. It’s not telling you that, the way to, to get to sleep is just to let it go.

Natasha: It’s not telling you that, it’s actually telling you, do this, and then you start doing it.

Martin: The information out there tends to be about doing more, it’s, if there’s a problem, do this. And with sleep, it’s all about doing less. If anyone has a recollection in their own experience of a time when sleep wasn’t an issue or a concern, what did you do to experience sleep in that way?

Martin: And it was nothing. It was going to bed. It was getting out of bed, living your life, and it just took care of itself. But then we just exposed to this proliferation of advice and information and hacks and gadgets and gizmos and this and this. And when we are feeling stuck it’s completely understandable that we are gonna be looking for a solution.

Martin: And almost everything in life, the solution is do this or do more, put more effort in. Try harder. That sleep is one of those outliers. And we can so easily through no fault of our own, get tangled up in that quick sound, so the more we fight it. The more we struggle with it, the more we try and escape that quick sound, the deeper we find ourselves sinking.

Natasha: Yeah. You said this and I think I, this is printed in my brain because I remember in one of our first sessions you said exactly this, you said that most things in life respond well to effort, but sleep doesn’t, sleep does not respond well to effort. And because we all have such a bias for action and effort, you think that if there’s something I can do.

Natasha: What happened to me was like one night I didn’t, I think again, my husband, I woke him up at 4:00 AM because I was like, I think I’m having a heart attack.

Natasha: Because, ’cause you are just palpitating now obviously your body’s completely dysfunctioning because you’re exhausted and you haven’t slept. And so I was sweating and I was feeling this like pinch in my heart and he got really worried.

Natasha: So I said, okay, let me just go and buy sleeping pills. And I didn’t know what that was. So I went to this pharmacy and I was like do you have sleeping pills? And they were like you need a prescription for that. Because in India you don’t need a prescription for a lot of things. A lot of things you get over the counter, but hang on, this one is one that we do need a prescription for.

Natasha: So then I started texting you can only get prescriptions from, obviously a licensed doctor or a psychiatrist. And I didn’t know any, so I texted one, a friend saying, do you know? And then she said yes. And so she connected me with somebody. But they said that you have to, you have to have a session with a therapist.

Natasha: For her to for them to evaluate you. And I was desperate, right? Because I hadn’t slept all night. And I said, listen, I just, I need something to knock me out and I don’t need therapy. I don’t need a therapist. I’m fine. Literally the only problem in my life right now is that for some reason I’ve developed this mysterious inability to sleep.

Natasha: And, but they of course, had the responsible practice was that I should talk to a therapist. So I did. And of course, at the end of the hour she was very sweet and she said it does seem you are fairly self-aware and your relationship with your partner is very good and everything is fine and maybe you just need medication.

Natasha: And I was almost like, yes, I told you so then she put me through a psychiatrist. And that person, but that was the interesting thing, right? When I went to the psychiatrist and it was, she spoke to me literally for 10 minutes, and this was on Zoom because we were still in the pandemic.

Natasha: And yeah, she was like okay, are you anxious about something? And you, you mentioned one or two things because if you are living life and if you’re adulting, of course you’re anxious about a few things. So I said a few things and she was like, okay, great. And here’s an antidepressant, which kind of surprised me because I’d never taken antidepressants before.

Natasha: And I have studied psychology, so I do understand SSRIs. So I asked her, I said, oh, why are you giving me an antidepressant? She was like basically this is, it’s just going to relax you. So I said, fine.

Natasha: So I took that, but I wasn’t happy about it because I wasn’t happy taking it. And I think what also what happened was I started taking the antidepressant for a couple of weeks. And predictably. So I slept okay on the first couple of times because it was a sort of a placebo, right? You had this like safety feeling that I’m taking a pill and I’m fine.

Natasha: And then I think I was traveling to Delhi for work and it, I had my pill and it didn’t work. And I was up all night and I had to work the entire day. And then the same thing happened the next day. I came back to the hotel, I was exhausted and I was like, I’m going to just absolutely crash.

Natasha: I think I fell asleep in the cab on the way to the hotel, but I popped my pill. I got into bed and I couldn’t sleep. And then I was like, okay, this medicine is not working. So I remember being, that, that makes you really worried because you see, I went to a doctor gave me something and now this is not working.

Natasha: So then I came back and then I tried different things. When I got back home, I remember that night I went to bed and my husband Suraj was sitting next to me, and that was very comforting. So then began this whole era of me saying, okay, I need you to sleep in the bed with me, right?

Natasha: You have to be in bed with me. So whether you are reading or whatever you’re doing, you need to be in bed. Because I wasn’t sure the medication was working. And so I stopped taking that, but then I didn’t have any other crutch, so I said, okay, you have to be in bed with me. And so he would have to get into bed and sometimes he likes to sleep a bit later and I get tired sooner.

Natasha: It was adding these layers of something is wrong with me to my sense of self, right? Because you’re like, first you can’t sleep, then you, now you need your husband to come and lie with you. And you’re affecting his life as a result.

Natasha: And then I became very averse to traveling as a result. So I said, I don’t want to, I don’t wanna go anywhere because I I don’t know, I, I don’t wanna sleep alone, so I don’t wanna go on business trips and I don’t want to go, but more than business trips, because those couldn’t be avoided.

Natasha: I was almost like, I don’t wanna go on personal instead of holidays with my girlfriends, and I just don’t wanna go on a holiday with somebody where if I’m not sure where I would have to sleep alone by myself. So I was supposed to go for this hike and we would go, we were gonna sleep in a dorm. And I was so terrified of the idea of being like, absolutely wide awake at 3:00 AM in a dormitory full of girls, I don’t know, which was not me at all.

Natasha: ’cause that, that I was not that type of person ever. So I opted out of that. I said, no, I’m not gonna do that. And it just started adding up right where I stopped making evening plans because I said, oh, if it’s too late, and then I get home late and then it I won’t have enough time to wind down and get to bed.

Natasha: So I think all of this was happening and even when I was traveling. In 2022, I remember we went for this, I had this huge event in September or so. And it had been like eight months since my issues with sleep. But I had to go to Bombay for this event for a whole week. And my plan was that I’m basically going to night cap it through I’m going to have a drink every night and then I’m going to somehow knock myself out and just get through the entire week.

Natasha: And that’s exactly what I did. Which, in hindsight, that’s, it’s just such a terrible strategy. But there was no other way to imagine being able to do things like this. So I feel like this was carrying on and I had sort of, because I’d already been to a psychiatrist, one I once, I didn’t consider going back to anyone because what I was very aware of was that I really wasn’t struggling with anything in my life in a big way other than sleep, so I. And that was the other thing. ’cause again, anytime you ever told anyone or even hinted to somebody that you find it hard to sleep, the first question they’re like, oh, are you stressed out about something? Or or and that can almost start grating you. ’cause you’re like, no, I’m not stressed about anything.

Natasha: I’m not stressed, I’m not per se stressed and I, but this thing that, you’re losing sleep because there must be some something underlying and something subconscious and you’re like, no. The only thing that’s conscious, subconscious and all pervasive is sleep anxiety. And I think the fact that sleep anxiety, again, is its own category of anxiety, of, it’s a type of anxiety that perhaps happens.

Natasha: And there are no other underlying hidden, Freudian reasons for why you’re not being able to sleep. You’re really, you’re just having some, you’ve developed a strange relationship with sleep and your bed. So you are passing out on your couch and then the minute you hit the bed you are like wide awake, so I think this thing was something that I have only processed a little bit in hindsight and through, conversations with you and understanding this whole situation. But like throughout 2022, it was just, it was some, it was a hack, just hacking my way through it. And because things were working out really well with having my partner in bed with me I was like, okay, fine, this is fine.

Natasha: How bad is it? And even through 23, I think like 23 actually was very stable because like I said, whenever I was traveling, I had become that person where I said, okay, I’m not gonna sleep when I travel. But even then, I think there was. There was a, I remember again, I went for a team retreat and I was up the entire night, like the sun came up and I just got outta bed and we all had, and this was this big strategy retreat, which you had to talk a lot of strategy.

Natasha: And that was the, and I was confused about whether I should tell my teammates that I didn’t sleep all night. And so I, but I decided to, ’cause I said I can’t, I’d come to that point where I was like, this is just who I am. This is going to be forever. So I have to start telling people that I find it hard and I’m, I have lovely colleagues and they’re all wonderful people.

Natasha: So I said, maybe I can trust them and I could just tell them that I couldn’t sleep all night, because, if I’m spacing out in the middle of the dates, it’s only fair that they know. And I did tell them and and they were very kind about it, but I think I was so tired.

Natasha: At the end of that day, I remember, and I was so terrified, Martin, that I was not gonna be able to sleep again. And so I actually asked my one of my teammates who I’m really close with, and I really like her. And I told her, I said, and this is gonna sound very strange ’cause we were all living in a house.

Natasha: So it was nice. It was like a large, huge villa. And I said, is it okay if I sleep with you? And she was like, yeah, sure. And she was very sweet about it. And so I actually had went and I slept in her room with her. And I think that there were parts of me that was so embarrassed by this, but also so helpless about it and feeling like what is happening.

Natasha: Whenever you tell people they, I mean they are sympathetic, but either they don’t understand or it’s the sort of you’re stressed.

Natasha: And again, I think I was talking to someone and they recommended the psychiatrist and this therapist to me. So then I went to her and she prescribed me a whole other set of SSRIs and anti-anxiety medication. And again, I took it for a while and it does make you feel slightly different. So I think I started feeling a little bit. Not okay on some of that medication.

Natasha: Especially, I think the worst experience which I’ve had is taking medication, going to bed, not being able to sleep, and then you are waking up with half, slept with this half digested medicine in your brain and you’re just getting through the next day because you know you, ’cause you have to.

Natasha: All of us end up going through all these rabbit holes because there is no direction and the experts are actually giving you wrong advice and Google is definitely leading you in the wrong direction. And then you’re just stuck with all of the, this sense of helplessness and this huge sense of the fact that something is broken inside you.

Natasha: And it’s funny, because I do actually work in the mental health field and there is a lot that’s said about the stigma associated with depression, with anxiety because even though there has been so much awareness building and conversation still, if your team members or someone in your organization is going through depression and they’re not able to perform, very few people can actually come and say, this is what’s happening to me when it’s happening.

Natasha: They can talk about it once they have figured it out and gotten over it. And in a strange way, like insomnia is like that because if I hadn’t slept all night and if I slept at 4:00 AM and I woke up at seven and I had a call at nine 30 in the morning and I had to cancel it, or I had a call at seven in the morning, which I had to cancel.

Natasha: I couldn’t be like, I’m sorry, I have to cancel this call because I couldn’t sleep all night. I would say I’m sick, or something else. But it sounded absurd to see, it almost sounds like you’re not a, you’re not a capable functioning adult if you say oh, I couldn’t sleep. And I think that sense that something that everybody else is just doing so effortlessly and everybody else is just doing without thinking and you’re just not able to do.

Natasha: And it’s so basic. It’s, I would look at my son he’d just pass out. It feels so basic. I think that was the hardest part, like now in hindsight, right? It was of course the tiredness and all of the other things. But this, the psychological experience of going through insomnia, I think is very difficult.

Martin: I completely agree with you. Just the way you were describing it there, you could tell how insomnia or sleep just started to become more of your identity. It was almost like taking over more of who you are. And in a way you were just losing this independence, this independence, this sense of agency that you have over your own life, because so many of your actions became geared towards protecting sleep, avoiding insomnia compensating for difficult nights, all of which is completely understandable.

Martin: And when all of that stuff just doesn’t feel like it’s proving to be a long-term solution, it can then feel really mysterious, right?

Martin: It can feel like there’s something uniquely wrong. There’s something going on here that is different to what other people might be experiencing, and then we can get all of that kind of self-judgment and maybe some shame and some embarrassment and the negative self-talk, and we can be really harden ourselves that just piles it on and makes things even more difficult.

Natasha: Yeah. I don’t wanna start like blaming, Google and blaming the sort of sleep culture, but I think the thing is that scientists the people who are closest to the science are the most humble about the conclusions. But the health industry is the exact opposite, right? There are just lots of claims and there’s lots of stuff.

Natasha: And now the algorithms just push it to you because for sure at some point my algorithm figured out that I had, and probably very quickly that I was anxious about this.

Natasha: So everything that I was being prompted. Was just like this about sleep and that about sleep and women in sleep and something and constantly actually the reverse, which was the extreme benefits. And so everything from like longevity to dementia to osteoporosis, every single thing is linked to sleep.

Natasha: And of course it is, in the sense that, but it’s also linked to diet and it’s also linked to happiness and it’s also linked to genetics. And it’s linked to a hundred thousand things.

Natasha: Once the algorithm finds you and finds your weakness, it starts then. And then I actually actively stopped looking at any of that content. ’cause I very quickly realized what it would do to me, right? In the sense that it would just make you feel even worse about where you were. And I think that, that’s one big part of sleep anxiety as well, because you are convinced that you are like hurting yourself.

Natasha: You’re convinced that you’re becoming very unhealthy and that you’re going to die, because because you’re not being able to sleep well and that, your brain is going to deteriorate very quickly and everything is just gonna deteriorate.

Natasha: I do know people who sleep badly and they run marathons and they just it doesn’t matter, like they just live their lives despite the fact that they sleep badly and they continue to sleep badly and they continue to live their lives. But I do think that there are others. And then me especially I was not being able to reconcile these two things, that I would not sleep well, but I would just get on with my life. I think the, the sense of the control and the pop science was also hurting quite a bit.

Martin: When we have a problem, we wanna look for a solution, right? And there’s just so much out there. And I think there is also a lot of misinformation and misleading information out there because that’s what gets the attention. If someone writes an article that just said Sleep, it’s important, you can’t control it.

Martin: No one’s gonna read that, right? But if someone comes up with a headline that says 12 Sleep Hacks that guarantee eight hours of sleep, or 12 things you can do tonight to prevent cancer ever showing up in your life, loads of people are gonna read that.

Natasha: Over those two years I did lots, I accomplished lots. A huge part of life was continuing.

Natasha: But the point was that I was not entirely myself and that’s the bit that I was missing. It had become a new mutation on my identity, the sleep thing, right? So 99% of my identity was still the same, but there was this new 1% that had just emerged from somewhere.

Natasha: You’re not accepting your situation. You’re quite distressed by it. That’s another thing that comes with insomnia.

Martin: It becomes more powerful the more we try to resist it. You can find yourself acting in ways that don’t really reflect who you are or who you want to be.

Natasha: Actions are a powerful way to signal to your brain what, where your attitude lies, so I think that sometimes you can’t just intellectualize your way out of a problem.

Natasha: Like sometimes you have to change the way you’re behaving. In that sense, this kind of almost subterranean signal to your brain that your attitude towards something has changed because now your body’s doing different things than what it was doing.

Martin: You’d already tried so many things. You had a strategy, a roadmap that you were following with kind of mixed success.

Martin: What made you think it would be productive or there would be an opportunity here for you to get something from us working together?

Natasha: What happened in 2024, which is when we met, was that everything just started failing. And I don’t know why necessarily. I think we went on this holiday for New Years in 20 23 we went to this holiday.

Natasha: And at that holiday, our entire day routine was starting very late. And we were not sleeping before 12 or 1230 every single night as a family. And I think because we’d lived that kind of routine for about two weeks, when we got back home early 24 I think I was like, I have to go to work, so I should get to bed at night.

Natasha: And obviously your body was in attuned to sleeping at nine. And and then that, and this time I went to bed. My husband and I went to bed. He promptly fell asleep. I don’t know his bo his body can sleep as much anytime. I dunno, it just doesn’t seem to bother him. But I couldn’t. And then there was that like, oh shit moment, right?

Natasha: That, oh my God, my last standing hack has stopped working. And there was all this legacy of failure as well in the past. And so then I think basically I went through a couple of weeks where I, it was exactly as bad as your peak struggles where you’re just not sleeping before you had figured out your placebo or your hack or your safety behavior before any of that, ’cause once I figured some of those out in 22 and 23, then there was a whole period of stability. But again, I was back in this tumult and we had to go for, to celebrate a function for the same sweet teammate of mine who had shared her hotel bed with me. And she, her sister was getting married and we went and we flew to another town for this.

Natasha: And again, basically all of us landed. We got to the hotel really late. Everyone’s exhausted, husband and child pass out. I don’t sleep at all. At 5:00 AM I think he woke up to get a glass of water. And he saw, and I was reading and he said, oh, why are you up? And I said, I haven’t slept all night. And so I think for him, he was like, oh my God.

Natasha: What is, this is bad. Because, I think he could really empathize saying You must be exhausted. And I was tired and I was just, I was so upset because I’d come for this wedding and I’d been really looking forward to it. And I didn’t feel like participating in anything because like literally my body, my brain, everything was hurting.

Natasha: So he then said we should go to, he found some sleep clinic and we went there when we got back. When we got back home again, it was the same, it was the same thing. So again, I went to the sleep clinic, the doctor prescribed me some other, like tricylic or some other cocktail of drugs. And even as the doctor was talking, and this was like a neurologist who literally told me, and I have no issues saying that, this is what he said to me.

Natasha: He was like, oh, that’s really strange. Oh, you should be able to sleep, but if you’re not, here are some pills. And if these don’t work then you’re going to be on sleeping pills your whole life. There’s no other solution. He said that. He was like, oh, come back to me in a month because if this doesn’t work, then, and he literally shook his head and said, oh, then there’s no hope.

Natasha: And then you’re just gonna have to be having sleeping pills for the rest of your life. And even as he was seeing it, I think something in me just got really pissed off. I was like, this is ridiculous. He didn’t even listen to my story.

Natasha: It was just like, oh, you have sleep problems? Okay, here you go, here’s some drugs. So as soon as we got home, I told Suraj, I was like I don’t think he, he doesn’t know what he is talking about at all. I have actually had this situation for the last two years and I don’t think he knows what he’s saying.

Natasha: And Suraj of course, trying to be the very like, supportive person. He said no, you should not. Don’t reject the doctor’s thing, just take the medication. You will be fine. And sure as hell, it didn’t work. Like after three, four days it stopped working.

Natasha: And then basically I think I, in one of my, fever dreams at 2:00 AM 3:00 AM like as I was awake I was just typing into Spotify ’cause I was listening to different podcasts to to keep myself entertained at night.

Natasha: And I was like, oh, there must be some podcast. Somebody must have talked about insomnia. And I typed that into Spotify, and then I found your podcast, and then I started listening to it. And Martin, for me, I was so desperate by then, I was so tired and so desperate that I said that I won’t even bother listening to all these episodes.

Natasha: And, piecing together the wisdom. I said, I’m just going to write to this person and I’m just gonna directly reach out to him. Because at that point, I was very sure that I really needed like somebody to work with me, somebody to talk to. I couldn’t do some sort of self-paced, self-help. I really had to feel like I had shared my side of the story with somebody and then they understood and then they were going to kinda help me.

Natasha: So that’s how I actually, I found you. And that’s what brought me. So in some sense, it was the ultimate failure of everything that got me here.

Martin: When we started working together what kinda concepts did we explore or what kind of changes did you make that were different, that you feel helped you move forward and start emerging from this struggle?

Natasha: One of the things that I really appreciated was that you actually asked me to list out my own strengths, right? And I think when you did that, one of the things that you noted was the fact that I do actually lead with intellect to some extent. And so for me, being able to understand like psychologically and cognitively understand things.

Natasha: And once I see them in a new light, I think that’s very powerful. So that was the first thing where I think I still, this was like, I still remember our first conversation right where you said that sleep doesn’t respond to effort. And that line, it just almost like immediately, I think I just completely changed my behavior almost immediately in response to that.

Natasha: I remember you mentioned in the early days itself was the fact that you can sleep really badly so you can have a bad night, but you could have a good day and you can have a good night and you can have a bad day. And so I started attending to that.

Natasha: And I actually started noticing that was true. Like I could have had a very bad night, but the next day many things went well. Many things went my way, and the day was pretty effortless, even if I was slightly tired and whatever.

Natasha: And then there were other times where I’d slept perfectly well and I was like, whatever, restless or fidgety or the day had gone badly. And so this dissociation of sleep is this thing that, produces this perfect day for you the next day, and you are just like this perfect person the next day.

Natasha: I think for me the dissociation of those two things was also very important from, again, a kind of intellectual lens.

Natasha: And then of course there was the whole bit around how do you change your actions, right? What will you do differently? And why I mentioned these two reframing sort of points is that I think they help you take those actions because sometimes you can’t take an action without conviction.

Natasha: If you’re not convinced or if you don’t understand why you’re taking the action may not yield very much, but if you do understand why you’re taking that action, it helps.

Natasha: I was always so conscious about like setting up breakfast meetings. I would never set up breakfast meetings. I had stopped doing that ’cause I was like no. I don’t know.

Natasha: I started setting up breakfast meetings. I started like setting up dinners. I said, that’s fine. I’ll deal with it like however it goes. Calendaring your life the way you would if you did not have any issues with sleep. There was perhaps something powerful about that.

Martin: It sounds like in terms of that perspective, really when we were working together, it was just a process of teasing out what you already knew, what was already inside you. This idea that sleep doesn’t need or want or require all of these kind of efforts or attention or rules or rituals or accommodations, it just wants to take care of itself.

Martin: And as we explored that, you were able to reflect on your own experience and you realized, huh, yeah, that is the case. Like my experience has been telling me that, but because I’ve, my superpower of problem solving is the dominant force right now that has almost been clouded in a way. And you got this pressure to continue trying to problem solve, continue putting effort in, even though the experience says that might not be useful for you.

Martin: And then the second approach was the actions you started to chip away at that power and the influence that sleep was having by focusing more on actions that served you rather than serving insomnia. And as you did that it kinda lost some of its power and influence over you.

Martin: So maybe in turn you might have been less inclined to put that effort in, and so it becomes a cycle again, but maybe a more positive cycle compared to before.

Natasha: Yeah, very true. I also of course, owe a debt of gratitude to K-Dramas because I one of the things that we discussed and we talked about was also like, I think nighttime awakening is a very unpleasant experience, right?

Natasha: And that’s the other thing that people who struggle with insomnia will talk about that. Just the experience of being awake at night is for some reason really unpleasant. But if you flip that and if you start looking at it as some sort of invitation to binge watch K-Dramas, and for me it was fine because you the day is very busy and you’re, you’ve got children, you’ve got work, and so you can’t exactly just watch silly television all the time.

Natasha: So for me, I tried to, I started thinking that so I actually intentionally found certain series and. I said, okay, I’m gonna watch these at night and I’m not gonna watch them through the day or at any on the weekends. I’m not going to and I’m gonna watch this at night. And I, and the other thing I told myself was also this idea of, a little bit of like sleep consolidation, I think.

Natasha: Which did help with the hyper arousal part because I think that’s so physiological. It had to be trained out. Was this fact that no matter what, I’m not gonna sleep before 1130 or 12 even, so I’d start watching like my TV at, nine 30 and then I almost used to feel, I was almost looking forward to the TV time.

Natasha: ’cause I said I have two and a half hours to watch tv. I have so much like time, actually, I don’t have to turn it off. I could just watch the next episode and the next episode. Because, I’d get up and I’d make myself a beverage and I’d come back, I’d make myself a snack, so it became this I have this whole day, which is relentless, and then I have these three hours that are just mine.

Natasha: So looking at it from that point of view did help because once I told myself that I’m not gonna try to sleep before 12 I think it helped because then, yeah, by the time it was 12, I was quite tired and I hadn’t spent two or three hours in bed trying to sleep, working myself up, on the kind of arousal lad because when you’re tossing and turning, you get kinda worked up in a way that’s very different from when you’re just watching like Korean tv and then you’re genuinely tired.

Natasha: And then by 12, 12 30, I was so there were many nights where I started successfully falling asleep at the time that, I decided to fall asleep at, which was 12 or 1230. And I think that also helped quite a bit because this idea that your relationship, like I was saying, that relationship with your bed literally and your body’s own cues that, when it lies down, it starts to feel like this.

Natasha: I think it suddenly started changing because of accepting the night. I am accepting the fact that the night is going to be long, and so why don’t you make it nice?

Martin: Your relationship to being awake at night had changed through your actions. So even if sleep was exactly the same, in other words, you never fell asleep before, let’s say three o’clock in the morning.

Martin: The difference is one time you might have been in bed tossing and turning, really struggling, battling away until three o’clock in the morning. This alternative approach involved watching some TV shows that you like doing stuff that’s more pleasant, setting aside time for yourself making it a more useful way to spend that time awake and that in turn.

Martin: Although there’s obviously no guarantee that’s gonna make sleep happen because it’s out of your control. It just makes that time awake more pleasant. It doesn’t get you so exhausted and tangled up in that struggle. And it can also help train your brain that maybe being awake at night isn’t such a threat that we need to be on action stations to try and protect you against.

Natasha: Exactly that.

Martin: What would you say if someone is listening to this, and we’re talking about making being awake more pleasant, we’re talking about accepting that sleep might be out of your control, that the difficult thoughts and feelings might be out of your control. But someone’s listening to this and they’re thinking, I’m not interested in any of that.

Martin: I just want to sleep. I don’t want to. Read a book or watch tv, I need to get rid of these thoughts and these feelings. I don’t wanna learn how to deal with them. I just wanna sleep. How do you respond to that?

Natasha: I would say that’s a perfectly understandable reaction. So the first thing is that, that’s a completely understandable thing to feel when you’re going through this.

Natasha: And I felt exactly that. I think I also had this, you have to go through your arc because you do go through this like resistance and anger and you feel very, yeah, you feel resentful at the fact that you’re being asked to accept something that you don’t like at all.

Natasha: But, I think there is, again I think humans are very resilient in the way that at some point I think you realize that there is no choice. There is no option but to accept because not accepting this is not serving you very well. And so that was the other thing that I think this feeling that you should not be having negative emotions about insomnia.

Natasha: That’s not true at all. Like of course you’re going to feel bad. Recovering from insomnia requires you to not think that sleep is important? No, it’s none of that. Because of course you, you’re not gonna think sleep is not important or you’re not gonna value sleep.

Natasha: You do value it and it is important. And it is. It’s perfectly fine to exist in that contradiction of, knowing that this is important, wanting it, desiring it, but not becoming completely agitated. I think because that’s the really important part. How do you find routines and rituals, and how do you find maybe just the first level of acceptance.

Natasha: That’ll help you feel a little less agitated. And then I think that, these are positively reinforcing loops because when you experience that slight, like release from not feeling very agitated, from that first level of acceptance, you accept a little further, and then you practice acceptance and it gets better and better.

Natasha: And the funny thing is, it is true. There are times of course, and I am sure that many of your other like people might have said the same thing, but when you start sleeping better again, there’s a part of you that’s I should not be noticing this. I should not be noticing that I’m sleeping better, that this is working because I don’t wanna notice it.

Natasha: A part of you is noticing the fact that, okay, I’m relaxing and I’m, I’ve let go. I’ve just let go now. So I’m gonna watch TV and I’m just gonna stay awake and I’m gonna embrace whatever this is. And then you’re like, and it tends to work. And the more you do that, the more it works, so I think it’s a com. It’s this whole like positive loop.

Martin: All thoughts and all feelings are okay. So much of our struggle can come from this belief that we shouldn’t have certain thoughts or we shouldn’t have certain feelings, and that can just set us up for a struggle.

Martin: The alternative way forward is to acknowledge all of our thoughts and our feelings as normal valid human. That as human beings we experience the full range. Some make us feel good, some don’t. Some are useful, some aren’t. Some are true, some maybe not. We have the power to decide how we choose to respond to them, and I think that’s really what you’ve encapsulated so well because it’s when we respond with resistance, which is completely understandable, it feeds into it and it gives that stuff more power and more influence, and it just gets as tangled up.

Martin: If we’re feeling stuck, if things feel mysterious, perhaps there’s an opportunity here to respond in a different way with a little bit more acknowledgement, acceptance, and letting go, as you said, not holding this all so tightly just opening up to it a little bit more.

Martin: If nothing else, perhaps that would just free up a little bit of energy and attention that otherwise would’ve been consumed by battle for you to do more of the stuff that really matters to you.

Natasha: Yeah, and if anyone’s listening to this, I think they’re already halfway there in the sense that they have at least found something that’s giving them, that’s helping them square their own experience with some amount of knowledge. And at least, like I said, for me it was really helpful. Like the hardest part was all the misinformation, like when you are being, when you are consuming something that’s not actually helpful for insomnia and then, and so it’s either lack of information or it’s misinformation.

Natasha: But I think once you get the right information, even if there’s resistance initially, resistance gets spent, eventually you are spent, right? Because how much are you gonna struggle? Because you will resist, and you will resist. And then eventually, if it’s not working, you will be tired and you will let your guard down.

Natasha: And at that point, at least you’ve got the right information and you are ready to receive it. The problem is when there’s just no information and then you just continue in these loops of confusion. So I think for me, awareness generation is really important.

Martin: I remember when we were working together, you had this concern about acceptance. How do we achieve acceptance without it feel like you are in a position of helplessness and you’re giving up, versus how do I achieve acceptance with a sense of power of individual empowerment?

Martin: And that can be a bit difficult to wrap your head around, right?

Natasha: It is. I remember writing to you and saying that I’m not feeling like I’m choosing acceptance. I’m being forced to accept, in which case it’s not acceptance, it’s just something that’s forced on you.

Natasha: But the thing is, like I said, I think that resistance and that friction was required for me to get over the hump as well. And there are people who may perhaps come to acceptance easily and there are others who may not. And I think both reactions or like a whole spectrum of reactions is perfectly natural.

Natasha: What I do feel is from my own journey also, is that eventually, like acceptance is inevitable because, the friction doesn’t yield anything that’s helpful in this situation. And so the only thing is that, like I said, having somebody to talk through on when you’re going through this, having someone to talk through with is important because, some of the words and the reframing and the perspectives, they’re there at least.

Natasha: And it’s like when your acceptance portal finally opens. It’s available for that information to go inside. If there was nothing there, then you may accept it, but from a place of helplessness or sorrow or just, I don’t know. And then you would have to work a lot harder perhaps to generate solutions and kind of perspectives for yourself.

Natasha: But if there is some perspective, initially the door is closed and it’s not going in, but that’s okay because at some point the door will open and then all of that stuff that’s waiting to be heard and understood will go inside.

Martin: Yeah. There’s value in every part of the experience, even when it feels like we’re really struggling, there’s always something to be learned from that, and it might not feel like it’s useful at that time, but at some point in the future, we will serve some kind of value as a learning experience or something we can pick and choose from to help us move forward in a different way or to keep us moving forward in the way we want to be moving.

Natasha: Yeah. Yeah, that’s true.

Martin: What did progress look like for you on this journey? Did you find that as you were starting to get this sense of independence back, sleep just suddenly magically transformed and you were having great nights of sleep and every single night was better than the last?

Natasha: I wish I could say that. There is no such thing as perfect sleep. And no one is sleeping perfectly. I mean, you may have less sleep for multiple reasons, right? You’re traveling and then there’s other disruptions and someone is sick and so on, so forth.

Natasha: So I think, I think the important, the huge tangible change, I think and it’s not a change that, let’s say that if you just looked at the surface of my life in terms of like, how productive is she and how active is she? And how creative is she? I think a lot of that is probably looks the same because you are still doing things.

Natasha: But I think what did change, one of the things that did change Yes, is that I think this idea of traveling definitely came back for me. Traveling for leisure. Not just work, but traveling for leisure. And so I did actually travel last year a couple of times for leisure. And so that was one small change.

Natasha: Yeah, like having late nights and it’s totally fine having early mornings and it’s totally fine. And just so that sense of like release with your own. Calendar and not having anxiety about it, so I think for me, there are, of course, even today, there are several times where, you will get, six hours or five hours, because maybe you’re traveling.

Natasha: But I’ve noticed that not only I don’t talk about it, like that’s the other thing, right? I don’t, I’m not talking about it with like my husband or my sister or anybody that, gosh, like I wouldn’t see that talk about it at all because I’m yeah, it’s fine, I’ll go to bed tonight and tomorrow or whatever.

Natasha: And even if I’m, even if I’m like, I’ve got three straight like events and for some reason the three straight nights I’m going to be pulling like late nights, I’m okay. I’m not very stressed about that. So I think basically there’s a certain sense of relaxation and I will say that, look, this journey is not linear, right?

Natasha: And I suppose like the longer you’ve struggled with it or the harder you’ve struggled with it, and the more intensely you have felt about it, like it is gonna take you some time to feel like this isn’t a theme in your life at all. And like for me, for instance, even like this showing up here to talk about it and to have it recorded, there was for a long time I thought that I wanted to write about it actually for last year, early last year, I started wanting to, when I experienced a lot of these benefits, I said I should write a whole piece.

Natasha: And then I just couldn’t because I said that, I don’t want to jinx it. And so there were these lingering feelings, right? Saying that if I talk about it, if I, and if I go out and announce that I’m fine and I had this problem and I no longer have it I don’t wanna say that. But then, over time it just faded away.

Natasha: Even that, even holding onto that kind of goes away. Time actions, consistency and of course this underlying reframing is the journey. It happens in fits and starts, but I think eventually you do get to a point where. Your relationship, like you said, the relationship with sleep changes.

Natasha: One of the things I do appreciate about this journey has been that I have actually learned a lot about sleep. There is no perfect, there is no eight hour, eight and a half, seven or whatever. There is no, you have to find your rhythm and the more you dissociate with the sleep dogma that has become a culture I think the better off everyone is.

Martin: In terms of the timeline here, how long would you say that it took you to get to a point where you felt like you’d left the struggle behind?

Natasha: I think there was this whole period of, there, there was also like micro progress and then there was like a little bit of a slide back and there was frustrations. Like I said, it was non-linear. So I would say that it was probably only by the summer, so about maybe four months or so, four or five months.

Natasha: And I did actually start scheduling like work trips and travel and so on so forth. And the more I did that, I think by the time summer rolled around, I was starting to feel like I could plan my days and plan my weeks and plan my time the way I wanted to. And yeah, and it’s been like a steady stabilization from that point all the way, till now.

Natasha: I do wanna again stress that when somebody says that they no longer struggle with insomnia, it doesn’t mean that they sleep like nine hours or eight hours every single night consistently all the time. That is not the, that’s not what resolution looks like.

Natasha: Resolution is you’re not controlled by it.

Martin: It’s very rare that someone tells me that they’re able to change everything and transform their lives in a few days or a few weeks. And it often requires ongoing practice too, right? There’s ups and downs.

Martin: We’re always gonna get pulled back into a struggle, whether it’s with sleep or insomnia or anything else that goes on in our lives. It’s just that awareness when that’s happening and being able to change course to refocus on actions that matter to us and to live our lives and allow sleep, the opportunity to take care of itself rather than trying to fix sleep so that we can live our lives.

Martin: If we can just flip that around, it can just be such a transformative way of approaching this.

Natasha: Yeah, I agree.

Martin: Your whole learning experience, your whole journey maybe comes down to this realization through action that you have the ultimate power over your life. And as you reinforce that, sleep just becomes a thing. It doesn’t just, it doesn’t become the most important thing in your life when you are not resisting it so much when you’re just accepting sleep is gonna turn up and do whatever it wants or insomnia’s gonna turn up, do whatever it wants.

Natasha: And you do start sleeping much better. I think the listeners especially need to hear that if they’re going through it right now, they don’t want to, feel like the takeaway of this is that, oh, you’re just gonna reach some radical acceptance, but your sleep is not gonna change.

Natasha: The truth is that the sleep does change and you do feel rested and you do sleep more and you get back to sleeping normally. The idea is to just not expect that. That every, you’re going to be in some sleep paradise all the time because that’s just, that’s not even normal life, and I think by the time, if you’re going through a lot of insomnia, what you want is that you want sleep paradise.

Natasha: You just want something where every day you’re just knocked out cold beautifully because you develop that kind of a, sensitivity to sleep. But once you get over it, you realize that most of the times you’re sleeping well, sometimes you’re not. And irrespective, it’s just not on your mind anymore.

Martin: Natasha, I want to thank you for all the time you’ve taken to share your experience with us. I do have one last question for you. If someone is listening and they just feel like they cannot end the struggle with insomnia, that there’s nothing they can do, what would you say to them?

Natasha: The first thing I would really say is that it’s understandable to feel that. And it’s hard. It’s very hard feeling that, it’s a really hard place to be in when you are feeling like that. But I would say that there are many people now who have figured out how to come out of this.

Natasha: It’s not a pharmacological technical solution, it’s something that’s inside you, everybody has it. Your sleep is not broken. Your brain is not broken. Like nothing about you is broken. It’s a phase and I think like everything this will pass and some of just a little bit of intentionality and just to some amount of, perhaps, hopefully perspective and reframing and then just changing your actions a little bit and a combination of all of that and patience will get you through it, so I think that’s probably what I’d like, anybody listening who’s struggling to take away.

Martin: Thank you so much again for coming on.

Natasha: Yeah. Martin, thank you so much. Thank you for what you do.

Martin: I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Insomnia Coach Podcast. I’m Martin Reed, and as always, I’d like to leave you with this important reminder — you are not alone and you can sleep.

I want you to be the next insomnia success story I share! If you're ready to stop struggling with sleep and get your life back from insomnia, you can start my insomnia coaching course right now.

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Dan had never struggled with sleep — until a stressful period in late 2023 turned his nights upside down. After a panic attack and a couple of sleepless nights, he found himself pacing the house at 2 a.m., clock-watching, and convinced he was broken. Even after medication gave him one long night of sleep, the struggle came roaring back the very next evening.As a highly-skilled problem solver, Dan threw himself into fixing insomnia. He followed strict routines, taped over every bit of light in his room, tried teas and supplements, and skipped work after difficult nights. Yet the harder he tried, the worse things got. Every attempt to control sleep just added more fear, more pressure, and more exhaustion.Things began to shift when Dan stopped trying to control sleep and fight every thought. He started making small, practical changes: limiting nighttime clock-checks, going to bed later at night when he felt sleepy rather than tired, and committing to one meaningful activity each day — even after rough nights. Those actions reminded him that life didn’t have to stop because of insomnia.Over time, Dan learned to respond differently to the thoughts and feelings that used to overwhelm him. He discovered he could notice them without needing to believe them, and he didn’t have to beat himself up when sleep didn’t go the way he wanted. With patience and practice, nights became less of a battle, and his confidence in his body’s natural ability to sleep began to return.Today, Dan isn’t just sleeping better — he feels stronger than before insomnia began. He knows he isn’t broken, he has skills he can always rely on, and he’s living more fully, no matter what his nights bring. His story is a powerful reminder that with time, self-kindness, and small daily steps, it’s possible to stop struggling and regain trust in your natural ability to sleep.

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Kelly’s struggle with insomnia began after the birth of her first child. What started as one sleepless night quickly grew into panic-filled evenings and anxious days. The harder she tried to make sleep happen — through medication, supplements, holistic remedies, and strict routines — the more elusive it became. Sleep turned into an obsession, and every decision seemed controlled by fear of another difficult night.Things began to shift when Kelly discovered that her body wasn’t broken — it was the exhausting fight with insomnia that was fueling her struggle. She started to let go of rituals, loosen her grip, and give herself permission to live more freely. At first she worried that these changes might just be more sleep efforts in disguise. But with reflection, she realized the difference was in her intention: instead of chasing sleep, her actions were now serving her life.Kelly also transformed her relationship with thoughts. Rather than identifying with them or trying to push them away, she learned to notice them as experiences she couldn’t control — stories and sensations that didn’t have to dictate her choices. With less resistance, they lost their power.When she became pregnant again, insomnia returned. But this time, Kelly approached it differently. Instead of getting pulled back into an endless and exhausting battle, she leaned into acceptance. She reminded herself there was nothing she could do to force sleep, and gave herself permission to rest, watch a show, or simply allow the night to unfold. Slowly, the fear eased, her days opened up again, and sleep returned on its own terms.Today, Kelly no longer measures progress by hours of sleep, but by how little influence sleep has over her life. She’s free to live her life — and sleep takes care of itself. Sleep is, once again, effortless.

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t show up.Months later, when a medical diagnosis and abrupt medication changes disrupted her sleep, that old fear returned — stronger, louder, and harder to ignore. She threw everything at the problem: strict sleep hygiene, medications, rigid rules, new routines. But the harder she fought for sleep, the more relentless the struggle became. Some nights she found herself outside at 3am, wrapped in a blanket, scrolling for answers — exhausted, anxious, and desperate for relief.The turning point didn’t come from a new trick or another pill. It came when she stopped fighting. When she stopped treating wakefulness as a threat and gave herself permission to feel what was already there — the fear, the frustration, the anxiety — without trying to push it away.In this episode, Stephanie shares how letting go of the fight helped her start showing up for her life again. She talks about responding to difficult nights with more presence, more compassion, and more trust in her ability to cope — and how she rebuilt her life one night, one breath, one value-based action at a time.Stephanie’s story is a powerful reminder that recovering from insomnia isn’t about winning the fight. It’s about realizing there was never a fight to win in the first place.

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Laura never expected insomnia to arrive during one of the happiest times in her life.She had just gotten engaged. She was heading out on vacation. But one sleepless night quietly snowballed into many — and nights quickly became something she feared.She tried everything: supplements, routines, medication, strict sleep hygiene. But nothing seemed to work. The harder she tried to fix sleep, the more distant it became. And eventually, she realized the struggle wasn’t just with sleep — it was with her thoughts and feelings about sleep.She found herself caught in a loop: trying to control, reason with, avoid, or edit every uncomfortable thought. Every wave of fear or frustration. And it was exhausting.The real shift came when she began to relate to insomnia differently — not as a problem to defeat, but as an experience to meet with less resistance. She practiced making space for the thoughts and feelings that showed up, and bringing her attention back to actions that helped her live the life she wanted to live.It wasn’t a straight path. There were setbacks. Relapses. Hard nights that tested her resolve. But each time, there was something to learn. Because while change is hard — not changing can be even harder.And Laura kept going. With persistence. With compassion. With honesty. With courage.Today, she still has the occasional tough night — like all of us do. But those nights have lost all the power and influence they once had over her. She knows how to move forward, independently of sleep, and no matter what thoughts and feelings might be present.This is Laura’s story.

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t doing something right.What changed wasn’t a new pill or a stricter plan. It was her relationship with sleep — and with herself.She began practicing a different approach. She gave herself permission to rest without sleep. To play golf. To laugh with friends. To live with uncertainty and discomfort instead of fighting them. She made room for the thoughts and feelings that once overwhelmed her — and realized they didn’t have to control her life.Sleep didn’t return overnight. But as her days became fuller and her nights gentler, it began to come back — naturally, and with far less struggle.Today, Rebecca still has shorter nights from time to time, as all human beings do. And they no longer define her or limit her. Because she knows: she can still live fully and move forward — no matter what the night brings.

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s life apart from sleep. It felt as though her mind was working against her. The more she tried to silence her mind, the louder and more distracting it became. The more she tried to make sleep happen the more of a struggle it became. Things started to change when Rupsa realized that trying to fight or avoid uncomfortable or difficult thoughts and feelings was consuming her energy and attention and pulling her away from the life she wanted to live. So, she started trying to be more open to whatever showed up. As she did this, she found her thoughts and feelings often contained important information. Reminders of what mattered to her. With this, she discovered that her mind was never working against her. It was actually working for her.Rupsa stopped trying to control sleep. She practiced bringing her focus and attention back to the present whenever it drifted away. She was kinder to herself. She became more accepting of whatever her mind might do and whatever each night might bring. With this, a burden was lifted — and, with going practice, things started to get better.Rupsa now sleeps well and, when the occasional night of less sleep shows up, it no longer has any power or influence over her.

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Tim’s insomnia began during a stressful time in his life. At first, it was just a few bad nights but the more he worried about it, the worse it got. The harder he tried to fix his sleep, the more he struggled.Things started to change when Tim learned a new way to deal with insomnia. He realized that trying to control sleep was actually keeping him stuck. So, instead of resisting wakefulness, he began to give it permission to exist.As he stopped following strict sleep rules and gave himself more freedom, Tim learned that being awake at night wasn’t the real problem — it was his response to the fear of not sleeping that made things harder.Over time, as Tim let go of the struggle, sleep showed up all by itself, without him needing to go to war with insomnia night after night. And, when he stopped chasing after sleep and focused on living his life independently of sleep, insomnia lost the stranglehold it once had over his life.

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s back to sharing a bed with her partner. She is ready to grow her family. She is free from the insomnia struggle.

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s sleep is back on track. And, when the occasional difficult night shows up, it no longer has any power or influence over him or the life he wants to live.

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t create more struggle, consume more energy, put more focus on sleep, and keep her trapped in the vicious cycle of more trying and more difficulty. Esther became less fearful about the possibility of insomnia showing up. She became more comfortable in its presence. Insomnia lost the power and influence it once had over her.

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s exactly what happened.

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Listen to the podcast episode (audio only)Dulce’s insomnia began when she left Mexico to study abroad in Canada. The stress of midterms and the change of climate led to sleep disruption. However, even after returning home, sleep continued to create a struggle and insomnia became a part of her life.

Even when she felt sleepy, Dulce struggled to rest. Anxious thoughts regularly interrupted any sleep she was getting. Medication and supplements didn’t get rid of the insomnia or the difficult thoughts and feelings that were showing up with it.

Things began to change for Dulce when her brother shared his observation that the more she seemed to try to make sleep happen, the more she seemed to struggle. Dulce began to realize that all the trying and all the effort to make sleep happen and all the sleep hygiene rules and rituals were giving insomnia more power and influence over her life and making things more difficult.

Dulce then found the Insomnia Coach podcast and took comfort in the fact that what she was going through wasn’t unique or unusual — that she wasn’t alone. Realizing that a different approach was needed, she enrolled in my six-week course.

Dulce started going to bed later at night and really appreciated the extra time she had in the evening (she also gave herself permission to watch TV, listen to music, and read books that were interesting rather than boring at night)! She started to respond to wakefulness and the thoughts and feelings that came with it with less struggle — being more of an observer rather than an opponent. She reduced and eventually eliminated her use of melatonin.

Dulce found this approach empowering. Instead of trying to control her sleep, she was letting go — and this freed up energy that helped her do more of the things that really mattered to her. She became focused on controlling her life rather than her sleep and that shift reduced the power and influence sleep had over her.

This process took time and Dulce created the best possible conditions for success by focusing on implementation rather than putting pressure on herself to make a certain amount or type of progress happen within a certain timeframe. As a result, Dulce has now freed herself from the insomnia struggle.

Click here for a full transcript of this episode.

Martin: All right. So Dulce, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to come on to the podcast.

Dulce: Thanks for inviting me. I’m so excited and happy to share my story with the people that is listening to your podcast, because that was the way that I discovered you. I discovered your program and listening to other people’s stories. So this is. The best way to share.

Martin: Yeah, it can be so powerful to hear other people’s stories, that’s one reason why I’m just so grateful for guests like yourself being willing to come on and share their experiences, without further ado, if we can get talking about your experience and your story, if we start right at the beginning, when did your issues with sleep first begin and what do you think caused those initial issues with sleep?

Dulce: I think that I struggled. I started struggling with insomnia like around 15, 17 years ago, almost when I was in college, two specific events triggered my insomnia. First, I moved to Montreal to study abroad and the stress of midterms. And also, it was very cold. down there. I was living in Mexico at that point.

Dulce: So Mexico is pretty warm and I was so used to certain temperature. At night and I don’t know, I was used to my climate. And then when I moved there, I couldn’t, since I, I suffer from a lot of allergies and also my skin, I have a lot of skin problems. I couldn’t turn the heater on. And. In the middle of the night.

Dulce: So I had to turn it off, but I couldn’t get, warm. So I couldn’t sleep and that started triggering insomnia afterwards because that got me anxiety like a couple of weeks. I couldn’t, I, was just starting thinking about. Okay, I’m not going to sleep again because so cold and that started with the trigger and that was my first one, the cold weather, the allergy flare ups in Montreal, along with the anxiety from academy pressure because the, academy level in Montreal was so high.

Dulce: very complicated, then there made it difficult for me to sleep and upon returning home the stress of my university, because it was the last semester. And at the same time I was, in musical theater rehearsals and further also that exacerbated my sleep issues because I couldn’t calm me down. It was a lot of energy.

Dulce: And we used to rehearse with a lot of people. People and music and we used to sing and dance. So when I came back home, I couldn’t sleep because of the energy. And during that time, I started, experimenting with, Valerian and herbal teas and. so many supplements and nothing could work. Nothing was working, not even in Montreal, not in Mexico, nothing.

Dulce: So I would say that everything started there and. It became part of my life forever until now.

Martin: So you had a lot going on. Sleep in general is quite sensitive to what’s going on in our lives when we are going through really busy periods or stressful periods or difficult periods or even really joyous periods. I like to use the example, if someone wins the lottery jackpot, they’re probably not going to sleep for a while, right?

Martin: and I think that’s understandable. I think most of us can. understand, it’s not really mysterious, when insomnia shows up in the midst of, in that context with all, everything that’s going on. But what could then can happen, which then makes things mysterious and can lead us into that struggle that leaves us feeling stuck, is when all of that stuff, whatever it is, when all of that stress or whatever the circumstances are.

Martin: when they’re no longer present or they don’t feel relevant anymore, when our focus is now really on sleep and it becomes like a preoccupation and it feels really mysterious and we find that our actions Whereas once we engaged in actions to do things that were important to us, that matter to us, we can start to find all of our actions are geared towards trying to make sleep happen, or trying to get rid of wakefulness, or trying to get rid of anxiety, trying to make ourselves feel relaxed and calm.

Martin: And that’s how it can just so easily progress to this stage where, We get really confused and worried even more and start to think that, maybe there’s something broken with our sleep system. is that what kind of happened for you as these stressors and everything that was going on started to feel less relevant?

Dulce: Yeah. at that moment I thought that it was that period of time that, and it would go and disappear, but then it persisted. That was the problem, that it persisted and, I thought that there was something wrong in me. Even when I felt sleepy, I struggled to rest. Anxious thoughts would wake me up all the time.

Dulce: and that created the vicious cycle that you, I think that you mentioned many times during the course, that it’s sometimes something, there is an event, Triggers that insomnia and then it becomes just part of the vicious cycle. this pattern persisted over years, like forever. And it, that impacted the, my ability to, do everything in my life, even in my wedding.

Dulce: probably I shared this. In the forum several times that in my wedding, I, during my wedding period, even it was a very small wedding. We were only 36 people, but I was so anxious and so, excited and she’s nervous at the same time. I couldn’t sleep during that time, like two months. I was sleeping, I don’t know, three hours, at night.

Dulce: And then creating all these thoughts that, okay, I’m not going to sleep. I’m not sleeping, so I’m not going to rest. and I’m not going to sleep the day of my wedding. And effectively I didn’t sleep the day of my wedding. my mom that day gave me two, it was a full dropper of antidepressants.

Dulce: And also I took two pills of Ambien in order to sleep. And I only slept three hours that day. that night. of course, the day of my wedding, I was completely high. I was super high. I was drugged because of all the, pills that I took. And, but I enjoyed my wedding and everything, thanks God. But besides that, everything persisted.

Dulce: The insomnia persisted and all those thoughts.

Martin: I think you just shared, you just gave us a really good illustration of how difficult this struggle can be and how it can really influence and disrupt us from living the kind of life we want to live. So it makes sense that we want to fix this problem. And that can lead us into that vicious cycle like you touched upon where it’s, like the more we try to make sleep happen, the more effort we put into it, or the more we try and control our mind or our thoughts and our feelings, the more difficult all those things become.

Martin: And so then we try harder and then the more difficult it becomes and we try harder and it just goes round and round right?

Dulce: Yeah, it’s, I love the way that you describe and it’s so easy to understand when you say, so you don’t eat if you’re not hungry. So you can’t go to bed. you can sleep if you don’t feel sleepy, but you persist and you insist and okay, you have to sleep. you must sleep. You, have to, try.

Dulce: And, but the more you try the worst. It gets, so that is a, huge problem that I wasn’t aware. I thought that was the only way to do it because I didn’t know how to. And at the end, when I realized that, okay, so you just have to go through another pathway, not this one that you keep being doing for years, almost, yeah, almost 16, I think it was 17 years, a lot.

Martin: Yeah, I like that hunger analogy. it’s like if, we’re trying really hard to make sleep happen, it’s how do we make hunger happen? So if I was to tell you, okay, make yourself hungry. Or there’s not really much we can do apart from not eat for a certain amount of time. And really that’s all sleep needs to happen.

Martin: We need to be awake for a certain amount of time for sleep to happen. but then what can make it more difficult even once we’ve been awake is as soon as we start engaging in all those efforts, start struggling, start battling with our mind, battling with wakefulness, the brain kicks up a gear and it thinks there’s a threat because we’re so engaged in this struggle.

Martin: So it fires up and it suppresses the sleep. System in order to keep us awake so that we can survive, even though there’s not really a physical threat in front of us. The brain doesn’t know the difference. And just as you touched upon when we are so tangled up in this struggle, there is that we’re not aware so much of we can just not even realize that we’re tangled up in this loop.

Martin: because it’s like our brain wants to solve this problem for us, even though it can feel It’s a bit adversarial, but really the brain is trying to fix this problem for us. So it’s coming up with all these ideas. let’s try this, let’s try this, let’s try this. And then when those things don’t seem to work, it runs out of ideas.

Martin: And so then the brain’s let’s, go back to trying all this stuff we’ve already tried, but we’ll try harder. Let’s just keep trying harder and harder and then we, It’s when we’re trapped in that cycle, it can feel like this is it. This is the only thing we can do is just keep trying harder.

Martin: But one reason why it’s so valuable having guests like yourself come on to share their experience is when you’re able to look back, you realize now that there’s this awareness that there is an alternative option. We don’t have to be stuck in that cycle, that there might be a different way of responding to all of this.

Martin: And it might be that different way that kind of gets us out of that vicious circle where it’s just more effort and more struggle. what, was that moment for you when, because you just touched upon, like, how influential this was in your life, some of the things that you tried. What was, what happened for you to think, ah, maybe there is a different way forward, there is a different way of responding to this?

Dulce: I wasn’t aware that there was a different way, but the moment that broke my mind into pieces, I would say, or my heart was, I remember I went to see my parents in Mexico and my brother was at home also. And I came with my husband and we, my parents have different separate rooms. They in their house. So I remember that I couldn’t sleep the night before, because I never slept.

Dulce: And, my husband told me, if you want, we can sleep in separate rooms and you can probably, you’ll fall asleep easily. And I said, yes, please let me sleep by myself in another room. And my brother came to the room and he knocked the door. He’s very direct. And he told me. Dulce, have you thought that you are so wrong?

Dulce: You, every, time that I see you, could be every two months or even every six months, I see my brother. And he told me that day, every time that I see you, you need one more thing. On the top of what you have built already. So you are adding more and more structure in your life and you’re adding more curtains and then you bring your own curtains because I used to bring my own blackout curtains and I used to bring my ear pods and earplugs, sorry, and, everything and my melatonin.

Dulce: And then I couldn’t, watch TV. at night with my family and enjoying my family time at night because I was thinking, okay, no, I have to start my, sleep hygiene. It’s eight o’clock. So I need to start right now. And I couldn’t enjoy my life as I wanted to. And my brother really Open my, eyes at day saying things so directly.

Dulce: And he told me, you, you’re not broken. you don’t have anything wrong in you. It’s just that it’s your mind. You have to think that probably, you just have to let it go. And I needed that. That part. And then I started, I don’t know, checking podcasts and I stopped and then I, saw yours and I started listening to different people’s stories.

Dulce: And I was like, okay, so there are more people like me in the world. I’m not the only one and they have overcome. So there’s. There’s a light.

Martin: I think, first of all, it’s great that you just had that. I think you’re quite lucky that you had that person in your life that was able to just first of all notice everything that was going on, how you were struggling and just be able to point this out to you. Because like you said, we can have this lack of awareness when we’re really tangled up in the struggle.

Martin: And second of all, I hope your brother never becomes a sleep coach because it sounds like he would put me out of business.

Dulce: no, he’s the worst. He’s the worst, but at least he opened my eyes to see that insomnia, it’s, it wasn’t the insomnia itself. It was the anxiety that provoked it in me significantly affected my daily life. I became so meticulous about travel preparations, for example. I was ensuring I had blackout curtains.

Dulce: And sleep aids, whatever, melatonin, magnesium, so many herbal teas. I was trying with one combination and then I was saying, no, this is not working. I’m going to change it for another combination or a mix of herbs. I spent many sleepless nights searching for solutions online. There’s so much information out there that is so confusing at the same time.

Dulce: And at the same time, when I was searching online, I was checking, okay, this could help, but in my mind, I was. Thinking, Oh, all the blue light is affecting me. That is why that is the reason. So everything was a reason, at that point in my mind, that’s what I was thinking, I was completely wrong.

Martin: It sounds like you had these. Just these lightbulb moments, aha, this is the solution. So then you try that and it turns out not to be. So it’s aha, this now is the solution, this is the reason. So then you try that and then it just repeats itself and repeats itself. And before you know it, it’s almost as though you are not living your own life anymore.

Martin: It’s almost like you’re living your life on behalf of insomnia, sleep, anxiety. Like, all of your actions are just aligned with, if you imagine all of that stuff as this little gremlin that sits on your shoulder, your life just revolves around that little gremlin now. You’ve got to keep that gremlin happy, try and keep that gremlin calm, and you just lose sight of just living your own life.

Martin: And It just makes everything so much more difficult, and I think it’s the reason why it’s so easy to feel stuck and to get stuck.

Dulce: I was completely stuck and it just say it very clear. It’s like an external force that you are trying to calm. And you can’t do sometimes anything about it, until you realize that, or you, let it appears and then you can just look at it or observe it instead of fighting against it because it’s like you are punching to the wall. The stronger you do it, the stronger you’re going to feel the punch. for me, for example, traveling to different time zones was completely nonsense. So I didn’t want to travel. Didn’t want to go to Europe. I remember that I, sent you a message, an email asking you, what should I do now that I fixed my, sleeping troubles, my sleeping issues?

Dulce: Should I just travel or not? And then your answer was so easy, it was so clear. You have to live your life the way you want to live it. You have to have the life, what is the phrase that you use? You have to follow the life that you want to live. And I love because I struggle with jet lag all the time and disrupted sleep patterns over and over again

Martin: The truth is that Even insomnia aside, anxiety aside, to live a rich and meaningful life, there’s going to be difficult stuff that comes with that, right? In order for us to form a relationship with someone, for example, we have to expose ourselves to the possibility that we will get crushingly, devastatingly hurt by that person.

Martin: To have children, we have to understand that they’re going to come with a lot of joy, but a lot of anxiety, a lot of stress, a lot of worry. When we travel across time zones, there’s going to be some sleep disruption. But to do the things that matter to us, there’s going to be some difficult stuff that comes with it.

Martin: What can we really do? We can acknowledge that to live the life you want to live, there’s going to be some difficult stuff that comes with it. Or we can withdraw from living a rich and meaningful life to try and protect ourselves or to avoid the difficult stuff that comes with life. But the issue then is we withdraw from life and we’re doing less, but a lot of the time that difficult stuff still shows up anyway.

Martin: So now we’re in a place where we’re doing less and dealing with all of this difficult stuff compared to doing stuff that matters in the presence of the difficult stuff. And that’s really the two choices and it’s natural and normal for us to get pulled into this withdrawal strategy because I think it’s a survival mechanism.

Martin: But often when we reflect on that, we can realize that this isn’t really making things any better. And it is like you’ve got that baseline of all this difficult stuff and all the things we’re doing to try and fight or avoid it. We’re adding on top. So now, it’s not just the insomnia, the anxiety, and all the other stuff that comes with it, but it’s also this big pyramid of all of the stuff that we’re doing in response to it.

Martin: We just get dragged away from the life we want to live, and it seems like this is just consuming our lives and consuming our attention.

Dulce: Totally. Yeah, it was consuming a lot of my precious time the only thing that we have valuable in this life is our time and if I don’t know, 50 or 60 percent of your time you’re wasting on, okay, what is the next thing, the next supplement? I’m a nutritionist, so I was so focused on that. Okay. So probably it’s my diet probably is.

Dulce: the, this supplement is not working or I’m taking this supplement at night that it’s not working because it’s interrupting another supplement or another nutrient and it was in a rabbit hole eternally,

Martin: So you had this kind of, it almost sounds like a bit of an intervention moment from your brother, where he really just pointed out, all these added layers that you’re adding on top, through your response to the insomnia and the anxiety and all that stuff.

Martin: And so you found some podcast episodes, and you’d listened to some stories, realized that what you were going through wasn’t, unique, that you weren’t alone and that it was possible to explore a different approach. And so then we started working together. So you, enrolled in my online course.

Martin: What were some of the initial changes you made that now you’re able to look back? You think, that’s what got me started on this new approach, this new path forward that was more helpful.

Dulce: The sleep window. was perfect for me because that gave me freedom at the beginning. I was like, okay, so I don’t have to go to sleep early. Actually, I have to go to sleep a little bit later. No way that’s not, that, makes no sense, but I’m going to follow Martin’s instructions because, all these people have overcame their sleep issues, I’m going to do it.

Dulce: So I’m going to just trust the process and I started doing it. And that gave me so much freedom. My husband, he’s a great sleeper. it’s one of the things that I usually, that I’ve been listening into your podcast that, when partners are together, what, when they, a person who has insomnia issues, usually their couples have the best sleep.

Dulce: of their lives or they’re great sleepers. It’s like my husband. My husband is a great sleeper. So he would say, okay, do you want me to wait for you to fall asleep? And I said, no, just go to sleep. And I’m going to stay here watching TV. Why not? and that was something so weird for me because I stopped watching TV at, night. Or even, reading, novels or something that would wake my brain. I, used to stop reading that type of, science. I stopped reading science because I didn’t want to, think at night. So I say, why not reading whatever I want or watching TV? And it helped. I would say this since the first week it helped because.

Dulce: I don’t know what happened. It was just my anxiety went away and I was sleeping, only probably five hours and I was waking up in the middle of the night, but at least I was sleeping during the first week. And that gave me that new found freedom. I felt empowered to take control of my sleep patterns, not to take control.

Dulce: I would say to leave that control out. And just relaxing. So that was very, helpful.

Martin: Before you did that, did you find that you were spending like a lot of time in bed or allocating a lot of time for sleep, like more than maybe you even did when you were, when sleep wasn’t a concern, so you were going to bed a lot earlier than you might have wanted to or staying in bed a lot later in the morning?

Dulce: Yeah. As many people, I forced myself to go to bed earlier and being there because I was reading so many other books and other theories, that once you are In bed, you shouldn’t wake, you shouldn’t, wake up or stand up. You should stay there. I was not even drinking water at night because I was afraid of going to the bathroom and then when come back, my heart would beat harder so I couldn’t sleep.

Dulce: That was my mindset. so it was just putting so many, things in meticulous, processes in my sleeping patterns. And yeah, I was spending a lot of time, wake up in the middle of the night thinking, or, sometimes I would do the respiration, the breath exercises, like three, it was how many?

Dulce: Four seconds, inhale, five seconds, sustain and six seconds, exhale. I was doing that. That didn’t work. I was counting. I was, praying, asking God to send me, the sleeping and nothing worked until I woke up and then I went to the, pantry, took two or three or five or even six melatonin pills.

Dulce: And I thought that would give me. with me, back to sleep. Sometimes it would, but the next day I would feel horrible. yeah, so I was just spending a lot of time in bed. Nonsense.

Martin: I think that it’s understandable why we do that, because we want to get a certain amount of sleep, so we figure that, I’ll give myself that opportunity to for, sleep to happen. And then we can think, I normally spend, let’s just say four hours, five hours awake at night. So if I want to get.

Martin: say six hours of sleep. If I add the five hours of wakefulness, then really I should be spending like 10 or 11 hours in bed. That’s an extreme example, but that’s, the path we can go down where we just end up allotting so much time for sleep. and yeah, our average nightly sleep duration is significantly less.

Martin: So it’s almost like we’re setting ourselves up for really long periods of wakefulness. And, When we’re allotting so much time for sleep, there’s less time available for everything else, as you touched upon, and we can end up kind of feeling really constrained by it, because half of our life, maybe, is now set aside for us being in the bedroom trying to make sleep happen.

Martin: And we can also engage in all these, we can start move, removing all these things that are important or meaningful or enjoyable, like watching TV or reading books or doing certain activities because we’re concerned how that might influence our sleep. Really, our goal with it is to start moving away from the chasing, from chasing after sleep, by doing things like going to bed earlier, staying in bed later.

Martin: Because often when we can reflect on our own experience, the more we chase after sleep, the more elusive it becomes. So as a first step on the journey for moving away from chasing, to chase sleep less, is how about we start going to bed. or getting out of bed earlier, like just allotting an amount of time for sleep that’s a bit closer to what our current sleep duration is on average.

Dulce: Yeah, and I think it’s really helpful. The, all the studies that you show on your program, on the course, because those studies, For people that are so structured and rational like myself, that you have to have back science back. Everything those studies give you also release that, okay, I’m not gonna die if I don’t sleep.

Dulce: That’s okay. Some people can sleep five hours. at night and that’s okay and they feel fine. My dad, for example, he’s not the great sleeper and actually I already recommend him your course. because he really needs it. But all his life he has slept like five hours and that’s okay. That’s fine. But sometimes he struggles with anxiety because of that.

Dulce: He thinks that’s wrong. And I told him it’s not wrong. Actually, let me show you or share this studies that. There’s no back science, there’s nothing to prove that if you don’t sleep eight hours at night, and we, not all the humans, not all humans are equal, or we are similar of course, but we can, follow different sleep patterns or structure and that’s okay, and you don’t have to wake up every single morning at the same time. Sometimes you’re going to wake up earlier, and sometimes you’re going to wake up a little bit later, and that’s okay.

Martin: Suggesting that everyone needs to get, say, 7 hours of sleep or 8 hours of sleep. Would be like saying everyone needs to get a certain number of breaths every single day. It’s something the body wants to take care of by itself.

Martin: And it’s when we try and understandably get tangled up in the process of it, that things become more difficult because can you imagine trying to count the number of breaths you take every day? Like how distracting that would be, how much of a focus it would be, and then trying to modify and figure out, okay, so between 10 and 11 a. m. to keep me on track, I should take this number of breaths and then between one and three, while I’m working out, then maybe I should, I’m going to take a certain proportion of breaths then I’m confused already just trying to figure this out and that’s really what it can be like when we’re trying to control sleep, like the body wants to take care of it by itself and the more focus and attention we give it, it’s like the more it can consume us and recognizing that We don’t have to get a certain amount of sleep, and we can’t do that through effort anyway.

Martin: The body will take, will generate the amount of sleep it needs. It’s always going to generate the bare minimum. Maybe not on a single night, but over the course of a week, for example, it will generate the bare minimum we need. And everyone has their own individual sleep requirement, and even that can vary over our lifetimes, and it can even vary from day to day based on what’s going on in our lives.

Dulce: Yeah, in terms of nutrition facts, it’s just the same. Not everybody is going to need the same calorie intake. It’s not the same as a child compared to an older person. To, an older adult, it’s not going to be the same and you’re not going to need the same macronutrient intake. so everybody is different and every person needs something different.

Dulce: And also depending on the stage of your life. So this is something that really opened my mind. So why, if we don’t need the same amount of calories, why everybody needs the same amount of sleep? It’s makes no sense to me, but nowadays it makes no sense now, but before it would make sense.

Martin: Yeah, it’s, it is so much different, isn’t it, when we’re able to look back. we just have this different awareness. When we’re able to look back and describe this process, it can sound quite straightforward and quite easy, but it’s definitely not.

Martin: It’s one thing to talk about this. It’s really quite easy to talk about. But the actual action of change and the ongoing practice and the ups and downs that come with it, are still difficult. And it is a process and it’s a journey and it takes time. So you mentioned that a couple of the first things that you changed was you started going to bed later and that freed up more time for you to do other things.

Martin: You started to make decisions or take actions based upon what you wanted to do, rather than what, that little gremlin on your shoulder was telling you to do. So you started to not really be concerned about what kind of spectrum light you might be exposed to. You would watch TV, you would read books that were of interest regardless of whether they might activate your mind or not.

Martin: You started to break down those rituals or those rules and restrictions you had in place. What other changes did you make? Were there any other changes in addition to those?

Dulce: Yeah, initially, I reduced my reliance on melatonin, for example, and also all type of insomnia medications, nothing too strong, but still, those are, what is it, for allergies, but they, so I, used to take the anti allergic drugs or antihistamines that helps to sleep and I used to take those so I stopped taking those but I was taking a little bit of melatonin because I was afraid of non sleeping.

Dulce: but then I started lower down the dose little by little until I just stopped. I said I don’t need this anymore and embrace the sleep time restriction window. the frame. what about, or so I was learning about the correlation between sleep duration and health outcomes that, that has nothing to do rather than causation, because there is correlation, but there is no causation.

Dulce: And that provided me with newfound freedom. I felt empowered also to stop taking control of my sleep, just letting, things go. And besides that, the awake exercise, I was like, Oh my God, this is the exercise that I need, not only for my, for my anxiety at night, but also during the day. I’m still doing the AWAKE exercise every single day.

Dulce: I don’t care. And it’s part of my meditation, pathway because I’m in the journey of getting better in meditation and not because of insomnia is because of what type of peace gives me. But I think that your course gave me a starting point and exercising meditation, mindfulness. And I love the AWAKE exercise.

Dulce: It’s been a game changer for me. So yeah, those are the patterns that I started stopping at the beginning and then little by little, letting everything go. I didn’t took my blackout curtains because, Because that keeps my room cooler and I love being not too cool, but not too hot at night But not because that interrupts my sleep It’s because I the way I feel and that’s the mindset that I’m switching Compared to I need to have all these situations and all these patterns in order to fall asleep Compared to that is no it’s because it makes me feel good and I keep doing my sleep Ritual, but because I enjoy it and my ritual is okay.

Dulce: Now it’s 9 p. m I’m gonna start doing my makeup Removal routine my skincare because I love doing my skincare and I used to stop listening to music but now I’m listening to music at night or putting up a video Whatever video I want to watch in YouTube while I’m doing my skincare routine I love because that is my routine and that makes me feel good, calm Distress of whatever and during the day and then I close the windows I Drink a cup of tea Actually, I was stopping eating 5 p. m. Because I thought that was also one of the causes of my sleep issues. But now I stop eating at 6 or 7 sometimes, it depends on how I feel. But I do it not because of my sleep interrupting. I do it because that makes my, tummy feels better at night, lighter, and I wake up lighter, but not because that would interrupt my sleep.

Dulce: Actually, when I go to Mexico to see my parents, oh my god, they have huge dinner and very late night. I have it because I want to enjoy with them, and I have it, sometimes I just go for a walk in order to get better digestion, I come back and I fall asleep. That is something that I wouldn’t imagine before, I don’t recommend nobody to eat late at night, but it’s more because of health issues, but nothing to do with, sleeping.

Martin: Your actions are serving you rather than your actions are serving insomnia, sleep, anxiety, stress, worry, etc,

Dulce: Yeah. Yeah. The farther you step away from, insomnia. And actually I love what the exercise that you put on the course that you say insomnia, so you repeat the word over and over again. So say it, until you realize that it makes no sense. The word is just a word.

Dulce: That’s it. So the, farther you step away from that situation, the better you’re going to feel and the more focused you’re going to be on the things that matter instead of thinking on one little thing in your life.

There’s many exercise in the course, but don’t worry, there’s nothing complicated. This is just tools that you are grabbing or taking. And the better the best tool that you collect, it’s the one that you’re going to keep the rest of your life. That’s the way that I.

Dulce: I saw, but I found that incorporating these practices into my day and that helped me to manage the stress of the daily life, not only during night, but also the anxiety during the day.

Martin: first of all, I’m glad that you found those exercises helpful. , and I think it’s important to emphasize that any kind of exercise or practice or skill that we practice, We’ve got to be mindful of what our intent is, right? So if we’re doing something with the intention of making sleep happen or getting rid of certain thoughts and feelings or controlling our minds, we might be setting ourselves up for a struggle because usually we can’t directly and permanently control that stuff.

Martin: But with the exercises you mentioned from the course, really what they’re about is building skill in. struggling less when that stuff shows up. And it usually starts with acknowledging what we’re thinking and feeling rather than just trying to avoid it or immediately trying to fight it.

Martin: like you said, being more of an observer of it, being kind to ourselves when it shows up.

Dulce: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Incorporating those exercises is mindfulness into my daily life. And that helped me to regain, letting go. control over my thoughts and actions. Sometimes you can’t control them and that’s okay. Then you realize that, you’re going to get freedom and besides, or instead of controlling my thoughts, I prioritize in activities that brings me joy and stop letting thoughts about, I don’t know, insomnia or stressful activities in my day that dictate my life choices. For me, traveling was very important, was very joyful, used to be, and then it stopped being joyful. Stop, bring me joy because of my insomnia. so I learned to be more gentle first with myself and accept that occasional sleep disruptions that were part of everybody’s life. But also if you think with this, Biohacking movement that is out there, that we all need to sleep certain amount of hours at night and you have to experience and experiment with different, biohacks, like red light therapy.

Dulce: I, I spend so much money in all that stuff, thinking that would fix my sleep troubles.

Martin: There does seem to be this proliferation of, life hacks, and, they often come with new terminology or new slogans or new buzzwords and catchphrases. and I think often that can overcomplicate things or make it, or imply or suggest that there’s this one thing that’s going to be effective for everybody.

Martin: often, unfortunately, it can just add to the confusion, and when it comes to sleep there really doesn’t need to be any confusion because sleep is like breathing, like digestion. It’s something the body wants to take care of by itself. We just need to be awake for long enough for sleep to happen.

Martin: And really we need to not put any effort into making sleep happen. And then we’ve got the two perfect conditions for sleep. If we were going to summarize what the changes were that you made that you found most helpful, it sounds as though, maybe first of all, it sounds like that awareness of, the futility of adding struggle and effort on top.

Martin: What your brother pointed out was that first big moment for you, just the awareness itself. And then it moved on to not chasing after sleep so much. So you’d start to go to bed a bit later rather than earlier in an effort to make. more sleep happen or a certain amount of sleep happen. You started to identify and then break down any unhelpful rules and rituals that you had around sleep.

Martin: So you started to allow yourself to watch TV again. You started to allow yourself to read whatever you wanted to read again. you started to practice acknowledging the difficult thoughts and feelings that would show up, making space for them, being more of an observer of them, maybe being kind to yourself when things felt difficult to, and practicing ways that you might experience being awake at night, dealing with all the thoughts and feelings that can come with that with a little bit less struggle.

Martin: Refocusing your attention during the day when your mind started to pull you away and started to worry or think about what the next night might be like, or what you should try next, or this is never going to work, you should give up. Just acknowledging that and refocusing, bringing yourself back to the present moment with some kindness, refocusing on where you are, what you’re doing.

Martin: And, Doing what matters to you, so your actions served you. They didn’t serve your insomnia anymore. So everything you did was because that was important and meaningful to you, rather than important and meaningful for that little gremlin on your shoulder with the name of insomnia. does, that feel like a good summary of what your plan of action was?

Dulce: it was perfect. Yes. That’s exactly what I’ve been doing and nothing have been done overnight. So it’s being. a journey. You have to go, you have to be patient with yourself and allow things to, to do by themself, to let things go with the flow and calm down. And because people, and that is something that I also noticed On the forum, your forum.

Dulce: some people are super desperate. They want things for tomorrow. They want things be, they want results. overnight and that’s not possible. imagine how many years you’ve been struggling with this situation. And if you want results for tomorrow, probably that is a reason why you’re not sleeping.

Dulce: Because you are focused all the time in that anxiety. So instead of focusing on your insomnia, start focusing on letting things go, letting your anxiety be. Observe it and be gentle with yourself. so yeah, you, summarized perfectly the way that I’ve been, following those, steps. But I didn’t even think about the steps themselves.

Dulce: I only follow the process. I trust the process. I trust you and thank you. Yes. Thank you. I don’t know what I would done without my brother. Telling me at the beginning that day and opening my eyes. that I was just focusing in things that really didn’t matter. but that pushed me to find your course.

Dulce: I actually found, I think that I shared this with you that I was about to follow other course. it’s, it includes different tests, hormonal tests and, different biomarkers, neurotransmitters. And I was like, really? Do I really need this? it’s too much. It’s just giving me even more anxiety, but thanks God I found.

Dulce: your podcast. I found two podcasts. So it was like in between two. And I said, no, this is what my heart says. And yeah, I, follow it. I trust the process. And here I am.

Martin: I appreciate the, credit that you give me, but really, you did all the work. I can provide the information, no one’s gonna change their relationship with sleep just by consuming information.

Martin: Really what matters is acting on that information. and that’s, the hard part. Because change is difficult, change is scary, change is unpredictable. And like you touched upon, It makes sense that we want this fixed, right now. I want, and I wish I had that magic wand in my back pocket that I could just wave and everyone would just sleep perfectly tonight and never experience anxiety at night or any of the other thoughts and feelings that come with insomnia.

Martin: But we can’t. we can have this outcome goal in mind. But we can’t make that outcome happen through effort. What we can do is focus on the process of moving toward that outcome. And we can control that process in a way because it’s action based. So like you touched upon, what matters is making those changes, taking that, making that commitment to consistent action that move you towards the outcome that you want.

Martin: And it does take time. There’s no certainty in terms of the timeline, and there’s always ups and downs along the way. There can be patches where it feels like we’re doing great, and it’s all behind us, and then we have a difficult night again, and we feel like we’re back to square one. But we’re not. It’s just a case of continuing to practice if we feel that this new approach is getting us closer to where we want to be. If we’re noticing that, yeah, this is better than the alternative, which is struggle, fighting, avoiding, engaging in actions that aren’t realigned with who we are and who we want to be. How long would you say that it took for you to get to that point where you felt like you just weren’t engaged in that constant struggle anymore, the insomnia, sleep, the thoughts and feelings that come with being awake, were losing their power and influence over your life?

Dulce: It’s hard to tell, but I would say it started Doing certain effect in my mind since the first week, even though I, was struggling, I was still struggling with insomnia, I was waking up in the middle of the night, I was not sleeping the first week and not the following week, not probably one month, but at least my anxiety was lower, was not that high, and since the first week sleep window helped me to give me freedom. So that freedom allowed me to decrease my anxiety level. So from the first week. And then I would say that the second month, I only had two or three nights with insomnia, but I didn’t want to pay attention on them.

Dulce: I didn’t focus on them. And the third month, I didn’t have not even one insomnia, night. Not even one. I was waking up in the middle of the night, but that’s not insomnia. It’s part of your normal, sleep pattern. Everybody wakes up in the middle of the night. It’s just that some people, is more aware of it.

Dulce: And especially people that struggle with insomnia. They think that is part of the insomnia, but it’s not. It’s just that some people come back to sleep in 30 minutes, some people in 10 minutes, some people one. But yeah, I would say the third, month, I was in a wake or I, like for long, longer periods of time. Yeah. Like three, three months.

Martin: does this mean that now every single night is fantastic and perfect and you never have any difficult nights or never spend much time awake at night?

Dulce: no, Of course, sometimes I’m awake and, I was sharing the hormonal information a lot that when we are in our fertile, window, or years, women struggle more during luteal phase compared to, follicular, your estrogens are higher. So when they are higher, sometimes you can sleep.

Dulce: you can fall asleep deeper and that’s okay. And when you’re in the luteal phase, your hormones fluctuates more, especially because progesterone wakes you up a little bit more during the night or, gives you hot flashes. Like when you are in menopause also, you’re gonna keep struggling with that, with hot flashes.

Dulce: So you wake up and yeah, that’s a little bit hot. That’s okay. And just took the blankets out of myself. Just let it cool. That’s fine. And if I don’t sleep, if I can’t sleep, I just grab a book. I read a little bit and then I go back to sleep. That, is my life nowadays, but I don’t struggle with that situation. I don’t follow any rules.

Martin: It’s so insightful, just what you shared there, just this acknowledgement that, yeah, there’s going to be some difficult nights from time to time. Sometimes there might be a reason for it, like the hormonal fluctuations. Sometimes there might not be, but your response now or your relationship to that is completely different.

Martin: Like it’s not consuming you anymore, consuming your attention. It’s not this giant magnet from a Looney Tunes cartoon pulling you away from the life you want to live. You’re just acknowledging what’s happened and then you’re getting on with your life. It’s not throwing you around so much anymore.

Martin: It’s not a big focus. It’s not a big concern or an obstacle or a problem anymore on those occasional nights when insomnia decides to temporarily show up again.

Dulce: Yes, yeah, I no longer obsess over the number of hours of sleep. I get and focus more on the quality sometimes of my sleep and how I feel when I wake up. my husband used to be a better sleeper. He is a good sleeper, of course, but sometimes he wakes up and he says, Oh, I don’t know. I didn’t sleep. Oh, I don’t feel restful.

Dulce: And I say, I always feel restful, but it’s so rarely when I don’t feel restful, even if I just slept five hours. I feel restful and I feel with a lot of energy because I’m focusing on other things.

Martin: And on that note, something that I hear a lot from people is once they feel like they’re struggling less with being awake at night, maybe their sleep duration hasn’t even changed. Maybe they’re still spending a lot of time awake at night, but when they’re able to recognize that they’re struggling less with that wakefulness when it shows up, they feel like they’ve got more energy the next day, even though they’re not getting necessarily getting more sleep just yet.

Martin: But that absence of the struggle and the battle that takes place that might have been taking place for hours throughout the night is freeing up so much more energy. And that’s reflected in how we can feel the next day.

Dulce: Yeah. Sometimes we want to be perfect, but perfection is not attainable and embracing imperfection, once you embrace that imperfection that allow you to find peace within you.

Martin: I love that. I’m really grateful for the time you’ve taken out of your day to come on and show your story. I do have one last question for you, which I like to put in at the end of all these discussions.

Martin: And it’s this, if someone with chronic insomnia is listening and they feel as though they’ve just tried everything, what would you that they’re beyond help, that they’ll never be able to stop struggling with insomnia. What would you say to them?

Dulce: to anyone struggling with insomnia, I want to say there is hope. you don’t have to navigate this journey by yourself. sometimes we need guidance and support to realize that there are other people struggling with the same situations as you, and you can reclaim or let that control over your sleep and your life can get better, light. I would say trust the process and believe in your body’s ability to find balance again because your body is wise and it may take time and patience. But healing your body and your mind, especially your mind, because there’s nothing wrong with your body. I know people that have cancer. I’m a nutritionist.

Dulce: I work with elderly people. My patients, I have younger patients, but I also have older and, I work with over 65 years old people that are struggling with so many situations, cancer, diabetes, whatever you think, metabolic diseases, and they still, they can sleep, they still sleep. So if they can sleep while you’re not, while you cannot sleep, everything is in your mind and healing is possible. And I would say take the course. Don’t think about it. Just take it and trust the process and trust you.

Martin: Thanks again for coming on to the podcast dulce it’s really appreciated.

Dulce: Thank you. Thanks for inviting me. and thanks for, doing this, Martin. You are doing a great job, for this world.

Martin: That means a lot. Thank you.

Martin: I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Insomnia Coach Podcast. I’m Martin Reed, and as always, I’d like to leave you with this important reminder — you are not alone and you can sleep.

I want you to be the next insomnia success story I share! If you're ready to move away from the insomnia struggle so you can start living the life you want to live, click here to get my online insomnia coaching course.

Note: Dulce is an holistic nutritionist and can be found at Dulce Dagda Nutrición (website in Spanish).

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Listen to the podcast episode (audio only)Neseret’s experience with insomnia began when she tried tapering off an antidepressant she had been taking for 13 years. Every time she tried to get off the medication she found herself unable to sleep.

Although a move from shift work to regular daytime hours and being more active during the day helped to improve Neseret’s energy levels, she still couldn’t make the final leap to being medication free because she was petrified of going without sleep.

Finding Insomnia Coach and the stories shared on the podcast gave Neseret a newfound confidence that she could taper off the medication. She had hope.

Neseret began a supervised medical taper while practicing new skills and habits that helped her move away from struggling with sleep and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that often come with insomnia.

She stopped putting pressure on herself to generate a certain amount of sleep. Whenever she found herself struggling during the night, she would engage in another activity so she had an alternative to struggle. She stopped trying to control sleep.

Neseret’s journey was not easy. There were ups and downs. There were setbacks. And yet, today, she is off the medication and sleep is no longer a problem or an obstacle to her ability to live the life she wants to live.

Click here for a full transcript of this episode.

Martin: Okay, Neseret, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to come on to the podcast.

Neseret: Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

Martin: Let’s start right at the beginning. Can you tell us when your sleep problems first began and what do you think caused your initial issues with sleep?

Neseret: The first time that I experienced insomnia was when I was trying to taper off of psychiatric medications.

Neseret: and one of those medications being an antidepressant that actually, is supposed to help with sleep. And initially I was, diagnosed with depression and while I was exhibiting some hypothyroid symptoms, which is a medical condition that mimics a psychiatric, symptoms. And I was also in burnout, from being a psychiatric nurse and working in acute care.

Neseret: And I was placed on a hypothyroid medication and an antidepressant, and I had an adverse reaction to both of them. And within a few weeks, I became manic. and ended up being, diagnosed with antidepressant induced bipolar disorder. So I had sensitivities to medications to begin with, and this, antidepressant I was put on, I was on it for about 13 years, called Mirtazapine, and it’s pretty heavy duty, and I was told that it would help with mood, anxiety, and sleep, and appetite.

Neseret: pretty powerful, and I realized, over time that I was, there was periods I attempted to get off of it because there was quite a bit of side effects, sedation, brain fog, and sleep problems. weight gain, lots of increased sleep. So I would sleep for 12, 13, 14 hours. And, and so I attempted to get off of it several times.

Neseret: And that’s when I discovered I, I went into insomnia and I had never experienced that before. And just to give you a con, timeline. I was 30 when I was diagnosed and placed on the antidepressant for the first time. Prior to that, I never really had any issues with sleep. no insomnia. I, never had insomnia.

Neseret: And so when I attempted to taper off of this medication, was when I experienced like real insomnia. I’m talking about zero sleep, sometimes maybe one to two hours of very light sleep. And it was incredibly, unsettling. And and that was the first time that I realized, oh my goodness, this is what people go through, and this is what insomnia is.

Martin: So how long ago was this?

Martin: You mentioned it was you’re about 30 years old. I don’t want to make any assumptions about how old you are now. So I’m just curious, how long ago this was.

Neseret: It’s okay. I am 44 right now. And, when I first was placed on the antidepressant, I was, it was in 2010. And, And then I was on it for a while because I was struggling with my mood and, I didn’t realize at the time that I was actually having an adverse reaction.

Neseret: and there was several times along the way, along the path that I attempted to get off of, the antidepressant. And, I couldn’t. I kept going back on it. Because my sleep would be the last thing that came and I would just, wouldn’t sleep for days on end and I was just, I couldn’t get off of it. And that was actually, I was on multiple medications it wasn’t just the antidepressant, there was another medications that I was on.

Neseret: And I was able to taper off of that, but I was absolutely terrified to get off of mirtazapine. just because of, yeah, the impact.

Martin: Do you feel it was that, it was specifically that one medication that it was every time you tried to move away from that medication that you had experienced the insomnia?

Neseret: Oh, for sure. Mirtazapine is known for being incredibly sedative. but it also, and yeah, I was, I felt like for those years, I always say, figuratively, I was asleep, not only because I was on a cocktail of medications, but I would come home from, at the time I was working full time, from an eight hour shift, from seven in the morning until three, and by the time I’d get home, I was so exhausted, I would just lay down on the couch and sleep for a few hours, then get up and do some, a little bit of work I have to do, and then I would be in bed probably by eight o’clock.

Neseret: I was exhausted all the time. And if I could, I probably would sleep even longer. So it just felt like I was sleeping my life away, and, I wanted to get off of it. That was just one reason that I wanted to get off of it. There was other reasons, side effects, and this is the case for a lot of psychiatric medications, or even sleep medications, specifically, that are prescribed in psychiatry.

Neseret: there’s many medications that are pretty powerful that are prescribed to help people sleep and have, very serious side effects. a lot of them have, cause metabolic syndrome, which is like weight gain. they do something to your blood sugar. usually people end up being pre diabetes.

Neseret: they interfere with your blood pressure. just really compromised your physical health a lot of the times and mirtazapine did that for me. So the sleep was just one thing, but there was other issues as well.

Martin: Yeah. It sounds like you were really caught in between these two extremes of a whole load of sleep, excessive sleep, or the alternative was what felt like just no sleep at all.

Martin: That felt like they were your two options at the time and you were right in the middle of that.

Neseret: Absolutely. Yeah.

Martin: I’m curious, you, mentioned that nowadays you’re a psychiatric registered nurse, is that correct?

Neseret: I’m a registered nurse in training, but I have practiced psychiatric nursing, so that’s a specialty area for 17 years.

Neseret: And, yeah. I actually decided to end my career not too long ago, and decided to do coaching instead and consulting, and start my own business. And there was, there’s reasons for that, but, one of them being burnout. but yes, that’s what I practiced, for 17 years.

Martin: So were you practicing whilst you were in this really difficult period of wanting to get away from the medication.

Martin: And if so, was there any support you could draw upon, like from your professional background or advice that you could lean on to help you during this struggle?

Neseret: That’s a really good question and very interesting one. as you may already know, there’s a lot of stigma around mental health concerns.

Neseret: And, yes, the 13 years were, at the same time that I was in nursing. So it’s interesting, it’s coincided, I was taking care of, my clients. And I was also experiencing my own, symptoms going through that process. And I, people experience stigma nowadays, just fear that they’ll be judged.

Neseret: And I felt like there was like a double stigma with being a psychiatric nurse. I felt like I should figure this out. I should know how to handle this. And so there was like a shame around that, being a psychiatric nurse and also having mental health symptoms. And the interesting thing is, we are human beings, mental health professionals.

Neseret: And, we have, everybody has their own trauma and their own challenges in life. And, we, there’s such a thing called vicarious trauma, which is basically witnessing other people’s traumas. And so as mental health professionals, people come to us and they share and they unburden and tell us what’s been going on with them.

Neseret: And so I experienced a lot throughout my career, I would say about every few years, burnout. And it was because I was hearing, heartbreaking stories of people, which many of them research shows now that trauma usually precedes mental health and addictions issues. And so we’re just as vulnerable sometimes, I think, even more vulnerable.

Neseret: And I think mental health professionals are one of the most traumatized people. And so I think that I had the usual resources of, workplace therapy and this and that, but I never really felt comfortable to share things with people. I felt that I needed to figure this out and sort it out on my own, which is not the best way to go.

Neseret: but I think that is one thing that people struggle with when they are suffering. I’m sure people, when they arrived, to you, they’ve already suffered for years and years. even if it is when, with insomnia or whatever’s going on with them. So there’s just this sense of not wanting to reach out for help because of fear of judgment and, stigma.

Martin: I appreciate you coming on and sharing this. It sounds like you’re able to be a bit kinder to yourself too, and more willing to just open up and talk about it. So I really appreciate, you sharing that in an, open way. So thank you.

Neseret: Yeah, no, thanks. I think, I agree with you about the self compassion and, it’s still not easy to do it, but I feel that I want to share my story and my journey so that if there’s somebody out there who is struggling and going through the same path that they have some hope, at least that’s what I got from watching the interviews that you’ve done as well.

Neseret: So I do appreciate what you do. Just giving people that space to share and. help, others

Martin: to just to return that appreciation, the podcast wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for guests like yourself being willing to come on and share their experience. And a lot of that experience contains a lot of struggle.

Martin: and maybe a lot of self judgment upon reflection. And it can be difficult to talk about these things. And yeah, I appreciate you coming on and being willing to talk about that.

Martin: So you’re at this situation where staying on the medication is associated with sleeping your life away. Coming off the medication is associated with not going to get any sleep. how did you, at first, when you first realized that you were stuck in that really difficult position, what did you do?

Martin: How did you respond? Were you looking for like alternative medications or alternative ways of addressing your sleep so you could move away from the medication? what were your first steps on that journey like?

Neseret: I was definitely felt like I was stuck for many years and just having to put up with the side effects of the medications and then trying to figure out a way to just figure out a way for me to get proper sleep and have just a healthy lifestyle.

Neseret: So I was looking for different ways and I believe in a holistic approach to healing in general. A few years ago, I decided to give up shift work and, got just a daytime job. So I was getting up every morning at the same time at five o’clock and that’s one of the things that you teach in terms of anchoring your sleep.

Neseret: And, and so I was just working Monday to Friday and I noticed throughout the year like something shifted from me. Like I felt better. My energy was a tiny little bit better and I just liked that schedule. And, so I was also trying different things like, walking a lot, like hiking five to 10 kilometers a day.

Neseret: I was, doing intermittent fasting. I was, doing some mindfulness, exercises. So I started really exploring all these different things. And, I eventually also did the ketogenic diet for, mental health. And between all of those things, the last thing was I had tapered off of, Multiple medications and the only one that was left was the mirtazapine and I was terrified.

Neseret: And so I was researching for sleep and that’s when I came across your information. And because I just thought, you know what, do I have to be on this medication for the rest of my life, even though I have all these other side effects? And I was just like, I don’t know how to get off of it. And I don’t know how to sleep.

Neseret: It was just like, I was just petrified. I was just like, I, don’t know how to do this and I can’t do this and I don’t want to stay on this medication. And so I would say it was like a seven year journey altogether when I started to really look at this holistic approach. And the sleep piece I knew was like foundational and I needed to sort through that and this medication wasn’t helping me.

Neseret: like you said, it was just like being stuck in a rock and a hard place, that expression. And so when I came across your information, I was just like, Oh my God. Okay. I think I have, there’s hope for me, but yeah, that was basically the journey that, I went through.

Martin: Wow. So you knew that you wanted to be off this medication.

Martin: And At the same time, you knew that if you just remove that medication or tape it off that medication, the sleep issues would show up again. So in the meantime, you’re looking at all these different ways of creating the best possible conditions for sleep or just setting yourself up for good sleep by Changing your job so you had a more consistent schedule, so you’re working the day shift, doing hiking, exploring mindfulness, different diets and different fasting, but you still knew that even with all that ongoing experimentation, there’s still that, what is it, what’s the expression, like the 300 pound gorilla in the room, which is the medication.

Neseret: Yes.

Martin: what was it when, you came across my work that you mentioned, that stood out and you thought, ah, there’s, something here, there’s there’s either an approach I haven’t tried, or there’s something here that resonates with me. What is it that stood out and made you think, ah, there’s, an option here, or there’s, a new way forward here?

Neseret: When I came across your work, you just had a way of explaining things that was so straightforward. And I liked your energy, like I’m sensitive to people’s energies, and I just felt like you were very grounded and down to earth.

Neseret: And you presented the information in a way that, That was so practical. and then listening to the podcast interviews, I really love hearing stories of people and just seeing their journey throughout and that transformation. And I just felt, I thought, okay, I’m going to, binge watch everything here and learn as much as I can.

Neseret: And that was really the information that gave me the confidence to finally taper off of this medication that I was, yeah, I became dependent on basically. I felt like I had the confidence. I was just like, I think I can do this now. and yeah, it was just incredibly helpful and liberating to, to actually have hope. It’s just Oh my goodness. Okay. I can do this now.

Martin: I get a lot of questions from people that feel ready to make changes to their approach to sleep, but they might be on a medication, various medications.

Martin: And a common question I get is, do I need to? My goal is to be off the medication. Do I need to be off the medication to start making these changes? And my answer is always no. As far as I’m concerned, the medication isn’t something that we really explore because I’m not a doctor. that’s a discussion for you to have with your doctor.

Martin: But really what, when I’m working with clients, we’re looking purely at behavior change. We’re looking at identifying current behaviors that aren’t really working. And, Exploring how we might be able to change them into behaviors that might be more helpful. Not only for sleep, but to move us closer to the life we want to live independently of sleep.

Martin: And so because we’re focused really on actions and practicing new actions and behaviors, forming new habits, really their skills. And we can practice new skills regardless of whether or not they’re helpful. medication or not. I’m curious, you mentioned that when you started to consume my content, you said that it gave you the confidence to start that tapering process.

Martin: Was it You worked through all the content and then you felt, okay, I’m ready to make these changes and start tapering immediately. Or did you start making the changes and then taper? I’m just curious, in the context there.

Neseret: This is a general guideline for psychiatric medication, especially if someone is on a prescribed psychiatric medication for sleep.

Neseret: Tapering in general needs to be approached. not lightly, like you really need to be very careful because some of the, withdrawal effects you can have serious impact. And that was the case with mirtazapine for me. So I really have to approach it with, so there is, I agree with you. There was like a psychological dependence and the, behavioral stuff that I had to learn, but there was also, a biological, chemical dependence. It’s one thing if you were just taking even melatonin or some sort of like herb or supplement. But I think when it comes to a more powerful medications like psychiatric medications, that tapering process to really needs to be approached with caution. And, I actually had to go through a compound pharmacy to make sure that I was tapering, and work with the pharmacist and a family physician.

Neseret: So it was a medically supervised taper. and to go very slowly because, there was withdrawal, effects. but what I did was I first went through your information and got the education piece and all the different, strategies and, like you said, behavioral changes, but I also realized, yes, it’s, it’s an, Attitude change and how you approach not just sleep, but like you were saying, life in terms of, being patient and, not expecting results right away.

Neseret: being able to have some flexibility in your thinking and approach, even like when you’re not being able to sleep at night, get out of your bed and just do something else for a little bit, as opposed to those things, were really helpful. And, So I first got, I think it depends on, for everyone that’s different and how they approach it.

Neseret: But for me, it was incredibly helpful for, to first go through your program, go through your information and have that, because I was just so terrified that wouldn’t have been a good experience for me to go through that taper. So your information is actually what gave me the confidence to go through the taper.

Neseret: Because, I felt like now I had knowledge and tools that I can do this. And that emotional, arousal of Oh my God, I am doing something, it’s not going to work, was not helpful for sleep anyways. So for me it was first go through your information and feel that, have that knowledge, have the tools, feel confident, and then went through the taper.

Martin: When I get that question, that’s largely my response. if, we can recognize that our approach to sleep is something we want to change and we’re taking medication. If we realize our approach to sleep is something we want to change, why wait? We don’t need to wait until we’re off medication or until we’re tapering medication to make changes to our approach to sleep if we feel our current approach isn’t working, right?

Martin: I think a lot of people come to me and they believe that they’ve got to be off medication for any of this to be worthwhile, but I don’t think that’s the case. Although everyone is the expert on themselves and it sounds as though what you’re saying from your own experience that wasn’t the case for you either.

Martin: You found it helpful to just start exploring this new approach, maybe getting some practice in with a few changes and then it was a decision you made a little bit further down the line. Okay, now I feel ready to talk to my doctor and come up with a specific tapering off plan at that time.

Neseret: Oh yeah, I actually, recommend all of my clients that I work with your program because I feel like it’s, such a, anybody who’s experiencing mental health and addictions issues, sleep is such a major issue.

Neseret: But I also feel like your approach and things, the tools that you teach, like I said, it’s not just helpful for sleep, but it’s a way of being that is just, mindful. And. I do feel that people can benefit from that whether they’re on medication or off medication and they can implement it at any time in the process.

Neseret: I just would make sure anybody who is on pretty powerful medications to take their time in the tapering process. But I agree with you in terms of that this could be implemented at any time. Just for me, this was what worked. but the sort of the teaching and the approach and the attitude, It can be helpful for anyone that is struggling with sleep at any point.

Neseret: Yeah.

Martin: And I appreciate the emphasis, too, that it’s important that if anyone is taking medication to talk to their doctor first, to talk about their plans, what they want to do, and to really work with, their physicians before making any changes. Now you’re able to look back, what do you feel that some of the, New approaches specifically to sleep that you made, or changes you made to how you approach sleep that helped you move away from the struggle?

Martin: What do you feel were some of the really helpful changes that you made?

Neseret: One of the first big ones was I had this idea that I needed eight hours of sleep to just function properly. And I remember the first night I was completely tapered off and I was a little anxious and I, I actually slept for three hours and I got up and I was so excited and I was just like, oh my goodness, like I fell asleep on my own and I stayed asleep for three hours and I told my partner that and the next morning I was so excited and it was just like, I haven’t done this like in 13 years.

Neseret: Just to be able to sleep and stay asleep on my own, and it was like, just a huge accomplishment. I feel really rested and I am not obsessing about Oh, I need nine hours or seven hours or, eight hours.

Neseret: as I just pay attention to my body and see how I feel, how my energy is and I’m okay with it. So that was a big one. Just this sort of like cultural conditioning and, idea of how much sleep somebody needs. And that was like a huge thing. and also another one was just that when you’re not able to sleep to get out of bed and, just do something else until you’re tired again.

Neseret: So just having that flexibility in your mind. You’re not forcing anything. That’s a really good sort of, life principle. It’s not just for sleep. Because we tend to just push against something when we’re struggling with whatever it is as opposed to just maybe hitting the pause button and stepping back and being like, okay, just be in a more surrendered state.

Neseret: And so that was another thing that I really appreciated about your teaching.

Martin: So it sounds as though It was almost like a mindset shift where you weren’t holding yourself to this standard of I need to get a certain amount or a certain type of sleep. and when that shift happened, maybe you were then in turn putting less pressure on yourself and maybe being a little bit less critical or self judgmental on any times or based on whatever happened from night to night.

Neseret: Yes. Yeah, that was huge. And along those lines too, you mentioned that sleep is like a natural human function that all of us just like breathing. We can do that. Our bodies can manage to do that. And so that was huge because I think when you are become dependent on a medication or a supplement or something outside of you to sleep, you get to that place where you’re thinking, I need something outside of me to get some sleep.

Neseret: And so it was so freeing to realize, you know what, I, my body has its own wisdom and I can fall asleep and I, I can stay asleep on my own. And so that was so important to realize. and there was, I remember in one of your emails you sent out, There was a quote about a person who was saying that when you give someone, a pill or something outside of themselves to sleep, you’re basically giving them the message that they can’t do that on their own.

Neseret: And so it’s really disempowering in the end. And that is something that I feel in, psychiatry, not just with sleep, but many other medications over medicated, on multiple medications, often they give them terrible side effects. And I’m not against, completely against psychiatric medications. I think in acute crisis and in a short, brief stabilization period, even if it’s sleeping medications to reset your sleep, those can be quite helpful.

Neseret: But long term people experience dependency, they experience, many unwanted effects and sometimes adverse effects and toxicity. And but also the message that, we all suffer and we all experience life challenges. And sometimes you go through stressful periods when sleep is going to be dis, disrupted.

Neseret: And that is temporary and it can be resolved. And there’s many other different paths and ways of coping and dealing with it. As opposed to this immediate of I want something to be fixed right away. That’s also like that mindfulness piece that I really appreciate about all of that is just being able to be patient and find creative ways to help a person, whether it’s to improve their mental health, whether it’s like you said, to live the best life that they can to find peace of mind contentment and or get a good night’s rest.

Neseret: So there’s different ways, creative ways to approach the path of healing and becoming whole. it’s not just medication and it’s not just therapy, like there’s many paths to healing.

Martin: Yeah, I think you, you touched upon this word flexibility earlier as well when you were talking about, how we respond to being awake during the night, for example.

Martin: There’s more than one way of responding to insomnia. And I think when we’re really caught up in the struggle, it feels like there’s only one way to respond.

Martin: And that is to fight it, try and destroy it, defeat it, get rid of it once and for all. And that is completely understandable. And yet for most of us, when we reflect on our experience, I think we can realize that although the approach is understandable, it doesn’t seem to be working over the long term.

Martin: And so maybe it is the fighting itself and the struggle that comes with that’s keeping us stuck where we are. so maybe there are other alternatives that we can explore. And I truly believe that no one is ever broken. It’s just so easy to get stuck and we just need to look at exploring new ways forward.

Martin: And I think there’s always a new way forward even when things feel completely hopeless.

Neseret: I love that. I absolutely love that because So many people I think that are struggling with insomnia or even with their mental health or with an addictions issue that’s where we get to we get a person gets to that place where they can You struggle so much for so long, you tend to lose hope and then you think, I think I’m stuck in this.

Neseret: And there is such a sense of, defeat and just feeling like you don’t have anything. And so that idea of, what you’re describing to me is like surrender. to be in a surrendered place, but also, to be open, like just open to the possibility that there might be hope or there might be, help and, then being willing to look in different ways and different directions.

Neseret: I think that’s where I came to in my sort of like 13 year journey, halfway through. I did come to a place where I was really losing hope. I felt I was so stuck that, and also feeling like I was a burden It was very painful. And that’s really hard to admit, but I know it is something that impacts so many people. but during that halfway place where I was starting to explore alternative and complementary and holistic approaches, That’s when I was in that place of surrender and thinking, okay, maybe, I’m trying to figure this out on my own.

Neseret: But maybe there’s, a different way to look at this. Because I looked at it in one way, which is, as, my training as a psychiatric nurse, as a registered nurse, is based on western medicine and, psychiatric care, which is very much heavily reliant on the biomedical model. And that, there’s something genetic, chemical, which is, by the way, not necessarily, there’s some truth to that, but it’s not entirely true.

Neseret: it was the willingness to be open to other possibilities and ways of healing, not just the one way that we know, which is diagnose, medicate, and this is it. And I think I, to some extent, bought into that. And that’s not from, my background. I’m actually originally from Ethiopia, East Africa.

Neseret: And my ancestors, that’s not the way they looked at things. people were into exploring spirituality, connection, and community. my grandmother was like a herbalist. My grandfather was, a dream interpreter and a farmer. And so I come from that rich indigenous background where medication and therapy, that’s, not even, it’s looked at as one path of healing, but it’s not everything.

Neseret: And so that idea, I really appreciate your teaching around that in terms of the, not fighting against something and just thinking that is the only way to solve that problem. But to actually really look at that. And that is a life principle. It’s not even like, I said, the thing that I love about the way you teach things, is that these principles are good for sleep for sure.

Neseret: fantastic, but they are, have deeper implications for a human being in the way they look at life and in the way they approach life altogether, which is really beautiful. So you benefit from, getting good rest, but you also get tools to live your life in a way that actually makes sense and will help you have some peace and contentment.

Martin: Again, I really appreciate just your openness and your honesty, sharing, the struggles and your thoughts that you’re having at the time when things felt hopeless, because my goodness, there’s no doubt that when things feel hopeless, it’s really difficult and it can really feel as though there’s no other options.

Martin: There’s no way forward. but I think that even when things are hopeless, there’s always a way forward. It’s just that we might not be aware of what that way is yet. and it, in a way, It’s almost the signal of an opportunity because when we feel hopeless it shows that maybe what we’ve been doing up to this point isn’t the right approach for us.

Martin: It’s that, whatever it is that’s leading us to feel hopeless isn’t the right thing for us, and that’s okay. Even, it might be, it might, in air quotations, work for 99 percent of people, but that doesn’t mean it should work for you. It just means that we need to explore ways forward that are right for you, and everyone is different, and I think there’s always opportunity to move forward.

Martin: new approach you were exploring was helpful for sleep, but also it seemed to offer you benefits in other ways related to living the life you want to live, and developing some growth or some new other skills in living your daytime life.

Martin: doing things that matter to you. I’m living a more rich, more and more rewarding life. Can you dig a little bit deeper there?

Neseret: Yeah. so I think what happened was, I told you that I was, work is really important and meaningful for me personally.

Neseret: And, I remember at the time I came across your work, I was heading down to burnout, which was a long, a long time ago. And, I was actually looking for ways to do my work in a more meaningful and creative way. And so it’s interesting when I came across your information and I saw how you are approaching your work and the service that you’re providing and in the way you’re providing it.

Neseret: I remember thinking, wow, this is really fantastic. And I would love to, do something like this, but I’m in this path that I’ve been on for 17 years and, I loved doing what I was doing. I was always been fascinated with sort of human psychology and loved working with people. I felt I was privileged to do what I do.

Neseret: just giving, creating a safe space for people to share what was going on for them. But I was very discontent with how. because of the many challenges that are in the system and that it didn’t align with who I was and what I believed in, terms of how to approach people in distress. and so I wanted to do something different and I just remember, and I’ve always had that in the back of my mind.

Neseret: And when I came across your work, and I’ve come across other people as well, but Your, information really deeply resonated with me because sleep is something that is such a major issue for individuals, many of the individuals that I’ve worked with and for myself. And so I was looking at it not only because, from a perspective of a client in terms of your work, I was looking at it from, as a clinician as well, who wanted to branch away from the traditional and conventional system And do something different.

Neseret: And so I thought I need to learn something from Martin and see what he’s doing. And maybe this is possible for me as well. And so there was a huge major decision that I made at that point. It wasn’t too long ago. I’m talking about Oh, about, October, November of last year, just, and, that was something that was a huge decision, not only because I had this period of stability and I had implemented so many things that are holistic and I was able to put a condition that is considered, I was told, was chronic, lifelong, and I had to be on medication for years.

Neseret: And I would need, medication to help me sleep and eat and all of that. And I was able to put that into remission. And. Bipolar disorder and remission are not never in the same sentence in psychiatry. And so that, that inspiration came and I thought, okay, I’m going to do this. And so that was a, I made a major decision to leave, a 17 year career and start my own business.

Neseret: So not only did you help me with my sleep, but you also inspired me in the way you are doing your business. to be like, you know what, maybe there’s a way for me to use everything that I have learned and gone through personally and professionally and bring that into, doing, and, creating something, an alternative approach for others to give them an option as well.

Neseret: So I, I made those two decisions, major, shifts and changes and thank you. I want to say thank you so much.

Martin: I can provide some information and maybe act as a guide, but really you’re the one that makes the changes and makes the decisions. I hope that you’re able to give yourself like 99 percent of the credit because you’re the one that did all the work.

Martin: but it sounds as though now you’re able to look back on this whole experience that and you’re able to reflect on what you’ve learned, how you’ve grown, how you’ve changed, what the transformation has been like, that it’s felt quite empowering to you and that sense of empowerment has got you enthusiastic to explore what you can do with that, what you can do with that period of growth that you’ve experienced and maybe live a life that’s more aligned with who you are or who you want to be.

Neseret: Oh, absolutely. And that’s been a huge blessing. And it was terrifying at first, to leave something that was so familiar and I have been identified with for so long, but it also, I had that desire to find something, a path that was more aligned with who I was. And also, I felt limited in what I could offer people as a psych nurse because in the traditional system, like I said, there’s only a couple of different options that people have.

Neseret: And so for me to, now, as a coach and can, and I had started my own company, I have, a YouTube channel that, I, create videos for and, it’s a, major shift, but it does feel like, it’s freeing, and also it allows more creativity for me, and, I had to also be in a surrendered place there because, there’s a lot of, uncertainty and the unknown in making that transition.

Neseret: And so again, those mindset, things that you mentioned like surrender and flexibility and maybe even just sitting with the unknown and, uncertainty and being okay with it. just the same as when you’re like wake up in the middle of the night at 2 a. m. and you have anxiety or fear or you can’t sleep for whatever reason.

Neseret: You just accept that, okay, this is what’s happening right now, and we’re gonna just be with it. Maybe there’s something that can be done, and maybe there isn’t. But either way, not to make it into a huge problem, but to just go with the flow for the moment, and then out of that will come whatever the next, the right step is going to be.

Neseret: And it, those principles that you teach about sleep are actually really have a lot of application in many ways. so yeah, I am really grateful that I have my health, my, I’m completely tapered off of all medication, psychiatric medications. I am no longer experiencing any symptoms of depression or hypomania.

Neseret: And, my sleep is good. I, My energy is good. I sleep about six hours. So it’s incredible to have so many hours to work with every day and to do different things like enjoy with family and work and, read and just go for nature walks and all those things. it’s just amazing to have not to be sleeping two thirds of your life.

Neseret: And also not sleeping and not having any sleep. So it’s just to find that balance and, also to. Help support people through that process as well and give them an option, an alternative to the traditional conventional system. it’s, been amazing. Like I, and like I said, I, every client that I have, I’m like, you have to talk to Martin

Martin: I appreciate that. Were there any other changes that you made or practiced during this process that you’re able to reflect on and you think, yeah, that was really helpful for me.

Neseret: Yeah, there’s so many things, that can be really helpful. I think the first step is just, knowledge. I think that piece is real, really critical. If you can educate yourself about, this work and I spend some time listening to the stories. That’s huge.

Neseret: That part is really critical. Knowledge is power. And then the next thing would be, The willingness to commit to something that is going to take time. Like a lot of the times we seem to want something to be sorted out right away, like a quick fix. And I would say this work is not a quick fix. I would say this was about, for me, starting to give up shift work that was like a couple of years back.

Neseret: And then. coming across your work and then tapering off of medication. So it was a process. I’m not saying it’s going to take you a year or two years, but you need to give yourself some time and have realistic expectations of what you can achieve during that time. That in the beginning, it’s going to be a little bit of up and down until you get to a place where you can have that stability and consistency with sleep.

Neseret: So to just, be willing to have those incremental shifts over time. And I think that applies for our health in general and for many things that are worthwhile in life, that nothing happens overnight. And there might be some, growing pains and process as you go through. But if you’re willing to stick with it and learn and be patient with yourself, and like you said, have self compassion.

Neseret: I think that’s huge. because a lot of the times, we’re too hard on ourselves, and that is not helping. That’s not helpful to us. So if we can develop like a way to just relate and be more compassionate and soothing, self soothing as well, then It just makes that process a little bit easier and also To be able to be willing to reach out for help and support.

Neseret: I know like I said, I wasn’t very good at it over the years and I felt because I was a psychiatric nurse mental health professional then I should have my stuff and I shouldn’t need help and also sometimes you feel like there’s that divide but I realized over time I was like i’m no different than any of my clients.

Neseret: They’re human beings. I’m human being they suffer. I suffer You we all don’t want to suffer. So it’s just I had to come to that place where I’m just like, yeah, I, need to figure this out and then to be able to help others as well. and so I guess my point was, don’t be afraid to reach out for help and support, like your information.

Neseret: I think you are doing amazing work. if you’re really struggling it it helps to have someone who has, who knows, who has knowledge and who can guide you through that process, and and there’s no shame in asking for help and support. I think as human beings, we thrive with encouragement and support and the, thing about hiring a coach or working with someone who is, who knows what they’re doing is that it cuts off so much of your struggle and it shortens that time.

Neseret: And so it makes it much, much easier than having to struggle on your own.

Martin: You touched upon the ups and downs, which I’m really grateful for because it’s never plain sailing, right? it can be easy for, People to listen to these podcast episodes, and unless we specifically talk about it, to believe that progress should be linear, it should just be good night after good night or get better and better but there are always ups and downs.

Martin: There are always setbacks. Setbacks are a part of progress. How did you deal with them whilst you were tapering away from the medication and practicing this new approach to sleep? So when these difficult nights maybe show back up again, how did you respond to them in a way that kept you moving forward?

Neseret: I was, so grateful to, even have an hour of sleep or two hours of sleep on my own. It was just like everything was a win after that. Like the fact that I was able to just fall asleep and stay asleep. That was a huge thing. And then any, anything else after that, it was just like, just a victory.

Neseret: I love reading. So if I wake up and I’m not able to go back to sleep, I just get up and do some work. And then usually within a couple hours, I’ll feel tired again and I’ll go back.

Neseret: And, I just, like you said before, I just didn’t want to make sleep into a problem anymore. I don’t want, it’s something that has, we need as human beings and that’s okay, I accept that. But let it be however way it looks. And that’s again, our life as much as we like to for it to be a certain way, like I didn’t see myself, my career necessarily ending in the way that it did after two decades of investing all my time and energy.

Neseret: I can just stay bitter and unhappy about the whole thing, or I can just shift and pivot and do something else and be grateful for the experience that I’ve had, even what I went through personally or whatever suffering that came out of that. That I could use that now to make a difference in the lives of others.

Neseret: I, like I said, it’s there’s such, so many parallels between sleep and our approach and attitude towards it and the way we live our lives as well. Which is, again, just being mindful and being grateful. So yeah, if I sleep four or five hours or three hours, I’m grateful for that. I’m just like, okay, I got some sleep.

Neseret: I don’t make it into a problem anymore. Yeah, it’s not, sleep doesn’t occupy my mind as much. Now, as much as it did way, before,

Martin: I think there’s always an opportunity to notice a glimmer, even if it’s just a glimmer of positivity or hope, and to just tease that out and be more aware of it. And I think it’s a skill and it requires practice, but the more we can practice looking for the positives, because our mind doesn’t normally go there by itself. We have to make that conscious effort. It really can help change our mindset. when we focus on our successes or we reflect on other times in our life when we’ve got through adversity, when we think about what strengths we have and how we can use these to get through these difficult periods and when we have less expectations. around things like sleep, like I should get, or I need to get, I have to get, I must get. We put so much burden on ourselves to perform in a certain way, which in other areas of life, maybe that can motivate us. But when it comes to sleep, Usually what happens is the more we try to make a certain amount or type of sleep happen, the more difficult it can become.

Martin: so just look, that mindset shift is I think it’s a common theme or a common thread that runs through these podcast episodes that a lot of people identify with. It’s almost like the first thing that changed, not before even sleep started to change, was the mindset change. how we interpret.

Martin: what happens from night to night and what our relationship with sleep is like tends to change. And then once that becomes more entrenched, once sleep starts to lose its power and influence over our lives, that’s when the body maybe takes over and is more likely to start generating more sleep or better quality sleep or more consistent sleep.

Neseret: Oh, for sure. Yeah, I think that little bit of appreciation goes a long way.

Martin: You touched upon this career change that you embarked upon. So it sounds like you’re in the coaching field yourself. what kind of clients are you looking to take on or what kind of clients do you help?

Neseret: So the clients that I work with are individuals who are struggling with their mental health.

Neseret: they may or may not have a diagnosed, a sort of a diagnosis. many of them are on medications, but they don’t have to be. Okay. and I work with individuals, adults, and at risk youth, and their parents. And, I basically help advocate for them to, navigate the traditional system, because I have a lot of knowledge around that.

Neseret: But I also, have taken a course in metabolic psychiatry, and, believe in a holistic approach. So I help people if they want to Approach that path with, less medication, go through a process of reducing significantly or tapering. I connect with their clinicians and work with that, as well as helping them implement the ketogenic diet and for mental health and, addressing all the different aspects, of their health, not just, lifestyle changes, like making sure that they have proper sleep, reducing stress, being mindful, exploring spirituality, whatever that means to them, creativity, meaningful work, like looking at it from many different sides.

Martin: Where can people find you if they’re interested in learning more about what you do?

Neseret: so I have a YouTube channel, Nesra Bemiant, and I’m also on Twitter.

Martin: Great. I’ll be sure to put links to those in the show notes for anyone that wants to check out more about the work you do and your philosophy and your approach. yeah. I, really appreciate the time that you’ve taken out your day to come on, Neseret. I do have one last question for you, which I would like to pose and see what insights you can share with us.

Martin: and it’s this. If someone is listening to this and they just feel that they’ve tried everything, they’re beyond help, they Just cannot move away from the insomnia struggle. What would you say to them?

Neseret: That’s a really tough place to be. And it can feel like you’re on your own and alone in it. And it’s tough when you’re in that space to feel like there is, because you’ve struggled for so long, that there’s any help or hope.

Neseret: that’s understandable. At the same time, I know, that if you’re willing to keep an open mind that there’s a way for things to be better, then there’s that possibility. and that’s hard when you’ve tried so, for so long to, and struggled for, quite a time. but I would say, Spend some time on, Martin’s, channel and subscribe to the email so that you get those, lessons and start with that and then start applying just a little bit baby steps, and be patient with yourself, really be patient with yourself and see where that goes.

Neseret: You can’t, you have to first, it’s hard to try something new when you have tried so many things and hasn’t worked out, but this is something that is going to, that you’re going to create from within yourself. It’s not anything that’s going to come from outside of you. And the major piece, like even in our conversation today, and Martin, you said like the, there’s a theme that runs through this, the biggest shift that you’re going to make is a mental shift and an attitude shift.

Neseret: And that can be started anytime, at any point, from where you are. Even if it is to say, you know what, I’m going to try one more thing, and I’m going to try this thing, and I’m gonna make change. And just be willing to be open to that possibility, that you have the power within you, even in times when it feels hopeless, and you have tried everything, that there may be something else.

Neseret: And the biggest shift is going to be that journey that you make in your mind and in your heart and in your attitude.

Martin: Thank you again, Nesret, for taking the time to come onto the podcast and share your experience. It’s appreciated.

Neseret: Thank you so much for having me. I really, I have a lot of respect for what you do.

Neseret: And I’m, thank you so much for what you’ve given me as well, through your example and through your work.

Martin: I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Insomnia Coach Podcast. I’m Martin Reed, and as always, I’d like to leave you with this important reminder — you are not alone and you can sleep.

Mentioned in this episode:

Neseret’s website: Mental Health Reset
Neseret’s social media: Twitter/X & YouTube

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Listen to the podcast episode (audio only)When Bryan got sick he experienced an entire night of no sleep for the first time in his life. He didn’t sleep the next night, either. When his sleep didn’t get back on track, Bryan started to believe that he had lost the ability to sleep and that belief generated a lot of anxiety.

As sleep consumed more and more of his energy and attention, Bryan started to withdraw from life. His relationships suffered as sleep became the center of his universe.

Bryan found that the more he tried to make sleep happen, the more difficult sleep became, the more anxiety he experienced, the more likely he was to engage in actions that didn’t reflect who he was or who he wanted to be, and the more difficult everything became.

And yet, as a driven problem-solver, he continued to try.

Things began to change for Bryan when he accidentally fell asleep. When he fell asleep even though he didn’t do anything to make sleep happen. There was no trying. No effort. No rules. No rituals. No medication. No supplements.

Bryan realized that he hadn’t lost the ability to sleep after all — and that he didn’t need to do anything to make sleep happen.

This insight didn’t get rid of Bryan’s struggles overnight but it prompted him to change his approach.

He started acting in ways that served him and the life he wanted to live, rather than sleep. When difficult nights showed up, he would remind himself of the better nights (and how they required no effort or intervention). Then, he would refocus his attention on what he could control by doing things that mattered to him — actions that kept him moving toward the life he wanted to live, independently of sleep.

With this approach, sleep started to lose the power and influence it once had over his life. In Bryan’s own words, as he started getting his life back to normal, his sleep started getting back to normal, too.

Click here for a full transcript of this episode.

Martin: Okay, Brian, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to come on to the podcast.

Bryan: Yeah, thank you.

Martin: Let’s start right at the beginning. Can you tell us a little bit more about when your sleep problems first began and what you think caused those initial issues with sleep?

Bryan: I pinpointed back to a time where I got sick and I got sick and that evening my body broke out in hives.

Bryan: And I ended up taking myself to the urgent care and they gave me a steroid. They gave me a steroid plus some other medication to to curtail the hives and the breakout. And I don’t know if it was an allergic reaction that I had to the medication, the steroid injection or the medication that gave me, I’m not sure.

Bryan: But that night. My, my hives persisted and I didn’t sleep at all. So it was, I went my first time in my life going an entire night without sleep. And that was the beginning of this era of me not sleeping for a couple years. And so that, so I thought, okay, fine. I didn’t sleep that one night.

Bryan: Nothing will happen the next night. We’ll be fine. It happened again the next night I didn’t sleep. And so I continued to have these. What I thought was the inability to sleep persisted and so for a couple of weeks and after that I went to the doctor. He gave me some antihistamines to make me drowsy but they didn’t work either.

Bryan: And then time goes on, then they end up putting me on actual sleep medications like Lunesta, Ambien, things of that sort.

Martin: So it sounds as though you can like really pinpoint an original trigger for that sleep disruption.

Bryan: Yeah, the original

Bryan: trigger was that one night of not, but as I think I mentioned to you in our previous email conversation was that it began it began a season of sleep anxiety where I thought I really lost the ability to sleep and so that was the, that was the beginning point and not exactly sure what the exact reason was, but it persisted for about two years.

Bryan: And it made my life miserable.

Martin: So I think many of us can recognize that sometimes stuff shows up in life that can disrupt our sleep just as you mentioned, and typically we just attribute that sleep disruption to whatever’s going on tend not to think too much of it and then takes care of itself once that trigger disappears or is no longer as relevant.

Martin: When did that. Maybe that understanding or relationship change for you where it went from, okay, sleep is being disrupted because of what’s going on to, Oh, now it’s like sleep is the issue itself. What’s going on here? There’s something going on with my sleep. Sleep is the problem.

Bryan: Yeah. It took a while, it took a while.

Bryan: It took I want to say a good several months, maybe, up to a year to figure that out. I was trying to do everything On the exterior, I was doing I was trying to do the behavioral therapy listen to green noise, white noise whatever you want to call it, sleep stories anything to kind of, deal with the the the secondary symptoms And it, it finally realized that it was just my, it was my anxiety.

Bryan: It finally realized that I had anxiety that I can’t sleep. Like it, I was tired. I was really tired. I, my, my head would hit the pillow. Then all of a sudden I’d be wide awake, thinking about sleeping over and over again am I going to sleep tonight? Can I sleep tonight? Is it going to be the same night, like last night?

Bryan: Then I’d be up to two, three in the morning just. dozing off for what seemed like five minutes and waking up and doing that persistently throughout the night. And so it came, it was about a year ago I realized that it was actually sleep was the core issue. And my, just my whole thought process behind what the sleep function was.

Martin: So the longer it went on, it was as if sleep itself was just consuming more of your focus, more of your attention, more of your energies, more of your concerns.

Bryan: It was 100 percent of my life for for two years where I, I think about, I go to the office without any sleep thinking, am I going to be able to sleep tonight?

Bryan: And that was just the center of my universe, and I did things that were contrary to even my belief systems and to my, to things that just out of frustration, just out of desperation of trying to sleep, like drinking, like I started drinking I hadn’t drank in a very long time.

Bryan: And so then I started popping open bottles of wine in my, that I had stored in my house. For years and I started drinking, and I started doing things that like I never thought I would do just to try to, um, try to relieve quite candidly, the pain.

Martin: And I think that’s where we can so easily get stuck because we want to fix this issue of sleep and it gets to a point where we just will do anything.

Martin: to try and fix the situation. And just like you touched upon, that’s when it can become even more difficult because it can draw us into behaviors and actions that aren’t aligned with who we are or who we want to be. So we feel uncomfortable and things can get difficult because we’re doing those things.

Martin: And then it’s like a double whammy because on top of that, we might not even be noticing an improvement in our sleep on top. And there wasn’t.

Bryan: Even after I started drinking, I wouldn’t say that I, I drank it, I was drinking dangerously, but it didn’t improve my sleep at all.

Martin: And it sounds like that was an action or a behavior that you didn’t really want to be engaged in.

Bryan: That’s not something, yeah, that, yeah, exactly, that’s not something I wanted to do. But, like I mentioned, it was out of desperation.

Martin: And it’s all completely understandable. Yeah. And the reason I just like to dig a little bit deeper there is just because I think everyone listening to this will be able to identify with that to some degree in the, we just become so understandably focused or intent and determined to address our sleep issues.

Martin: We can so easily go down that path of doing things that we’d rather not be doing in an attempt to fix the problem. So now And then when that doesn’t work or if that doesn’t work, we’ve still got the sleep issues and then piled on top, we’ve got all these new actions or behaviors that can make us feel bad or make things feel more difficult because they’re not aligned with the person we want to be.

Martin: We don’t really want to be doing those things. And that’s why it’s so easy to just end up feeling stuck.

Bryan: It changed me quite a bit. Now, during that era I was reclusive. I, I went to the office, but I was absent and I it was hard to get a hold of. There were just a lot of things about my behavior that changed and about who I became for that period of time that I just hated.

Bryan: But I’d stay at home, try to sleep just for a couple hours and it just didn’t work. It just Yeah, relationship suffered my kid suffered, it just was not a good, it was not a good time.

Martin: Correct me if I’m wrong, but it sounds as though there was a little bit of hint, a little hint in there that maybe you were being quite hard on yourself too.

Bryan: I’m always hard on myself, so that’s who I am. I’m a very driven of a person and I’m very goal and achievement driven And I’m often, I’ve been told that I’m my biggest critic but that’s who I am. I can’t that’s one thing I can’t separate from myself.

Martin: Yeah. Did you find that when you were being hard on yourself, specifically in connection to sleep, did that make things easier?

Martin: Did it make them more difficult? Or do you feel like it just didn’t really have much of an influence, it was neutral?

Bryan: I was determined like one way or another. I think my trying to drive like myself being very driven as a person it drove me to not just settle for what was happening to try to find a solution.

Bryan: And so I went to sleep doctors, I did apnea tests. I did all these things to try to figure out what was the core root of my solution. So I was going this way, that way, not only trying to deal with the symptoms, but trying to figure out what the core. issue was. And I remember that one night where I was, I was hooked up to all these gadgets for a night and to do a sleep study.

Bryan: And obviously, I didn’t have sleep apnea, but but I was driven to find a solution to it. And it just so happens my solution didn’t even come from where I was looking but nonetheless, like it, it really was. I was really determined because again, my relationship relationships were suffering and things were happening.

Bryan: My work was suffering. And I just I needed to find a solution one way or another, and I was going to find it somehow.

Martin: That’s a really good point that you raised there. I think that we can use our inner critic in helpful ways, for example, to drive us to become better advocates for ourselves to explore solutions.

Martin: And at the same time, maybe there’s like a shadowy side of the inner critic where we can just be really mean to ourselves after difficult nights. Like you shouldn’t have had a night like that. Why is everyone else able to sleep better than you? Why haven’t you fixed it yet? And it’s that side of things that can easily draw us into that route where things become more difficult because we’re just being, we’re adding that harsh self talk and, lack of self compassion on top.

Bryan: Yeah. Yeah that’s very true. I was I was being, I would beat myself up every night for why didn’t I have a good night’s sleep and why can’t you do this? What’s wrong with you? What’s wrong with you? Even, I even wanted to go and get blood tests to see if there’s anything biologically wrong with myself.

Bryan: Obviously, no, no avail there, but but yeah, I was doing everything I can And there’s something wrong with you but yeah.

Martin: What was an average night like for you when things were really difficult? Was it more to do with difficulty just first falling asleep at the start of the night?

Bryan: Most nights it was I couldn’t fall asleep. For a number of hours. And maybe around two o’clock and I just use that generally, but by two o’clock I fall asleep. But it’d be for a very brief moment where my head was still racing and I would wake up almost immediately.

Bryan: So even from the point of time where I actually did fall asleep after three hours of laying in bed or, getting up, trying to go to sleep, going here, going there It would about, it would be almost immediately wake, I’d wake up almost immediately and I would, that would continue throughout the night till where I had to wake up like at six o’clock or six thirty, whatever it was.

Bryan: So I had brief moments of sleep but there was never anything that was elongated to actually allow me to go through a single sleep cycle.

Martin: When you found that your head was racing what kind of, what was going on at that time?

Bryan: Like how, just how do I get my head to stop racing?

Bryan: And why am I thinking so much? Why am I thinking about this so much? And so I would do anything I can. I put in my earbuds. I tried to listen on YouTube to sleep stories music, something soothing I think I mentioned like green noise or brown noise or white noise whatever they call it.

Bryan: And just to ground out my thoughts. And they would help a little bit, but not necessarily. Um, none, it wasn’t, it was definitely not a solution. I tried to do everything that I was, I read about, I try to get up, read a book to make myself, go to sleep and, and dim light, or, if you don’t, if you’re not, if you’re not sleepy, get out of bed.

Bryan: I do everything like don’t watch TV. Don’t use your phone. A couple hours before bed, everything as far as behavioral therapy that I was told to do, I did. And none of it worked.

Martin: There’s so much there that I just know that a lot of people listening are going to really identify with. The first thing was, that dealing with that racing mind.

Martin: I think everyone struggling with sleep can identify with that. And when we see that racing mind as an obstacle to sleep, it makes sense that we want to address that and tackle it. So then we end up going down the route of, okay, how can I stop my mind racing? How can I clear my mind? How can I stop?

Martin: Thoughts, or what was the word you used? Drown them out quell those thoughts how can I promote calmness? How can I create all of those good conditions for sleep? And it’s interesting because I think, first and foremost, it’s completely understandable why we do this. And secondly, I think if we’re able to, I think there are some insights there because I think if we can reflect on a time in our past when sleep wasn’t an issue or a concern, did we go to similar levels of effort to eliminate certain thoughts from our mind, to promote calmness to slow down our thoughts or any of that stuff?

Martin: And if we didn’t, maybe there is. That’s an insight there that maybe this stuff isn’t needed. Maybe we can still sleep regardless of what our mind is doing and maybe it’s all the understandable effort we’re putting into kind of wrestling with our mind, getting it to do what we want that might be making things more difficult.

Bryan: That’s a good point. I almost think that I almost think that the behavioral therapy and everything I was doing, it was counterproductive because it kept my mind on the issue, it kept my mind on sleep. Yeah. And I would go back, we’d go back to when we were kids. We’d have a long day of school, playing sports, whatever it is, and then we’d hit the pillow.

Bryan: And within minutes we’re asleep. That was just naturally what we did and that’s the way God made us. We’re naturally able to fall asleep, but in, in all of these behavioral therapies, I’m not saying they don’t work. I’m not saying they’re not good for some people, but for, in my experience, it was counterproductive because it kept my mind on the issue.

Bryan: It kept my mind focused on my inability to sleep. And so it just it and I’m going to probably just going to assume that, My experience is going to be the same, similar to other people as well.

Martin: I think everyone listening to this will probably be able to reflect on, it seems that the more effort I put into this.

Martin: The more stuck I feel it’s almost like being in the quicksand, like the more you’re struggling, the more you’re trying to get out of it, the more you feel as though you’re either not moving or maybe you’re sinking even further down. And I think that’s sometimes where any approach towards addressing this can sometimes trip us up, because if we’re engaging in a certain behavior, For example listening to certain sound frequencies, or not watching TV in the evening.

Martin: In an effort to control something that happens inside us, to control our thoughts and feelings, or to control sleep, we might be setting ourselves up for some struggle there, because typically those things are out of our direct control. If we can reframe our actions or have a different intention or a different goal, maybe the goal is to explore how we can move away from the control agenda, from trying to create perfect conditions for sleep, for trying to eliminate certain thoughts and feelings, for trying to make sleepiness or calm or relaxation happen.

Martin: Maybe if we can Use our problem solving strengths with that intention. That might be more helpful than using them with the intent of trying to control stuff that our experience might be telling us can’t be controlled through effort.

Bryan: Yeah. Now, I don’t try to control my sleep. I’ll be candid.

Bryan: I don’t I’ve never been a good sleeper and so six hours for me is perfectly fine. Like I function on six hours. I’m good. I’m very active person. And I know some people that they need eight, nine hours and that’s fine. But for me, my body functions very well in six hours and sometimes less.

Bryan: But I don’t try to control my sleep anymore. And so once I lock, once I Once I let go of that control aspect of my sleep where I just go to sleep when I’m tired. If I have a crappy night of sleep, I’m like, okay, fine. I forget about it. Like whatever, no big deal. I’ve stopped trying to control my sleep.

Bryan: I’m not going to come and control it. I just know that I have the ability to sleep.

Martin: Yeah, just know, knowing that you’ve got that natural ability to sleep can be really helpful.

Bryan: It’s actually very powerful.

Martin: So maybe this is connected, but I’m curious, so you have this issue with sleep. You want to fix it. As you said, you’re quite a driven person, a problem solver. You want to get to the solution. So you’re trying all these different things. They seem not to be working.

Martin: Maybe every now and then they seem to. temporarily work or, some improvement but over the longer term, they don’t seem to be getting you to that place that you want to be. How do you change direction? So how do you move away from just continuing to try, continuing to attempt to control and take this different approach of, I’m going to let go of trying.

Martin: I’m going to let go of trying to control sleep. How do you do that?

Bryan: Yeah, that was a tough thing because I wasn’t able to. And I didn’t mention it in my email to you is that it came by accident. I did everything I can, like I said, behavioral therapy, drinking. I was, my doctor didn’t seem to care either as far as his prescription of sleeping pills.

Bryan: I, I told him, I said, Hey, listen, any I prescribed Lunesta to me and I was going back every month for two milligrams or whatever it was. And I went back to him and said, Hey I’d like to cut this out of my life, and, I don’t think, I don’t want to be on this the rest of my life.

Bryan: And his reaction was like, Oh, what’s the big deal? Everybody’s, a lot of people are on sleep pills, for the rest of their life. He seemed to have no concern of my desire to get off these things. So I’m like, okay, thanks doc. And he literally gave me a year supply of prescription because, they’re controlled substances.

Bryan: You gotta, take your ID to the pharmacy and show it. And so he gave me like a year supply of this stuff. And so anyways, like I had no help from him, but as I mentioned is the, in my email to you the, when I fell asleep on accident and I say by accident, because I just put my head on my pillow watching and I just.

Bryan: fell asleep for the entire night. I woke up not only refreshed, but with a new understanding of my relationship with sleep is like, Oh my gosh, I have the ability to sleep. I just did it on my own without any prescriptions, without any trying. And that was it. Like I didn’t try, I didn’t try to sleep.

Bryan: I didn’t try to force myself to go to bed. I didn’t try to force myself. I did it without any effort at all. I could do this again. I can replicate this. And so that’s when it started to build on it. Yeah. I had some relapses and I had to take some pills here and there, but that was now the, that was now the kind of the apex of the road where I’m like, you know what?

Bryan: I’m going to change directions. I’m not going to try anymore. I’m just going to let myself naturally go to sleep. We’re going to let myself, my, my head just naturally wander. Because I know I have the ability to do it. And so I just built upon that, night after night, and after, several months, it took several months, where I’m like, you know what, I don’t need melatonin, I don’t need any of this stuff, I’m done with it.

Martin: It sounds like that was just a huge light bulb moment for you, that really helped drive you toward this different approach.

Bryan: And I think that’s where I wanted to share my story with you. Because I don’t think it’s unique. I think there’s a lot of people that are struggling in the same sense where they feel a loss of ability and that beginning to try.

Bryan: And I’m like, no, just stop trying. Once you stop trying and allow your body to naturally go through its sleep cycle and just do what it naturally does, the way God made us, let’s, that, honestly that’s my experience. It’s just letting sleep take over.

Martin: Was that the first night that you’d not taken medication before going to bed or had you tried that approach before in the past and still struggled?

Bryan: I, I tried without any success. But that was not my intention. My intention that night was to watch, watch a little TV, because it was still early, but I was obviously exhausted because, lack of sleep. And my intention was to get up and probably take a pill.

Bryan: And so I didn’t have any intention of not taking the pill that night. I had no intention of, not doing the things I was previously doing to try to sleep. It just happened. And that’s when I’m like, Oh my gosh, that was like, you said the ah-ha moment that light bulb work. My goodness, I could do this.

Bryan: I was successful one night. I could be successful a second night too. And then the second night I was successful. I was able to sleep. I was actually giddy to go to sleep. I’m like, I can do this now. Such a simple thing that we take for granted.

Martin: Yeah, absolutely. And I’m going to guess that it wasn’t like, so you had the first night where this first happened, second night, you sounded like you had a good night again.

Martin: And then it was just all plain sailing from then on third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, up until today, every single night was just fantastic.

Bryan: Not at all. Not at all. There was a lot of struggle. I call them relapses, but I did have to go back to take a half a, half a pill of Lunesta. I did have crappy nights.

Bryan: But I always went back to that success of the first night. I, it’s a side story, but I coach competitive baseball and softball. And so I have pitchers, and I actually use, I actually, this was a lesson that I learned that I was able to give to my pitchers that struggle in the circle in softball.

Bryan: When they’re struggling, I take them back, I’ll call time out, I’ll go talk to them. I take them back to the success that they had in previous moments. I said, Hey, someone’s, Dakota or hey, Alexa, whoever I’ll take them back to success that I had in the past.

Bryan: And remember when you did this, remember when you achieved this in this game or, whatever it is, you can do that again. Today, like right now what’s happening, this is just for a moment. You can, you can go back to those moments of success, and that’s what I had to do. I had to go back to that moment of success for continue to remind myself that I can sleep, that I do have the ability that this right now that’s happening right now, this really crappy night.

Bryan: This is just a moment in time that’s going to pass. Tomorrow will be better.

Martin: That is, It’s so helpful and so important, I believe, because in that, just that practice of consciously drawing on your previous successes or reminding yourself of your previous successes and maybe even identifying and drawing upon your strengths.

Martin: What strengths did you use to get through to these difficult periods in the past? And how can you draw upon them again? Because the mind will always want to focus on the most difficult thing going on right now, where you’re really struggling. It has that real negativity bias on all the difficult stuff because It’s doing its job, it’s trying to look out for us.

Martin: So it doesn’t care about the good stuff. It’s just going to focus on all the difficult stuff. So we do, I think, need to make that conscious effort to practice reminding ourselves of our successes, reminding ourselves of our strengths, and refocusing our attention in ways that help us draw upon all of that good stuff rather than just being Or the difficult situation we’re in at that time, just overwhelming all of our attention.

Bryan: No, absolutely. Absolutely.

Martin: I think that’s what you were really sharing, like when you used that example of coaching, because when someone is struggling, that’s it, the mind is just focused on that struggling with the pitching, right?

Bryan: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, you see it in their face. You see it in their demeanor.

Bryan: Yeah, you see it in their demeanor, and you’re like, hey, You are really good. You just did this. Yeah, today’s right now you’re struggling a little bit, have the ability because you did it.

Martin: I think someone listening to this could maybe take that kind of approach and even just use it on themselves, almost like being our own coach in a way.

Martin: So when things do feel difficult is Maybe see if there’s a way we can detach ourselves from that inner critic or from just that automatic behavior of focusing on, I’m really struggling now, so this is going to be 100 percent of my focus, to maybe talking to ourselves like a coach would talk to us, or Maybe talking to ourselves like we would talk to someone that we loved who was dealing with this right now.

Martin: What would we say to them? Would we tell them, ah, forget about it, you’re broken, you’re a failure this struggle that you’re in is never going to change? Or are we more likely to say remember that time when This happened when you were successful. Remember, what strengths can you draw upon? You’re a strong person.

Martin: Just, all of that stuff can just be so helpful to, to get our brain out of that negativity bias that it’s always gonna, that’s always the path it’s gonna take. That’s like the clearest path forward for the mind to take. No,

Bryan: you’re right. Obviously, like if someone’s struggling with sleep we’re not going to tell them you’re a failure or anything.

Bryan: I know that was tongue in cheek but I also think it’s somewhat not productive to, give them all these things to do as well. Hey, do this, do that, and give them a checklist to check off because again we’re trying to do, we’re trying to do something that we naturally should be doing and we all do like we all have the ability to sleep.

Bryan: And so it’s like putting too much effort into something that naturally comes like breathing, you know I’m like do we put a lot of effort into breathing? No, do we put a lot of effort into our blood flowing through our body or heart pumping? No, absolutely not it’s involuntary and sleep should be Considered, we shouldn’t see sleep as involuntary is where it’s just something our body naturally does and we you know We’ve open put too much effort to it that it just you know, we I think we lose focus on You know what part of our life it really is

Martin: I really that analogy with breathing is one that I use quite a lot because with breathing We can also temporarily control or influence it, right?

Martin: We can hold our breaths, for example but eventually the body will take over and make breathing happen. And I relate that to all of our efforts to sleep, like we put all of these efforts into sleep, and they can in turn make sleep more difficult a lot of the time. But no matter how little sleep we get on one night or two nights, three nights, four nights, five nights, Sooner or later, some amount of sleep is going to happen because the body will take over and just as it always generates the minimum number of breaths we need, it’s always going to generate the minimum amount of sleep we need.

Martin: That might not happen on one specific night, but as we average it out over a week or a couple of weeks or a month, it’s always going to generate the minimum that we need. So you’ve got this big light bulb moment of Oh, I accidentally had no intention to sleep and I found myself sleeping, so I realize now that I don’t need to exert so much control into sleep and that I can sleep by myself.

Martin: How did you use that to help you get through the return of difficult nights in the future?

Bryan: Yeah, I started to do the things I did before I, I stopped sleeping. And for that period of time, I was not doing the things that I love to do, like running, riding my bike, going to the gym, things like that.

Bryan: And I, I ride mountain bikes, and so my I had friends that would call me on, Hey, let’s go ride on Saturday morning, and I’d say, no, I can’t, I feel sick. Which the truth was, I didn’t sleep that night. And so it was constant of that. And so what I did is I started returning to the things that I love to do and which is mostly athletics, as far as, um, like my, my, my hobbies and stuff.

Bryan: It’s athletically driven. And so whether it’s running, lifting weights or riding my bike or now it’s coaching, my, my kids I started to do those things that I used to love to do. And so it was getting my life back to normal and that helped me like getting my life back to normal, help my sleep, get back to normal as well.

Bryan: Because again, like I mentioned before, my sleep deprivation had absolutely affected my entire life where I was not doing the things that I should be doing or I love to do or, or anything like that. And once that sleep returned and it’s, in some shape or form that I started to return to my normal life and things became normal again.

Bryan: It started to become more and more normal every single day, every single week. And so it was not putting sleep as a focus where I’d stay at home, I’d be in the office just thinking about sleep. I’m going to sleep during that. And I’d literally have a yoga mat in my office to just lay down, pull my head and turn off the lights.

Bryan: Just to see if I could sleep at all in my office in the middle of the day. And that’s how much I was focused on sleep. My, 24 7. But then I just started returning to normal life, doing the things I had to do, or wanted to do.

Martin: So it sounds like your focus really shifted from nighttime actions to daytime actions.

Martin: So instead of focusing really on creating the best possible conditions for sleep or putting effort into sleep, trying to control your mind, your focus was on each day doing things that mattered to you.

Bryan: And not thinking about sleep throughout the day, like I used to. And so thinking and caring about things that I actually cared about or people that I care about and stuff like that.

Bryan: It was just one of those things where my sleep, the focus, I just took my focus off sleep and focus on life.

Martin: If someone’s listening to this and they think, I would love to be able to stop thinking about sleep, but it’s all I can think about. And no matter how much I try to stop thinking about it, my mind just wants to think about it.

Martin: How do you get to that place where you’re just not thinking?

Bryan: Oh man. I, that’s a million dollar question because it came different. Honestly, it’s, I don’t have the answer for that person. But the answer, but what I do. What I will share is that you do have the ability to sleep. You have not lost it.

Bryan: It’s in, it’s an errand in our, how we’re created. And so we have the ability to sleep, how you get there. I would suggest that you start doing the things that you love to do before sleep took over. If it’s, if it’s reading, if it’s crocheting, whatever it is, start doing those things, those relationships that perhaps you neglected for that time, because they do like relationships suffer.

Bryan: When you’re sleep deprived and when you’re dealing with insomnia that all happens start re engaging with those people and just do the things that you used to love to do and Just watch how you’re behaving Your brain and your whole mindset starts to refocus on things that matter rather than things that shouldn’t matter.

Martin: Yeah, I think the reason it’s a million dollar question is maybe because there’s no way to consciously stop our mind from thinking certain thoughts. No, there’s not. And maybe that is what makes us struggle more, that makes things more difficult because we realize that we don’t want to be thinking about sleep all day long, all night long.

Martin: So we try not to. But then we’re really focused more on the thought of sleep because we have to focus on the thought of sleep in order to try not to think about sleep, which is like really confusing, but I think what can happen when we take this approach that you talked about of doing more of the stuff that matters or bringing that back into our lives again, the stuff that we might’ve moved away from, things that are important, things that matter is.

Martin: That’s not going to immediately and permanently delete thoughts about sleep or anything else. But what it does do is it gives our minds other things to focus attention on. It opens up and broadens, expands our focus because there’s more stuff available for the mind to calculate, think about, figure out.

Martin: And the more we’re doing things that matter to us independently of sleep. The less power and influence sleep is having over our lives because it’s not having the same level of influence over our actions. So I think a natural, maybe a natural byproduct of this is the mind is less concerned with sleep now because we’re doing more of the stuff that matters independently of how we sleep.

Martin: So the mind’s less bothered about it, the mind’s less focused about it, so it tends to think about it less. Not because we’re trying not to think about it, but because we’re proving to our minds that. Sleep doesn’t have this high, intense degree of power and influence, so the brain’s Okay, this is something that I don’t need to really think about so much anymore.

Bryan: Precisely. Absolutely. And sleep, when I tell people don’t really understand When I explained to them that I suffered from insomnia, anybody that has dealt with chronic insomnia knows that it’s absolutely suffering.

Bryan: And there’s a lot of things that are going on, but mentally it is depressed. It just, it’s just, it’s draining. And so we do suffer from insomnia. And the vast majority of that is the. The 24 seven thinking about it where everything else is neglected. And so the more that we shift our mind and our focus to things we love and people we love and.

Bryan: And things we want to do, the less time sleep has, the less time that we have to think about sleep, and the less power it has over our lives.

Martin: That’s really powerful. When we’re suffering with insomnia, we see the only solution to reducing that suffering as to get a certain amount or type of sleep.

Martin: But what you’re saying is there are other ways of reducing our suffering, and one of those ways of reducing our suffering might be to get back into doing more of the things that matter to us. More of the things that enrich our lives, that make us feel good, that are important to us. And so we’re not trying to directly control sleep right now.

Martin: But we’re just trying to do more of what’s important to us. We’re trying to take actions that move us towards the life we want to live. And that, in turn, is one way that we can reduce our level of suffering. Am I hearing you right there?

Bryan: Absolutely. We’re like, we’re a cup. We only be filled so high.

Bryan: We only be consumed so high. And when we’re suffering from insomnia, we’re pretty much at the top of our, at the fill level. When we start filling it with other things, That, like I said, matter to us that we have less time to be consumed or less time to be filled with the aspect of sleep.

Martin: That’s, it’s almost like you had that prop prepared there. Did you have that rehearse? That one?

Bryan: It’s because I love coffee.

Martin: I think it’s a great analogy. The idea of, I, I use. I use something similar by talking about concentration and dilution. So when our entire focus, when we’ve got nothing else to concentrate on or to do, that car There’s just our life is a bubble and inside that bubble it’s just sleep.

Martin: Because we’ve removed everything else that makes us who we are. And so it’s really concentrated. And what if we can add stuff back in? Going for a bike ride, if we like bike riding. Going for a walk around the block if we like walking, maybe meeting up with some friends if we like to socialize with friends.

Martin: And so sleep or insomnia might still be in that bubble, but now there’s other things in that bubble too. So we’re starting to dilute it down a little bit, and so we reduce its level of power and influence, and we might also reduce the level of suffering that brings us.

Bryan: For even those that are, that are listening to this, that think that, my life is perfect now and my life is, like sleep is perfect. I get eight hours of sleep. That’s not the case. Because again, I have so many things going on in my life. There’s so many things like I’m being tugged and pulled all these different directions. So I’m not going to say that I have eight hours of sleep, and I don’t wake up.

Bryan: That’s just not the case. I still drink a lot of caffeine throughout the day. And because, again, because I love coffee, that’s just one of my things. And if I get six hours of sleep, I’m fine with that. Everybody, every person is different. I do wake up through the night. And as I get older, I’m getting older, that’s going to happen more, getting closer to 50, which is, , things happen when you get older.

Bryan: And so don’t expect to have like perfect night from here on out or every night or whatever it is because I don’t have that. But what I do know is that I can’t sleep now naturally. I don’t need to take pills. I don’t need to drink. I don’t need to, take anything, any substance to make myself fall asleep.

Bryan: It’s a natural ability that I have now. Or I’ve always had, I just had to re-realize it.

Martin: You make a good point there, because no one has the perfect night of sleep every night. Just like nobody has the perfect day every day. We have really difficult days, we have great days, and sleep is the same. We have great nights, we have really difficult nights.

Martin: I think what matters is, how we respond. So do we respond to a difficult day, for example, by just being, that was a difficult day. I’m never leaving the house again, because I never want to experience a day like that ever again. Over the long term, barricading ourselves into our house might give us a little bit of comfort, but it’s probably not going to give us a very rich, meaningful life.

Martin: And it’s a similar thing about sleep. So if a difficult night happens, how do we respond? That’s really what matters. We can’t go back in time and change what’s already happened. So do we respond by what’s often the easiest response of getting drawn back into the struggle again? Or do we respond by maybe just being honest with ourselves, acknowledging we had a difficult night, being kind to ourselves in return, and then continuing to do things that matter to us, no matter how small they might be.

Bryan: Yeah. Yeah. I, every time I have a, when I have a bad night of sleep, I, it’s very, I’m very nonchalant about it. I’ll wake up and man, that night sucked, but I’m good. I’m good. Like I know next, did when, The next night will more than likely be a lot better than the previous night.

Bryan: That’s just the way it is. Like I have that attitude now where, all right, this night sucked or I didn’t sleep well, no big deal, going to go through life and I’m going to do what I need to do and, take care of all the commitments I need to take care of and then go to sleep at night. And if this all happens to not work out again, oh I will sleep again.

Bryan: It’s not a big deal. Like sleep has not become a core focus of my life. Whatsoever. It’s actually taking a backseat where it just is, it is what it is.

Martin: When you first started to reintroduce things that mattered to your life like I think you mentioned that mountain biking, was that one of the things?

Martin: Like the more of the kind of physical stuff. Yeah. Did you find that was always easy to do that?

Martin: Did you find that it always gave you the same kind of feelings that it gave you compared to when sleep wasn’t an issue?

Bryan: So when I was out there, yeah because I find doing things physically I, when I do something to the extreme and so I exert myself to the extreme.

Bryan: And so I’m talking about like elevated heart rate. I’m just. And that’s just the way I am, like if I’m walking for an hour, that’s not exercise to me, but heart sprints, intervals, stuff like that’s exercise to me. So I’m very much to the extreme on a lot of things.

Bryan: So it was hard for me knowing that the way my, my mind works, as far as I need to go to the extreme, it was hard for me to push myself out that door to get there. To do it because I know okay, my body may not be up to it because I don’t take things easy. But once I got out there, I was like, okay, I can do this again.

Bryan: I feel that euphoria again. I feel that sense of bliss and serenity out here in the, on the trails with my friends, even if I was by myself, it didn’t matter, but yeah, it just felt good to be out there. And it took me back to where I just wanted it again. I wanted that sense. I wanted those sensations again, even the smell.

Bryan: I miss the smell, I live right by trail system and I’ll leave my garage and I’ll go up the trail system and I have that, there’s that, that, a floral smell in the trails that I just missed, that I now crave, so it’s just like all that sensation yeah, I just, it, yeah, I just need it again.

Bryan: So it just drove me, it drove me to do it over and over again and just build on that.

Martin: Yeah, you’re just expanding that focus again, like we were talking about, you got that coffee cup and now you’re adding mountain biking into that coffee cup, you’re adding the smells that you experience the physical sensations that you experience, there’s so much more stuff just from that one action, even though it can be really hard to motivate yourself to get yourself out of the door in the first place, once you’re actually out there and doing it, or once you’ve finished, you found that was more beneficial compared to not doing anything at all.

Martin: How long would you say that it took for you to get to a point where you felt that you just weren’t engaged in any kind of struggle with sleep anymore when it just didn’t have any level of power or influence over your life?

Bryan: I don’t know the answer because I put it so past, far behind me.

Bryan: It’s been years. It was pre, pre COVID pandemic. So it was, it’s been a good five, six years where I’ve been, I don’t want to say cured, but I’m not suffering from insomnia anymore. But if I had to recall it probably a good six to eight months of consistent reassuring myself that I can sleep because I did, there, there is those times where I actually just recently found a old bottle of my Lunesta.

Bryan: In my cup or my, my cabinet where I actually like, Oh crap, like these and throwing them out and old pills to like antihistamines and the other things that they tried to give me, like I found some of those things were actually do not need anymore. My pill cutter to like I had a pill cutter to try to cut down on doses.

Bryan: It takes a while. It’s not like just a, it’s not just something that happens overnight. Yeah. That incident that, that. Night of sleep happened overnight. Retraining your brain to, to understand the normality of sleep, that doesn’t come.

Bryan: You have to continue to reassure yourself. And I want to say about a good six to eight months where I’m like, you know what, I don’t think about this anymore. I can throw everything away. Don’t need any sort of crutches. I’m good.

Martin: Just as you said, it’s a process. It’s not a quick fix.

Martin: And there are usually ups and downs on the way, just as you described, it wasn’t, you had that light bulb moment and then everything was magically transformed. There were still difficult nights. There were still times when you were drawn into the struggle. There were still times when you were aware that you were engaging in some different kinds of sleep efforts.

Martin: You hadn’t fully been able to let that control philosophy or control agenda go just yet, which is fine, but it was a process, right? It was a series of steps, sometimes forward, maybe sometimes backwards, sometimes not moving. But it was all part of the process. And. It sounds as though your process involved a period of identifying efforts to control sleep and starting to eliminate them from your life and reintroducing all the stuff that maybe got lost.

Martin: Pushed aside, always held back until you were sleeping, getting a certain amount or type of sleep again. You just were like, no, I’m going to do it the other way around. I’m going to put this stuff back into my life now, rather than waiting. If that was a summary of the approach you took, do I have that reasonably accurate?

Bryan: I think you’ve summarized it quite well. Once I realized I had the ability to sleep, I started filling my life up with things that mattered. And didn’t wait for that full recovery to start doing those things again. That would have just taken too long.

Martin: I can just tell that, all those character strengths of yours that we spoke about earlier, like this determination, this very solution focused approach come out just in that one sentence.

Martin: If I’d have just waited. Before doing all this stuff that mattered to me, that would have taken too long.

I’m very impatient with things. And like I want it done here and now obviously that’s not always a good thing, but but yeah, if I would have waited, it just I would have suffered even more.

Martin: There’s often a question that I ask when I’m working with clients, is if a client tells me about something that’s really important to them, that has dropped out of their life because of their struggles with sleep first of all, we explore why that’s important. And then I’ll ask them if that’s important to you, why wait?

Bryan: Because everybody that suffers from insomnia they are, they are removing things from their life that are important to them and it’s going to be people, it’s going to be. events. It’s going to be the arm. They’re substituting those things with their consumption of sleep.

Bryan: Absolutely. There’s not one person out there that suffers from signing. And I said, I still do all these things. Yet I still suffer from signing. No they’re replacing all those important things with sleep, and so absolutely this focus more, let’s get back to focusing on what’s important and replacing the sleep with it.

Bryan: the people and the things that are important to you.

Martin: What if someone is listening to this and they say sleep is important to me.

Bryan: Sleep is important to everybody, but I think the analogy we used before, so it’s, so is breathing. And so is blood flowing through our bodies. And, so is certain other things that are involuntary.

Bryan: Yes, it is important . But you have to realize that it is an absolute natural. We have the natural ability to sleep, it’s, it should be considered involuntary and can, think about sleep as involuntary and just allow your body to just let it happen.

Bryan: Focus on the doing the things you’re gonna, don’t ever think about sleep as I’m going to go do sleep. I’m going to go, I’m going to work to get to sleep when you have to go to sleep, just say, I’m going to go to sleep because that’s what’s going to happen.

Bryan: I’m not going to work towards it. I’m not going to focus on it. I’m not going to, spend any inordinate amount of time on sleep. It’s just going to happen. So yes, it’s important for other day functions, but yeah, it’s just focus on the things that really do matter.

Martin: I suspect that you might’ve covered a lot of this just in our discussion, but there’s a question that I like to ask all my guests at the end.

Martin: And so I’m going to ask it to you as well. Maybe you could just summarize it. And it’s this, if someone with chronic insomnia is listening and they feel as though they’ve tried everything, that they are beyond help, that they’ll never be able to stop struggling with insomnia. What would you say to them?

Bryan: I’m going to tell them that I hope and pray that this podcast does help you a little bit or other, the other podcasts that, that you want and have to share. But I’m not certain that it will, and I’m not certain that, anything that I tell you is going to help you because my experience is going to be vastly different than somebody else’s.

Bryan: All I want to tell you is that is. It’s unquestionable that you do have the ability to sleep. It is natural. It is God given. It’s involuntary and don’t try to do it. But you do have the ability to sleep. You’re thinking to yourself, I don’t know. I’m not sure, but I promise that you do. I thought I lost the ability.

Bryan: My recovery is going to be different than everybody or different than a lot of different people. Yeah, try to, hopefully my, my experience helps you, but if it doesn’t you will recover, and you do have the ability to sleep. Please just understand that you were a child once and there was a time in your life that you did not even have to think about it.

Bryan: You went to sleep. You can get back to that past success. You can do that again. You didn’t lose the ability.

Martin: Brian, I really appreciate the time you’ve taken out of your day to come on the podcast. I’ve got no doubt that this discussion is going to resonate with a lot of people help a lot of people and maybe just tease out some insights that will help people to maybe think about their insomnia or sleep and the role it plays in their lives in a slightly different way.

Martin: So again, thank you for coming on.

Bryan: Thank you. Thank you, Martin, for having me. It’s it’s been

Bryan: fun.

Martin: Yeah, and I really hope this helps somebody.

Martin: I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Insomnia Coach Podcast. I’m Martin Reed, and as always, I’d like to leave you with this important reminder — you are not alone and you can sleep.

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Listen to the podcast episode (audio only)Emily’s insomnia struggle began around four months after the birth of her baby. Even though her daughter was sleeping well, Emily was finding it really difficult to fall asleep. She started to get nervous and anxious as her level of exhaustion intensified.

When the medication prescribed by her doctor didn’t work, Emily started to get really concerned. She started researching solutions but found that the more she tried to fix her sleep, the more difficult it became and the more stressful things got.

Emily’s anxiety intensified to the point where the arrival of bedtime would lead to a racing heart and a sense of panic. It felt like her body was preparing for a marathon while she wanted to get a good night of sleep so she could be the mother she wanted to be for her daughter.

Emily’s transformation began when she changed her approach to sleep and her response to insomnia.

She reduced the amount of time she allotted for sleep to more closely match the amount of sleep she was getting on an average night. She started to do something more pleasant whenever she found herself struggling with being awake at night.

She stopped calculating the amount of sleep she was getting each night and she began to look at sleep with less judgement and more neutrality.

Instead of trying to fight or avoid her racing heart and the anxiety, she surrendered to them — she acknowledged their presence and allowed them to exist.

And, she committed to doing things that mattered, even after difficult nights and even when she felt exhausted.

Emily surrendered to whatever might happen each night — and this freed her from the pressure she was putting on herself to generate a certain amount or type of sleep and allowed her to move away from the struggle that came from trying to control her thoughts and feelings.

Today, Emily goes to bed sometime around 11 at night and wakes naturally around seven in the morning. Sleep is no longer a concern or a focus. Her focus now is on living the life she wants to live.

Click here for a full transcript of this episode.

Martin: Okay. So Emily, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to come onto the podcast.

Emily: Thanks for having me, Martin.

Martin: It’s great to have you on. Let’s start right at the very beginning. When did your struggle with sleep begin and what do you think caused your initial issues with sleep?

Emily: I noticed that I started having issues about four months postpartum to having my first child. Was always a pretty good sleeper and actually slept probably longer than the average person and yeah, I started noticing that, um, I just the sleep disturbances from having a newborn I think kind of are what triggered the not falling asleep at night because I was on high alert and that’s where it just spiraled downward.

Martin: So I think people might understand that having a baby is going to create some sleep disruption. And at the same time, they might also acknowledge or predict that, as we start to adjust to having a new baby, as the baby starts to sleep a little bit more reliably through the night. That our sleep might get back on track.

Martin: But I’m assuming that because we’re talking, you found that wasn’t your experience.

Emily: Yeah. I it’s so funny, I remember the exact day, like it was yesterday, I wasn’t, to my knowledge, particularly stressed or anything. I was actually, it was a really nice day, and it was in the fall, and we had taken our daughter to do a little walk in the woods, and just a really nice day, and she was actually Sleeping a good chunk of time through the night at this point.

Emily: And that night, I probably slept one hour. I was just, could not fall asleep next day. I chalked it up to maybe it was something I ate. I just tried to come up with reasons why I couldn’t sleep. And then just assumed tonight I’m going to sleep really good and I’m going to go to bed early because I need to sleep and I need to make up for this.

Emily: And so I think that night when I couldn’t fall asleep knowing how exhausted I was, even though my kiddo was asleep in the next room, I just, that’s where it started to, the nervousness around sleep and the anxiousness around sleep really started to perpetuate.

Martin: It sounds as though At first, when the sleep disruption showed up, you were yeah this kind of sucks, but, it wasn’t having too much of an influence, but then as it continued, it maybe started to generate more concern and maybe start to feel a bit confusing and a bit mysterious and a bit more concerning the longer it went on.

Martin: Was that your experience?

Emily: Yes. I had never experienced anything like this before. I’d had occasional sleepless nights like anyone from having to travel the next day or, just the random night. But I really, um, I went to the doctor and told the doctor that I wasn’t sleeping and the doctor, I was nursing my child at the time.

Emily: So the doctor gave me something that was. Safe while nursing and that really didn’t work. And it, I went, I want to say three or four nights without getting much sleep. I think I slept maybe one or two hours max. And I’ve just started spiraling and I thought, what is going on with me? Is this going to, the all or nothing thinking, is this going to happen, go on forever, am I losing my mind?

Emily: It just Catastrophizing. And I, that’s when I started doing the researching and the Google and looking up postpartum sleep loss remedies and yeah, it just, it became a self fulfilling prophecy at that point. I feel like I just was constantly looking for ways to, and I feel like the more I stressed about it.

Emily: The worst it got, and then it, it turned into that sleep anxiety, and that was really severe for me. It got to the point where I would, it would start to be bedtime, and I would start getting my heart racing, and nervous, just felt like I was going into a panic attack mode. It was like, okay, I’m about to race a marathon, but it’s bedtime.

Emily: So I think that was the hardest part for me, was the anxiety around sleep at that point. Because there was nights where I would lay there, I was sleeping in another room because my poor husband, I was thrashing around and having these little meltdowns in the middle of the night and he had to get up for work the next day.

Emily: And my kiddo, I had to get up and mom the next day. So I think that was also a story that I had created. Like I can’t function if I have to take care of my daughter tomorrow. Yeah. And stories just started to build and build. And my mind just was on overdrive.

Emily: And yeah, it just, it was a rough, a very rough patch. Um, and of course, like I had mentioned earlier, I was constantly trying new things. CBD oil. I was trying weighted blanket calcium, magnesium, or magnesium, the calm supplement. Everybody, I was telling everybody about it at this point, and everybody had their opinions and their remedies for it.

Emily: And I remember actually, at one point coming across an article, About cognitive behavioral therapy for sleep. And this woman wrote a book about it and I, forgive me, I can’t remember her name, but she had talked about how she did the sleep restriction therapy. And I was like, no way. That sounded like the most painful thing for me in the moment.

Emily: I was like, I can’t do this with a four month old baby and try to, because I was thinking in extremes. I was thinking we’re going to get a four hour sleep window here. And, I just wasn’t ready. I had to wait three years to finally put this into practice. So yeah, was, it was a journey for sure.

Martin: I think a lot of people listening are going to identify with the way you’ve described the way it can progress, the way this struggle with sleep can progress, where it starts off and it’s, maybe it starts off more as like an inconvenience.

Martin: It’s not something you give too much thought to. It’s just Oh okay, I’m going to get on with it. Tonight will probably be a better night or I’ll go to bed earlier tonight. But then when it sticks around, there’s that growth in the concern. It starts to consume more of our focus and more of our attention, which in turn can make it harder for us to focus on other things in our life and to do other things in our life, to concentrate on other things in our life.

Martin: And. Because our brain’s number one job is to look out for us, it’s there. Maybe it starts off in the background with lots of different thoughts and feelings and stories and predictions, which over time just get louder and louder and more powerful and more difficult and uncomfortable and more distracting.

Martin: And so we’re not just dealing with what’s going on with our sleep, but we’re also dealing with everything that our mind is doing in response. And because often we identify quite rightly, I think that is another potential obstacle to sleep. We’re not only battling with sleep. Now we’re also battling with our mind.

Martin: And it’s the longer it goes on, it’s like a snowball rolling down a hill, right? It just gets bigger and more unmanageable. And More difficult to deal with them the longer that snowball is rolling down and I think that’s why it’s so easy to get Stuck and just feel so overwhelmed when this shows up.

Emily: Absolutely. I just it was all consuming for sure.

Martin: Was there such a thing as an average night back then and you touched upon it was you found it would find it really hard To fall asleep. Was that the main issue or was it also Waking during the night and then finding it hard to fall back to sleep.

Emily: It was the falling asleep that was the hardest part for me, and I think that’s why I got such tremendous anxiety around bedtime, because it was like just hours that I would lay in bed, and just the longer it took me, the more I would go into a And, I’ve heard a lot of other stories on your podcast and, just in general.

Emily: And some people say they didn’t get that extreme panic like I did, but I realized, after working through it and even in the middle of it, my husband had mentioned, I think you put sleep on too high of a pedestal. And I even did that before this happened. I was ingrained with this idea.

Emily: That we need eight hours of sleep a night, for good health and well being. And I think that those beliefs that were really, cemented from early on are what, what made this sleep anxiety so intense for me. And. Yeah, it was just, it was all consuming and I was doing a lot of the whole, like the CBT talks about like black and white thinking all or nothing.

Emily: Catastrophizing. I think I was doing it all at that point. I just, I was really in it. Yeah. It was definitely old belief and thoughts. From early on that I think led me down that path because, I have friends that have had sleep issues in their life and they’re like, Oh, I’m just tired.

Emily: I’ll just drink extra coffee, and a new day, but I ruminated on it, and then the more tired I was, the more in my face it was, I’m exhausted and I’m so tired. Painfully aware of this. And so I just, yeah, I think that before I had the steps and develop the trust and retaught my brain that, Hey, this isn’t forever, you’re going to get through this and sleepless nights are nothing to be afraid of, but I’ll tell you what I really was living in a lot of anxiety and fear around sleep for Good three years.

Emily: And I ended up having to get on choosing to get on a drug, a prescription drug for it to it helped me with the onset of sleep, but it was when that drug on a low dose started to wear off or not work as well that I thought I don’t want to keep staying on drugs the rest of my life, just to sleep.

Emily: This is a natural thing. I know that I never had issues with sleep. So why is this a life sentence, and it was when on a vacation, when I noticed that I was not getting the sleep, taking my regular medication that I had to find a different way. And by that point, my daughter was already, a toddler.

Emily: sleeping through the night and I took the walk of faith.

Martin: There’s two things that you were talking about that really stood out to me there. And the first was how we can often hold ourselves to standards or have expectations about sleep. And When we do that, I think the natural consequence is we can judge ourselves based on whether we met those expectations or beliefs that we had or standards that we had for ourselves.

Martin: And the thing about expectations is the best possible outcome really is neutral, because if an expectation happens, it’s ah I expected it to happen anyway. So really. the most likely outcome from having expectations is disappointment, frustration, judgment. What if we were able to flip that a little bit and instead of having expectations, maybe see each night as almost like a fresh start or as a as though we’ve never gone to bed before.

Martin: Huh. I don’t know what’s going to happen. What’s going to happen. I’m not holding myself to a certain expectation. And then in the morning, whether we sleep or not, maybe there might be a difference then in how we respond to what happened that night. Maybe we’re not going to be judging how we slept based on certain standards or expectations.

Martin: Maybe we might be able to start practicing seeing what happened that night as being something that happened that night. And that’s all it means. And we’re not trying to trick ourselves. If the night was truly awful, we’re still acknowledging that night was truly awful. And that’s what it was.

Martin: It was a truly awful night. But that’s all it meant. It doesn’t mean anything else. It doesn’t mean that you’re a failure, that you are broken, that tonight is going to be exactly the same, or that the day, there’s not going to be even one moment of joy during the day. It just means that you had a truly awful night, and I think there can be a difference there when we are able to move away from having those standards or expectations from night to night of how things should be.

Martin: Now you’re able to look back a little bit, is that something that you feel you can identify with?

Emily: Oh yeah high expectations and feeling like I needed to calculate the time that I slept, and looking back now, it’s Oh man, I’m so glad that’s not something that I need to do anymore.

Emily: And I can judge by the way I feel. I don’t need to sit there and go, how many hours did I sleep? Cause I used to wake up and the first thing I would do was look at the clock and calculate the hours. And yeah, it’s sometimes I’ll sleep five hours. It’s four hours and I’ll wake up and I feel pretty rested.

Emily: So yeah, then I don’t have to think about it all day, ruminate on it and create stories about it. So yeah, I was definitely, yeah, I had high expectations and I think that what you said about looking things with neutrality, looking at things more neutral is powerful It’s when I create a story about something, it makes it bigger than it is.

Emily: Instead of just saying, Oh, or I slept instead of I slept this many hours, I slept, you know, or even the whole, that was a terrible night’s sleep. I slept a little it’s interesting how our, my mind picks up on those little things. and holds on to them.

Martin: It is really interesting how the brain works.

Martin: It can be so easy to think of our mind as an adversary when it’s When it seems to be working against us, but the truth is our brain is always working for us. It’s just the To get our attention The only way it can really do that Powerfully is by generating really difficult thoughts and feelings and emotions and stories and predictions to get our attention And where this can backfire is because they don’t feel good and then we try and fight or avoid them and then the brain freaks out even more.

Martin: It’s hey, I’m trying to look out for you and protect you here. Why are you ignoring me? And so it starts to yell louder and we try and suppress or fight it even more. And then before we know it, we’re completely stuck.

Emily: What you said about just allowing those thoughts and feelings was something that really helped me work through all of this.

Emily: Because I was constantly looking for solutions to get away from those thoughts and to get away from the heart racing and everything, instead of just surrendering to it and saying, okay, these thoughts are here and it’s okay. They’re just thoughts. These feelings are here. I can get through them. The more I ran from them, the worse they got. So it’s an interesting, it’s just interesting how that works, it’s okay, if I face this. and don’t try to fix it, mellows out.

Martin: One thing to note is, it’s completely understandable why you would want to fight or avoid or try and run away from these thoughts and feelings, because they don’t feel good and they can be really difficult to experience.

Martin: And I think that pretty much every human being on this planet is hardwired to want to avoid uncomfortable, difficult, unpleasant stuff, and difficult thoughts and feelings fall in that category. So it makes complete sense why. We typically follow that route but like you’ve been talking about, it can so easily just get us feeling stuck because all of our energy and our focus and attention is then just engaged in this tug of war battle with our minds.

Martin: I’m not sure we can ever win that battle. that battle. The brain will always be holding onto that rope. We’ll never be able to pull it, pull that rope over the line. But what if, like you touched upon, what if we can just drop that rope? And so the opponent, let’s say the thoughts and the feelings that we, like the anxiety that we’re trying to get rid of, might still be there.

Martin: Sure. Just because you drop the rope is not going to get rid of it. But how might things be different if the anxiety is there, but now you’re not just focused. And you’re not using all your energy and your attention on pulling that rope. What if you just put the rope down? Might that free up some energy and attention for other things in life?

Martin: Might you be able to notice more of the world around you and open up a little bit more and maybe be better able to do some of the other stuff that’s important to you in life? rather than just everything being on, I’ve got to win this tug of war battle with my mind.

Emily: Yeah, that was that was really comforting working through your program when I got to the part where it was like, you know what, just because I had a difficult night of sleep didn’t mean that I need, needed to cancel plans and essentially put my life on hold.

Emily: And I think just. I’m just seeing that and putting it to test in my day to day life. And there was days when I started working the program where I was just like dead tired. I was like, I am still going to go for my run. I am still going to go out to dinner with my family. And it got to a point where it was like, I laugh now because I’m sitting there like just delirious and we’re eating and I’m like, I’m a superhero, dammit.

Emily: I have slept one hour and look at me. And it got to where it was like reframing my whole thought around sleep. It was like I was basically growing new neurotransmitters in my brain or neural pathways. And I think that, yeah, that’s what started to shift. That’s when I started to see the shift and it wasn’t such a panic inducing thing at night when I couldn’t sleep, and then my brain just finally started clicking with all this new information, but that was a big one for me, just learning to still enjoy the moment and live my life fully.

Emily: Even though. I, thought that I needed to be staying home and resting, yet I was just ruminating and perpetuating the anxiety.

Martin: I would completely agree with you that, yeah that’s superhero stuff there, and I think that anyone experiencing chronic insomnia is a superhero, just to be able to get through each day when they’re tangled up in such a really difficult struggle.

Martin: So I think that’s a great word to use. You might be the first person to use the word superhero on the podcast. I think it’s a very accurate description of anyone struggling with insomnia, whether they’re still finding it really difficult or whether they’ve emerged from it. It doesn’t matter.

Martin: Superheroes, every single one of you. And I like how you described

Martin: that commitment to engaging in things that were important to you, independently of sleep. How that, it sounds like that wasn’t easy, it often required a lot of willpower and determination, more superhero powers emerging here, right? But as you did that, you started to regain some control back from insomnia.

Martin: So you were able to move toward the life you want to live, even while insomnia might have still been present. Even when anxiety and fatigue and exhaustion and all that difficult stuff was still present. But just through those actions, doing things that were important to you, that mattered. And they don’t even have to be big things, right?

Martin: You mentioned a few big things, like still going for a run. Maybe we might just go for a walk. Maybe we might just step outside on the front porch for five or ten minutes. Just anything. If we can just do something that moves us toward the life we want to live when this difficult stuff is present, it helps us regain some of that control back over our own lives and it starts to slowly reduce the level of power and influence that sleep and all the difficult stuff that comes with insomnia can have over us.

Emily: Yeah. It It definitely took a while. It took me about four or five months to finally just, it’s so funny. It was just like one night. I just went to sleep and the sleepiness was such a lovely feeling that like laying there on the couch, watching TV.

Emily: And I just couldn’t even keep my eyes open. I was like, Oh, I like this. So I It was a reassuring feeling because on those nights that were more like particularly rough and I just didn’t get as much sleep. I would remember that day that sleepiness was going to set in because you’re, you’re going to follow your sleep window, you’re going to stay in your sleep window.

Emily: But building that empowerment around sleep and knowing that I’m going to be okay, even on the worst days, the worst thing that can happen is I’m just really tired. That was a big one for me. It’s been a while. So all these recollections are coming up, but I had forgotten that. That was a big one for me. It’s I had created so many stories around not getting sleep and being a good mom and, it just went on and on that I, when I realized the worst that can happen has already happened, you’re just tired, and that I think was a big one for me to get my mind wrapped around.

Emily: The safety aspect of it, you’re still safe, even though you’re not sleeping, you’re still safe, you’re going to be okay, and I needed that because, that was just, the catastrophizing was just ridiculous for me.

Martin: Going back to what we were talking about earlier, where the brain’s number one job is to look out for us.

Martin: I think the part of it does come down to reminding ourselves, either with the way we talk to ourselves or through our actions, that although being awake is not what we want to be, we’d much rather be asleep. We are still safe. We’re at home. We’re in our bedroom.

Martin: There’s not like a grizzly bear prowling around the house looking to eat our legs. But that’s what our brain thinks because we’ve just been struggling night after night. As far as our brain is concerned, being awake is no different to a grizzly bear stalking around the house. So our brain is on high alert to look out for us and protect us.

Martin: And so part of what is part of a different way of responding instead of trying to fight or avoid. all those messages our brain is telling us as it’s trying to look out for us, is exploring actions we might be able to engage in that help train our brain that we are still safe. The, yeah, being awake might suck, we’d much rather be asleep, but it’s not the same as a grizzly bear walking around the house looking to eat us.

Martin: And something that you were talking about that you touched upon was How we can feel powerless when we’re tangled up right in the middle of this struggle. But there are things we can do. There are different ways that we can respond that might be worth experimenting with. And in, as people that regularly listen to this podcast know, my philosophy is always related to moving away from trying to control.

Martin: And the thing that our experience tells us can’t be controlled. So falling asleep in a certain amount of time, getting a certain amount of sleep, getting a certain type of sleep. Not experiencing certain thoughts and feelings. All of our attempts to do that are completely understandable. But I think most of us when we reflect on our own experience realize that maybe they can help temporarily but over the longer term Perhaps not.

Martin: And as we engage in that understandable agenda of trying to control, trying to fight, trying to avoid, it becomes so easy to get pulled away from the person we want to be, or the person who we are, and the life we want to live. We can engage in actions that don’t really reflect who we are. One example might be we cancel on our friends, and that’s something that goes against our values.

Martin: We feel really bad for doing that. It sounds like for you medication even was something that you didn’t really want to do, but you found yourself getting drawn into it. And, that’s not to say that medication is a bad thing. It just depends on what someone’s individual values are.

Martin: Some people are very comfortable taking medication, and that’s perfectly okay, of course. But some people find that they get pulled into this route of medication or supplements or, I don’t know, weighted blankets, anything, as they just try to, Control sleep, fix sleep, and it’s so easy to end up, to pull us into actions that don’t reflect who we are.

Martin: It’s like we get, it’s like a magnet, right? It’s pulling us away from the life we want to live, the more we’re struggling with it.

Emily: Yeah, that control aspect was a big one for me. When I started this journey into recovery A big mantra for me was surrender. And I would at night just say to myself, I surrender to whatever happens tonight.

Emily: If I’m supposed to sleep, I’m going to sleep. If I’m supposed to get up five times, I’m going to get up five times. And I just really practiced letting go of that control. And I really think that once I surrendered, To the tools of this program. That’s when I started seeing real changes. And, um, I’ve had setbacks, but I just am like, okay, time to start back up with these tools again, and it’s okay.

Emily: And don’t freak out like I used to, because I know there’s a workable solution. And. I don’t need to make it bigger than it is just a sleepless night. And I just go through that reassuring my brain again okay, you’ve been through worse and you’ll get through this, so a lot of self talk involved there and it’s helpful.

Emily: I remember there would be times where my husband would be laying next to me and I’d be awake and. I’d start doing the self talk out loud because for some reason that just helped cement it in my brain and He’d be like, oh what and I’d say, oh, I’m just talking to myself Go back to sleep. Don’t mind me.

Emily: It’s just roll over Yeah, it worked though

Martin: It sounds as though that self talk for you involved talking to yourself in a kind way Which might, maybe was different compared to when you were first really tangled up in the struggle, where perhaps you were quite mean on, toward yourself, quite hard on yourself.

Martin: And then you started to adopt an approach where you talk to yourself in, maybe a little bit, with a little bit less judgment, a little bit less criticism in a kind of way. More like how you’d talk to a loved one who might be going through this.

Emily: Yeah, absolutely. I never thought about that, but, Thinking back to the beginning of when this all started, I would go into these like extremely angry feeling would come over me, the frustration, like I just wanted to go punch a pillow.

Emily: I was so frustrated. And then it just became more of a accepting, gentle approach. Yeah, I, I didn’t even think about that, but yeah, I was, and I never would have thought that it was me being angry towards myself, but it was like, I was probably without even realizing it, thinking what’s wrong with you, why can’t you sleep, instead of just saying, okay, this is happening, it’s not your fault.

Emily: And yeah, I just never thought of that.

Martin: I hope I didn’t put words into your mouth there. It’s just the impression that I got as you were describing it. The, often when we are able to look back and we reflect on how helpful self talk was, it tends to be because we’re talking to ourselves in a kind of way.

Martin: If we feel that self talk is helpful, isn’t really helping us, maybe that means or implies that we might be talking to ourselves a little bit more harshly a little bit less compassionately. So yeah, I was just keen to hear if that was your experience, but I hope I didn’t unintentionally put words into your mouth there.

Emily: Nope, nope, it actually just made me realize that, oh yeah, I was pretty, pretty hard on myself in the beginning. And I didn’t have the knowledge that I do now.

Martin: One word you used earlier was the word surrender. And Sometimes I think that can come with some negative connotations, like it means giving up being okay with insomnia, being okay with anxiety, and it makes sense that a lot of people listening are going to be like, no, I’m not okay with that.

Martin: I cannot surrender to this. I will never, I just do not want to accept this. Does this mean giving up? Does this mean that I just have to be willing to experience this insomnia forever with no change and Be happy to have anxiety forever with no change But so I’m curious to hear your idea on If you had to define surrender in this context of the insomnia struggle How would you define it to people that might be thinking?

Martin: That just sounds to me like giving up and I’m not ready to give up

Emily: well one thing I have to say is I Was following a plan So it wasn’t like I was in the thick of my insomnia, just hanging on by a thread with no guidance. I had the structured plan, but I had to trust, because it wasn’t an overnight fix.

Emily: Obviously it took time and it took trust. It took surrender to the outcome. I wasn’t giving up. I was still following this, but I was surrendering to whatever happened, because like you said, dropping the rope felt a whole lot better than this struggle all the time and trying to fight it and fight it.

Emily: And that’s what made it so bad in the first place. Constantly fighting against the sleepless night, constantly searching for ways to not feel the way I was feeling, constantly searching for ways to. I running away instead of walking through it. So I feel like that surrender was a saving grace for me.

Emily: Like it, it was, it brought peace to me to say, you know what? I am done fighting. I’m going to do what I’m supposed to do and trust what the outcome’s going to be. So I guess it goes more hand in hand with trust or faith. If you want to. You want to take it to that. I’m myself a spiritual person. I know not everyone is.

Emily: But for me it, it was a lot to do with faith and trust.

Martin: I appreciate you sharing that with me. I think what stood out to me was how we, you bounced back to that analogy of dropping the rope and it, I think really it’s, surrender in this context is surrendering the struggle, really.

Martin: That’s how I think about it. It’s about realizing that the ongoing struggle isn’t getting us closer to where we want to be, so how about we surrender that as a strategy and we look to explore some different strategies.

Martin: It’s just so important to emphasize that surrender isn’t just about being okay with experiencing this.

Martin: It’s, and it’s not about just completely giving up and just saying, Okay, I’ve got it, I’m gonna, I have to be comfortable with having insomnia for the rest of my life. It’s just about giving up whatever’s not working. And. looking to explore and maybe practice a different approach. That’s how I would define it.

Martin: But especially just hearing your description of it, I asked you that question without knowing how I would answer it. So I put you on the hot seat there. But I think that this was maybe a helpful discussion for people listening as to what we mean really, when we’re talking about surrendering to, to this difficult stuff.

Emily: No, it’s good to clarify, because I do know that some people could misinterpret surrender as defeat or giving up, but to me, it was like what you said, I’m going to drop all this striving that I’m doing and all this stuff that doesn’t work. And I’m going to trust there’s a new way to do this, even though I haven’t seen it work yet.

Emily: I’m just going to trust, so I guess that, yeah that’s what surrender for that meant for me, just, okay. I am not, I’m just done. I’m done trying all this stuff. I’m done laying here, tossing and turning. I’m done staying home because I’m tired because I think this is what I need to do. I’m just going to.

Emily: Do what somebody else is telling me to do and trust it’s going to work out, not even telling me what to do, suggesting.

Martin: On that note, what, you’ve already touched upon a couple of them already. But what kind of changes did you make to your approach? So you mentioned you were struggling with this, trying all different things for, I think you said about three years.

Martin: Then. You adopted this new approach, this new plan of action. Now you’re able to look back. What changes did you make to your approach or your response to difficult nights or your response to anxiety that you feel were most helpful that were most valuable to you?

Emily: I think now in the beginning it was a little rough, but I started the sleep journal and I started Sleep window, and I made a reasonable sleep window for myself.

Emily: And I just stuck with it. I said, if I’m laying here for more than 15 minutes in the tailspin, or, I’m having anxiety, I just got to get out of bed. And at first I wasn’t doing things that I really enjoyed. It was more like journaling or Sitting in a corner of the room. And I realized after listening to one of your podcasts, that this can be a little more pleasurable.

Emily: I can give my brain more of a a good memory of what happens when I get out of bed instead of I don’t look forward to this. So I, I know it’s not the best solution for everybody, but I had a. A chick flick that I put on the TV, ready to go. I put the dim light in the living room, almost anticipating that it might happen.

Emily: So I lowered my expectations and I would get up and I would cozy up on the couch and just watch this kind of easy breezy TV, nothing heavy, you know? And there were times where it was like, okay, my eyes are heavy, go lay back down. I would lay back down, even though I had the really sleepy feeling and that, that anxiety would kick in.

Emily: So it was, it was challenging at first it wasn’t, even though I was sleepy, I was still getting that almost PTSD in a way, because my brain was still used to bed. Being a struggle or bed equating to fighting, fight or flight. So I it took a long time to retrain my brain that bed was a peaceful place. But that helped me having a sleep window, getting out of bed when I was anxious, making it a good, enjoyable environment was key for me. Because I didn’t want to get out of bed, especially in winter and go sit somewhere quiet. This is depressing. It’s lonely. One thing that you touched on that really helped me was when you had said that when our body knows that we need that restorative sleep, it automatically puts us into a deep sleep to make up for the sleep loss.

Emily: And that really was reassuring for me. Because I was like, Oh, I haven’t had my REM sleep and I haven’t had my deep sleep and I’m not getting, my neurons aren’t firing together. That kind of a thing. I just had a lot of fear around that. And I remember that was mentioned in an interview or somewhere you had talked to somebody about that, that I heard and I was like, Oh, that’s so good to know that our body is.

Emily: Know how to give us the rest we need, when we haven’t had it in a while. So that was big for me. I’m trying to remember the other things. It’s funny. It feels like so long ago now.

Emily: Making myself do things during the day that were fulfilling that was a big one too. It’s just, what? I’m going to make the most of this day, even though I’m exhausted, I’m going to make the most of this day. And that was a big one for me because it taught my brain that life is still good when you’re tired. It’s not,

Emily: I really did in the beginning, I thought my life is being ruined here. This is messing up my joy, my livelihood. And that once again was an unhelpful thinking way of thinking.

Martin: I think the biggest benefit of a sleep window is it’s one of those things that can start us moving away from chasing after sleep. We’re less likely to start going to bed earlier, staying in bed later, in an effort to make more sleep happen. I’m starting to suspect that’s really one of the biggest benefits to having an earliest bedtime and a reasonably consistent out of bedtime in the morning, is it just helps us move away a little bit from that control agenda.

Martin: And Doing something a little bit more pleasant whenever being awake at night gets really difficult. That can be so helpful. And you touched upon how you, it’s like you’re training your brain that it’s possible to have a better experience of being awake. You started off by maybe this has to be boring and miserable in order to create the good conditions for sleep.

Martin: Again, which is one of those remnants of trying to, of the control agenda, right? Which again is understandable. We often get drawn back into it multiple times, but really all we’re looking to do is move away from that struggle. not struggling quite so much with being awake at night every single night. And one way we can do that is to just engage in an alternative activity.

Martin: It doesn’t really matter what it is because our goal isn’t to make sleep happen. We’re not trying to make sleep happen. We’re just trying to experience being awake with a bit less struggle and in turn that might also train the brain again that being awake isn’t a grizzly bear. It’s not a danger to us.

Martin: It doesn’t have to be quite so alert to protect us from being awake. And with that in mind, if someone doesn’t even want to get out of bed, I don’t think there’s any need to force ourselves out of bed. We can read in bed. Watch TV in bed, use the bed as a trampoline if we want. It really doesn’t matter because what we’re looking to do is just build a little bit of skill in being awake with a little bit less struggle.

Martin: That’s really what our new goal is there. And then you mentioned how just the education side of things. was quite helpful. You found it helpful to understand that our brains control sleep architecture, all the different stages of sleep themselves, the brain takes care of that. And that might not always be visible it doesn’t mean that after a certain number of nights of less or no sleep that we’re going to get more sleep.

Martin: Although that does become more likely, there’s no guarantee, but behind the scenes, the way the body compensates and it will generate more deep sleep and it will generate it earlier in the night and spend more time there as a proportion of sleep, for example, if it needs to. And the same with all the other sleep stages.

Martin: And just knowing that. Is, I think, another thing that can help us move away from that control agenda. From trying to make a certain amount or certain type of sleep happen. Because it is something that the brain can and wants to take care of by itself. So would you say that was a reasonable summary of the things that you found helpful?

Emily: Yeah, I’d say. I think just listening, I also did quite a bit of listening to your podcast when I was doing this program. It was a reassurance for me. So, when I went on walks or jogs, I was listening to your interviews and hearing different perspectives and how many people had gone through to the other side it was a driving force for me.

Emily: It was inspiring and it also just kept me pushing. It kept me going. So that was extremely helpful. So I just kind of. Just went in full force. I did the program. I listened to the interviews and just yeah, just changed the way I was doing things like a hundred percent. And it was so nice to learn. There’s just so much knowledge that I gained from listening to all these different stories.

Emily: And, um, it just taught me so much about sleep that I didn’t know. And about the habits. It’s the kind of thought patterns that we get stuck in and the way that I was thinking that wasn’t helpful, so I realized, okay, we could try a new approach here and things will change and it’s okay if it’s not right away, but I look back now, when I was starting to feel more confident around sleep and when I noticed that things were shifting.

Emily: I was still having little things that were triggering for me or causing anxiety. If I went out with a group of friends and it was getting late, I would start getting that anxiety. Oh, it’s late. I’m getting past my sleep window. I need to get home. Those were the thoughts that were coming in and I would feel the anxiety.

Emily: And then now looking back, I don’t even get that. We’ll have late nights. And I just think, Oh, okay. If you sleep less tonight, it’ll be all right. It’s not. It’s not a big deal. So it’s pretty amazing. It’s pretty pretty cool how our brain can change.

Martin: Yeah, I completely agree. And sometimes it can feel as though change isn’t possible, but I think change is impossible.

Martin: Change is always happening all around us. It’s, but it’s so easy to feel stuck and to feel that things can’t change, but things can change. And this is one reason why I’m so grateful for people like yourself coming onto the podcast to share your experience, because as you found yourself, it can be so helpful to listen to other people’s stories, to realize that you’re not alone, that this isn’t a situation or an experience that you are going through alone.

Martin: You might not know other people out there, but there are. Lots and lots of people going through this and in a way, I like to think that when you’re able to recognize that, maybe you can just share that struggle or share that burden a little bit, like with with others, even if you don’t know them, it’s just this might sound a bit abstract, but you’re just sending that struggle out into the universe to be shared amongst everyone else that’s going through this.

Martin: Because at any given moment, regardless of what time it is during the night. You’re not alone. There are other people going through this difficulty with you and it can be very easy to lose sight of that.

Emily: Yeah it’s a very lonely condition to be in. That was, I think that one of the most challenging parts about it is you’re in the middle of the night.

Emily: Who do you talk to, you know? And so it was just like a breath of fresh air, Hearing these stories and, and knowing that I wasn’t going through this alone. And it was, yeah, it was very it was a blessing for me. I’m so grateful that you do this work and that you share it with everyone, and I just found you one night in desperation and I’m like, Oh my gosh.

Emily: There’s other people who are telling my story right now, because, when you, when I talk to people in my day to day life, my friends and family, they were scratching their head, or they were offering me the same old stuff that the sleep doctor recommended me or the, I don’t even, I don’t even want to say sleep doctor, all the things, the typical things that they tell you to do.

Emily: Oh, dim lights, no screen time. It’s yeah, I’m well aware of this.

Martin: How long would you say that it took for you to get to that point where you felt that you weren’t just constantly engaged in that tug of war battle, that struggle with sleep and all the thoughts and feelings that come with it, when you felt, yeah, I feel like this is behind me now, like this isn’t, this isn’t having much power and influence over my life anymore.

Martin: I’m in charge of my life now.

Emily: I’d say when I really felt confident and less focused on it, I guess was probably around five months. It took me a while because it was pretty intense for quite a while. And I also weaned off the medication to do the program or no, actually I think I was weaning off of it as I was implementing all the tools.

Emily: Um, so yeah, it took me a while to to start to feel that way, I’d say around five months. And then within about a year, I remember thinking, wow, I haven’t really thought about sleep in a while. This is nice. And I did for a long time though. I stuck with a sleep window.

Emily: Now I don’t really have a sleep window. If I’m tired I don’t try to go to bed to make up for that though. I still go to bed at the same time usually. Even if I didn’t sleep too good the night before. So that’s something that I’ve stuck with. But yeah, I held on to a pretty strict sleep window for a while.

Martin: And over those months, was it just, Constant improvement, or were there lots of ups and downs and setbacks along the way?

Emily: To be completely honest, about four months, I was struggling. There were nights where I slept a couple hours, and I just said, Nope, I’m already this far in, I’m going to keep going.

Emily: And, it was just, it’s strange, it just feels like a shift just happened. It wasn’t like a The anxiety started to go away a little bit. I will say that was gradual after about two months. And then once that anxiety started to lower, then yeah, I was still having sleepless nights, but I remember it just, it’s weird.

Emily: I just had a full night’s sleep one night and I was like, okay. And I was getting more and more, I was starting to feel that sleepiness and Yeah, it’s just my brain just, I don’t know, it just shifted. So everybody, I know everybody’s different, but for me it was just a gradual improvements, but it took a while.

Martin: Yeah, and I like to ask this because I think it is helpful to realize this isn’t really a quick fix. It often takes time and ongoing practice and part of progress. is setbacks and the return of some struggle. That is inevitable. I don’t think I’ve come across anyone who has not experienced setbacks the return of some struggle, return of difficult nights, the return of the difficult thoughts and feelings.

Martin: That’s always going to happen. It’s part of progress. What matters is how we respond. Noticing and being aware of how we’re responding can be so helpful too. Because it doesn’t matter if we find ourselves that we’ve been drawn right back into the struggle and we feel back to square one. It’s never too late to pause, notice this has happened, be kind to yourself because it’s understandable why it happened.

Martin: It’s not your fault that you’ve been drawn back into the struggle. And to just refocus attention on that. An alternative way that the way that you want to be moving forward and to just re engage in that direction. That really is what matters is how we respond to this, the return of some struggle or the return of all this difficult stuff.

Martin: That dictates whether we continue to move closer to where we want to be or either we get pulled back into that old struggle all over again.

Emily: Yeah, the way I think of it is. I’ve had these thought patterns for years, so I have to keep strengthening the new ones. If I start going back into those old channels or neural pathways, I’ve got to go back into the fainter ones and keep digging them, making them thicker and wider and stronger, because it’s just practice, and awareness is a big one for me, being aware of what I’m thinking.

Emily: How I’m responding. And when I was listening to all of your podcasts, it was I’m, I’m grateful that I heard a lot of people saying that they had experienced setbacks because then when it was my turn, I was like, okay, this is normal. This, you know, that recovery is not linear. And yeah it’s It’s, it’s just one day at a time in so many areas of my life.

Emily: And this is one of them, one day at a time, this present moment is the moment that matters and yeah it’s a journey.

Martin: Yeah, absolutely. What’s an average night like for you these days, Emily? Is that, is there such a thing?

Emily: Yeah. I actually go to bed later than I used to. Surprisingly, I used to be a, I need to get in bed by 10 o’clock.

Emily: And now I’m like, yeah, 11 o’clock. I’ll close my book, and I usually just wake up naturally around seven,

Martin: just hearing the difference in the way you describe how a night goes, you can just tell that. it’s just your relationship with it. The way you reflect on it is completely different now.

Martin: It’s just effortless. There’s less attachment to it. It’s just yeah, now, I’ve generally go to bed a bit later. I’ll be reading a book and I’ll wake up naturally around about seven o’clock. That’s all that’s all there is to it. Whereas in the past it would be I will go to bed at this time after doing X, Y, Z.

Martin: You and there’s so much more analysis and attachment to what it all means compared to how you’re, you describe it now in just maybe you used a dozen words there to describe an average night. It’s such a shift.

Emily: It’s just crazy how different things are now, just such a, Oh, I’m just so grateful that I don’t have to worry about that like I used to, take nights that are.

Emily: Less sleep as they come and, okay. That wasn’t fun, but, new day.

Martin: I like to use the word transformation because I think it is a transformation. It’s a transformation in your relationship with sleep. And, because there’s a transformation in your relationship with sleep, and, the level of power and influence it has over your life, there’s often a transformation just in your life too.

Martin: It just becomes so much easier to do the things that matter to you and to be the person you want to be. So I think that maybe transformation is a word that’s overused, but in this case I don’t think it is. I truly believe that everyone that comes onto this podcast, what they’re sharing is transformation.

Martin: So I’m really grateful for you coming on. I’ve got one question for you though, just to wrap things up, Emily. And it’s this, if someone with chronic insomnia is listening and they feel that they’ve tried everything, that they are beyond help, that they will never be able to stop struggling with insomnia, what would you tell them?

Emily: I’d say no matter how hard. you’re struggling or how hard things are getting, there is a way out. I’m living proof. I went through a long battle with this and I thought it would never get better. And look, just don’t give up on yourself. Keep trying.

Martin: Thank you so much, Emily, for coming on and sharing your experience.

Martin: It’s really appreciated. Thank you.

Emily: Thank you too, Martin. I appreciate you.

Martin: I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Insomnia Coach Podcast. I’m Martin Reed, and as always, I’d like to leave you with this important reminder — you are not alone and you can sleep.

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Listen to the podcast episode (audio only)Kirstin began using medication every now and then to help her sleep on Sunday nights. When she faced a big personal challenge that made sleep more difficult, she started to use it more often. The plan was to take a small dose to get her through that difficult period and then stop the medication because she didn’t want to be reliant on something to help her fall asleep.

Unfortunately Kirstin found that when she tried to stop taking the medication, sleep didn’t happen. She went without sleep for three or four days straight before reaching for the medication in a desperate attempt to make sleep happen. Kirstin developed the belief that she couldn’t sleep without medication and this created a lot of panic, distress, and confusion.

Kirstin became obsessed with sleep. All she could think about was insomnia. Her days were filled with researching sleep remedies and experimenting with sleep-related rules and rituals. Nothing worked.

Kirstin tried to stop herself from thinking about insomnia. That didn’t work either. As nighttime approached she would get extremely nervous, scared, and upset. People tried to be supportive but nobody understood what she was going through.

Things changed when Kirstin came across the Insomnia Coach podcast and realized that she wasn’t alone. As she listened to the stories of others, insomnia started to feel less mysterious.

At this point, Kirstin started to reclaim her life from insomnia. She made and followed through on daytime plans, regardless of how she slept. She prepared for difficult nights in advance so she had alternatives to struggling and battling all night long. She abandoned all her sleep efforts, rules, and rituals. She allowed all the difficult thoughts and feelings she was experiencing to exist — she acknowledged them and allowed them to come and go as they pleased. She practiced being kinder to herself.

Kirstin’s journey was not easy. She experienced ups and downs. When things felt difficult she made the conscious effort to focus on actions that would keep her moving toward the life she wanted to live and the relationship with sleep she wanted to have.

Kirstin is also applying many of the skills she gained from her experience with insomnia to other parts of her life. And, she is sleeping without medication.

Click here for a full transcript of this episode.

Martin: Okay, Kirstin, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to come onto the podcast.

Kirstin: Thanks for having me, Martin. It’s really exciting to be here.

Martin: Yeah, I’m excited to have you on. I think you’ve got a great experience and a great transformation to share with us. So let’s start right at the beginning.

Martin: When did your sleep issues first begin and what do you think triggered those initial issues with sleep?

Kirstin: So I think a bit of a complex question, so I’ll break down the answer. I’ve always had this thing, that everyone calls Sunday night blues. I used to For a lot of my life struggled to fall asleep on a Sunday night, but I knew it was happening.

Kirstin: So I knew Sunday nights were going to be a bit difficult and I just carried on with my life and it was fine. In May, 2023, I was working extremely hard and I think I was very close to burnout maybe even burnout completely. And I started having this weird, Thing happened where there was nights that came in ebbs and flows where I just completely stayed awake the whole night And I would I thought okay, this is strange didn’t worry about it yet, but I was like, it’s not nice I’m lying there the whole night and My alarm goes off 6am and I haven’t slept the whole night and it was very weird for me.

Kirstin: And I was freaking out a bit when it happened, but I was like, okay, it’s fine. It’s gonna carry on as normal. Then at the start of June, I went through quite a big personal challenge. And it lasted for about two weeks. And the first night of this personal challenge, I struggled to sleep. So I was like, okay, definitely.

Kirstin: struggling to sleep because I’m just going through a tough time. And there’s a lot of things to work through mentally, et cetera, et cetera. You know what, I’m just going to take a half a sleeping tablet and I’m going to use that to help me get through this little patch. Then I’m going to leave it and I’ll carry on as normal.

Kirstin: So for this period of two weeks, I took my sleeping tablet, just a half a one. It was actually Zolpidem, so a Z drug which I never researched how, for lack of better word, hectic or intense it is to take those types of drugs. But I just took it because every now and then when I had Sunday night blues, I would take a half a tablet and it would be fine.

Kirstin: So then obviously on just before I left the tablets, I was like, okay, tonight I’m not going to take the tablet after two weeks. And. Obviously in my subconscious, I was like, I need a tablet. I’m not going to fall asleep. So I completely panicked and freaked out when I didn’t fall asleep that night.

Kirstin: So I ended up taking a half a tablet and then all the nights following that, I couldn’t sleep if I didn’t take this half a tablet and it really just went downhill from there.

Martin: So it sounds as like you initially thought of that medication as this temporary thing just to help you weather the storm and then it seemed once you’d started you had to stick with it or all these difficulties with sleep would reappear.

Kirstin: Agreed. And it was almost like a subconscious thing. So it wasn’t like I went to bed that night thinking I’m going to struggle to sleep tonight. I was like, things are fine now. Like things are going to be good. I’m like in a positive space again. And I think just subconsciously, maybe a little bit, maybe you do become addicted to those tablets.

Kirstin: But also subconsciously, I just think I thought if I don’t take this tablet, I’m not going to sleep tonight. And I didn’t give myself a chance to even fall asleep because it would be two hours, three hours, and I would just be stressing, getting hyper alerted.

Kirstin: It was a very intense period for me. It felt like it was every night. So whenever I didn’t take it, I Wouldn’t fall asleep. So I would try it for About Three, four days. And then after the fourth day, because at that point in time, I didn’t understand insomnia and I didn’t understand this whole, I almost think it’s like a whole different world that you discover.

Kirstin: I was really freaked out. I was like, People, when you Google can’t sleep, it’s it’s people use it as a form of torture. And I was thinking, what’s going to happen to me? Oh my word, if I don’t sleep, this is terrible. So I never gave myself like a week or two weeks or however long you need to actually just fall asleep by myself.

Kirstin: And I got so panicked in the evenings. Like three o’clock in the morning, I would be absolutely so panicked, crying, distressed, It was really traumatic and terrible. So I think it was every time I tried to not take the tablet, I couldn’t sleep. So I ended up having to take the tablet, the half a tablet.

Kirstin: Otherwise like nothing was going to happen for me in my mind.

Martin: It’s just so easy to get stuck, isn’t it? Because we understandably do not want to experience being awake when we’d rather be asleep. And we don’t want to experience all those thoughts and feelings and stories and suggestions and statements that are going on inside our minds as our brain is doing its job, trying to look out for us.

Martin: It doesn’t feel good, so it makes sense that we want to avoid it. And that can so easily pull us into these behaviours or these actions that we’d rather not be engaging in. For example, Sounds like for you, you prefer, you would rather have not been taking sleeping pills, but it felt like you had no alternative, because otherwise then you had to deal with the wakefulness and all the thoughts and feelings that come with it.

Martin: And so we end up feeling stuck, like we’re out of options, what do we do next? And that in itself can then generate even more intense and difficult thoughts and feelings.

Kirstin: That’s very true. And I think you make a valid point. I’m a person that doesn’t really like to use a lot of medication. I think it’s necessary when it’s needed, but for me, it was like, I don’t want to be reliant on something to help me fall asleep.

Kirstin: So it was almost like a spiral. I didn’t want to take the tablet, but if I did take the tablet, then I was able to sleep. And if I didn’t, I wasn’t able to sleep. So I was almost going in this absolute spiral and nowhere seemed to give me like an answer to this terrible thing that I was going through.

Martin: It sounds like it was, in addition to it being difficult, it maybe felt like a little bit confusing and mysterious as well.

Martin: Like, why is this happening? Up until that point, I never really had an issue with sleep. So why is this kind of showing up now? And then that in itself can lead to all these new questions. Is there something wrong with my sleep? Is my sleep system broken? Like what is going on here?

Kirstin: Exactly that. It was a very confusing time, lonely time. I was beyond myself and I didn’t know what to do.

Martin: I think a lot of people who aren’t really familiar with insomnia just think of it as like a nighttime problem.

Martin: It’s a struggle during the night, but really, it’s a Daytime struggle too right because we have to deal with everything associated with insomnia during the day like how we feel All the fatigue the anxiety the worry that’s difficult to focus How are you finding? struggle with sleep at night was affecting your days.

Kirstin: Oh, it was really terrible. It completely took over. I was obsessed with sleep, researching, Googling actual like not sleeping, but then also the, taking sleeping tablets and reading all these articles of you become addicted to it and you’re going to have to take more and more as your body becomes used to it.

Kirstin: So I was, again, just a spiral being filled. Also as soon as the nighttime approached, I was very nervous, very upset. I remember crying a lot. I’ve never cried so much in my life. It was terrible. I think another thing that you raise, I spoke to a lot of people who were trying to be very supportive. I do have a lot of friends and family that are supportive.

Kirstin: And I think they have either heard a story or themselves experienced sleep disturbance. And now that I’ve got a bit more knowledge on insomnia, I, for lack of better word and inverted commas, get annoyed when people. Say sleep disturbance is equal to insomnia because it’s really not insomnia is being scared and having a fear To not be able to sleep But what makes it so terrible is that it comes around every single day and every single night So if people are scared of heights and i’m not taking anything away of other fears i’m taking that because that’s the easiest example You can do things to prevent yourself from being in that situation.

Kirstin: You can try not fly as much or not go up in high buildings or that type of thing. Almost give yourself a little bit of time to recover and just work through the situation before you faced with it again. However, with insomnia, whatever you do, it comes every single day and you faced with it.

Kirstin: Day and nighttime and this fear just absolutely keeps building and that really made my days really difficult another thing that I That I found myself doing quite a lot is having sleep envy During those days when I was so confused and what’s happening with me I would literally walk around and apart from being so obsessed With researching sleep I would be thinking everyone that I walk past I’d be like I wish I didn’t have the sleeping problem.

Kirstin: It looks like you don’t have a sleeping problem I don’t know. My mind was playing so many tricks on me. I would literally be wondering is anyone else walking around me that’s also having this problem because no one seemed to, when people were saying to me, sleep disturbances, you just need to relax and, get out of this burnt out position and things will get back to normal.

Kirstin: I knew that was not the issue because I knew it wasn’t something else hindering me. It was. Oh my word, I cannot sleep and I’m so scared of not sleeping. And it was really difficult to put it into words. So my days were very terrible.

Martin: Yeah. I think you just highlight how difficult it can be. And I think you make a really good point that this is something that it’s almost, we, so we’re dealing with.

Martin: All the difficult stuff that comes from the fact that we’re struggling. And then on top of that, we’re dealing with anticipating a whole renewal of that struggle. as the night approaches. And I guess for, maybe for people who aren’t that familiar with insomnia, maybe this, like a parallel would be something like, maybe this is what made the Nightmare on Elm Street movies so scary or so effective was because these terrible things happened in their dreams.

Martin: And so these people were trying to avoid dreaming but the fact of the matter is you can’t right if you’re gonna sleep you’re gonna dream So they had this knowledge that every night this thing was gonna happen to stick with the movie theme, I remember when I first watched the Blair Witch Project and I don’t know if you’ve seen it or if anyone listening has seen it, but this group of people and they get lost in the woods and every night is a really traumatic experience.

Martin: And I think what made the movie so effective and so powerful was the fact that they’re trying to get out of the forest each day. And as, as it becomes apparent that they’re not, As the audience, you’re watching this and you just start to feel like this anxiety and this discomfort as you know the night is coming and how difficult and how traumatic that night is going to be.

Martin: And so I’m really glad that you raised that because I think for people that aren’t really struggling with chronic insomnia, they might not get that part of it. It can be really difficult because you’re dealing with all the stuff as it happens and then you’re preparing yourself for what might happen.

Martin: Night after night.

Kirstin: Exactly. It was, that was the hardest thing about it. Just not being, it sounds bizarre if you think about it, it’s what do you mean? It’s such a natural thing. And that’s what makes it also so bad because you’re like, Oh my word, am I broken? What is wrong with me? How am I not sleeping?

Kirstin: Yes, I know it’s natural. And really. I don’t think if you don’t go through insomnia, you don’t truly understand what it means. You can be supportive for someone and be there for them and learn as much about it. But this thing that happens in your mind of how it takes over and how I used to be a person that, and I guess this comes later on in the discussion of how insomnia has helped me, but I used to be a person that stressed about everything.

Kirstin: And when I was going through this insomnia period, I stressed about nothing else but sleep. Everything the whole long list that I always had about life stresses completely went out the window. All I could think about was insomnia day in, day out. And it also becomes all you can talk about and you just sit there and you start crying and it’s I also feel sorry for the people that are around someone suffering with insomnia because I’m sure most of people’s families try to be supportive, et cetera, but it, I feel sorry for, as a person that went through insomnia for myself and other people that have gone through it or going through it, but the people around you.

Kirstin: If you just take a step back and look or put yourself into their shoes, it must be something just so you can’t expect them to relate to you because it is something so personal that you only really experience if you go through it. And that was something I only realized and saw like a lot later on in my journey, because in that point in time, all is your insomnia.

Martin: Even though you were quite lucky in the respect you had a supportive environment around you, you still felt quite isolated and quite alone in this.

Kirstin: Very much. Loneliness and isolation is definitely the best words to describe this experience.

Martin: When you were tangled up in this struggle. What kind of things did you try in an effort to get your sleep back on track and to deal with this?

Kirstin: Initially when I stopped the sleeping tablets or tried to, wanted to the first thing I did was, okay, I’m going to go to the pharmacy and I’m going to try get some herbal thing.

Kirstin: And I remember quite prominently going to the pharmacy and telling this lady that I am struggling to sleep. I don’t want to take, um, intense medication, prescription medication. What herbal things can she offer me? And she decided to tell me this whole long story. And she was like she gave me this herbal medicine to take, but then she was also like, you need to change your life.

Kirstin: If you’re not sleeping, there’s obviously something happening. And she was telling me about her own story of not sleeping. And now I know that was sleep disturbance, what she went through. Cause she was saying things like she left her job. She left her country and she ended her marriage because all of these things were causing her to not sleep.

Kirstin: And I just think back and I’m like. Oh my word, imagine, like you should be so careful what you say to someone that has insomnia, but it’s a weird thing because if you don’t go through insomnia, you don’t know what to say to them, or you don’t know what the right advice is actually, because You don’t understand it, but her saying those things to me, I obviously didn’t do any of that, but if I was maybe slightly more of a, in a more desperate situation, even though I felt very desperate, it’s very difficult.

Kirstin: And you should be very careful what you say to people with insomnia. It was just something that I remembered. And I was like, that was quite a scary thing to just give advice freely like that. But. My days were filled with also trying to think of other sleep remedies. So I would stop drinking coffee and I really like coffee a lot.

Kirstin: So I was like, let me give up coffee. Let me drink herbal teas chamomile tea. take a bath, have candles, read before bed, not because I actually enjoy the reading, but because it’s supposed to help me sleep. So I had all these sleep efforts. And the other thing that was quite a big sleep effort, I was like, I’m not allowed to think of insomnia.

Kirstin: I call that a sleep effort because I think that is also something A lot of people told me they’re like, just don’t think about your insomnia. Just go to bed, lie there, think about happy things. Think about people like going outside on holiday and just being in the nature, et cetera. So I tried all of that and it actually just made it worse.

Kirstin: Cause if you’re telling someone with insomnia to not think of insomnia, it’s actually. So counterproductive. I also started running, trying to exhaust myself, and go to the gym more often. And none of these things were working, and I was becoming more and more desperate, and thinking, Oh my word, now I’m really broken.

Kirstin: This is, nothing is helping. And then I obviously had to resort asleeping tablet the whole time.

Martin: You make a really good point there about this difference between sleep disturbance and insomnia. And I think that one of the key differences, sleep disturbance is generally more temporary in nature.

Martin: And I think it has the characteristic that it’s, We can identify the trigger. So you use the example of like your pharmacist. I think they said when they travel, they tend to experience some sleep disruption. But then it gets back on track either when they’re home or when they’ve adjusted. And that’s the difference is when we experience these temporary sleep disruption, we can generally recognize what’s causing it, and it tends to go away when that trigger or that situation isn’t present or it’s not relevant.

Martin: And the difference with chronic insomnia is the trigger might be mysterious, or we might not know why it’s showing up, or we might know when it first shows up. When that trigger was first present, when the insomnia first started, but that trigger now is no longer present, or it’s no longer relevant, but yet the sleep issues remain.

Martin: And then there’s a change in our approach to sleep as well, which is a common characteristic of the longer term struggle of chronic insomnia, where we start to put more effort into sleep, where we never really thought, I’ve got to put effort into sleep before, and now we want to fix this problem, and so we’re putting more effort into sleep.

Martin: We might have new rules around sleep, like I can’t watch TV in the evening, I can’t drink coffee in the morning. We might have new rituals, like I have to read one chapter of a certain book at a certain time. And we might try and change our thoughts like you suggested. And this is again where we can get so stuck because when all of this stuff doesn’t seem to work, we can start thinking we’re broken, there’s something seriously wrong.

Martin: Really, when this stuff doesn’t work, it’s a valuable insight which often is clouded in the fog of the struggle that we’re dealing with. And the insight is. no matter what we’re doing, no matter what we’re trying, doesn’t seem to be getting us unstuck. So perhaps that suggests that our experience is telling us that the more we try, the more effort that we’re putting into sleep, although this effort and all these attempts and all this focus is completely understandable, perhaps that implies that Sleep cannot be controlled.

Martin: And the more we continue to try, the more effort we put into it, the more rules and rituals we have around sleep, the longer we’re going to remain stuck.

Kirstin: That’s very true. Honestly. I completely agree with what you’re saying and you get into the spiral where you just try more and more rituals and you research more and more on Google and everything is just.

Kirstin: going more and more south as you’re in this the spiral and it really affects your mental being and like how you view Just literally everyday life you become so desperate and lonely and isolated as we spoke about earlier. So just being stuck this insomnia thing is a phenomenon where you’re battling with your thoughts and you are stuck until you really do the right thing to try and overcome it, which is, working through the mental aspect of it.

Martin: I think battling is the key word that you shared there because I think many of us would recognize that if we’re engaged in a battle, then maybe sleep is less likely to happen.

Kirstin: Exactly. Completely agreed.

Martin: But again, I think one reason why we can get stuck is because we think if I don’t battle, what’s the opposite of that?

Martin: Surrender? And I don’t want to surrender because this is awful to deal with. So again, we feel stuck. We might even recognize the battling isn’t working, but we see our only alternative is surrender, which means a lifetime of this. So we’re stuck in the middle of those two options, which feels completely impossible to deal with.

Kirstin: Exactly. And I almost think battling you a little bit more, it’s more known. So you know what’s going on, where If you tell someone that’s not got any context of insomnia and they’ve just started their insomnia that you need to surrender, I think, I know I would have said, what do you mean surrender?

Kirstin: And that sounds so extremely scary. Because even just the, one of the things I Googled during this time was people speaking about CBT I and I obviously didn’t know what it means at the time when I was in the struggle. But then, Also, obviously some bad articles written about it, but where they would only let you sleep for two hours and monitor you for a few weeks or months and like each day or each week you would add an hour or something.

Kirstin: Like to me, that would have been a thought of surrender, but that sounds even more terrible than this battle that I, that’s known to me that I’m currently facing. So I think This whole surrender thing sounds super scary and it’s so just you don’t understand what that’s supposed to mean at that point in time.

Martin: That is a great point. Surrender has so many negative connotations, right? It means giving up it means defeat. Whereas when it comes to insomnia, it’s really more about how workable is the battle, is the strategy of battle proving to be. And if it’s not, is there an alternative approach? Did sleep in the past require all of this effort?

Martin: Did it require the battling? And if it didn’t, can we get to a place where that’s not required again? And surrender isn’t about giving up. And it’s not about defeat. It’s about exploring a different way forward that doesn’t involve battling. That doesn’t involve struggling. I’m curious because tried so many things, did a lot of research.

Martin: When you came across my work, what was it that you felt, either stood out or was appealing or was different or captured your interest compared to all the other material and information that’s out there?

Kirstin: I remember the day so well. It was a weekend that my partner and I were actually visiting some family.

Kirstin: And. I was drinking my sleeping tablets and I was on actually other medication that my psychiatrist prescribed to me. And she was even saying to me, oh my word, she doesn’t understand how this stuff doesn’t knock me out. So then I was even in a worse place. But then my psychologist that I was seeing, who I was also seeing to try and help me through this, I literally, I tried everything.

Kirstin: It was crazy. She said to me, Go and YouTube or Google since you love googling so much and go and check out Sleep anxiety and honestly, I am so grateful for her to have said that to me because she’s not a sleep expert but she gave me that advice and I went and I was like, okay, I mean Let me just try this.

Kirstin: And I came across one of your videos and I watched it. And it was actually the video with Maria and honestly, I watched that video so many times. So if Maria is out there and she’s ever listening, just thank you for your story, Maria. She was just saying so many relatable things. And for the first time.

Kirstin: I feel like very few times in life you have this aha moment and that video was honestly just made me relax so I listened to this video felt such relief for the first time didn’t feel so lonely Hearing that people didn’t sleep for days. I was like i’m not the only one in this world that’s experiencing this absolute terrible thing.

Kirstin: So hearing her going through her stories, and I think why her story also stood out to me was she spoke a lot about going off medication and she was on medication. So for the, it was a really relatable story to me. So I really was so intrigued by this, but then also my problem solving mind afterwards would be like, No, surely not.

Kirstin: It can’t be it like, surely you need medication and stuff to fix this. Surely it can’t be like just a mental thing that you need to work through and, do this acceptance and do everything that’s in your course. But it was cool and weird at the same time, because for the first time I felt relief.

Kirstin: But then also I was like really questioning this. And I didn’t know how to apply any of the things. I think now looking back to that moment, it was, it’s really cool to look back to that moment now.

Kirstin: Because it was actually a life changing moment.

Martin: That’s really powerful and it’s one reason why I’m so grateful for people like yourself coming onto the podcast to share your story because like we talked about earlier it can just feel so lonely and isolating and scary and to hear other people’s experiences, how they’re, how they struggled, the fact they got through it.

Martin: You can really identify with so much of what people talk about. And you do realize that you’re not alone. There’s it doesn’t necessarily make things easier. Like it’s still difficult what you’re dealing with, but it’s almost like that burden is now being shared a little bit. with others who are out there, you realize you’re not alone.

Martin: And you also realize that maybe there’s that glimmer of hope that if other people are going through what you’re going through and have come out the other side, then perhaps you can too. And now, of course, your problem solving mind will probably be coming up with all the kind of what ifs, what if you’re the exception?

Martin: Yes, but this person had this or did this, you’re a little bit different here as it’s trying to look out for you. So you, on one hand, you have that kind of relief. And then on the other hand, you have your brain going what if still now, what if this doesn’t work, then you’re all out of options.

Martin: So we’re still dealing with all these difficult thoughts and feelings, but just realizing you’re not alone, that your experience isn’t unique or even unusual can be so helpful.

Kirstin: Something that you said now that I think is really important is this whole thing of you thinking you’re the exception. I remember, I know I could relate to this one particular video very well, but my problem solving mind would try and search for exact similarities to myself and other people in other videos.

Kirstin: So I would have this relief that, okay, maybe there is something out there that can help me. But then I almost wanted to marry back my story exactly to someone else’s story. And of course that’s not how it works. It’s a bit, everyone’s story is a bit tweaked in different ways, but it was just so interesting now that I can look back and analyze the situation of how extreme your problem solving mind can really be.

Martin: It’s always so much easier to look back on this in a different context, right? And you’re able to more easily pull out these little insights and actions and behaviors that may not have been helpful or that were helpful. It’s just a completely different context, right? And it’s great that you’re able to look back on that and reflect on this and to share your insights with others by coming onto the podcast.

Martin: So I’m curious when you found these videos, you related to other people’s stories. Of course, information is just one part of the puzzle, right? We can consume all the information in the world, but unless we do something with that information, it’s unlikely that we’re going to experience much change.

Martin: What changes did you make in response to this new approach or this new direction that you uncovered?

Kirstin: I watched all these videos and I had a to do list of things. I’m careful to say to do list cause you don’t want to actually say any of those types of words with insomnia, but there was at least like a plan to follow and that was, okay, firstly, I’m going to.

Kirstin: Wean myself off any medication if I’m going to do this plan. I want to do it on my own Through my own ability without something helping me because I knew if I had to stay on the sleeping tablets and if this worked because I now finally had a bit of a Glimmer of hope I would be thinking oh, it’s only working because i’m applying it with taking medication So I slowly I weaned myself off the medication Watch the videos during the day.

Kirstin: And then I, the first night I said to my husband, I was like, I’m going to just, If I can’t sleep tonight, I’m going to get up and I’m going to go to the lounge. You don’t need to worry about me. Because he would always be quite worried. If I get up because obviously he knew this was such a traumatic thing that I was going through and you would, try to chat to me or, support me.

Kirstin: But I said to him, I need to take a step back from. everyone around me, i. e. family and friends in terms of taking advice and just talking about the sleeping thing. I don’t want to talk about it. I’m going to take a step back and I’m going to try and follow this plan that I found.

Kirstin: This was my I had to try this. This was worth a shot because I just couldn’t carry on how I was carrying on. It was just so lonely and depressing and so many people were saying that this worked for them. So the first night I, it didn’t work. But I knew that was probably going to happen.

Kirstin: It wasn’t going to just happen overnight. The second night I was also still struggling to sleep. And I think in those days, I think I emailed you and I was asking you questions cause I was seeking reassurance cause I was thinking, okay, no, but I saw these videos, but now it’s not working. I need some reassurance, but anyway, I didn’t cancel any of my plans.

Kirstin: I remember I had a friend visiting and I was like, I haven’t slept for two days, but I’m still going to see this friend. In all the videos that I’ve watched, they say, don’t cancel your plans, just go. And I was really fatigued, but I still went. And on the third night, the magic happened. And for the first time in months, I slept without any tablets on my own for about six hours.

Kirstin: And I was like, no, this can’t be. I remember being so shocked, but so happy when I woke up that morning, I was. So happy, but obviously then as the night time approached again, I was like, Oh no, maybe that was a one off cause I was really tired. And for about a week, I actually fell asleep every single night.

Kirstin: I had my comfy corner on the couch. I set it up every night before I went to bed. And I knew that if it didn’t happen tonight, I had a place to go and I had a plan and I wasn’t going to worry about being awake the whole night. So that’s where this whole struggle then started to. Like the pressure started to alleviate a bit

Martin: just knowing that you had an alternative you had a plan in place so whereas before When sleep just wasn’t happening, it would just create Struggle because you had no options No kind of plan of action for what to do in response other than what maybe you’ve been doing up to that time Which was trying to think about?

Martin: change what you were thinking or putting pressure, putting effort into sleep, trying really hard to just make sleep happen, clear your mind. Now you have this alternative plan that said if I’m awake and things start to feel difficult, I can just move to the couch and maybe I can read, or maybe I can watch TV.

Martin: And really that’s what it’s all about, right? Because what you’re doing there is you are giving yourself the opportunity to reloan or to rebuild that skill in experiencing being awake with a little bit less struggle. Because we can, the more we struggle with being awake at night, the more difficult it becomes.

Martin: And the more we might be training our brain that being awake at night is a threat, it’s a danger, it needs to be alert to protect us from being awake. And that in itself then makes sleep more difficult. So you’ve got this alternative plan that helps you practice being awake with a little bit less struggle in a slightly more appealing way.

Martin: Now it’s probably not going to lead to you feeling this overwhelming sense of joy that you’re awake. But if it just helps you practice being awake with a little bit less struggle, that’s perhaps going to be more appealing. And continuing to struggle.

Kirstin: 100%.

Martin: And it also, perhaps, over time helps to train your brain that yeah, when you’re awake it still probably sucks.

Martin: You’d much rather be asleep, but it’s not a physical threat. It’s not a danger. And the brain learns this because if it was a danger, then you wouldn’t be reading a book, watching TV. You’d be engaged in the struggle. And I think that’s where the difference is. In that context, a lot of people say to me, I don’t want to get out of bed when I’m awake.

Martin: And I say to them you don’t need to. Really, what the goal is just to practice experiencing being awake with a little bit less struggle. If you don’t want to get out of bed, Feel free to stay in bed and just explore ways of being awake with a little bit less struggle. So you might read in bed instead of reading out of bed.

Martin: You might even watch TV in bed, which is crazy when you read all of the stuff that’s out there that says you cannot do anything in bed other than sleep. But really the nuts and bolts of it is insomnia is a struggle problem. It’s kept alive the more we struggle with it. By having an alternative option of responding to wakefulness that involves a little bit less struggle can help us start moving away from feeling stuck, from being in that hole of insomnia.

Martin: And it sounds as though that was your experience, if I’m hearing you right.

Kirstin: That’s correct. That’s absolutely right. And also as my recovery journey progressed, I was quite fluid. It’s a good point that you made that you don’t have to get out of bed. So definitely at the start, that was something I definitely did.

Kirstin: But as it went on, I thought to myself I’m going to be fluid with this. And sometimes I would read in bed or I would just Lie in bed and do some of the exercises from your course, or I would watch my series in bed. So I then made it very fluid so that I didn’t want to be boxed into anything.

Kirstin: When I started understanding insomnia, I was like, I need to be fluid because I need to be able to deal with anything coming my way and need to be able to work through it.

Martin: I think that Being more flexible in how we respond is one of these indicators that something is changing.

Martin: Because when we’re really tangled up in that struggle, it seems as though we’ve got no options. That the only thing we can do is resist and fight and battle, and understandably to try and fix this issue. That’s the only way we can respond. There’s only one possible response. But then as we start to move away from the struggle, we realize we do have alternative options that we can respond in a slightly more flexible way.

Martin: And one way is we can get out of bed, or we can stay in bed, we can read, or we can watch TV. And we can respond the next day in different ways too. This can be really difficult because we can feel exhausted and fatigued and stressed and anxious and depressed and worried. So our brain is screaming at us to do less, to withdraw from life.

Martin: And unfortunately, that rarely makes things easier, especially over the longer term. If we’re able to somehow just push through that, even if they’re tiny actions, and just do some things that are important to us, that matter, no matter how small they are, then, again, we’re responding in a more flexible way.

Martin: And We are giving ourselves the opportunity to keep moving toward the life we want to live, to keep doing things that matter, even when the insomnia is still present. And the more we can do that, I think the more we also perhaps train the brain again, that wakefulness isn’t something you need to be quite so alert to protect me from.

Martin: I can still do some of the things that matter to me, that are important to me, even after difficult nights. And, when you’re able to continue to practice this, you do start to generally notice things change and sometimes it can be this really insightful moment, like you shared, like that first night when you sleep without medication.

Martin: And other times it can just be, It can be less of the aha moments, but more of just things slowly start to change. You start to notice you are able to do more of the things that matter independently of sleep. You notice that maybe there’s a little bit less fear and trepidation rising as the night approaches because you’ve got an alternative plan in place.

Martin: You’ve got alternatives to just endless struggle. Um, yeah, I really appreciate you, you sharing that experience and that insight with us. Were there any other changes that you made to your approach other than, having that alternative plan for dealing with wakefulness when it showed up and trying to follow through with your plans or continuing to do things that mattered to you?

Kirstin: I think I definitely threw all the sleep efforts out the window so that I went back to drinking my coffee didn’t need to do all these sleep rituals and be, do this at a certain time before bed, be calm put on candles. If I put on candles, I would put on candles because I actually wanted to, not because it made me sleep.

Kirstin: And I think the other thing to, to stress was that It didn’t just become like that first, I would say, first week it was amazing and I was on this almost like this high, in this cloud of just being so happy. Like I’m seeing everything in color again after struggling for so long. But the speed bumps are very real and this You have to keep applying everything that you learned.

Kirstin: I, I had a few months where I had to implement this and I had speed bumps and I had to each day dedicate to change the way I was thinking. So I think one thing I changed was just how I was thinking and not applying all these sleep rituals and also trying to be. excited about life in general. And also when I had things that were going to freak me out, like a speed bump or dealing with, if you have family over or other people staying over thinking about how am I going to deal with my insomnia tonight?

Kirstin: If I’ve got people staying in my house. Going through all of those things and working through them also really helped me and helped generate positive thoughts as to how to work through it and not be so scared. So I think I just, I really changed my mentality of how I thought about insomnia and how I thought about going through the day and preparing for nighttime.

Kirstin: But I didn’t really, I didn’t change anything else specifically. I didn’t incorporate something or take something away other than what I’ve already done.

Martin: I’m glad you mentioned those the speed bumps or the ups and downs on the journey because they are a part of progress. Setbacks are a part of progress and they can still be quite crushing though, right?

Martin: Especially when we feel like we’re making this. stretch of progress and things are looking up and then some difficult nights show back up, it can be quite crushing and we can feel like this isn’t working, I’m back to square one, maybe I should give up and go back to the struggle, we might even get pulled back into the struggle.

Martin: But really what matters is how we respond because it’s we’re always going to have these setbacks, there’s always going to be difficult nights, what matters is how we respond to them because we have a choice. We can respond in the old way and maybe we can reflect on our own experience there and ask ourselves how workable is that as an approach?

Martin: Or we can pause and give ourselves a moment and then decide if my experience is telling me that the old way wasn’t that helpful, maybe I should just continue on. And just continue focusing on actions that help me move away from the struggle and toward the life I want to live. And it’s not easy.

Martin: And it’s natural and it’s human to get pulled back into the old struggle. To get pulled back into the direction that moves us away from where we want to be. But no matter how far we get down that road, we can always stop. We can always turn around. We can always be kind to ourselves in response, because it’s normal for us to get pulled in the wrong direction.

Martin: And we can change direction, no matter how far down that road that we didn’t want to take, we’ve gone. We always have that opportunity to stop, pause, notice what’s happening, and change direction. And that’s really what matters.

Kirstin: I completely agree with you. And I think especially on my recovery journey I was hoping and expecting to, I’m quite an efficient person and I like to, get things done and that type of thing.

Kirstin: So I was thinking, okay, maybe I’m going to struggle for a couple of weeks, a month or so, and then things are going to just go right back to normal. Again, like how I thought if I just stopped the sleeping tablet, things are going to just go right back to normal. And I think I should stress that I had a lot of setbacks or speed bumps in my journey.

Kirstin: And each one feels more terrible than the last one because your problem solving mind is telling you all these things of why this one is different and why this one is going to, destroy your journey and everything that you’ve learned.

Kirstin: I just try to, when I had these difficult nights and setbacks, I would go back, remind myself of all the teachings from your course.

Kirstin: And it was a difficult journey and it really was not linear. It was very bumpy and it was hard.

Kirstin: It was just really hard sometimes. But I had the tools to help me. And that is what I was so grateful for. I was never back in that very desperate moment because although I might have been sad that I was experiencing these setbacks, I wasn’t so desperate because I knew that it could work. There is a way out.

Martin: I’m curious on the subject of all the difficult thoughts and the stories that the brain comes up with when things are difficult. Did you find that how you responded or your relationship with them changed as you were on this journey?

Martin: Perhaps at first, again, you were maybe trying to battle with those thoughts, trying to fight them, trying to avoid them, and then maybe as you practice a different approach of, I think you said the word, detaching from them a little bit, maybe being more able to just acknowledge them, make space for them to exist, be more of an observer of them rather than getting tangled up in a kind of tug of war battle with your mind.

Martin: Was there a change in that relationship or that approach?

Kirstin: Most definitely. Yes. And I think that was one of the Most valuable things I learned from your course, because like I said, I mentioned previously that one of the sleep efforts that I was doing was I’m not allowed to think of insomnia or that I have this problem, or I always try to avoid thoughts.

Kirstin: And I remember thinking, how am I going to get through insomnia? Trying to. Am I supposed to pretend like I didn’t have it? How do I get rid of this thought? Like you can’t, if you’re thinking of something the whole time, it’s very impossible to not think about it. And if you’re putting pressure on yourself to not think about it, you’re going to think about it.

Kirstin: So I was like really confused with this idea of am I supposed to just forget that I have had this problem or like everything that’s happened to me. And. I think what I did with my thoughts and what I could incorporate to other stresses in life, I saw myself doing as I was carrying on is actually just welcoming those thoughts in and allowing them to exist.

Kirstin: So anything that I was stressed about, I was like, okay, bring it on. Okay. I’m stressing that I’m going to have another setback. Okay. Bring it on. Let me just allow that thought to exist. And I could again just separate myself from that thought and that helped me immensely. Just being able to not chase the thought away, completely allow it, almost say to your thought, okay, cool.

Kirstin: Like I get you. I get that you, you scared about tonight or that you’re not going to sleep or that you’re going to have to go through all these things and it’s fine. Just chill there or just mellow there. You’re allowed to exist. And I just try to. Go on with my day knowing that this thought is going to be there.

Kirstin: And I was actually just okay with the fact that thought was going to be there. And it brought me so much calmness to just allow these thoughts to move around in my head and just chill there as I would like to call them.

Martin: If someone’s listening to this and they’re hearing you say talk about The benefits or this change of approach of welcoming difficult thoughts and feelings or giving them permission to exist.

Martin: And they’re thinking to themselves, I don’t want to welcome them. I don’t want to give them permission because they’re awful to deal with. How do you respond to that?

Kirstin: That is a very good question. I think one thing that, that I learned was you don’t have to, you Enjoy the struggle or the battle that you’re going through.

Kirstin: If you just fear it a little bit less, then you can see some progress. Or you can learn to have some calmness in the storm. I would just encourage those people to really just open their minds to really take this approach. You have to take a bit of a leap of faith. You have to, buckle up and go on this journey.

Kirstin: But again, you don’t have to enjoy it. So maybe it makes them feel better knowing that they don’t have to enjoy letting these thoughts go all around, but you just live with it for a little while and have the hope. That it is going to get better because sometimes nothing easy comes without a bit of a struggle.

Kirstin: And I think it’s just, there’s hope that it will get better. You just have to, be brave and just try it. Because you have nothing to lose by just trying it. And if it is difficult, It’s because it is meant to be difficult and you just eventually, through practice, you get there.

Kirstin: So I would just encourage them to, just be brave and try and embrace it. Because there’s no other way to do it than just to actually do it.

Martin: I think you made a really good point there that welcoming or giving these difficult thoughts and feelings permission to exist the same thing as enjoying them.

Martin: The difference is we’re just creating less resistance. We’re making more, a little bit more space for them to exist. And sometimes it can be helpful to just ask yourself, openly, kindly and honestly, what might be the benefits to this? To lowering the resistance level just a little bit, especially if your own experience tells you these difficult thoughts and feelings are going to show up anyway.

Martin: What might it be like to experience them showing up, if they’re going to do that anyway? But you’re not adding that struggle, that resistance on top. Instead of battling with them when they turn up, you’re maybe just being more of an observer of them. And so I’m really glad that you raised this idea of giving thoughts and these feelings permission and welcoming them isn’t the same as enjoying them.

Martin: We’re not trying to trick ourselves here. What we’re trying to do is just reduce our level of struggle with them. Reduce the power and influence they have. Reduce the amount of attention and focus and energy they’re consuming when they show up. And it’s not easy. And it does take ongoing practice. So yeah, I’m really glad that you shared that.

Martin: I think that’s a really important thing. And interesting point that you made that welcoming is not the same as or giving permission is not the same as enjoying these difficult thoughts and feelings because they’re still difficult. It’s just we’re not piling on struggle on top when we adopt this alternative approach.

Kirstin: Completely agreed that was something that really was significant in my journey when I made that, that mind shift. And again, it doesn’t come after the first or second time that you implemented it’s practicing it over and over again. And eventually your brain just calms down. And I think that is the big thing.

Kirstin: It just starts to really not freak yourself out so much.

Martin: Yeah. And I think one, One reason why that might be the case is when we give a little bit more permission for this stuff to show up, we acknowledge our thoughts and our feelings rather than just immediately start battling with them, is The brain then knows that we’re listening.

Martin: The brain, our brain is always doing its number one job of looking out for us. And as it tries to look out for us, it’s going to try and get our attention for things that it perceives as a threat. And one way to do that is to generate really uncomfortable thoughts, feelings, and stories. And, if we, quite understandably take an approach where we try and fight or avoid those thoughts and feelings, then the brain can really start to panic because it’s generating these thoughts and feelings for a reason to try and look out for us.

Martin: And then if we respond by trying to ignore it or trying to resist, Then the brain gets really worried, and it starts to yell louder, and it generates even more difficult thoughts and feelings, and things get even more difficult, and then we respond with more fighting, more battling, more struggling, and the brain is going, getting even more and more powerful.

Martin: So taking this alternative approach of lowering those barriers a little bit, acknowledging them, being kind to ourselves, making space for these thoughts and feelings to be present. Because they’re going to show up anyway, trains the brain that we’re listening.

Kirstin: Exactly. Key to the success is really just really engaging with your thoughts and allowing them to exist.

Kirstin: Because you can’t pretend like it’s not there. You have to find a way to cope with it and work through it. And all the teachings from your course gives you those tools. To be able to work through it. And maybe afterwards you even find that this horrible traumatic thing Because it is traumatic for me.

Kirstin: That’s a word that I used to describe it. It was Really traumatic. Maybe the teachings that you learn from it you can implement to Make other parts of your life successful and that’s truly What I believe. You can gain from insomnia. And it’s exciting. There’s an element of excitement to it as well.

Kirstin: When you get to understand these teachings and allow these thoughts to exist because it goes further than just where you are at that point in time. And you will it’s, again, it’s not a, you’ve got it and then you can just go and that’s how you’re going to apply it. It’s, A few days you maybe got it, then you could slip back a little bit, because it’s difficult to apply that frame of thinking, and life happens there’s difficult things that happen during your day, maybe at work, or when you’re out, or, I don’t know, whatever you’re doing, it’s not gonna be easy to apply all those thoughts.

Kirstin: Every day, but if you’re kind to yourself and what is being kind to yourself mean go that do something for yourself I don’t know whether that is making yourself a cup of tea and just sitting there or Buying a coffee from your favorite coffee shop or something like that. Be kind to yourself on the difficult days but know that an easier day will come again and just trust the journey a little bit

Martin: How long would you say it got to a point where you felt that you were just no longer engaged in that constant struggle with sleep when you felt as though insomnia and all those thoughts and feelings that come with it were losing their power and their influence over your life?

Kirstin: It was probably six or seven months. Where it started to alleviate. Where I don’t fear sleep or not sleeping. I know it could happen. Cause it happens to everyone, whether you suffer from insomnia or not, but it’s not a, like I don’t get into bed fearing that I’m not going to sleep. So that took about six or seven months.

Kirstin: And again, I’ve seen videos where some people it takes quicker. Some people it takes longer. There is no right answer because it depends. You experience the journey and it could take you a year. It could take you two years. And it could flare up again at some point, but it probably took me to just get over that horrible fear and getting used to setbacks and not seeing them as setbacks.

Kirstin: It was about six or seven months.

Martin: Yeah. I like to ask that question because It’s important to emphasize this isn’t really like a quick fix. Very few people notice that everything is transformed in a few days or a few weeks. It is often we’re looking at months, right? Because it takes, really what we’ve been talking about is a skills.

Martin: They’re action based skills and they require practice. It might be like we want to learn how to play the piano or no one’s going to learn how to play the piano in a few weeks. We might feel really good and make that we’re making lots of progress pretty quickly in a few weeks, but then there’s going to be setbacks where it feels like we just can’t do this and it’s going to take.

Martin: ongoing practice, keeping on taking actions that just keep us moving in the direction we want to be heading. And as long as we’re heading in that direction, sooner or later we’re going to get to where we want to be. It’s just a case of keeping on going, heading in that right direction through consistent practice and consistent actions that are going to get us there.

Kirstin: Exactly. I agree with you 100%.

Martin: So Kirstin I really appreciate the time you’ve taken out your day to come onto the podcast. I do have one last question for you which I’m keen to hear your answer to. And it’s this, if someone with chronic insomnia is listening and they feel as though they’ve tried everything, they’re beyond help, they’ll never be able to stop struggling with insomnia, what would you say to them?

Kirstin: Oh I would just say to them. There absolutely is hope. I’m actually excited for them because the journey can only get easier from here. If you apply the teachings from your course I think. I’ve learned so much from my insomnia struggle.

Kirstin: And I think I’ve touched on it during this video, just in terms of how I deal with other stresses in life. Nothing is so big that you can’t, separate your thoughts. Because your thoughts are always going to try and make you scared or prep for the worst or that type of thing.

Kirstin: You can really apply this teaching to so many parts of your life. And I would just say there is hope and you can get over it. You really can. And you just need to be patient and you need to go through the ups and downs and also just embrace this time because you’re gonna get through it if you apply everything that you can teach through this course and through all the videos and then it’s going to be so nice to look back and just see how much you’ve progressed as a person and how you’ve gotten through this really traumatic, terrible thing.

Kirstin: Cause I’ll stress again. It, I know it’s terrible. It really is traumatic and it’s terrible if anyone is, going through it right now. But I just cannot stress as other people in other videos stressed and I watched it over and over again. There is hope and you really can get through it. And you just need to be patient and keep going and you will get there and be really kind to yourself.

Kirstin: I was serious when I said, do the little things. Everyone has something small that makes them feel better. If it’s like I said, a cup of tea or a cup of coffee, it doesn’t need to be big because you can’t do big things all the time to make you yourself feel better. It’s the little things, do little things to make yourself feel better and.

Kirstin: Embrace this course and these teachings because I truly do believe this is the way that you can get past your insomnia and you really can. I thought it was impossible. I was in such a desperate place. But it’s actually really exciting and there’s a lot to look forward to on the journey.

Martin: That’s great.

Martin: Thank you so much for taking time out of your day to come onto the podcast Kirstin. I’ve got no doubt that hearing your story and your experience is going to help a lot of people. So thank you.

Kirstin: Thanks, Martin. It was such a pleasure.

Martin: I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Insomnia Coach Podcast. I’m Martin Reed, and as always, I’d like to leave you with this important reminder — you can sleep.

Mentioned in this episode: From the Insomnia Coach Podcast: How Maria faced the fear of insomnia by allowing it to exist and discovered that all its power came from how she responded to it (#49)

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Listen to the podcast episode (audio only)When Summer experienced consecutive nights of insomnia, sleep started to consume her life. She started taking time off work and she began endlessly researching sleep. Summer felt that if she could get rid of anxiety and stress things would improve — but this led to even more of a struggle as Summer went to war with her mind.

Sleep became an obsession. It was all she could think about. Summer felt as though she was losing control. She felt helpless. She started to blame herself. It was becoming increasingly difficult for her to live the life she wanted to live.

The more Summer tried to fix her sleep, the more she seemed to struggle. Sleep-related rules and rituals didn’t work. Changing her diet didn’t work. Changing the temperature in her room didn’t work. Trying to eliminate blue light didn’t work.

Ultimately, what worked for Summer was not trying. She realized that she couldn’t control sleep. And, by no longer trying to make sleep happen, she started to struggle less with sleep and she had more energy to live the life she wanted to live.

Summer also started to be kinder to herself. She stopped trying to fight or avoid the thoughts her mind would generate as it did its job of looking out for her. She acknowledged her thoughts and feelings and allowed them to come and go. She expanded the focus of her attention. She spent more time with friends. She lived by her values.

Summer stopped trying to control sleep and she stopped trying to control her thoughts and feelings. As a result, sleep no longer controls Summer’s life. Thoughts and feelings no longer control Summer’s life. Summer controls her own life.

Click here for a full transcript of this episode.

Martin: Okay, Summer, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to come onto the podcast.

Summer: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Martin: Let’s start as always right at the very beginning. Um, can you tell us a little bit more about when your sleep problems first began and what you think might have caused those initial issues with sleep?

Summer: They started in February of 2017. So I have a very specific date in mind for when I noticed that I had sleep problems. these types of problems with sleep. Um, I think I probably had sleep issues long before then, but it wasn’t something that I thought about or gave any attention to. Second week of February 2017, I, um, experienced, I want to say four, but it might’ve been five nights of no sleep, not even an hour.

Summer: For four or five consecutive nights, I didn’t know it was possible to go without sleep for that long. So I, for the first time, had to go into the hospital. And I saw a doctor as well who prescribed a low dose of Valium I’ve never taken. that in my life. Um, and that got me sleeping again for a while. I didn’t even take the entire amount.

Summer: I think I took two or three tablets and, uh, the sleep issues just continued. They persisted. Um, I haven’t had a week where I’ve gone four consecutive nights or five consecutive with no sleep since that particular incident. But, um, It, that was the start. And it’s, I have a very palpable memory of that. It was a extremely busy time for me work wise.

Summer: Um, I think I was working. About nine hours a day with a, I want to say between 10 and 15 minute break. Um, and barely got to take that break. I was teaching and, uh, just was very inundated with, with responsibilities during the day. And then I was driving between 90 minutes to two hours. Um, in rush hour traffic, both ways, morning and evening.

Summer: Um, and it just, I remember feeling so much dread. I loved my job. I do love to work and teach, and I love being in the class and being with students that work in the university. Um, it’s not like I’m working with Children who are exhausting me. And that particular month, February 2017, um, and that second week of the month.

Summer: Just hit me really hard and, uh, it was the first time I think ever in that job that I have called in sick and then not been able to come into work, which caused me even more stress, which I think continued. I was thinking I would just take one day off. That also caused me to start, Investing a lot of time into researching online and it just, it really turned very quickly into an obsession.

Summer: Um, it was, I mean that this, and I thought that I would get over it maybe in, you know, six months or so. I just kept thinking if I could get past the next hurdle, whatever it was that was causing me to be anxious or stressed in that moment, I thought if I could get past it, the sleep would return and I continued to just be up and down, but I think it was more the obsession.

Summer: It was more than the time and focus and attention I was giving it. Um, obviously I. was still working and functioning and driving a car. And but my life really, um, took a turn for the worse that just the quality of life drastically reduced after that incident because of the fear. And then my obsession with trying to figure out how I could control sleep to prevent that from ever happening again.

Martin: Yeah, which I think is completely understandable just based on your description of everything that you went through.

Summer: I’ve been busy before. Um, I’ve flown across the international date line. Used to live in Australia and I, I’ve been over the ocean. Uh, six times, I guess, back and forth. Yeah, so I lived, I lived there and I would go back and forth between the U. S. and Australia. That’s about as far away as you can go without coming back. I know what jet lag and sleep deprivation feel like, and I didn’t die. I didn’t become obsessed. Um, I’ve been exhausted in other situations and circumstances as well. And this I think was the only thing that I can think of was that I felt like I didn’t have time to even eat or go to the bathroom in the day.

Summer: Um, the work load for that month, that month of February was so intense. And then the driving to and from. And just the expectations that I felt were on me, which I think in all fairness, I was putting the expectations on myself. I took more, took on more work than I, than I could have or should have taken on.

Summer: And, um, it just turned into a serious issue. And, uh, Each night that I would lay awake, I would think I, I’m not going to be able to function tomorrow. And what’s going to happen? Am I, you know, what’s going to happen to my job? How are my students going to react? How will my, my supervisors react? What if I get into an accident on the way to or from work?

Summer: It just, it was this This onslaught of negative what if, what if, what if, what if, and this just continued, and continued, and continued, and it was just one night after another, and I don’t really see that as being so extreme. Having a long workday where you have few breaks, lots of people. work like that.

Summer: I’m sure I’ve worked like that in the past. Um, but I want to say it was the second night. So I went through the first night of no sleep and I remember waking up and thinking, well, this isn’t good. Um, but I’ll be so tired. I’ll fall asleep tonight. Well, the next night. I didn’t. And it was that morning when I tried to stand up and realize that I had lost, kind of lost control of my equilibrium, that I couldn’t get behind the wheel and drive.

Summer: And that was the first time that I felt like the lack of sleep, and it had been at that point two consecutive nights with nothing, just lying there thinking, why is this happening? Um, and I took some over the counter. pills. I think I took some different hydramine, which is the ingredient in Benadryl. I just tried, didn’t work at all.

Summer: And I think that was it. It was, it was the second morning after having no sleep. So, um, and realizing that I had to drive and I had to go and work and that I still had, you know, three more days of the week to get through and then after that another two weeks to work this type of schedule. Um, and for me, it’s, I think, really comes down to control.

Summer: I had lost the ability to control anything. Um, and I felt like this, this sleep issue had just taken complete control of me, and the more I thought about it and fed those, those fears, the worse it got, um, and it just, that’s what it turned into, um. It, it was, it was just my, my inability to control what was going on, and I’m not sure if I’ve ever felt that out of control.

Summer: I felt somehow responsible for what was going on and it was my fault that it happened and it was my responsibility to fix it. And the more I tried to fix it, the more it would not be fixed. Uh, it just, it was, I mean, I don’t want to over exaggerate this. I, this happens to people everywhere in, in so many different types of circumstances, I wasn’t in a traumatic situation, nothing had had occurred.

Summer: Um, that would really. Well, it’s not right to say that, that nothing happened that justified me having this, this fear, anxiety and fear and stress and frustration is always valid when, when it comes, regardless of what’s triggered it. But there was nothing going on at the time in my mind that justified this other than feeling like I just was working.

Summer: Too much and not in the day. I literally just did not have time to get a drink of water. Go to the bathroom. There was just there wasn’t time. And, um, I was, I was hungry, you know, there was no time to eat if I couldn’t go to the bathroom, of course, there was no time for me to eat. It was, it was bad and it was, it was my own fault.

Summer: No one was forcing me to work like this. I had had taken on extra classes because I wanted extra income at that time. Love the job. But I, I just, I felt as though I’d put myself in that situation. And then I thought, this is my fault. I’ve got to fix it. Oh my goodness, I can’t. Now what? And that, I think, really is what started it.

Martin: And I think that’s why it’s so easy to get stuck, right, when these issues turn up. Um, because, like you described, we can be really hard on ourselves, which rarely makes things easier. Um, and we can then start engaging in, you know, actions that involve, with the intent of trying to control sleep.

Martin: And sleep, I think everyone listening to this, if we’re being honest with ourselves and reflecting on our own experience, we can probably tell that the more we try to control sleep, the more difficult it often becomes. And similarly, the more we try to control our thoughts and our feelings, the more we try and get rid of anxiety or worry, for example, the more they kind of push back and the more power and influence they get and So, all of these are natural responses, and I think that’s why it’s so easy to get stuck, um, and to then feel really confused and feel really concerned or worried that something uniquely wrong is, there’s something uniquely wrong with us, that maybe we’re broken, there’s some, some biological problem, but so often it is down to that change in approach, the change in the way we approach sleep, or the change in our relationship with sleep, um, that gets us tangled up in this struggle. And that’s what it sounds like you’re describing, just hearing you describe your own experience.

Summer: I never imagined that what was happening would turn into a five year battle with insomnia that would span two continents at the time I was living in the United States. Um, I brought this with me here to Europe and suffered, um, probably suffered more here than I did even back in the U. S. So it, uh, you know, even in my, my worst thoughts back when this happened.

Summer: First started, it, it was never, it just did not cross my mind that I was going to struggle with it for five years. Um, and, and just continue to have this horribly unhealthy. relationship with sleep, but I did.

Martin: What, what happened next? Like how did, how did things continue from that point onwards?

Summer: I, um, again, I had, I loved my job.

Summer: I had a great job and, and my colleagues and supervisor were very understanding and supportive. Um, I was extremely proud. When I was able to discard the Valium, I’m not a medicine person at all. Taking over the counter pills was, was something I didn’t want to do, but I’d been doing it. But when I got a prescription, I researched side effects and I just, I don’t, I thought I don’t want anything to do with this.

Summer: So I was very, very happy to, I think, take only three of those and then just, Get rid of the rest of them. Um, and I, I was sleeping on and off, but I was, I was having a hard time because there were other nights where I would lay awake. I never really had a problem again where I went day after day after day or night after night after night with zero sleep.

Summer: But because that had happened, every night that I struggled became a potential disaster to me. And like I’ve heard so many of your guests say, and so many participants on the forum have written about this, lying awake thinking every possible bad thing that can happen to me tomorrow will now happen because I’m not sleeping tonight.

Summer: Um, it’s such a, it’s such a typical story, but, but like you just said, back then when I was kind of new to this, this experience, I thought it was just me. I thought this is, you know, the, and, and my way of trying to deal with it was to look up, um, information on the internet about what was going to happen to me if I didn’t get there.

Summer: Control of the sleep problem. So I was changing my diet. I was trying to figure out I at the time I used to swim pretty consistently. Um, and I was trying to figure out if there was a certain time of the day, maybe relating to atmosphere. It was just ridiculous, the things that went through my head. Was there a better time that I should be swimming?

Summer: Um, I remember talking to a student, um, of mine. He was a, he was an associate professor that had come to our, our program. program to do some kind of research or something and I was, was working with him in, um, presentation skills in the English language and he specialized in Alzheimer’s and I remember him mentioning that if you exercise at night, the oxygen is less.

Summer: So you’re, you’re doing damage to yourself if you go out jogging at night or have, you know, brisk walking in the evenings. It’s better to do it in the morning when the quality of the air is better. So I would internalize all of these things and think I’m causing myself to, um, you know, be more at risk for all of these, these conditions and these disorders.

Summer: And if I don’t get control of them, And I don’t get control of the sleep problem. I’m going to end up, you know, having Alzheimer’s disease or having some other kind of, as if I have any control at all over that. And it, it really just. It turned into this, this obsession and the need to consume as much information as possible.

Summer: I would read studies that I didn’t understand at all. Things that, that I don’t have the, the depth of knowledge or understanding in. This isn’t my background, but I would read them as if I could understand. And then try to diagnose myself and figure out a treatment plan. It was just ludicrous. And this just went on and on.

Summer: Um, I changed my diet. I did all these funny things with light in my, my space. Um, I tried to get rid of all blue light after 6 p. m. Um, it just, I played around with the temperature. I did everything I could think of. Anything that I would find online that someone was suggesting might work. I would try it short of buying magic pajamas and wearing those, everything else I did and it didn’t work.

Summer: Um, there was a bit of a breakthrough, uh, in the summer of 2018. So this started in February of 2017 and then in 2018 I switched my diet pretty drastically to a plant based diet, whole food plant based diet, thinking I have nothing left to lose. I’ll just give up meats and dairy and all animal products and all preservatives and all of these things and I’ll just really try to go pure clean eating and within just a matter of days I noticed a drastic improvement in my sleep.

Summer: And I attributed that to the diet, and the improvement continued through, I’d say about six to eight months, where I felt like I had gotten the control back, and I was thrilled. And then I lost it. So, it just, you know, I had this period where I thought I was victorious and I had somehow managed to conquer this thing and all my work and research and my trying different things had finally paid off and I’d figured out what to do and then I became very, um, sort of zealous about plant based eating and trying to tell people to stop eating meat unless they wanted to have bad sleep, just ridiculous things, and it was working for me until it wasn’t.

Summer: So It just, it turned into the most unhealthy obsession that impacted every area of my life. Not just sleep, eating, relationships, exercise, um, where to sit in the house, what kind of music to play at what time of the day, um, you know, what kind of, of colors to have around me, so many things. And it was a very, very unhealthy obsession that I developed.

Martin: Just hearing you talk, we can see how easy this can consume our lives really because we engage in all these experiments, implement new rules, um, regulations and restrictions and rituals that then become the focus of our life rather than Living our life. Yeah.

Martin: And every time we engage in a role or a ritual or an experiment and it doesn’t seem to work, then we can put more pressure on ourselves. We spend more time trying to figure out the next thing to try. Um, and it just becomes. We just get pulled away from the life we want to live and we put more pressure on ourselves to sleep, all completely understandable.

Martin: I remember you posted in the Insomnia Coach forum and you shared that, reading forum posts from other people, um, and listening to other podcast episodes started to change your perspective. And that change in perspective was something that proved to be helpful for you.

Summer: Yes.

Martin: Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Summer: It was like a switch flipped. It was this thing that the switch had been stuck for years. I was convinced that, um, this is really silly, but I, I believed, I convinced myself that if I Left the USA at the time. This is I don’t want to go too far off on a tangent with this, but I wanted to leave. Um, I wanted to I’ve lived overseas most of my adult life, and I’ve really been happiest when I’m from the U. S. But I’ve been happiest and most at peace when I’ve been outside the U. S. For various reasons that I won’t go into. Um, and. I wanted out and, uh, I had planned on leaving. Um, I was in a graduate program, um, which I started after I’d had that horrible traumatizing incident with the sleep and whatever, and I was still kind of up and down and I think it’s important to, to point out that when I changed my diet, um, that coincided with the start of this new academic program I’d gotten involved in that was going to be demanding more of my time and giving me less.

Summer: Free time in the day and whatnot and forcing me to do more work and be on my laptop more and all of these things and I Decided to change the diet and lifestyle at the same time that I started that program and for the first six to seven months I was doing so well, and I really did congratulate myself, and I said, that was it.

Summer: That was the trick. But you said something just now. That made me realize that the trap with this is in the trying, and I think I was sleeping well during that six to seven month period because I stopped trying. I didn’t have to anymore. It was just happening the way it was supposed to. And, um, then I got back into this, this situation where I wasn’t sleeping as well, and when the pandemic came and I felt as if I were stuck and wasn’t going to be able to move out of the country, like I had been planning, um, That’s when it hit me again really hard.

Summer: And I started having trouble sleeping. It’s just it’s it’s control. So fast forward from 2020 to when I started to really understand that this was not something I had any control over. I moved to Germany to start a PhD. Very fortunate to be able to do that while The pandemic was happening. I think it was the first way.

Summer: This might have been the second. I don’t even remember now, but I got here and within something like four to six weeks, the country Germany went on lockdown. It was supposed to be two weeks, and it turned into six months. This is the second lockdown. And here I was in a foreign country, um, with no community, no Um, really no language skills at that time, um, supposed to be doing this research project and I didn’t have colleagues, I didn’t have really anyone to talk to, um, and I was sitting in an apartment day after day in lockdown.

Summer: So there’s plenty of time to sleep, but I wasn’t sleeping. And it’s important, uh, I think to, to mention that when I started reading the forum, the insomnia coach forum, I found it by happenstance. I think it was around the spring of 2022, and I’ve been suffering since I got to Germany. I did go through spurts where I had maybe four or five weeks of okay sleep, and I thought, Oh, good.

Summer: Okay. But I, I would be scared to celebrate it too much because always when I had done well in the past, I would regress. Um, I was so upset because I really thought that the solution to my problem was going to be moving here. Um, I had, I blamed my sleep issues on the country and the situation that I was in because I had never had insomnia in any of, I would say I’ve now lived in six countries, Germany is the sixth and I had never had insomnia issues or at least I’d never had this extreme obsession or focus on sleep anywhere else.

Summer: So I just thought this is because of where I am when I get out of this. I’ll be fine. And that didn’t happen, which upset me because that was my last effort to try and control, you know, what was going on. And in 2022, um, around March or April, I want to say, I just remember it was spring because we don’t get a lot of sun here in Germany and, and the sun had started coming out.

Summer: More days were getting a little bit longer and that helped. Um, restrictions had lifted, completely lifted in this country, and people were out and about. There were no mandates to show vaccine certificates. It just felt freer. And I started socializing because there wasn’t this fear of, you know, getting kicked out of some place because I didn’t have a booster vaccine or all these different things.

Summer: And, um, I started practicing my German. I’d been studying German, um, remotely through an online program and I started practicing speaking and just being out and about. And I’d been getting therapy. I started seeing a psychologist, I think in February or maybe early March of 2022. Um, and then within just a couple of weeks of seeing her, I found you, I found your, your, um, your podcast.

Summer: And I think you had a two week email. Um, I don’t remember what this was. You could sign up for a two week. Uh, email something or other where every morning you would get these emails with provoking questions and a little video or something like that. I started reading those and really just engaging with other people, um, who were going through this or had gone through it.

Summer: And realizing that there was nothing at all special or unique about me or my situation at all. Um, which was really comforting, learning that I wasn’t special in this way. Um, and those, those things kind of just came together and helped that, that switch release. It literally was like a light switch had been stuck down and could not be moved.

Summer: Um, I don’t need to worry about this. This is really, this is, this is crazy that I’m trying so hard and putting so much in my mental and even physical effort into trying to fix this problem. This was never a problem before when I wasn’t thinking about it. And now I’ve had this problem for more than five years.

Summer: And all I do is obsess over how not to have this issue. Um, and now we have freedom, and I’m in this, this country, and meeting these people, and learning a new language, and having this amazing experience. And, I’m missing out. You know, I’ve heard other guests talk about feeling like a spectator in their own life.

Summer: And I didn’t want that to happen to me here. Um, it just, it switched when I let go of control. When I just said, this is not, there are things I can control, but this is not one of them. And I’ve just gotta let it go. And I, I mean, I did have a, a psychiatrist, a psychologist, um, meeting with me. And, and she’s a, a cognitive behavioral therapist.

Summer: talking me through some of these things and As I think back on our first session, or maybe it was our second session, I remember her just saying to me, Summer what do you want? What what is it that you want out of these sessions, and I had this whole list of things But at the top of my list was like I want seven hours of the week Sleep.

Summer: And I don’t want to be awake more than 30 minutes at a time. I just, everything was just very itemized. And I remember watching her through the, we were doing remote sessions at the time. And I remember watching her through the camera. And if I go back now and think, I wonder what was going through her mind.

Summer: I’m pretty sure she was just thinking, right, that’s exactly how this works sarcastically. And she was very patient about it. Um, but After a couple of sessions with her and recognizing that she wasn’t actually going to follow up and ask me if I was getting seven hours or if I was, you know, falling back to sleep after 30 minutes, she didn’t validate any of that.

Summer: She said, Okay, I understand this is what you want. Let’s talk about how you feel when you don’t get these things that you think you have to have. Let’s talk about how you react to not getting them. And then what does that reaction then do to you? And yeah, she, she did a great job. But it helped so much to hear these stories.

Summer: Um, just individuals from all over the world who some of them maybe hadn’t had as, as frightening a circumstance as I had, but a lot of them, I, I remember one lady, I can’t remember where she was from. It was shortly after I first started listening to insomnia coach. Um, I think she said she’d been dealing with it for over 20 years.

Summer: Um, I’ve also heard other guests say that they’ve had it their whole life, which to me indicates that they’re aware that there was some kind of extreme disordered sleep for as long as they could remember. And I thought, my goodness, you know, to, to have that history, that must be excruciating. Um, it was just really good for me to hear these stories.

Summer: and recognize that none of us have control, none of us at all. There was something that you said, and I think you repeat this, I like this, this phrase about, um, giving attention and then taking away the attention. I’m pretty sure it was you. You say we, we starve it of the oxygen it needs when we just let go.

Summer: Um, sleep is going to happen when it’s going to happen, whether you want it to or not, whether you. try to make it happen or not, it’s going to happen when it, when it’s going to. And I heard it, and I heard it, and I heard it, and it finally sunk in. Um, and it just, I think there were a lot of factors that kind of came together at that time last year.

Summer: Um, I also am, I mentioned, I think, um, in our correspondence, I’m not a religious person. I grew up religious, but I’m, I’m not religious now, but I am a person of faith and I prayed and I, you know, I never lost that faith and I believe that that played a role as well. Um, feeling like there is someone much bigger who’s in control of this, who cares.

Summer: And, um, you just have to, to let that go. The end. You know, I went through that very scary experience of not having sleep for four to five nights in a row, and I, I didn’t get into a car accident. I didn’t get hurt or injured at all. I didn’t get extremely sick. I was scared and upset, but nothing terrible happened to me even after going through such a long stretch of, of zero sleep.

Summer: And I learned that the human body is actually capable of doing some pretty incredible things in extraordinary circumstances. But that wasn’t my focus back then. I wasn’t able to think about it in, in that way when it was happening or even after. So yeah, it was, um, it was a very freeing thing to just finally be able to say, you know what, if this isn’t my fault, it’s not my problem.

Summer: I don’t have control over it. Um, these bad nights are going to come and trying to stop them is, is really not a good use of my time and energy. Um, when they come, they’re going to come and I have to deal with them as they come. Um, and then just learning strategies for how to engage with those negative thoughts.

Martin: So just to summarize what I took from your description there, um, sounds like some things that you found useful, um, or that helped change your perspective was realizing that you weren’t alone. There were lots of other people going through a similar situation, like, you know, that struggle, but some details can be a little bit different.

Martin: Um, but the struggle is generally quite similar from person to person. Um, and, uh, you found it helpful to start to, Move away from that kind of control agenda. A little bit less trying. And as you did that, maybe you also freed up some time, some energy and attention to reengage in life in things that were important to you.

Martin: Yeah. Um, and so there may have still been difficult nights and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it. But even in their presence, you were still doing some things that mattered to you. Um, things that were important, things that you enjoyed, rather than 100 percent of your actions were focused on trying to fix, fix the problem.

Martin: And then you touched upon, how helpful it can be to drop the control agenda. Um, but as no doubt you’ve experienced, it’s very hard to do that, right? Because, um, we want to fix this problem and often this idea of not trying to control it anymore is kind of scary in itself because then we’re, we might be being hard on ourselves and we might suspect, well, this sounds a little bit like giving up. Um, I’m not going to try anymore. What does, well, I can’t, I can’t just give up. This is, this can’t be my life forever. Um, but you know, moving away from trying to control what our own experience tells us can’t be controlled can be really helpful.

Martin: But it’s one of those things that can be so much easier said than done. Then done. So I’m curious to hear, you know, how you approach that you were obviously reading, you’re working with a therapist, you’re also reading forum posts, listening to the podcast, and it sounds like you identified this common theme about moving away from trying moving away from trying to control sleep and what’s going on inside you.

Martin: But how did you how does that translate to action? Like, how did you actually go about doing that?

Summer: I had to let go of the guilty thought. Um, that I was having for not being able to fix myself. Um, I had to stop, uh, sort of excoriating myself for eating sugar at a certain time of the day. Um, or watching a movie until a certain hour and thus, you know, exposing myself to screens.

Summer: I just, I had to, I had to, um, forgive myself for breaking the rules. Before I could let go of the rules altogether and recognize I didn’t need those rules at all. I recognized that, okay, I am someone that needs to control. So let’s just redirect that control to something different. Channel it into something else and stop trying to control the sleep.

Summer: And in letting go, I started sleeping and I remember sending messages to some of my friends who’d kind of been praying for me over the course of several years, including my, my family back in the States as well. And it was, I think sometime in April, the month of April, 2022, I said, it’s gone. The insomnia is gone.

Summer: Um, I may still have some rough nights, but, but I’m not in, I’m not suffering from insomnia. And, um, some people kind of questioned it. Well, how can you just know? How can you know that it’s gone when you’ve had good, you know, good spurts or good periods of time before? How do you know? And I said, I just, I know because I’m not even going to attempt to control.

Summer: I’m not going to engage with these thoughts anymore.

Martin: One of the things that really stood out for me is your emphasis that there’s that desire for control. Um, which I think is probably universal. Um, especially when there’s difficult stuff present, we want to control it in the sense that we want to get rid of it.

Martin: And that’s completely understandable. Um, but what I love is how you kind of redirected that. You know, you reflected, yeah, I’m going to always have this desire for control. I’m going to want to control things. But in that context, you are then kind of brainstorming. Well, what can I control though? From my experience, my experience is suggesting that I can’t control sleep.

Martin: So I will satisfy my desire to want to control something. But instead of trying to control sleep, I’ll try and control something else. So for example, I don’t know. I’m just going to throw this one out there. I don’t know if this was relevant to you or not, but I might control my actions by, for example, going out for lunch today instead of trying to control sleep.

Martin: I’m going to control an action that might Just kind of push me along the path towards the life I want to live that’s more aligned with the life I want to live even when sleep might still be being difficult. And it sounds as though you also found it helpful to be kinder to yourself when things were difficult rather than being harder on yourself, putting more pressure on yourself to fix or control what your own experience was telling you can’t be fixed or controlled through effort.

Martin: Um, and I think that’s really important. And you’re kind of refocusing on things that mattered to you. Now, you know, we might be, people might be listening to this and saying, well, sleep matters to me. Well, yeah, absolutely. But you’re probably already focused on that. How about we refocus or expand focus onto other things that matter, um, other than sleep or in addition to sleep.

Martin: Um, and you kind of also, you said you identified rules and rituals that you were engaging in. Maybe as part of that control agenda to control sleep, and if they weren’t enjoyable, or you weren’t finding them useful, you started to kind of untangle yourself from them and allow yourself to be a little bit more flexible in the way you approached sleep, or the way you responded to difficult nights, and probably the big one is letting go of the difficult thoughts, the difficult feelings, um, not engaging with all those thoughts quite so much. I’m curious to know if you’re able to expand on that a little bit. If someone is listening to this and thinks, that sounds great. I would love to be able to let go of all these difficult thoughts, the feelings, the stories that my mind is coming up with. I would love to be able to not engage with them.

Martin: Um, how can we do that on a practical level? How can we practice that approach?

Summer: I made a decision that I was going to spend every single day thinking about the things that I was grateful for that I took for granted all the time. I focused on relationships because in that, um, I was able to listen to others and really absorb what was going on in their life.

Summer: And think about someone besides myself. And that self became less important. Finding this Insomnia Coach Podcast and really just taking the time to listen to these people. It’s the stories that you would feature on the podcast. And you’re right when you say basically it’s the same struggle, different things that precipitate this, but it’s the same struggle.

Summer: And um, it helped so much to, to hear that. I think his name was Eric. He said something that I really resonated with and that was that he would look at the bed and hate it and just not even want to see it. I went through that for years. I hated beds. Whether it was in my apartment, in a hotel, at a friend’s place, the sight of a bed was awful.

Summer: And I would look at it just with scorn and total contempt and think, You are the reason that I’m suffering, that I don’t feel well. And now, you know, I can’t wait to go to bed. I used to fear it. And now I just, you know, so I made a decision to just practice, um, gratitude. Um, and one of the, and it’s hard to do that when you’re hurting, when you feel dizzy or you feel nauseous, or you’ve got all this work to do, and you’ve got that sort of pressure in your head from not having slept.

Summer: And I, I know, um, It’s, it’s very difficult to be grateful for anything when you feel that way, so the only thing that really helped me was to just prioritize relationships and, and think about other people and try and take the focus off myself and put it on, on others. And that made a difference. Yeah.

Martin: That process of letting go of the difficult thoughts, of maybe engaging in them with them a little bit less, struggling with them a little bit less, was about maybe just diluting them. Um, not diluting them in terms of, I’m going to try and delete certain thoughts and feelings from my mind, but adding more stuff to them.

Martin: So if we imagine your life is a circle, and inside that circle you’ve got the insomnia. You’ve got the fear of the bed, you’ve got the anxiety, maybe the depression, um, the stress, the worry, all the difficult stuff. Um, and that can easily become our focus and that’s all we see inside that circle, right?

Martin: It’s all that difficult stuff. So naturally, we’re going to want to try and push it all out of that circle, get rid of it. Um, but what if we take a different approach where we just add some more stuff to that circle that’s a little bit more pleasant, or a little bit more enriching, or a little bit more rewarding.

Martin: And it sounds like you did things like gratitude practice as a way of identifying stuff that you might otherwise have missed. So you’re making a conscious effort now to actually look for some good stuff, which can be really hard to do when we’re really struggling, right? But if we look, we tend to find, even if it’s just one thing, there’s We tend to find something.

Martin: Maybe we heard the birds chirping. Something, it could be something small like that. You know, maybe we saw a leaf fall down in a really cool spiral pattern. Just something like that. You know, just something good that we can then put in that circle. And you said you focus more on relationships. What are other people going through?

Martin: How can I be there for them? You know, um, Especially if that’s something that’s aligned with your values, you know, being, being someone that can be there for someone else. That’s some more stuff that you’re adding to that circle, you know. So the difficult stuff might still be there, but now it’s not all that’s there.

Martin: You’re adding on all of this other stuff and kind of diluting it down a little bit. So maybe then Let me know if this was your experience. Maybe then you’re less inclined, perhaps, to focus quite so much on all that difficult stuff and really get tangled up in a struggle with it, because now your focus is kind of adding more of the good stuff and noticing more of the good stuff.

Summer: Yeah, when I started openly talking about it as well, um, not just posting on the, on the forum and listening to podcasts and talking to a, I mean, talking to a psychologist isn’t the same as talking to friends. When I started talking to people, in person. That was another thing. Instead of talking on the phone or, or, you know, sending messages and what’s up, but actually going to a coffee shop or going for a walk somewhere and, and talking with new friends that I was making here in Germany and saying, I’ve been struggling with this.

Summer: And, um, one, one couple that I met, one young couple that lived in my building, um, uh, the husband recalled a story of having some pretty serious sleep issues when he’d been on some sort of a work trip to Japan. And I remember just thinking as I was listening to him. Rehash the story and how it had concerned him, but he didn’t end up developing this obsession with sleep He just remembers that he had a hard time for a while.

Summer: He couldn’t sleep when he was there He had a hard time sleeping when he got back to Germany and I thought you know, this just this happens to everybody this happens all the time and It’s good people get scared people get upset. They might get sick but You know, they maybe they don’t need to spend five years fighting this and trying to to control it the way that I have and just having these these open conversations about it also made a difference, but definitely getting that focus less on on or if I’m going to think about myself, I wanted to think about the things that I was fortunate or blessed to have rather than how much I was suffering.

Summer: And I went from being resentful towards the people around me who I knew and didn’t know to being grateful for these people. I remember I would walk through my apartment and get very annoyed if, if a car drove by because the lights would shine through the little opening. Um, between the blinds where the blinds met the window and I would think because it’s after a certain time and I’ve got lights shining into my apartment, now I’m done.

Summer: I won’t sleep. And I was so mad at whoever was driving that car and I would go from that type of ridiculous, just completely illogical thought to I’m so glad that I’m not out there driving. I’m so glad that I live in a country that I don’t need to have a car anymore, so I don’t have to drive. Driving used to cause me a lot of stress as well when I was living in the U. S. because I was just always sitting in traffic. I don’t have to do that here, and so I literally just flipped. Everything changed. The resentment, the frustration, all of these things were replaced by gratitude, and I would just look for things, any small thing to be thankful for, and then. Like you mentioned, just try and find out what’s happening in other people’s lives, um, and think about that, and how can I, and even in some small measurement, how can I help if, if there’s a need for help?

Summer: And eventually, my issues just became less important, and eventually the sleep just came.

Martin: Did your approach in the evenings change at all? You touched upon, you started off having all these different rules and rituals. It sounds like you started to dismantle them. How did you start to respond to being awake at night in a different way that you found helpful?

Summer: That’s a really good question that I think about a lot. Um, I do have one rule that I should It’s not a rule per se, it’s a strong word. It’s something that I am, for the most part, pretty consistent in and disciplined in. And that is no clocks. Um, I stop watching the clock. And I don’t count sleep. Other things that, that changed I used to be really fussy about food.

Summer: And I would, I would have certain things that I would eat between 8 o’clock and 8. 30. Okay. I just stopped that. When you get up for some reason, hunger, going to the bathroom, whatever, a noise wakes you up, and then you can’t fall back to sleep, that is stressful. It’s frustrating. It’s infuriating. I sometimes feel resentful toward whatever it is that woke me up.

Summer: Um, I think the difference now is, is that I don’t get too upset about having those thoughts. I don’t punish myself. For having the thoughts, I just decide if I’m not going to sleep because I’ve been woken up or something, um, I might not have a very pleasant morning or day. but the day will go on and it will pass.

Summer: Um, and I’ve been through this before, just like so many other people have. And I’ll just get through it. Even if I have to get through it one hour at a time. And I don’t go through these motions anymore of, okay, I’ll do this. If this, and in case of this, I’ll do this. And I used to have plan B, C, D, X, Y, Z.

Summer: And I don’t do that anymore, but I do, I do lay awake sometimes irritated. That I’m not asleep. And it’s usually on the nights when I don’t have a lot of time, or I feel like I don’t have a lot of time. And I’m not looking at the clock, so I don’t know what time it is. But I know that I have to be up for something important the next day.

Summer: And I’m not happy about the situation, so I let myself be angry, and I’m okay with it. I didn’t ask to feel that way, um, so anyone who is waking up in the middle of the night and being frustrated that they are not able to fall back to sleep. has the right to feel frustrated and doesn’t need to feel like they somehow have to dismiss that thought quickly, right?

Summer: It’s, there’s nothing wrong with feeling what we feel over the these types of issues. But I think recognizing that’s what it is. It’s a feeling. It doesn’t mean that the day is going to be horrible. It probably is an indication if the sleep never does come or if it’s really poor sleep, the next day may not be great.

Summer: But that also doesn’t mean that everything is just going to fall apart. Um, it’s, it’s really helpful to just. deal with these thoughts when they come by saying, okay, I’m, I’m really, really angry right now. I’m really annoyed. I’m really frustrated with this person across the street who can’t keep their dog quiet, which I love dogs.

Summer: I have no problem with them barking all night, but I can see how that would bother some people, whatever it is, that’s causing that negative feeling. Uh, just feel it. It’s, it’s fine to have those, those, those thoughts and feelings. Um, you can’t. make them go away because you don’t want to have them. And night is a perfect time because we’re just lying there and mind wanders.

Summer: And it is, it’s really almost impossible to dismiss those thoughts. So bring it on. Um, but, but when the morning comes and you’ve got to get up, let it go. That’s, that’s all. And yeah, it’s, um, I feel like I’ve gotten control of my life by letting go of control of this. And in that, now I’m, I’m satisfying that need for control.

Summer: You know, I don’t let these negative thoughts control me. I don’t get scared of them when they come. I don’t enjoy them. I don’t mean to say that I like it. But I, they come, I deal with them. And, and they come again and again. Um, and I deal with them again and again. But then I, I have to let them go. Because I have things to do.

Summer: Like we all do.

Martin: I think it’s really important that you mentioned you still experience human thoughts, feelings, and emotions like anger, irritation, anxiety, frustration, because it’s really important. It can be so easy to fall in. It’s another one of these potential traps, right? Well, we might say, well, I’ll know things are better when I don’t, when I’m not anxious anymore, you know?

Martin: And I think of them as dead people goals, you know, well, we’re not anxious when we’re dead. Otherwise we’re always going to have anxiety pop up from time to time. Um, And so I love the fact that first, you just mentioned that, yes, I’m, I don’t consider myself an insomniac anymore. I’m not tangled up in that really big struggle, but I still have anxiety from time to time.

Martin: I still feel irritated or angry from time to time. But the difference now, and especially when that stuff shows up at night, is you’re acknowledging it now and allowing it to be present rather than putting on the boxing gloves and going unlimited rounds with this invisible opponent, which tends to just make things more difficult.

Martin: Now you’re naming it, you’re saying, okay, I’m feeling anxious and you’re just allowing it to be present for as long as it chooses. And then in the morning, your focus is shifting now onto action. Now I’m going to, even though. That anxiety might still be here, just using that as an example. Now I’m going to get out of bed and I’m going to do either what I had planned or do something that matters to me.

Martin: Um, so all that stuff starts to lose its power and influence because we’re less engaged with it. We’re like tug of war only works when each side are tugging on that rope, right?

Martin: When one person drops the rope, there’s no more tug of war going on. Um, and these thoughts can still be difficult. We’d still probably rather have that magic switch where we could permanently delete them.

Martin: But since it doesn’t exist, I think that this is a more workable approach.

Summer: Well, it’s the same thing in life, whether it’s sleep related or not. Negative thoughts. Regardless of what triggers them. Whether you’re, you know, in the middle of the night trying to fall asleep and stressed out about something related to work or family or relationship or anything, or it’s the middle of the day and you’re at work and you’re busy and you’re trying to focus on something and get something done, whether you’re tired or not.

Summer: And you have these negative thoughts. So I don’t really think there’s anything unique. And maybe I don’t know this would help. It does help me. But recognizing that those negative thoughts I have at night are no different from the negative thoughts I have in the day, when I’m in traffic, not that I’m in traffic anymore, when I’m frustrated, you know, Germany is a difficult country to live in, um, for foreigners.

Summer: It’s difficult for Germans, I think, but for foreigners, it can be really tricky. So every day is something it feels like here. And these negative thoughts are just present, ever present all the time. And for me, there’s no real distinction between the thoughts that come at night when I’m laying there, if I’m awake, and the thoughts that I’m having on a train or at work or sitting in my room trying to do something or whatever it is.

Summer: Um, they come when they come, they stay and their thoughts and their feelings and that’s what they are. That’s all they are. Um, and they’re always going to come, but, and I’m not going to be, I’ve just not bothered to try and control them. Um, maybe I’ll engage in why am I feeling this way. Let’s, let’s think about this.

Summer: Is this a rational? response, but even that sometimes gets a little too much. Just let them come.

Martin: I think sometimes there’s important information in these difficult thoughts, right? Sometimes they can be reminders of things that are important to us, things that matter to us. And it’s one of those reasons why I like to just think, I don’t even label thoughts and when I’m working with clients, I’m just, if, well, if we have to label them, how about we just call them natural?

Martin: Because they are natural, you know, joy, it feels good. Anxiety tends not to feel good. But they’re natural and normal. human feelings and emotions. Um, sometimes I think just when we put some certain thoughts and feelings in a kind of positive category and some in a negative category, we almost can set ourselves up for struggle because we associate negative as stuff we have to get rid of.

Martin: Um, but if we never experienced anxiety or fear, for example, we wouldn’t be alive today, would we? So how negative are they truly? Maybe it’s just the way they make us feel can be negative, right? But they can sometimes. Be really useful and really valuable. Um, and it’s that struggle with them that makes tends to make things difficult In in terms of that struggle like that process of moving away from it.

Martin: How long would you say that? Once you had this new perspective and you started to change your approach, how long would you say it took for you to get to the point where it felt that you were no longer entangled up in that constant struggle with sleep, when it felt as though insomnia and all the stuff that comes with it was starting to lose its power and influence over your life?

Summer: For me, this is, I think this is not typical, um, from, from what I’ve heard from listening to other guests. But for me, it was fairly instantaneous. Um, and this is where, you know, I’ve not, I’m not right about this, but I would attribute it to prayer. Um, I really do believe that that I believe that I gave away the control to someone who.

Summer: really can control it. Someone who cares about me can call, call it whatever you want. I call it God. Others might call it the universe or the cosmos. I’m fine with that. Whatever. I’m fine with it. But something or someone that I consider a benevolent force that actually cares for me and cares for what I’m going through here.

Summer: Um, and, um, Once I was willing to say, I give this to you, I’m done, I am finished trying to control this, this sleep, um, issue, take it, it was taken away, and it was instantaneous, and that tends to be very, I wouldn’t, I mean, it’s not magical thinking, I, I can understand how it sounds that way, but I’ve, I’ve heard so many stories of people that have sort of similar experiences where they have that switch flip.

Summer: Um, and I, you know, I think an easier way for people who aren’t interested in the spiritual or faith based side of this is just to think about the power of positive thinking. If you want to disassociate it with faith, um, it, it can happen, um, quickly. Um, I’m not going to say, when I say that it was instantaneous again, I’m not saying that I suddenly went from this sick, tired, worn out, stressed person to this happy, joyful person that was swimming every day and having all this fun, um, and I still struggle.

Summer: I still have bad days and bad nights, but it was instantaneous. Um, the insomnia was gone when I realized I would, I would say probably within a week or maybe two, um, listening to the podcast, talking to people about it in person, being on that forum, having a therapist who knew what she was doing. I stopped reading, you know, papers on, on all of these different horrible disorders that can come later in life from, from not having enough sleep. Uh, I enjoyed listening to podcasts about sleep prior to overcoming it because I thought like I was feeding myself important information, but I stopped listening to sleep experts other than the insomnia coach, insomnia coach podcast. I did not. Insomnia wasn’t a part of my vocabulary anymore. Um, it was very quick.

Summer: It was quick. It was an attitude adjustment. I prayed. I really prayed for that adjustment and I got it. And I’m not, again, trying to say that things are perfect. But I do not suffer from that. I let it go. I gave it away. It’s not something, it’s not something I have to bear anymore. But yes, I recognize I’ll still have tough nights.

Summer: I accept that, and that’s fine.

Martin: If someone with chronic insomnia is listening, and they feel as though they’ve tried everything, That they’re beyond help, that they’ll never be able to stop struggling with insomnia.

Martin: What would you say to them?

Summer: I think what you said earlier is be kind to yourself. There’s nothing, um, I, I feel like the person that is listening, that is having this, these feelings, I’ve had them, most of us have, that are, that are involved in this, this kind of a discussion, um, you’re doing everything you can do.

Summer: Um, so. What more can you do? I mean, I think really just, uh, forgive yourself for having these, these feelings of inadequacy or not being able to control it or not being able to get better. For me, I really believed I was at fault and I held myself responsible for what was happening. I really did. I would, I would sometimes, I would internalize this feeling of responsibility and I might blame someone else like on the outside.

Summer: Oh, this happened and this is why, or I, you know, I said earlier, I thought it was the country that I was in and the circumstance I was in. I thought if I left and moved somewhere else. So I was trying to pass blame when I really knew deep down that I was blaming myself. For not being able to figure out a way out of this.

Summer: So that’s what I would say to anyone else. Don’t do that. Don’t take it upon yourself to solve the problem. Um, It’s, It doesn’t go away just because we want it to. And we try 5, 000 different things that we might hear on a podcast or read on the internet. Um, so, When, when that hopelessness comes, recognize that it’s still, it’s a feeling, um, the insomnia is there, the sleep issues are there, the bad thoughts are there, but I don’t think that, that we have to be responsible personally for those thoughts and, and it can sometimes be hard to let go of that responsibility too, so.

Summer: Yeah, I would also say as much as possible, try and, and focus thoughts on others as much as possible. It is so hard to do, especially when people are talking about their own issues and, and whatnot. It can be very difficult when you’re suffering yourself. Um, but that is something that I think is really important.

Summer: We all get very wrapped up in our own head and what’s going on. And it. It makes a huge difference when we can just look outwardly and recognize there are other people out there that we could actually maybe be serving in some way, even if it’s really small.

Martin: That’s great. Well, thank you so much for coming on to the podcast and sharing your experience.

Martin: I just know it’s going to be so helpful for so many people, so I’m very appreciative. Thank you.

Summer: Thanks for your time.

Martin: I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Insomnia Coach Podcast. I’m Martin Reed, and as always, I’d like to leave you with this important reminder — you can sleep.

Mentioned in this episode: From the Insomnia Coach Podcast: How Eric got his life back from insomnia by focusing on what he can control (#53)

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Listen to the podcast episode (audio only)Nina typically dealt with occasional periods of sleep disruption by taking some form of over-the-counter medication. When she fell pregnant this was no longer an option. Work stress seemed to make sleep more difficult and so Nina stopped taking on work. Her sleep would improve but every time she started working again, she struggled with sleep all over again.

At this point, Nina thought her ongoing struggle with sleep might be down to pregnancy hormones and yet, after giving birth, her sleep seemed to get even worse. Nina tried to make sleep happen by consuming alcohol, taking supplements, and meditating. She tried hypnosis. Her doctor prescribed her medication but the side-effects were awful. Nothing worked and Nina felt stuck, she felt scared, and she didn’t know what to do.

Then, Nina found the Insomnia Coach podcast. She realized she wasn’t alone. That there was hope. When we started working together, Nina started to make changes. She started to do things that mattered each day, even after difficult nights and even when that felt really difficult. Instead of struggling with being awake during the night, she planned and engaged in activities that would help make being awake feel a bit more productive or a bit more pleasant.

Nina gave herself permission to be awake. She was kinder to herself when things felt difficult. She stopped trying to get a certain amount or type of sleep. She focused on actions that would help her get her life back from insomnia rather than continuing to battle with insomnia.

Nina’s journey was not easy. There were setbacks. She went back to sleeping pills from time to time. Today, Nina is back at work. She enjoys her bed again. She is being the mother she wants to be. She has her life back from insomnia.

Click here for a full transcript of this episode.

Martin: Okay, Nina, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to come onto the podcast.

Nina: Thanks for having me.

Martin: Can you tell us a little bit more about when your sleep problems first began and what you think might have caused those initial issues with sleep?

Nina: Yeah, so for me, it kind of, in a way, it kind of happened slowly.

Nina: And, I didn’t really know that I had a sleep problem. It actually came on me initially when I was pregnant. and it was just, I think as the pandemic was happening, and I was trying to go back to work and like I work in the film industry, so it’s not really something that’s constant. so it would be quite normal to actually not sleep very well before a job because you’re on off with work and you’ve really early starts and all that kind of thing.

Nina: So I was trying to go back to work. Kind of just when things were opening up again, and I was quite stressed I’d also gone through like a pregnancy loss before that like quite late late term. So I was you know, I think I’d had a lot of kind of stress trauma, whatever blah blah and And then the pandemic on top of it and I was a bit worried about my pregnancy You know, working in film, like, I’m a makeup artist, so I work quite closely with people and that kind of thing.

Nina: So I was just even trying to read scripts and things, and I was starting to get quite stressed. And then, when I went to sleep, I couldn’t sleep. And I, I just, it, again, it wouldn’t be unusual for me to not sleep. before work for the first day, but anytime in the past before I had been able to just take something to help me sleep, I’d go to the chemist.

Nina: Looking back, I don’t think this is a really good thing to do anyway, but it just shows you what I would have done, what we all kind of did if we, if we didn’t sleep. We’d be living on caffeine tablets during the day and, you know, taking flu tablets at night time to get a few hours to get up again at three in the morning or whatever, you know, crazy stuff.

Nina: But when you’re pregnant, uh, you can’t do any of that. So that, I think, made it worse for me knowing that I couldn’t take anything. And I just thought, Oh my God. And then the next day, the same thing happened. I couldn’t sleep. the day after that, I couldn’t sleep. And I thought, what the hell? So I thought, Oh, I’ll go to the chemist.

Nina: I’ll, I’ll see, you know, what they’ll tell me that I can, that I can take for sleep. And of course they went in and they said, you can’t take anything. You know, you’re pregnant, blah, blah, blah. And that then made it worse again. And the cycle just kind of continued. And then so. I thought, well, okay, you know, I can’t do this job, I’ll just step back for a bit, try again another time, you know, went back to sleep in absolutely grand, took another job, oh my God, the same things happened, you know, and I thought this is really weird, but I put it down to pregnancy.

Nina: I put it down to, oh, it’s because I’m pregnant and I can’t take anything to help me sleep. But then every time I tried to take a job the same thing happened and I just thought okay, well, initially, then I just thought, well, I have to stop working when I’m pregnant like this, you know, I can’t just stay awake all night.

Nina: When I have, you know, a baby, when, when I’m looking after a baby, essentially, you know, so, and it was during the pandemic anyway. So I just thought, well, I’ll just, you know, sit this one out. but then after I had the baby and I tried to go back to work again, the same thing happened and I fell into the same cycle with breastfeeding because it was breastfeeding and I couldn’t take anything, blah, blah, blah.

Nina: So this whole time, I didn’t really think it was insomnia. I thought it was just related to. Pregnancy, pregnancy hormones, you know, I just, I really didn’t know what was happening. but the same thing happened on and off for ages, and then it just got worse and I went to the doctor because I, every time I tried to go back to work, I would just be awake for the entire night, you know?

Nina: and yeah, I went to the doctor and that kind of made it worse again, you know? So, There just sort of seemed like there was no help out there for it, but I didn’t really know what the problem was, you know, so that’s kind of how it started,,

Martin: It sounds like once that initial trigger or the circumstances around what you identified as causing these sleep issues wasn’t, around anymore, or wasn’t relevant anymore.

Martin: The sleep issues still suck around. And that’s when it can start to feel really mysterious, right? Because we can attribute the cause to all these things, but now all these things aren’t around anymore, and then we can start to worry, well, what’s going on now? Is that the kind of thing that you experienced?

Nina: Yeah, exactly, because In the beginning, it was me trying to get back to work. And every time I would take on a job, I’d say, Oh, well, I’m sleeping great now. I’ll take a job. And then of course, I’d take the job and all the fear would come back. I wouldn’t be able to sleep, blah, blah, blah. But then it got so bad that it just bled into my everyday life anyway.

Nina: So then it was just every day, regardless of if I was working or not. And that’s when it really, like, you’d say the shit hit the fan, you know, because it was just like, I was just like tortured every day, you know, I just, and I couldn’t see a way out of it. And then it was only then that I thought, Oh, this is like probably insomnia.

Nina: You know, this is a real problem. and it’s actually taking over my life because I still had a young baby, like, and he was a really bad sleeper. So, you know, I think like. maybe that was part of the problem as well. Well, even though it started when I was pregnant, but then after he was born, like I had a very long, even labor, labor with him.

Nina: And then after that, he never slept, you know? So my sleep kind of was just, completely thrown off. And he was still quite young. I think he was probably only 10 months or nine, 10 months when my insomnia just became like a full time thing, you know. and he, you know, he would have been awake all night. If anything, actually the kind of, uh, treatment, like the, when I actually got the insomnia treated, it helped his sleep in a way, because I just could not be there to, you be with him all night, you know, and his sleep got marginally better.

Nina: But, but, yeah, like it definitely, that’s, that’s when it got really, really bad. And when it became proper insomnia, I think, or when I registered that that’s what the issue was.

Martin: So, Now you’re kind of in in that struggle, you know, you kind of figured out there’s there’s something else going on here It’s not just this temporary issue It seems to be this thing that’s present and I can’t seem to shake it off Like any normal human being you identify that as a problem and you want to try and fix it So I’m curious to hear what kind of things you tried, when you found yourself really struggling.

Nina: Yeah, I, I tried everything. I mean, I think when the insomnia kind of got really bad initially, uh, I was so freaked out, you know, at the beginning I started drinking, like probably the first night I tried like wine and stuff because before I had sleep issues, you know, a glass of wine, if I had one glass of wine and didn’t have anything else, it would knock me out.

Nina: So I thought, okay, I’m going to try it. I’ll drink. So I got out of bed, had a glass of wine, got back into bed, you know, didn’t fall asleep. The more things fail, the more freaked out you get, and the more freaked out you get, the less likely you’re ever going to sleep, you know. So it’s like the worst vicious cycle.

Nina: And you’re like, okay, so I’ll try something else. That doesn’t work. You know, obviously like meditations and all those kind of nice, you know, It’s music, music all through the night. You know, I probably know them all, those 24 hour things on YouTube and stuff, which are lovely. It makes it slightly better, but it doesn’t help you get to sleep when every time you go to sleep, you wake up with your heart racing, which is what would happen me.

Nina: yeah. I tried loads of supplements. I went to like Ayurvedic doctors and spent a billion quid on stuff. I tried all the antihistamines. I tried like two or three different types of melatonin. Like, I couldn’t get anything proper because I was breastfeeding. but one of the chemists, you know, was saying that you could take these.

Nina: Antihistamines, try them, whatever, at that stage I wasn’t really breastfeeding much anyway. and, yeah, but nothing, nothing worked, you know, so, like, really nothing worked. And then I think it was the day of my birthday. That it was just, it was so bad. And I remember then just going, I just need to go to the doctor and try and, I actually tried hypnosis before that as well.

Nina: Cause I’d heard that that had helped somebody and that actually made me worse. Like it, it made me so much worse having to lie in the bed and like concentrate on this thing that’s supposed to, supposed to make me relax into sleeping. But it was just making me pay attention to fact, to the fact that I needed it to sleep.

Nina: You know, and then every time this bell would ring at the end and I would just be like, oh my god, it’s the end of it. I’m awake, you know, and it would just make it so much worse. So like after that on my birthday, I went to the doctor and I said, blah, blah, blah, I have this problem. You know, I really need some help with it.

Nina: Like I feel like I’m going crazy. I need to sleep. I have a baby, like blah, blah, blah. And I was like, oh my god. he was, he, he was actually quite good. He wasn’t my regular doctor because my regular doctor wasn’t there, but he told me CBT would be really good and he gave me the name of a counselor, but he obviously mixed up CBT and CBT-I because CBT was just counseling and, you know, that was great, but it wasn’t going to help my insomnia.

Nina: And I did, but I did download CBT-I apps, which kind of gave me a a bit of, you know, an idea of what CBT-I was, but it just wasn’t enough. and then he prescribed me an antidepressant because he said that it might help with my sleep. And I thought, well, I’ve had a really stressful year anyway. So maybe this antidepressant will help me with my sleep.

Nina: I took it and then I had like the worst reaction to anything. Like I was, I was out of my head. Like, I literally felt like I was on loads of drugs. I was really horribly anxious. I felt awful. And I was like looking up Things on this and like the antidepressants, I’ve known people who’ve been on it and they’re absolutely grand and it did wonders for them, but I guess I probably wasn’t really depressed.

Nina: I was taking it for sleep or maybe it just didn’t work. My physiology, I don’t know, but, it didn’t work. And, you know, I, I thought maybe this is just a side effect of it and it’ll get better. And I tried to stay on it, but I actually couldn’t even function. I felt so awful. It did help me sleep funny enough.

Nina: It was the only thing I could do. Was sleep, but I felt so terrified that they had to prescribe the other medication to counteract the anxiety of that until I could get back into the doctor and then I got back and he’s like stay off them. So I did and that was that, but then insomnia was straight back.

Nina: So it’s kind of back to square one. I really didn’t know where to turn, honestly, and I was listening to another podcast that was nothing to do with insomnia, but they had suggested finding, like if you have a problem, to find what they call expanders, and it’s people who have been through the same situation as you.

Nina: that you can see to believe that something’s possible. So I thought, okay, well, I need to find somebody who’s gotten over insomnia for me to believe that that is possible for me. And I just knew two people, my mom, actually, funny enough, and my stepmom who have sleeping issues, but neither of them had gotten over them.

Nina: So I was kind of doing the anti expander by thinking, Oh my God, these people have sleep issues and they just take sleeping tablets and they can’t really do anything because they never sleep. And I, you know, it was doing the opposite for me. It just made me panic way more because I could just see what they were doing and I knew that I didn’t want that, you know, which is making it worse.

Nina: So I ended up just, googling, I got over my insomnia or something like that and up came your podcast. and that’s how I, that’s how I found you and your podcast and your YouTube channel and stuff, which gave me everything that I was looking for in, you know, in the Expander podcast. way, but, and that was great.

Nina: I really needed that. And I had actually gone to a sleep consultant before I, in Dublin. but yeah, that didn’t really help either. You know, like, I mean, it was, it was the right idea, but it just didn’t, it didn’t work for me either. You know, I just felt like it wasn’t, it was kind of a tick the box thing.

Nina: do this, this and this, see you later, you know, and it doesn’t sort of get down to that fear like that, that people with insomnia have, because you’re really just petrified, you know, and like, you need somebody to say, you’re going to be okay. And like, if you say, like, I remember saying to the last lady, like, Oh, you know, I just, how am I going to be okay?

Nina: And she’s just kind of like, Oh, you know. Probably. You’re just like, yeah, you know, it’s like they don’t want to tell you you’re definitely going to be okay in case you’re one of those people that’s not going to be okay, but like you will be okay, you know, like, I don’t know. You just, you need your hand held a little bit and you just need to be told.

Nina: It’s like, you know, that’s all it is. It’s just, it’s like, it’s an overload of stress and fear and like, you just need to be brought down off that ledge, you know, like you don’t just suddenly stop sleeping for no reason. Like, there’s reasons that you can’t sleep, you know, and you just need to be told, it’s okay, relax, you’ll be fine, do this, you know, and you’ll be able to sleep again, like, you know, it’s like, yeah, I don’t know why it’s made so complicated, you know.

Martin: The fear, like, just can be just this huge can of worms, right, because it’s understandable. First of all, I think it’s important to recognize and emphasize that fear is a natural and normal human emotion. You know, nobody goes through life without experiencing fear.

Martin: When we do things that are important, we experience fear.

Martin: When we do things that matter, we can experience fear. When we do things that aren’t pleasant, we can experience fear. We can experience it for all different reasons. But I think what can happen when we get tangled up in the struggle with insomnia is it’s kind of like this new front that we open up that gets us drawn into more of a struggle.

Martin: So we’re kind of struggling with the sleep.

Nina: Mm-Hmm. .

Martin: And we’re struggling with the fear ’cause we no longer wanna experience the fear because it doesn’t feel good and because we recognize it maybe as a barrier or an obstacle to sleep. And then we start to get anxious about fear turning up and then we can start to get anxiety about anxiety turning up.

Martin: Yeah. And it’s just. new front after new front opening up and we’re suddenly going to war with so many different opponents. And before you know it, we just feel stuck, right? We just feel like we’re just getting overwhelmed by all these invisible enemies and that it’s impossible for us to move forward.

Nina: Yeah. Takes over your whole life, your whole day. You know, and you get all these new triggers, like all the time, it’s like, Oh, the sun is starting to set. Oh God. You know, I need to start thinking about like all of the things next that are leading up to the event of bed, you know, and it’s like, it just goes on and like, it’s so ridiculous that like your brain can allow that to happen, you know, and that you can do that to yourself.

Nina: Day in, day out.

Martin: It can feel like the brain gets a bit adversarial, right? It’s like, why are you working against us? but the truth is, you know, the brain, when it’s generating fear or coming up with all these thoughts and stories and time traveling into the future, what might happen, what has happened in the past, really the brain is actually doing its job of looking out for us, right?

Martin: It’s just trying to figure out what’s going on, how to fix it, how to protect you, right? Um But because we, going back to what I was saying earlier, because we can see that as an obstacle, as a problem, and because sometimes it doesn’t feel good to experience certain thoughts and feelings and emotions, we can start trying to fight or avoid them.

Martin: so then the brain’s got this idea that, hey, I’m looking out for you here, I’ve got some important stuff to say. And we’re kind of, no, I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to hear it. I’m going to distract myself, or I’m going to avoid the situation that generates that stuff. and that’s when it can kind of grow in power and influence, right?

Martin: So all these thoughts and feelings and stories now kind of take on a life of their own. They become so much more powerful because they start to influence our behaviors. and they can start to consume more of our energy and attention as we just trying to push them away or trying to avoid them. and it’s completely understandable why we would do that, but it often just gets us drawn into more of a struggle that makes things so much more difficult.

Martin: And it sounds like That was your experience, not to put words in your mouth, but it sounds like that’s what you’re describing. Would you say that that’s accurate?

Nina: Yeah, it was definitely accurate. I mean, I kind of had, I guess I had the sleep issue for probably around two years, maybe two years more maybe, but for a year it was really constant.

Nina: Like, I mean, I also was on sleeping tablets, so I didn’t mention that before because I was given them, funny enough, by the first Sleep consultant. Uh, I got them from, from where she kind of told me like, Oh, you’re either taking them or you’re not taking them. So I ended up taking them and that obviously made the sleep, my sleep worse, you know, and then I was taking like a full sleeping tablet every day for, you know, I don’t know, five months or something, six months.

Nina: I couldn’t get off them then, you know, and they weren’t even really working, but like that made the anxiety worse, you know, and the, the sleep. Yeah. So I was just, it was like, I guess the sleeping tablets probably gave me a little bit of rest for a while, but I was also like, you know. The feeling of knowing that you’re using a tablet for sleep and that that’s not in your control anymore is just weird.

Nina: Like you don’t want to give your, their control of sleep over to a tablet. I mean, nobody really wants to know that even psychologically that like, Oh, I can’t go sleep anymore. So you take this tablet, you know, and then, you know, and they, yeah. Yeah, they kind of stopped working or whatever, but like, yeah, that was very much my life on and off and on and off and full time for months, years really, because I couldn’t like, you know, I still couldn’t go back to work or every time I did.

Nina: I’d have to take a tablet if I went back to work and sometimes the tablet didn’t work and, you know, and then sometimes I’d maybe one night I’d have a good night and I think I’m okay and then I wouldn’t again and it just, in the back of my mind, it was always like, Oh, I’m not over this thing. Or, you know, I felt still kind of like tied to the past in a way of like, you know, times that were harder or whatever, you know, like, That, that was still like clinging on in a way, you know, I wasn’t, I wasn’t over it.

Nina: I took, yeah, took a long time to get out of the, the horrible fear part, you know. definitely did. Definitely, definitely did. Yeah.

Martin: Maybe we could talk a little bit more about If there was a change of approach to that fear, or how you were able to approach that or deal with it in a different way, once we started to work together, because it sounds as though you recognize that the fear, maybe the anxiety around sleep, how it’s influencing your life, was, a major issue related to the insomnia struggle.

Martin: So can you tell us, maybe it was more than one thing, but maybe we can just start here. how you first started to approach responding to that fear a little bit differently when we were working together?

Nina: Yeah. Well, I think, for me, I started with the, I started with your free course actually, and that really helped.

Nina: I think from the moment I signed up with that. I stopped taking the sleeping tablets. So I think I was really mentally ready to just be like, I need this to go away and I’m going to do whatever it takes. Like, I really felt that I was, I had, I was gone down the right track basically, because of all the, the videos of people that I’d listened to on the podcast and everything, the YouTube videos that I’d watched and stuff, I really felt like, you know, if they could do it, I could do it.

Nina: So I wasn’t as. Afraid of what was coming. Like I knew what was coming in the sense that I’d done all the sleep restriction before. I actually had been doing all that for months before I worked with you. so I was somewhat sleeping, but I was also still on sleeping tablets. So I hadn’t managed to wean off them properly.

Nina: And like, I’d get some, I’d get somewhere with it and then I’d fall right back down again. So I guess, yeah, I was really, really, really ready. And I think what shifted was. I guess being up at night, just not resisting it, you know, and also going about my day and not letting things get in the way of that, that was a really important thing and that was a really, really hard thing to do because it wasn’t always easy, but I think that really helped.

Nina: some of the days were so long, even just with like, with a baby who woke up, like he would wake at like four or five in the morning. So my day was long and he would wake during the night and he would only be going to bed at like 8pm or something, you know, but spending the weekends trying to do something memorable, definitely did help.

Nina: And I know that was one of the things that you would say, you know, and the more that you would do those things, it would. you know, you would be making those memories and it would make sleep less important. And that is true. Although it was hard to do that, but it did end up making sleep less important because it wasn’t just like, I didn’t sleep.

Nina: So I’m just going to sit in today and my whole day’s ruined because I’m tired and I didn’t sleep. Whereas you’re just going to be tired at home doing nothing, you know? And so that helped, but also just. Staying up at night and not just waiting to go back to bed. And that’s such an easy trap to fall into because even like anytime I’d do well with sleep and then I’d have a little bit of a relapse again, I would fall back into those same traps again, you know, of being pissed off that I’m awake and, you know, just waiting to go back to bed and or just sitting pissed off in my bed, waiting to go back to sleep.

Nina: like. If you’re not sleeping, like none of that’s helpful, you know, you kind of have to be okay with, with being up. And that’s so much easier said than done at times. But what really did shift, and I did notice it shift was some nights just been like, okay, actually, what am I going to do tonight? You know, and like actually thinking about things that I could do that are enjoyable, because like, I didn’t really have much time to myself anyway, because my baby was awake all the time.

Nina: So, you know, The tables did turn a little bit if I was like, you know, I’m surviving on no sleep. I’m probably not going to sleep anyway, but I’m going to enjoy this time. Cause I don’t get much time to myself and I would plan to do something, you know? And then it was that shift that I found actually, like, I’m enjoying myself now.

Nina: And funny enough, I’m able to sleep better. You know, it’s like shifting it from just being miserable and having that miserable existence to having nicer experiences. You know, and I guess when you’re having a nicer experience, you’re lowering your stress levels and you actually probably can sleep better because you’re not just stressed out all the time.

Nina: So yeah. And I do remember that at one specific moment kind of going, because I had, I had notes up in my kitchen and I used to write things like ideas that I could do at night time when I was awake, I’d write them down. And sometimes it was really just like household tasks because I thought, well, if I’m going to do some cleaning, at least it means I don’t need to do it tomorrow when I’m retired.

Nina: You know, and I would take some things off my list, do the dishwasher, clean the cooker, clean the kitchen, you know It’s better than sitting down just you know, like I’d be so alert Anyway, as soon as I’d hit the pillow my, you know, stress levels would go through the roof My heart would beat so fast, you know No amount of sitting down relaxing was gonna chill me out that much So at least if I got some things done, I could feel good about that, you know, and Go and relax and not just be like looking at the clock thinking I need to go back to sleep.

Nina: So all of those things kind of did help. And that getting that into my head that that was okay and allowed. And I don’t need to just think about the hours that I need to get. Because you’re either going to get them or you’re not. And I could never tell whether how many I was going to get. So I might as well be doing other things.

Nina: And that shift sort of, I think really made a difference. Because at least I was happier, you know?

Martin: Yeah, and you’re kind of giving yourself options, right? Because when you got that, the default option, which is maybe like just stay in bed and just try, try, try to make sleep happen. Because maybe your mind is saying, well, if you do something else, whether that’s in bed or out of bed, then sleep’s less likely to happen now.

Martin: Because you’re not trying. but maybe then we can acknowledge, thanks brain, okay, I can see you’re trying to look out for me here, but what does my experience tell me?

Martin: My experience might be telling me something different. My experience might be telling me, actually, the more I’m just trying to sleep, and that’s my core focus.

Martin: The more I tend to struggle, it doesn’t tend to make conditions any better for sleep. So how about I give myself alternative options? so if I do find myself really struggling, it becomes really unpleasant, I’ve got something else to do. whether it’s reading a book, watching TV, getting some stuff done off the to do list, it really doesn’t matter, because at this point, the goal isn’t really to make sleep happen, because that’s something your experience is probably telling you cannot be achieved through effort.

Martin: The goal is really to practice experiencing being awake at night with less of a struggle. So we’re just doing something else that kind of, in a way, is training the brain that alright, wakefulness can be unpleasant, I’d much rather be asleep, I’m not trying to trick myself, but at the same time, it’s not a threat, you know, it’s not something you have to be quite so alert to protect you from.

Martin: And I’m demonstrating that being awake at night isn’t a threat. by struggling less with it, by doing other things, by not going to war with this invisible enemy of nighttime wakefulness. and that in turn can also just take so much of the pressure we might put on ourselves to sleep, because now we’re not actively trying to sleep.

Martin: We’re just making use of that wakefulness, maybe in a more productive or a more constructive way.

Nina: Yeah, as well. And on knowing that, you know, you would always say as well that like, Thinking about your day the next day is so much worse than actually doing, living your day the next day. And although sometimes the days are hard, but like the days actually that I was in work exhausted were probably a little bit easier than the days that I was at home exhausted anyway.

Nina: You know, like thinking about having to go to work for me, thinking about having to drive was really scary. Like, Oh my God, having to drive to work. And that was part of it as well. If I had to go far, but the days that I was in work weren’t that bad, you know, even days where I didn’t get to sleep at all, worrying about not sleeping was so much worse.

Nina: You know, and even the days, the nights where you’re just struggling, lying in bed. I actually used to have a cathedral outside my window and the bell used to go off every single hour on the hour. So it was like, don’t watch the clock, but it was like, ding, Oh my God, it’s 1am. You know, ding, ding. Oh my God, it’s 2am.

Nina: And that just happened all night. So it was like pure torture. Those nights were so much worse. And as soon as I was up, you know, if I had the telly on or something, at least I couldn’t hear the bells. I could hide my clock. I could just stretch from the time, you know, and when I was also given, I guess, the allowance to stay up and not worry about the clock as well, like I’m being told to do this.

Nina: It was a bit easier as well, cause I wasn’t, at least I knew I was doing it for a reason. You know, this is actually going to help. Don’t worry about it. You know, this is actually the right thing to do. Don’t just lie in bed, torturing yourself. Just do something else. You know, it’ll eventually lead you to the place that you want to be.

Nina: You know, you just have to, you might as well be just enjoying it. You know, do something, do something other than just lie in bed, which I did so much of anyway, you know, like my link with that pillow was so strong for staying awake and. not sleeping, you know, it was like as soon as I went into the room, I was like, you know, I’d like look at my bed.

Nina: I’d look at the pillow and I would just like, I’d hate it. You know, he’s changed the covers all the time and be like, Oh, I need to get these covers off, you know, and then I’d still hate the bed straight away afterwards. Like

Martin: just, just hearing you describe How the worries or the time traveling, the time traveling brain, the thoughts that come with that and how the brain often predicts things kind of worst case scenario, right?

Martin: and then when we actually go about our days, they can still definitely be really difficult and really hard, but often they’re not as difficult or as bad as what the brain might suggest, and I think it can be helpful to just recognize that, because the brain is hardwired to think of worst possible scenarios, worst case outcomes, because that’s what keeps us alive, right?

Martin: If we see this creature walking down the street that we’ve never seen before, the brain’s like, Don’t touch it. It could, it could be like this alien life form that’s going to destroy you and everyone within a 50 mile radius of you if you touch it. So we don’t touch it. regardless of whether or not that’s true, now we’re safe, right?

Martin: Because we haven’t touched the strange creature.

Martin: but that can work against us too. If we kind of take it literally, if we take those worst case scenarios that the mind’s coming up with and we just see them as 100 percent facts. because then. We might withdraw from doing things that matter to us, do less of the things that are important.

Martin: And then, like you touched upon, maybe then we’re kind of sitting at home, doing nothing.

Nina: Mm hmm. No job.

Martin: Yeah, exactly.

Nina: No money. No friends.

Martin: Yeah, and it’s not, then it’s kind of, The question is, is it the insomnia that’s leading to this result, or is it the way I’m responding to the insomnia that’s leading to this result?

Martin: and I don’t say it that way to kind of attach blame, but I say it that way because it can, Give us a sense of control, you know, because if it’s down to our response, maybe if we respond differently, if we can keep doing at least some of the things that matter, even if they’re really small, and maybe we start to chip away at the power and influence that insomnia and the thoughts and the feelings that come with it are having over us.

Martin: And as we continue to do that. Maybe we can start to emerge from the struggle, you know, pull ourselves out of the quicksand and it’s not a it’s very rarely a quick and easy process often takes ongoing practice, especially when your brain is screaming at you, you know, there’s no way you can do this.

Martin: You’ve got to stay home. You’ve got to rest. You’ve got to recover. You’re too tired to do any of this stuff. it can be a real effort because you Those thoughts in themselves are difficult, but the reality is often difficult too, you know, this, we’re not pretending here, the days tend to be really difficult.

Martin: we can’t directly control, you know, our fatigue levels, or we can’t permanently, directly, you know, Permanently delete anxiety or fear, but what we can do is change our relationship with those things. maybe acknowledge their presence, be kind to ourselves when things are feeling difficult and continue to do things that matter even when this stuff shows up.

Nina: It’s like what you said about the bully and it’s so true because You know, you are letting it take all your power away. You’re letting it take all the things you enjoy away. because you are trying to conserve your energy and stuff, you know, but then you’re just not doing anything. Like one of the things that I did as well, then as I started, I was Just going to the gym, whether or not I slept, you know, and I probably wouldn’t have done that before.

Nina: and I was fine in the gym. I was absolutely grand. I was still able to lift whatever weights I wanted to lift and I felt great for it. You know, whereas before I might have thought, you know, probably shouldn’t go because I need my energy. But it’s like, no, I’m, I’m going to do everything. Some of the days I actually had the busiest days.

Nina: You know, I did the most amount of things because I was like, I was just booking so many things in because it was, I, I didn’t want to just be sitting at home feeling sorry for myself and wallowing and the fact that I’m not sleeping. And also it was good to just distract my mind, you know, and then little by little, I wasn’t, I didn’t have the time and the energy to think about sleep, you know, and then I started sleeping better.

Nina: but yeah, it, it, yeah, it was, it was a process. It definitely didn’t happen overnight, but it definitely did happen.

Martin: You touched upon how helpful you found it to continue to do things or to reintroduce things that matter into your life, even when, even while the insomnia was still present, even while the fear was still there, the anxiety, the fatigue, all that difficult stuff was there.

Martin: You weren’t kind of, I need this stuff to be gone before I can do these things. You kind of flipped it around. I’m going to do these things even though they’re there and then maybe they might fade into the background or maybe they might lose some of their power and influence and in effect, maybe I’ll start to emerge from the struggle and conditions for sleep will become a bit better because now I’m no longer putting quite so much effort in.

Martin: These things aren’t having quite so much power and influence over me. and maybe I think this kind of comes back to what you touched upon earlier when you said. You know, what really helped me was dropping that resistance to insomnia or being awake at night.

Martin: And it sounds as though what you’ve also been describing is dropping the resistance to all the difficult stuff that comes with insomnia during the daytime as well.

Martin: whether that’s what you’re thinking or what you’re feeling, how you’re feeling, Okay. And I know that people listening to this are going to be like, Yeah, that sounds great. Drop the resistance.

Martin: If someone says to you, how do I drop this resistance? So if we start at nighttime, how do I drop that resistance? Because I don’t want insomnia to exist. So I want to resist it. I want to get rid of it. How do I drop that resistance?

Nina: Well, I think. Okay, well it’s like you get caught in a loop of not wanting to be tired and feeling scared of being tired all the time.

Nina: and I found that that’s for me where you’re just like, I just want my sleep or you might have one night. It’s nearly the nights where you have a good sleep that make it worse. Because you’re like, Oh, I feel really good. And then you’re afraid of losing it. And then you’re tired again. And when you’re tired again, it’s worse because you know what it’s like to have good, to have good sleep.

Nina: But I guess then you’re still just micromanaging everything, right? I think if you just give in to being tired, you’re just kind of like, this is it for now. I’m just going to be tired. I’m just going to do these things hard, and I’m just going to do the best that I can tired, you know, it, it doesn’t matter for now, because this is not forever.

Nina: This is temporary. This is not forever. And you just kind of have to drill it in that it’s not forever. And you just kind of have to make it the now more manageable. And know that that is going to get better. It’s just going to get better and better and better. It might go up and down, but it will just get better.

Nina: And I kind of feel like for me, that was sort of, I just had to give into it and be like, you know what? If you’re going to be tired tomorrow, you’re going to be tired tomorrow. Whatever it is, it’s not going to be as bad as the way you’re imagining it now. Because even, Even how tired you are at the end of the day, like sometimes you feel more tired in the evening before you go to bed.

Nina: Even if you’ve been up all night struggling by the time that you’ve in the morning had a shower and had your breakfast, you’re even a little bit more revitalized. You know, it’s not the end of the day, like if you just do something to change the mood or you know, you, you won’t be as bad the next day as you think you’re gonna be.

Nina: It’s never as bad and. I think just accepting it for what it is at the time and making the best that you can and just remind yourself that it’s not forever. You know, it is very much temporary and you are doing the right thing. Like I think that’s, that’s probably what helped me. And also just like, I just really had enough of it.

Nina: You know, I really had just had enough. I’m like, Oh my God, like I was so bored of my own thoughts, you know? So like sometimes they come in, I’d be like, Oh my God, who cares? Do you know? Who cares? Who cares? Yeah, you’re tired. Great. You know, whatever. Like, this is it now. I’m just gonna be tired. Grand. You know, I’m just gonna do something else.

Nina: I’m just gonna clean up. At least I won’t have to do that tomorrow. Or, yeah, just watch a bit of telly. Like, grand. This is not what other people are doing, but I’m gonna do it. You know, and just have a bit of joy in what you’re doing. You know, everybody has different struggles and this is just the struggle that I have right now.

Nina: And it’s not forever. I’m gonna make the best of it.

Martin: I think it’s natural and normal that we have that resistance, right? Because it’s something we don’t want to experience. but just listening to you talk, what comes across is just the fact that there is an alternative option available if we wish to take it.

Martin: So we can continue trying to resist. You know, each individual listening to this are the experts in themselves, and if they feel that’s the right approach for them, then sure, then that’s the option that they can pursue. If someone is listening to this and they feel that that resistance isn’t really getting them where they want to be, then there are alternative options.

Martin: And so for you to put that kind of into practice, to physically put that into practice, it sounds as though your alternative options were to do something else physically at night. Alright. Other than resisting insomnia, trying to make sleep happen, and during the day, instead of trying to resist the tiredness, the fear, the anxiety, you kind of acknowledged it, you know, this is true, I’m not trying to trick myself, I am pretty tired, I’m, I’m feeling scared, I’m anxious, my brain is time traveling all over the place, I can’t focus.

Martin: Even though all that stuff is present, I’m gonna respond by doing things that are important to me, things that are meaningful. So even though that stuff is there, there’s also some other meaningful or important things as well. and I think that really is how we kind of, that’s how we move away from the resistance, just by giving ourselves alternative options.

Martin: If our experience is telling us that resistance isn’t getting us closer to where we want to be.

Nina: Yeah, exactly. I mean, I kind of kept myself busy. I think that’s what I did during the days when I felt like, okay, I’m really, I just really, I’m tired of this now and I want my life back. So at least I was giving myself my life back.

Nina: I was just doing it tired, you know, but it helped. But also like, you know, lying in bed is fine, but you don’t want to be lying in bed. struggling. So it’s like, you know, if I was really tired, I’d be like, well, maybe lying in bed is okay. I’m like, I’ll lie in bed, you know, but if I was going to struggle, and I know you, you would always say that if you want to go to bed, go to bed, you know, if you’re, if you’re, if you want to lie in bed and be awake, be awake in bed, but don’t struggle.

Nina: And I think that’s the thing that like, there’s no point in doing that, in being in bed struggling, you might as well just be up doing something else. You know, and at least I was doing something else that was going to benefit me somewhat and make my life a bit easier.

Martin: So when you were practicing this, this new approach, something that a lot of my clients tell me or a concern they share with me is what if, This doesn’t work for me.

Martin: You know, what if I’m that kind of outlier? What if all this extra effort I’m exerting into doing things during the day that matter to me or, you know, doing engaging an alternative activity instead of trying to sleep at night? What if this isn’t going to work for me? What if I’m not going to make progress . Did your mind generate any of those stories? And if so, how did you respond to them to kind of keep you on track?

Nina: Yeah, I mean, I thought that all the time.

Nina: I didn’t think I would be on, on. The podcast or on a podcast or, you know, I mean, if anything, I just had people around me who like suffered from sleep issues and who were just popping pills and that was them, you know, and I was just like, I, Oh my God, that’s all I saw, you know? And thanks to your podcast and thanks to your, YouTube channel, there’s just so many people and then the forum as well, you know, like you could see on your form who’s a client and who’s not a client and, you know, and I think that’s great as well because you’ve got people who are clients helping people who aren’t clients and stuff, but it also, you can see how people are evolving and, you know, how people are struggling and it’s, you know, I just thought there was so much evidence there to suggest that this works.

Nina: You know, and that just kept me going. And I thought, you know what, like, I, you know, if you try hard, you have to have some success in it, you know? And it’s like, I guess my, the last sleep coach that I had, she sort of said like people who tend to suffer from insomnia can be people who are like a type A personality who like need to fix things and who have to try really hard and stuff.

Nina: and maybe that’s why they don’t sleep. She, she suggested that, you know, and I thought, that’s really interesting. But I guess if you then are a kind of person who wants to try really hard at something, and she was saying, you know, you can’t force sleep, but at least if you’re given a plan that you can try really hard at, that works, then why not do that?

Nina: You know, you can’t force sleep, but you can force a plan to work, you know? So I just thought, no, I’m just going to have to. It just made sense to me. It did make sense to me because it’s like, in a way, it’s somewhat like an anxiety issue. Like it doesn’t just appear out of nowhere, you know, like what you’ve said before as well.
I just thought that if I went with this plan, it would definitely work for me.

Nina: I felt like in a way I didn’t have a choice because I had to, I had to get on with my life regardless, you know, regardless of sleep. And at least that was part of the plan was, well, you have to get on with your, get on with your life, you know? So I was going to have to do that either way. but yeah, the fear was definitely there.

Nina: What if this doesn’t? work, you know, but it worked, it worked for so many other people, you know, and it definitely seemed like the best option because there wasn’t really that many more options out there. And I’d actually tried all of them, you know, I had literally tried all of them. but this definitely seemed like something that I, I did think it was going to work.

Nina: I did think it was going to work and I was going to stick it out as long as it took as well. You know, I think Watching everyone’s videos, the one thing that really stood out as well was that like everyone was a carbon copy of each other. I mean, even the symptoms that people had, you know, the thoughts that people had, just even knowing that there is so many people out there that were awake at night going through the same, you know, thinking the same crazy thoughts, having their whole life taken over by this thing, you know, like that helped.

Nina: And then knowing that so many people had come from that and overcome it. So I did, I did think that I would be able to get over this, but I also, there were often times when I was awake at night that I just wanted it to be over faster, you know, and then you’d think you’d get somewhere and then you kind of have a relapse.

Nina: And that was one thing as well, that you covered a lot in your videos and stuff, which I would then watch repeatedly, you know, to try and calm myself down. Yeah, but then it’s just like, like everybody says, I mean, everyone has the same, it’s the same for everyone, you know? And you can even find people in the videos that you relate to so much as well, like, Oh, this girl’s just had a baby and this girl, blah, blah, blah.

Nina: And, you know, it’s just, it’s like life events or, you know, seem to just make these things happen. and yeah, I mean, all of that, all of that definitely really helped. And I definitely wasn’t sure, but. You know, I think my sleep is fairly good now, so, yeah, it’s definitely better.

Martin: Talking about progress, can you describe the moment, if there was a memorable moment, or maybe it was more gradual, but Was there a moment when you kind of realized that things were changing?

Martin: that this whole new approach that you were experimenting with towards sleep and all the thoughts and the feelings that can come with it, that can come with insomnia were actually proving to be helpful, that this approach was, was proving to be useful.

Nina: Yeah, I mean, I did the course. I remember kind of getting to the end of that and being a little bit, like, afraid, oh my God, you know, I’m on my own now kind of thing.

Nina: Yeah. I remember thinking, okay, like if I struggle again, I’ll just sign up again, because it was, it was so helpful. Like I, I felt like a different person by the time I finished to be honest, but I, I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to kind of go out on my own. Like, and also because I hadn’t really gone back to work.

Nina: So for me, it was different and I think it was dragged out so much longer because of the way that I work. I wasn’t taking on any long jobs because I didn’t have child care and all of that. So I was taking sporadic days and then, you know, like it would just bring the sleep thing back up or, you know, and you’d actually said before as well that normal people experience, You know, bad sleep from time to time.

Nina: And that was something that I genuinely didn’t really agree with. I was just like, do they know they don’t like I had completely forgotten. Like I had forgotten what my sleep was like. I think I was just totally clouded like to that. And I really didn’t believe it. And now I really, I do, I can see that, you know, and that it is normal.

Nina: But at the time I didn’t think that, So yeah, every time I would go back to work or have a day, I would be like, Oh my God, I’m asleep, blah, blah, blah, which I’d say a lot of that was somewhat normal. And then, you know, of course it was going to be heightened for me, not really only because of the insomnia, but because I hadn’t worked really in years, like at that rate, I hadn’t, you know, my skill was, you know, You know, what not really being practiced and I’d had the whole pandemic.

Nina: I was now a mom, like there was so much in that. And then I was just like trying to just flex my makeup artist muscle and just go back to work as if like nothing had happened. And I just think that I’m just going to be able to go sleep and have a great night’s sleep. You know, that’s probably not likely going to happen.

Nina: So in a way it took me longer and I was a bit more afraid at the end that I you know, might not have great sleep, but I actually got on grand and my sleep, even when I did have to go back to work, yeah, it wasn’t always perfect. Sometimes I did dabble a little bit in a sleeping tablet just so I could get into work and stuff like that.

Nina: And, you know, that wasn’t always a great idea. it might’ve gotten me over a hump or two and then blah, blah, blah. My sleep would always go back to normal. But I think having the tools that I had learned. I could always go back to them. my sleep never got bad and also, you know, I just ended up having to go, okay, the sleeping tablets there, you know, not really like, it was kind of awful having them because it was so easy to use them, you know?

Nina: And it took me a while to realize that actually, Yeah, I can use them if I want to, but the more that I use them, the more these thoughts can come back, you know, and it’s just taking, it’s, it’s taking more time for me to actually have a good night’s sleep because I started thinking, Oh God, maybe I need this to sleep, blah, blah, blah.

Nina: You know, so it was on and off because of the way that I worked. but, but my sleep got so much better. I mean, by the time I’d even finished the eight weeks, I was, I was sleeping well without the tablets. Most nights. You know, and only when I did work was I a little bit like not sleeping as well. But then there were lots of reasons for that too, you know, like, and before I’d started with you, it was every night.

Nina: I couldn’t sleep, you know, it was like really bad. so yeah, and I was kind of like, I was using the form and stuff as well, a little bit, and I was still kind of listening to the podcast, you know, and I think one of the, you know, When I really realized that sleep wasn’t controlling my life anymore, it was when I wasn’t listening to the podcast.

Nina: And when I wasn’t going on your YouTube channel, like when I go on and I didn’t see your face on my YouTube all the time as like one of the most watched people. I was like, uh, I haven’t been listening to the podcast. Do you know? Interesting. Like, cause it was such a crutch for me. It was such a help, you know?

Nina: So that was definitely a sign that my sleep was pretty good.

Martin: If we were to attach some kind of timeline, to all of this in terms of moving away from a struggle, like how long would you say that it took for you to get to a point where you felt as though you just weren’t constantly engaged in that struggle with sleep and all the thoughts and feelings that come with it when it felt like it was It was all losing its power and influence over your life.

Martin: You know, when you went online and no longer you were kind of going to YouTube looking for my face anymore, it felt like you kind of regained your independence from that struggle. how long would you say roughly, that that process took?

Nina: Probably six months, maybe a little longer, you know, like it was very gradual.

Nina: Six months, I’d say where I was like,

Nina: You know, I mean, after three months, it was a good bit better, but I was definitely, I’d say another, another three months after that. And then it was a year before I was like, okay, this is significantly like, I really feel like I’m over this. but I, I remember as well, you would kind of do check ins and every time you did a check in, I was in a significantly different place, you know, and that was great.

Nina: Like, it was like, okay, this is great, you know, and anytime I would have a struggle like the, you know, I would sort of go, okay, you know, this, this is actually going to be grand. Like, it’s like, I, whatever, it’s fine, you know, it wasn’t a big deal. It became less of a big deal really, but yeah, I would, yeah, I would say it’s probably six months, you know, but I mean, by then it was a lot better.

Martin: I remember when, when we first started working together I think it was about a year ago, how time flies.

Martin: I remember the, your goals, like when I asked you, like, what are your goals here? and you had a few that stood out, And that was returning to work because like you mentioned, you had this concern about, you know, if I returned to work, the insomnia comes back, then what? so you really were keen to return to work.

Martin: You really wanted to enjoy your bed again. As you described earlier, you kind of had that really strong association. Bed is a, is a kind of battleground. It creates a lot of fear. Being capable of being a good mom was one of your goals, obviously very important and just putting that struggle behind you so you could kind of move on with your life, you know, live the kind of life you wanted to live.

Martin: now you’re able to kind of reflect on your journey. how do you feel you’re doing with those goals?

Nina: Yeah, like that makes me really happy because I’ve definitely. Smashed all those goals and I’m, I’m genuinely like, so happy about that. And I think like the taking on that job as well, it was like, that was my last thing.

Nina: Cause if I’d only done the days and stuff and the shorter things, I mean, doing a longer project should be absolutely fine. But you always think, what if my insomnia comes back in the middle of it or what, you know, I guess it’s like, it doesn’t. It doesn’t matter, you know, like it, it won’t because you’ll be busy doing other things, you know, living your life.

Nina: and yeah, it’s, yeah, I definitely, all of those things, yeah, back to work definitely feel like I can be a good mom, you know, the struggle is gone. And I have my life back, yeah, absolutely, 100 percent all of those things, yeah, thank you.

Martin: If someone is listening, someone with chronic insomnia is listening, and they feel as though they’ve just tried everything.

Martin: They’re beyond help, you know, maybe they’re a unique case, they’ll never be able to stop struggling with insomnia. What would you say to them?

Nina: I would say sign up at Martin, definitely, you know, I would 100 percent I would say like listen to the podcast, go on to the YouTube, you’re definitely not alone.

Nina: You know, there’s so many people, everybody seems to have the exact same needs. Everyone has the same thoughts, the same feelings, the same response to everything, you know, definitely start now and just, yeah, start living your life again and you will be completely fine. You know, this 100 percent works, like there is, you know, there is no reason to just struggle any longer, you know, just, yeah.

Nina: Yeah, there’s help. There’s definitely help out there and it’s worth doing and you can just get on with your life. Like it’s just no way to, no way to live. I’ve just been terrified of sleep and it’s, it’s pointless, you know, like, and the worry. The worry just takes over just, yeah, you don’t, you don’t need to be worrying like that for no reason.

Nina: Yeah. Sign up with Martin. Definitely. That’s what I would say.

Martin: All right. Well, I appreciate that Nina. And thanks again so much for taking the time out of your day to come on and share your experience. I know that it’s going to be really helpful for lots and lots of people. So thank you.

Nina: Oh, thank you so much. It was great to be here.

Martin: I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Insomnia Coach Podcast. I’m Martin Reed, and as always, I’d like to leave you with this important reminder — you can sleep.

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Listen to the podcast episode (audio only)In this episode, Kreuza shares her journey through the challenging landscape of insomnia and somniphobia — a fear of sleep. Initially, she found Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I) techniques helpful. However, when sleep problems returned as somniphobia, the same techniques faltered. Feeling isolated in her struggle, Kreuza realized that implementing rules around sleep were not helping her.

A turning point came when she embraced a more flexible, compassionate approach to sleep. She began to practice accepting her thoughts and feelings without resistance. She practiced being kind to herself when things felt really difficult. And she engaged in activities that mattered to her, even after difficult nights.

Kreuza’s story is a testament to the possibility and power of patient and kind practice of acceptance as a way to deal with deep-seated fears. It also highlights that moving past sleep struggles is often a journey of ongoing action and practice — and setbacks — rather than quick fixes.

Click here for a full transcript of this episode.

Martin: Okay, Kreuza, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to come onto the podcast.

Kreuza: Sure, I’m happy to. Thank you for having me.

Martin: Let’s start right at the beginning. Um, when did your sleep problems begin? And what do you think first caused those issues with sleep?

Kreuza: So my first, uh, issue with sleep was actually in 2013, um, which I did CBT.

Kreuza: It was very mechanical. There was, um, it was just go to bed at this time, wake up at this time. And so, um, there was really not much else to it. And so I overcame that in a few months. And, um, but the, the, um, last year I also had insomnia. But with Somniphobia on top of that. So that’s so that was way more challenging than just the insomnia itself that that required more than just, um, the mechanical CBT get up at this time, go to bed at this time

Martin: When you were first struggling with sleeping, you kind of practice these CBT-I techniques.

Martin: Um, you found them helpful at the time, and then it was kind of a little bit further down the road. Some sleep disruption showed up again. Did you? Yeah. Did you try re implementing those techniques? Um, and if so, what do you feel like the difference was that time around the second time around when you tried implementing those?

Kreuza: I sure did. So, so I, so I was familiar. So, because since I did struggle with insomnia 10 years ago, um, I, I always, it always kind of stuck with me ever since then that, Oh, I’m just a person who has trouble sleeping. Like I just, That kind of stuck with me, but it wasn’t really a problem for about a decade.

Kreuza: I mean, I would have, it was a nuisance at times. I would have periods that my sleep would be, you know, not so great. And then it would kind of fix itself. So it wasn’t a big issue for, for that period of time for that decade. Um, until, um, until last year when. I mean, it really just, as it tends to start, it really just started with a couple of nights not sleeping well, and then it spiraled.

Kreuza: And I, and I said, well, I’ve been through this before, I know what to do, and I know the protocol, I’ve done it before, and I know that it works. So, I started to implement it on my own. And I gave myself a certain amount of time in bed, I would, I would follow it pretty religiously. I stuck to my, to my, um, my schedule, but I noticed that it wasn’t getting better.

Kreuza: And so, and in fact, it was actually getting worse. And so that’s when it really started to spiral out of control.

Martin: Why do you feel that these CBT-I techniques were perhaps really helpful first time around, but then that, then later on when you tried to implement them again. The kind of results weren’t aligning with what you got the first time around.

Kreuza: Right. I actually think that’s because I was trying to do it on my own. The first time I had a therapist and I think that knowing that I have this support from another person and, and so when, because I, I do remember, I mean, it was such a long time ago. It was a whole decade had gone by since. Since that happened.

Kreuza: So I don’t remember everything, but I, I do recall that when I was having, uh, trouble sleeping at night, I was able to email him or I would go to his office. I, I remember every Friday I was going and discussing my week with him. And I think I was just getting that encouragement from him that keep going, this is normal.

Kreuza: This happens to other clients. So I would, I would have that sense of calm from him, which I didn’t have when I was just doing good on my own. Um, and so I think that that’s. Why? And I, and when you’re already struggling so much, um, you really can’t calm yourself down. You don’t need somebody from the outside to help you.

Kreuza: So I think that that’s why the second time, instead of getting better with the CBT, I, um, it actually got worse because I think it’s more than just a mechanical go to bed at this time, get up at this time. I think there’s, I think it’s more than that. I mean, if at least for in my case, because it was, it got to the point that it was so bad.

Kreuza: And that there was fear cropping up and anxiety that I don’t, I did need more than just the, um, just as a restriction. I needed more than that.

Martin: Your experience definitely isn’t unique there. And it’s something I’ve heard from quite a few people that, um, maybe they’d tried CBT-I and found it really helpful.

Martin: And then at some point in the future, the kind of sleep disruption came back and then. All those techniques that once were helpful don’t seem to be working in the same way. Um, and I don’t think it means that You know, there was no value to them or that you’re doing something wrong this time around. I think there can be two components, really.

Martin: One, which you’ve already mentioned. You know, if you’ve got that support from someone, whether it’s a therapist or a coach, it makes the world of difference, right? Regardless of what kind of changes you’re making. And I think, second of all, sometimes The kind of rigidity, or the really, the kind of narrow structure, you know, the inflexibility, perhaps, of CBT-I techniques themselves, can contribute to this sense that their intention is to make sleep happen or their intention is to get rid of insomnia, that there are rules and that if you follow these rules, then sleep will happen and wakefulness will be gone.

Martin: Um, whereas really the way CBT-I techniques are intended to work is they kind of, Address the behaviors that can perpetuate sleep disruption, you know, that can add kind of add fuel to the flames Um, so doing things like going to bed a lot earlier because we’re chasing after sleep or staying in bed later um and so What I think can happen i’m curious to know if you feel like this might have been relevant to you was We can believe that it was You know, only going to bed at a certain time, or only, or always getting out of bed at a certain time, responding in a very specific way to wakefulness when it shows up.

Martin: We can believe that all those kind of rules and rituals have actually made sleep happen, have actually got rid of insomnia. And then, when we come back to re implementing them again, we can believe that, okay, if we just do this Sleep will get back on track. These will make sleep happen. These techniques will get rid of insomnia.

Martin: And then if they don’t, then we start to get worried that, Uh oh, now there’s something really uniquely wrong. Um, do you feel like that, does that sound familiar or relevant?

Kreuza: One hundred percent. Um, everything that you said is relevant for me. And in fact, you know, looking back now, Um, I can say that, uh, you know, where, where I was in my life 10 years ago and, and, and last year you’re, you’re in such different mental, I mean, you’re, first of all, just the physical changes that happened that occur in your body.

Kreuza: So, so naturally I probably just need less amounts of sleep or, or, or just who I am has changed so much. So what worked for me 10 years ago, wouldn’t work for me now, but sure. This makes sense to me now that I’m fine. But when you’re going through it. It’s hard for you to rationalize these things. And so you just, all you, all you can think is that there’s something wrong with me now that’s unfixable.

Kreuza: And that’s what, that’s what I started to believe is that something just happened in my body that was making it impossible for me to get better. Um, and, and also what you, I want to address what you mentioned about, um, about, you know, the, just the, the mechanical, uh, the schedule, the restrictions that we implement.

Kreuza: Yes, that works. Of course it’s. it’s crucial in getting rid of your insomnia. But in fact, I also, I also believe that it’s how you choose to, how you implement it. Because I, and I do want to say that prior to you, I did have another therapist, a sleep sleep coach, and he was very focused on this aspect of go to bed at this time and wake up at this time.

Kreuza: He put so much emphasis in that that it actually made me quite paranoid about Not being in bed any longer than I, than, than he suggested. So I actually do recall that it was under his care that I started to become actually worse. Um, and it’s around that time that the somniphobia started, in fact. So, it really does matter that you find somebody that can give you the information, but also give it to you in a pretty, um, flexible and compassionate manner.

Martin: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I think that it’s, I think it can be helpful to kind of, Go shop, like see, looking for a coach or a therapist as no different really to shopping, to shopping around, to finding something that’s right for you because the way one, one person’s approach might kind of really align with what you’re looking for, um, another person’s approach might not, um, it doesn’t mean that that approach is good or bad.

Martin: It just means it’s not right for you and that’s perfectly okay, right? And so if we work with someone and find that’s not working out, yeah. Doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you or that what you’re learning isn’t useful. It just means, you know, that that’s not the, the right individual for you. Um, and that’s, that’s perfectly okay.

Martin: It’s all part of the process.

Kreuza: And if you remember, actually, when I emailed you, one of the first things I said was, well, can we keep it flexible? How long I stay in bed or if I, if I stay a little longer, um, it’s okay. Or if I go to bed a little earlier, sometimes it’s okay. And you said it’s fine. And already, just with you saying that, I started to feel calmer.

Martin: It’s so interesting because some people really love the flexibility. Other people really love the rigidity, right? Everyone is so different. Um, but the, the, you know, the way I like to see it is. If we’re able to look back or remember a time when sleep wasn’t an issue or a concern, we might then ask ourselves, well, how many kind of rules and rituals did I have around sleep then?

Martin: Did I have a rule that I could only go to sleep at a certain time? Did I have a rule that if I was awake, I had to get out of bed? Did I have a rule that I couldn’t read in bed? Or did I have a rule that I can’t watch TV at night? Often our experience is a good indicator there, right? Because for most of us, we didn’t really have many rules, rituals around sleep, but then Now we might have more and yet we’re struggling.

Martin: So maybe there’s a little insight there.

Kreuza: Yeah, and I was thinking about that as well. Um, but of course, again, um, when you’re trying to do things on your own, you’re not really thinking straight. So you do, you need that reminder, you need that other person to tell you these things, that you’re actually kind of forgetting when you’re going through insomnia.

Martin: When, when your mind identifies a problem, it’s going to focus so much attention on the problem, right, and fixing the problem, making your focus just becomes like a laser, and it’s really hard to see anything else or any big picture, or even just the context of your own experience, and that’s where it can be helpful to have someone to work with, to help you, to help guide you, really, because that’s all that I think coaches or therapists are doing, right?

Martin: All the real work is done. By you, the client, um, really the coach or the therapist is just guiding you and just trying to open you up to, you know, reach in the goals that, that you want to achieve or the goals that you want to reach for yourself. And to motivate you and to keep you on track.

Kreuza: I mean, you actually helped me so much with, um, if you remember, I was, Very unmotivated.

Kreuza: I didn’t have the energy or the desire to do much Especially because I felt so tired and I felt like everybody could see that the the tiredness in my face and when I’d go outside I’d see everybody looking so rested and full of life and I didn’t feel like I fit in with everybody So, um, so I just wanted to be a recluse and isolate myself But in fact you encouraged me to go out and do things that I like.

Kreuza: So if you remember, um, I was doing a lot of hiking because it was, you know, it was more on my own. Me and my dad would go hiking, and in fact, I do remember And especially being out in the sunshine, which is, which is crucial for, you know, like setting, um, you know, your sleep schedule. Um, so I was doing a lot of hiking at the time, even though I was tired, you encouraged me to do it anyway.

Kreuza: And I found that by doing that, it would lower my anxiety levels and. It, it, that actually did help me become tired enough to fall asleep the next day or at night. So that really helped. And that’s what, that’s one of the things that that was my mistake actually, is that when I started to struggle with sleep initially, I quit my job.

Kreuza: I didn’t leave the house. I didn’t want to talk to anybody. So doing all of those, then your whole life revolves around your insomnia. And that’s all that you’re thinking about. You have no other, there’s it, that’s your, your life becomes insomnia now.

Martin: Yeah, and it tends to make things even more difficult, right?

Kreuza: Yes.

Martin: Yeah, I’ve, sometimes I like to kind of picture it as, you know, we’ve got this, unpleasant thing that’s present in our lives, insomnia. Um, so if we kind of draw a circle that represents our life and we write the word insomnia in that circle, um, and then we kind of consider everything else that’s going on in our lives.

Martin: So maybe our family, our job, our hobbies, our interests, and we write all that into the circle as well. There’s a lot of stuff there. The insomnia is still there, right? But there’s also lots of other stuff. But what can happen, because insomnia is so difficult, is we can start moving away from all that other stuff.

Martin: So now we’re starting to pull all that stuff out of the circle. We’re not seeing friends and family so much. We might not go into work. We might quit our jobs. We might not engage in our hobbies. And so what we’re left with is this circle of our life, and there’s kind of only one thing left. And it’s just insomnia.

Martin: And so as we’re taking all those things out, which is completely understandable why we would do that, because it’s really difficult to do the stuff that matters. in the presence of insomnia. But when we are doing that, we’re kind of increasing the focus. We’re kind of concentrating that insomnia. So it becomes all that’s all that’s left really.

Kreuza: And it’s fine to, I mean, everybody will make their adjustments when they’re going through this next. That’s fine. Um, but I think that still, if you can’t go to work, do something that you enjoy, do something else. Even if it’s just for a little bit. Um, just so, just to, maybe you’re not going to completely get your mind out of it.

Kreuza: You’re, but at least you’re, you’re helping yourself. Um, to, to, to, to not focus on just your insomnia, uh, all day long, every day. So yeah, I think that you should really, what, because I, for me, it took a lot of pushing myself going against my instinct to stay indoors and kind of mope around and, you know, wallow in my misery, um, I actually did have to.

Kreuza: Push myself even though I didn’t want to so it was it was work. You know, it wasn’t easy Did I want to get dressed at 8 a. m at with two hours of sleep and hike a mountain? Not necessarily, but I trusted you. I I know that that’s what it required for me to get better So I did it and in fact the more that you do it, you’ll see that eventually As hard as it is in the beginning it does get easier over time and you’ll see that it’s helping you and I if I can tell one quick story, um, I This is exactly what happened is one morning I hadn’t slept that the night before I think maybe two hours maybe like You know, um, if even that And my dad said, let’s go hiking.

Kreuza: It was a good, it was a nice day outside. And I said, no way. I, I was feeling particularly anxious that morning. And, uh, and then I remembered what you said. And so I said, no, Martin says go out. So I said, okay, I will do it. I don’t want to, but I will. Um, and so about halfway up the mountain, the hill, I remember just feeling so anxious and wanted to turn back.

Kreuza: But then somewhere in that journey or in that, you know, hike, um, my anxiety just started to, um, to, to, to dissipate. I wasn’t feeling anxious. My heart rate actually slowed down. And by the time that I reached the top, I felt fine. I wasn’t having even those negative thoughts anymore. And I actually felt I was in a pretty good mood.

Kreuza: So. So that experience helped me to, then the next day or the few days later, then I was initiating the hikes because I noticed that it helped me feel better.

Martin: Yeah, I think that’s a great story. And, you know, that can be such a great bonus associated with doing things that matter to us, right? Is we can just, our attention just kind of expands and anxiety can either fall away, um, or just kind of lose its power and influence over us.

Martin: Um, but, you know, And also, what I think the kind of real benefit is, is let’s say that anxiety didn’t even fade away, let’s say it still remained pretty intense. Maybe what matters most is the fact that you were still doing something important. That was, you know, um, aligned with your values that kept you moving toward the life you want to live.

Martin: Um, even in the presence of that anxiety. You know, so you still are moving in the right direction. You know, you’re doing something that matters. You’re moving toward the life you want to live, the person you want to be. Even after a difficult night, even if that anxiety remains at a 9 out of 10 or a 10 out of 10.

Martin: Even in its presence, you’ve done that thing that matters to you. I think that, that’s, that’s just, it can just be so important and so helpful, um, to, to, to, to just kind of adopt that approach, which is not easy, exactly as you’ve described.

Kreuza: Yeah, it takes work. It does. Um, and if, if, uh, if it’s okay, actually, I’d like to talk about the, the somniphobia, because that’s something that I hadn’t experienced the first time.

Kreuza: So, so just to give you some, some context, the, the, the insomnia started, I believe in April.

Martin: So, April 2022.

Kreuza: And, and I, cause I remember quitting my job in May. So it must have been really bad. I mean, um, I do remember that I, I, I don’t think I was sleeping at all, or I felt like I wasn’t, or if I was, it was micro sleeps, you know, some people say I’m only getting like three or four hours.

Kreuza: That would have been great. I wasn’t, I felt like I wasn’t getting any. And, um, and then, and then, yeah, so then I think it was, In probably May is when I had that therapist that I mentioned earlier, um, and then I moved, so I wouldn’t, I want to say like maybe June is when the somniphobia started or July, early July.

Kreuza: So it took a couple of months. And so really all that happened and it’s, it’s just, you know, like seemingly out of nowhere because everything just seems to start with a single thought and then it spirals out of control from there. I just remember being awake one night and you know, when you’re awake at night and everyone’s sleeping, you know, you just, you, and you’re already going through, like you’re already kind of depressed cause you can’t sleep and all these things, you’re having all these negative thoughts.

Kreuza: And, um, so I remember just laying, it was middle of the night, I’m laying in bed and, Try attempting to sleep and um, I was aware of the process of falling asleep So I was so hyper aware of the fact that i’m a if I do fall asleep i’m going to be Unconscious i’m not going to be aware of my surroundings of what happens to me I just felt like vulnerable to anything on the outside debt, like harming me in some way.

Kreuza: Um, so I know that I was being quite irrational, but you’re not really thinking that way. I mean, you’re, cause your emotions take over. So it was just one thought that was the only thought. And then the next day I remember like, it just kept creeping up into my head. This, this, this one thought, and then it just, I don’t even know.

Kreuza: But so quickly within a couple of few days, It took, completely took over, and every night that I would go to bed, that’s all I could think about, all night, all night, I was afraid to close my eyes, I was afraid to, like, now I was afraid to fall asleep, so, having just insomnia, then I’m like, I wish I just had that problem now, because now, I don’t, you know, now, so I’m, I’m actually afraid now to fall asleep, because I’m worried that something’s gonna happen to me, um, I’m worried that if I’m unconscious, that That something’s going to harm me.

Kreuza: Um, and I was completely aware of how irrational that was. And if you don’t mind, I can, I can mention what, what the, what my thought was, if it’s okay. I was worried that somebody was going to break in my house and, um, like chop my legs off. I think I even mentioned it to you. So it was a very scary visual.

Kreuza: I knew the whole time that it was irrational and I was trying to rationalize my. Myself out of these scary thoughts. But when your anxiety is so high and your emotions are taking over, you really cannot rationalize or use logic to get out of, um, to get out of these, um, emotional, like high intent, emotional states.

Kreuza: Um, So, so yeah, so that’s, that’s what was keeping me up was this idea that something that I was just vulnerable and unconscious and anything could hurt, could harm me. What was so hard is because that I was desperate for sleep, but at the same time I was afraid that it would happen. And that is exactly when I, that’s when I reached out to you, but that is exactly when, um, I felt completely helpless.

Kreuza: I don’t think I’ve ever felt that helpless in my life. I was a hundred percent sure that there was nothing that can be done because I, I, um, was looking this up and it just was so rare. I couldn’t find any information about it. And not only that, but there was also this aspect of shame because I just felt like It was such a silly thing to be afraid of.

Martin: They all come from just that, the brain just doing its job of looking out for us, except it’s maybe trying so hard that it’s kind of getting in the way. Alright, so with insomnia, typically the brain is just trying to protect us from Wakefulness from being awake because it sees it as a problem probably because we’ve just struggled with wakefulness for so long the brain learns Wakefulness is a threat.

Martin: It’s got to be alert to protect us from that threat And similarly with the somniphobia now, it’s kind of the brain’s like, oh, well, maybe falling asleep is a threat too You know, so we have to kind of be alert to protect you from falling asleep as well now. So your desire to, to sleep was unchanged through this, just as you described, you still wanted sleep to happen.

Martin: But in the background, your brain is there with alarm bells ringing, red flashing lights, you know, sirens, everything, just trying so hard to protect you that it was getting in the way. Um, I mean, I, I think it’s useful to Recognize that because sometimes it can feel like our brain is kind of an adversary, you know, that it’s working against us, but really it’s just actually trying so hard to be on our side that it’s kind of getting in the way a little bit.

Martin: Um, which can sound quite unusual, but maybe now you’re able to look back on your experience. Do you feel that, um, you know, there’s any sense in what I’m saying?

Kreuza: Yes, of course, in retrospect, it all makes sense now that I’m able to think about it. And I think clearly, yes, of course, it all makes sense. But in the moment, you actually really start to, in the moment when you’re going through it, you really start to, um, In a way despise your the way that your brain works because you just feel like it’s against you.

Kreuza: I mean I Yes, technically. Yes. It’s working for you. But really what it’s doing. It’s it’s It’s not because it’s making your life miserable and, and the, the, the problem is, is that most, most problems in life we’re using logic to resolve. You can’t do that here. Um, you really can’t use logic. You can’t rationalize yourself out of this problem, this particular problem.

Kreuza: So it takes a whole other approach and one that we’re not acclimated to doing, which is acceptance. Um, because you feel like by acceptance, you feel like, like, Oh, am I just being apathetic? That’s not real. I’m not actually doing anything. How can I accept this? All these things go through your mind, but really it is the key.

Kreuza: It is the one thing that’s gonna work. Um, and it is, it is what got me out of it

Martin: and I’m really keen to talk more about that with you. Definitely. Yeah. Um, and I think maybe a kind of little intro to that is it’s so easy to. Respond to all this really difficult stuff in the opposite way of acceptance. Um, which typically is, you know, trying to fight what the mind is doing.

Martin: Um, so if the mind is trying to protect us from wakefulness by generating a lot of anxiety, we can start trying to suppress that anxiety, trying to distract ourselves, uh, trying to go to war with our minds. Um, and then when it It doesn’t maybe work, maybe temporarily distraction can help, but when all that stuff comes back, when we are no longer distracted, then we can be really hard on ourselves, right?

Martin: Um, because we will be like, well, I’m trying so hard, but this is still here. This is still a problem. Why is this a problem? What’s wrong with me? So then we can put more effort into trying to go to war with our minds, trying to control our thoughts and feelings, trying to get rid of certain thoughts and feelings, trying to welcome only other certain thoughts and feelings, and Before we know it, we’re just tangled up in such a struggle and we’re also just being so hard on ourselves that it just makes everything so much more difficult.

Martin: Was that your experience at first before you kind of changed your approach and explored the opposite, the opposite way

Kreuza: forward? Yeah, I was basically, I was trying to distract myself. I thought that was the answer. Um, I. But of course you can’t I mean this is pervasive now This is this has become such a big problem in my life that how can you distract yourself from something this this huge?

Kreuza: I was trying to solve it of course again rationally and again Like I said, it’s you can’t rationalize your your you know, you can’t rationalize yourself out of something like this Um, you have to tend to the emotions, to the, you know, to the root of the, to the actual emotions. Um, it’s not logic that’s going to get you out of this kind of situation.

Kreuza: Um, but I didn’t know how to do that. I had, I had, I had read a book by, uh, by Daniel, um, from the sleep school coach, school coach. I’d read a book from him and he talks about acceptance and it’s one thing to read a book and you can even absorb and understand all the information but implementing it is really the key and I think that what I needed was you to explain to me exactly what to do because it’s, I needed that guidance, you know, like I can read a book and understand what it’s telling me.

Kreuza: But actually doing it and implementing it in my life every day that that actually I need, I needed someone to explain to me exactly how to do it and exactly how that works. And that’s why you were so helpful is that you told me exactly what I needed to do. Um, and so that’s when I started to see improvement.

Martin: You know, first of all, I think, I think the book you might be referring to is set it and forget it by Daniel Erichsen. Yeah. Um, actually, uh, uh, just lives half an hour away from me, which is crazy. Um, with two, two people that, um, do a lot of, Insomnia work, um, for us to live so close together is quite funny.

Martin: But yeah, good friend of mine and yeah, he, I really love his approach as well. We’ve very similar approaches, right? In terms of what tends to make things more difficult is when we get tangled up in a struggle that’s caused by trying to control things, difficult things. That our experience might be telling us can’t be directly or permanently controlled anyway.

Martin: And I, I think sometimes where we can get tripped up is because, you know, what does acceptance mean? Um, does it mean accepting the, I’m never going to sleep again? Does it mean accepting the, my life is just going to be crippled by anxiety again? Cause those things kind of are unacceptable, right? Um, and so I think it’s important to clarify.

Martin: What acceptance actually means and since you kind of went through this process yourself I might put you on the spot a little bit here But if I was to ask you to describe what acceptance is or what acceptance means How would you answer that?

Kreuza: So it’s exactly what? what I wanted to talk about actually because initially I was I was thinking that acceptance and is accepting my situation and accepting that it’s not going to change and just learning to live with it and just being apathetic.

Kreuza: And that is not what it means at all. What it means as the way that I understood it is that whatever you’re feeling in this moment, whatever anxiety, whatever thoughts you’re having, you accept it in this, in this moment, you sit with it. You just accept that you’re having it now. That’s all that it means.

Kreuza: You accept that you’re having it now. you sort of tend to it gently. So I’ll tell you what, what I, what I, what I would do is I, um, I mean, I was having these negative thoughts, these scary thoughts with, you know, what I mentioned about like the intruders coming in and harming me hundreds of times a day. I would really just, they would come, I mean, on a loop, they would just, and so what I would do is, and this took work, but I do it is I go to the couch or the bed.

Kreuza: I put my hand on my chest and I would just tell myself, I’m having this thought. It’s fine. I’m just having this thought. It’s just a thought And when I did that believe it or not is when is when it would get less and less intense every time Um, if I try to distract myself or rationalize it, they would come back stronger.

Kreuza: But if I would just tell myself I’m just having a thought. It’s okay. It’ll pass gently. Um, yeah, they would sort of, yeah, they would just sort of go and come back less frequently. And so what, so, but so I did this, um, literally every time the thoughts come, I would do it hundreds of times a day. I would actually, even if, if I wasn’t at home, let’s say I was hiking or at the store or whatever, and I couldn’t, you know, do my technique.

Kreuza: Then I would just, what I did was I started to visualize a window opening up. In my subcon in my conscious mind and the thoughts were just sort of. fly out the window gently. I, I wasn’t hard on myself anymore. I started to be more compassionate with myself and I would just visualize these thoughts flying out the window.

Kreuza: And, um, and so, yeah, I mean, I, when I, when I’d catch myself, because of course there were times that I would catch myself later on, but as soon as I did, I’d become aware of these thoughts. Then I would just open up that window and they’d fly right out and eventually they would just be less and less intense and less frequent.

Martin: So it sounds like the way you’re describing it. It’s kind of like you’re instead of that reflex response, which I think virtually all human beings are hardwired to respond in this way of You know trying to push certain thoughts and feelings away Um, you were kind of practicing acknowledging them Making space for them to exist and allowing them to kind of just come and go as they chose rather than putting on that big suit of armor, putting the war paint on and trying to kind of go to war with them.

Martin: Does that sound like an accurate kind of summary?

Kreuza: Exactly, exactly. And it’s just so much easier to do that than to do all the other techniques of the distracting, the, you know, as you said, going to war with your thoughts. Accepting it actually is so much easier once you get into the habit of it. Then it becomes easier, but it, but because it’s so different, it’s such a different approach that you do have to develop the habit, which can take some time, but once you have, then actually you’ll find that it’s much easier to do that.

Kreuza: Um, and I would like to mention one more thing, actually, because somniphobia is quite rare, at least from my research, I couldn’t, you know, as you can imagine, initially, I was looking up what this, Even was and I couldn’t find much information However, I did find a girl on Daniel’s channel who had who described everything that I was going through And I reached out to her.

Kreuza: So at the same time that I was, um, with you working with you, I was also speaking with, um, emailing back and forth with her sometimes and just her validating my experience because it’s such an unusual experience to have just her validating it, saying, telling me that she had gone through the same thing and she overcame it with the same technique.

Kreuza: Um, that also really helped me. Um, I thought that was really important for me just to hear that because every other video was just about the insomnia. But for me it was. You know, even more than that. So, so yeah, having her, her, her video and her support Was crucial in me getting better. I’m sure I would have gone better anyway But I think maybe just helped me get better possibly a little faster.

Martin: That’s great to hear that. Did you pick up any specific Insights that you haven’t already mentioned from your communication with that person?

Kreuza: No she really just said the same thing. She just said, you have to accept every thought that comes every whenever it comes. Um, she motivated me as well as you did to stay on track because you know, you get tired, the thoughts keep coming.

Kreuza: They’re coming every day. They’re coming for weeks or months or however long they, you know, you might be struggling for and you just want to get better already. And so, um, and so you, you’ll revert back to the same methods sometimes that you used before you knew about acceptance because it may be just comes more readily to you.

Kreuza: But really, um, you and, and her name was Melina. She helped keep me on track and, um, and motivated me to, to, to continue with this. Acceptance technique.

Martin: I think it’s really important to emphasize that it, it kind of is a process of ongoing practice. Um, you know, responding to thoughts in a, in a way other than going to war with them, than trying to fight or avoid them.

Martin: It is a process and like you just said, the mind is always gonna kind of revert back to reaching for that sword. You know, you’re always gonna get pulled back into trying to struggle with those thoughts and feelings again. And that’s. Natural and normal. Even if you feel like you’re making really good progress for weeks or months.

Martin: You know, these thoughts and feelings don’t go away. It’s kind of like if we learn a second language, we add that new language to our mind, but we don’t lose the first language from our mind, right? Right, you’re training yourself. So that stuff’s still there. Yeah, that’s exactly it. And so we’re still going to get pulled back into the old ways every now and again, the ways that our experience tells us aren’t helpful.

Martin: And that’s natural and normal. It’s just a case of noticing when this happens kindly. bringing ourselves back to maybe a more workable approach that involves listening to what the mind is saying, acknowledging what it’s saying. We don’t have to force ourselves to believe it. We don’t have to rationalize it.

Martin: We just have to listen, you know, acknowledge what it’s saying. Then maybe it doesn’t have to keep repeating itself louder and louder because it thinks we’re ignoring it. Listen to what it’s saying, and then kind of make space. for whatever it wants to think or feel, and then refocus our attention on where we are and what we’re doing.

Martin: And of course, it sounds so easy and so simple for us to sit here and talk about this. But as you said, putting it into practice is difficult. It requires work, effort, and ongoing practice.

Kreuza: Yeah, I do want to emphasize it apps. I mean, I’m sure I’m coming off as very calm right now, but it wasn’t easy at all.

Kreuza: It took so much effort, it, uh, uh, patience, a lot of patience, um, and, and, you, and just awareness, because you won’t, you’ll be surprised at the thoughts you’re having if you’re not actually aware of them, because, like, okay, I can a thought like, okay, what if somebody barges in and harms me, but then at the same time, I could be having another thought like, oh, this isn’t, this isn’t ever going to work.

Kreuza: I mean, I was having those, those doubts constantly, every day, daily, multiple times a day, my brain was saying, this isn’t going to work. Um, you, you know, I mean, just, just so many scary thoughts. And, um, And so you really do have to, even when I was getting those thoughts, I w you, you, you should, I, at least I wouldn’t tell myself, no, it’s going to work because I don’t know that it’s going to work.

Kreuza: So you just accept you’re having even that thought you just really X you. So every, whatever you’re thinking or feeling, you just have to accept it kindly and, and patiently and just stick to the same, uh, technique.

Martin: Yeah. And again, all of those thoughts and feelings, again, it’s not the brain trying to work against you. It’s the brain looking out for you. You know, it’s trying to protect you. You know, it’s like, this isn’t going to work. Let’s go back to trying, trying harder, even though. What we might have been trying before doesn’t work.

Martin: The brain kind of gets out of ideas, um, because almost everything responds well to effort, right? But difficult thoughts, feelings, and sleep, they don’t respond well to effort. And then the brain kind of hits this dead end. It’s kind of run out of ideas. So it tries to pull you back into just trying through effort.

Martin: It’s not the brain working against you. It’s completely natural and normal for that to happen. It’s the brain looking out for you. Um, and it’s just a case, like you said, of just recognizing that maybe seeing it as just another opportunity to practice acknowledging. What you’re thinking and feeling, making space for it to exist and then just refocusing your attention.

Kreuza: And in fact, uh, being aware of the techniques helped me just even with other negative thoughts. I, I have to admit, I haven’t been using it as much as I was before with the insomnia, but I, I have found myself, um, going back to it in, in, in other circumstances. With other things. It doesn’t have to be just with sleep.

Kreuza: It can be any other stresses in life or problems that you’re having and you’re trying to work through them and you go into this loop in your head. Well, you can actually just take a step back and use the technique and you’ll find that. It’s really calming. It’s a really calming time. And for me I’m somebody who’s kind of naturally very like jittery and have a hard time like sitting still and, you know, maybe like a little bit energetic or whatever, you know, um, my, I’m always thinking, I’m always analyzing.

Kreuza: I like to write, I write a lot. So, um, so yeah, I’m just that kind of person by nature. So taking a step back from me isn’t, doesn’t come easy. Um, but. But, but again, you just have to train yourself and I, so yeah, you just, you really have to just put in the effort and when you see the outcomes, when you see that it actually works, you’ll, you’ll want to use it because you see that there’s something to this.

Kreuza: Um, and I’m, I’m really like, I’m really an advocate for this now because I, I found that it’s so helpful, um, not just with sleep, but just in life with, with, with many problems in life. I’ve, I’ve, I’ve sort of used this and, um. When other things fail, this kind of always seems to work. It always seems to at least help calm me down, which is great.

Martin: I completely agree. I think as soon as we just acknowledge whatever we’re thinking or feeling, even if it’s really difficult stuff, um, I, I’m not sure. I think it just almost takes the pressure off of ourselves that It kind of gives us permission to experience it as soon as we acknowledge it, rather than continuously trying to fight or avoid it.

Martin: And just that in itself can be a weight off of our shoulders. Um, and I think it can also make it easier for us to do things that matter. You know, things that are important to us because we’re freeing up all that energy and attention that might be focused on fighting or avoiding certain thoughts and feelings.

Martin: And instead we’re just allowing them to exist, we’re freeing up that energy and attention to do things that are important to us, even in the presence of that difficult stuff.

Kreuza: Yeah, and you can sort of feel the stress melting away if you really stick with it. Um, so yeah, um, and I actually would like to mention one more thing because I made it seem like it was just a linear progression, but in fact it wasn’t.

Kreuza: There were many setbacks. And, um, and so I just encourage people to continue even when there are setbacks because I most likely there will be. I mean, for me, there were, um, and when you get these setbacks, you think, well, I’m back at square one. It’s not working. What’s the point of trying? You’re going to have.

Kreuza: I had, I certainly had these thoughts. And um, but yeah, you just have to get really good at catching yourself when you’re having these thoughts and just sticking with the technique because what I was telling myself as well, I managed to sleep pretty okay for a week, let’s say, or a few days, which I wasn’t doing a month ago, so obviously something’s working.

Kreuza: So you’d have to just remind yourself of that and then just stick to it. And almost expect there’s going to be setbacks.

Martin: Yeah, I completely agree. And I always like to say, just as every human being has difficult days from time to time, we all have difficult nights from time to time. It’s when we maybe, we kind of succumb to that temptation of overanalyzing when those difficult nights come back or when the difficult thoughts and feelings come back that we can get pulled back and tangled up in that struggle again.

Martin: So yeah, absolutely. The ups and downs are completely normal. I like to think of it as another opportunity to just keep practicing this new approach because it is a skill and skills take a lot of practice. And when we’re learning skills, sometimes we can feel like we’re making really good progress. Um, we’re kind of flying through, I don’t know, the training manual, so to speak.

Martin: And then there’s other times where it feels like. We didn’t even start learning yet. Like, it feels like we’re back to square one, we can’t even read a page of this, uh, progress manual, this new skills development manual. But it’s, it’s all part of the journey. Um, so I’m really glad that you mentioned that it’s I’m still yet to meet someone that just found completely linear progress every single night and every single day was better than the previous one.

Martin: Yep. So just in terms of a practical sense, so if someone’s listening to this and they think, yeah, this sounds good. I think I want to explore this approach in terms of how this can be applied, um, and how you applied it in your own experience. So let’s say, let’s start by just kind of being in bed. So you kind of getting into bed, um, You might, all those sirens start going off in your brain, you know, the flashing lights, you start to feel really anxious or scared, all those stories start appearing.

Martin: What do you do next if you want to pursue this kind of acceptance, this alternative approach?

Kreuza: Right, so when I would go into, I would go to bed, and immediately, you know, the bed was the trigger really, um, immediately I would just have these, Scary thoughts and they were really scary. They were even graphic.

Kreuza: And yeah, so, um, um, I’m surprised. I don’t even know what they came from. It’s, it’s so strange, but, but yeah, so, um, I would, I, I would just, like I said, I would, I’d, I’d put my, my hand on my chest. I feel my heart racing and it was racing really, like really fast and um, and I would just all the thoughts, all the feelings, everything, I would just tell myself it’s okay, you’re just, you’re just experiencing these thoughts right now and it’s okay to just sit with them and that’s all I did is I was, I wasn’t judging, I wasn’t It’s okay.

Kreuza: Trying to change them. I was just sitting there with them. And yes, it does take a lot of patience because you don’t want them there. Um, but I, I, I just, you know, I, I started to have some compassion for myself. Um, and I just, you know, I sort of started to treat myself as like a scared child because in a way that’s kind of what it felt like.

Kreuza: It’s like if you have a kid who’s afraid of the monster under the bed, I kind of felt like I was that kid who’s afraid of the monsters going to get them. And so, well, how would I treat that kid? Would I berate them? No. I would sit there with them patiently and comfort them. So that’s what I did with myself.

Kreuza: And, uh, and I did this, yeah, every night. Every night.

Martin: So, you’re lying in bed, um, you kind of got your hands on your heart, you’re noticing that your heart is racing, you’re maybe talking to yourself or acting in a kind way towards yourself, um, rather than kind of berating yourself, which is so easy to do when we’re tangled up in all this difficult stuff.

Martin: Um, Would, would, would you then just be in that state or engaging in that practice, you know, for the rest of the night, like whether that was three hours, four hours, five hours, six hours, or did you kind of do that for a certain amount of time and then try something else? I’m just curious to know like what this looked like over the course of a night.

Kreuza: It was different every night. So, um, some, some nights, um, if I got really frustrated, I would get up. And, uh, I’d go to the living room and watch TV. Um, and then if I felt sleepy, I’d go back to my bed and start the process again. I wouldn’t, I don’t think I ever did it, the technique all night. I don’t think I ever did that, but I certainly did do it multiple times a night.

Martin: I was just curious to hear, you know, because I know everyone listening to this is going to be trying to The cogs in their brain are going to be whirring. It’s like, well, what if this goes on for six hours? Do I have to just sit there or lie there with my hands on my chest for six hours, you know? But it’s like you said, I think We need to be kind to ourselves and give ourselves flexibility too.

Martin: You know, just because we’re lying there practicing this new approach, it doesn’t mean that suddenly all this stuff’s going to disappear and we’re going to fall asleep. Um, but we always have the opportunity to do something else instead, whether that’s reading in bed, getting out of bed to watch TV, just doing anything.

Martin: Um, not again, I think it’s important to emphasize, maybe not with the goal of Getting rid of these thoughts and feelings or making sleep happen, but with the goal of just getting in practice with Experiencing wakefulness and all the thoughts and feelings that might be showing up with a little bit less resistance Yeah, you know with a little bit less struggle And how you do that probably matters less, um, than, than the fact that you’re just staying on track and your goal is to just practice experiencing wakefulness with less struggle, rather than getting pulled back into the struggle.

Kreuza: In the beginning, the thoughts were constant.

Kreuza: And so if I wasn’t, um, putting my hand on my chest and doing the techniques, then I was visualizing that window open up and just the thoughts would just float, float, uh, away. Um, so I would kind of, I was utilizing both of these techniques. I kind of just intuitively felt what I needed at the time. Um, so I think you’ll know like what’s going to work for you in the moment.

Kreuza: Like if I was, if I felt like I needed to, if I’m anxiety was really high, my heart’s racing, then I would just focus on my chest and I would put my hand there and do the first technique. If I’m sitting up in bed or if I’m watching TV, but the thoughts are still coming, then I would do the, the other technique.

Kreuza: Um, and I would do the other technique, like with the window opening up and everything. If I’m walking outside, because obviously I can’t walk around, you know, uh, holding, yeah. So I would just do that as I’m, as I was walking, and that was very therapeutic for me. Taking hikes and just visualizing these thoughts, um, like, you know, uh, uh, flowing out of me.

Kreuza: That was actually very therapeutic, and I did that a lot. I actually remember doing that. Well, I was shopping. Well, I was just walking, walking around. Um, just constantly. I mean, in the beginning I was doing it all the time. So, so yeah, and it retrained my brain to not feel so threatened by these thoughts because now that I have this technique.

Kreuza: I’m not getting emotionally, um, these intense emotions by trying to suppress them or fight with them. No, they’re just coming and going.

Martin: When we’re engaged in that struggle trying to fight or avoid all these thoughts and feelings, it’s kind of like we’re, we’re shrinking that available space down for them, right?

Martin: In the hope that they won’t be able to show up. Um, but then what happens is they show up and there’s only a tiny, teeny, teeny space for them so they’re more likely to get stuck and then they’re trapped. And then they’re there, um, or as if we practice accepting their presence, we kind of open up and make space for them.

Martin: They’ve got more space to kind of move around in. Maybe then they’re less likely to get stuck, more likely to come and go because we’re more willing. To experience them, um, rather than closing everything down, trying to get rid of them or prevent them from turning up in the first place.

Kreuza: Yeah, yeah, I think that by doing these, it kind of signals to your body that, oh, the fact that you’re accepting it, it’s maybe it’s not that much of a threat.

Martin: Yeah. And, and also I think that then, then the mind learns that you are listening to it. So maybe it doesn’t have to keep saying the same thing over and over again. And because you’re listening it, maybe it doesn’t have to yell quite so loud. Um, but again, it’s something that the brain tends not to twig onto or understand that when we first start practicing this approach, it tends to be, we have to repeatedly.

Martin: Acknowledge repeatedly, make space for this stuff to exist repeatedly, allow it to come and go as it chooses before the mind sort of figures out that, oh, maybe there’s not really much behind these thoughts, behind these ideas that I’m coming up with. Maybe we can kind of tone them back a little bit. Um, I’m curious to know when you started practicing this way of responding during the night.

Martin: When did you kind of notice that it was making a difference, that it was maybe a more workable approach compared to whatever you’d tried in the past?

Kreuza: I would say it took about a month and a half, um, for me to start feeling like this is working. Um, Yeah, I would say that around a month and a half, uh, with setbacks, but yeah.

Martin: Yeah, definitely with setbacks.

Martin: Um, what was the, what was the difference? Like, was there something that happened, you know, after about a month and a half? Was there like an aha moment or was it just this case of like gradual,

Kreuza: gradual change? No aha moment. I, I never had anything like that. It was just a gradual change where I could. See that I was retraining myself.

Kreuza: Like I could actually see that that was what was going on. It wasn’t anything overnight. Like I said, it was, it was. a progression, you know, so like, so I would, yeah, like I, I was just noticing that my, when I would do a technique, I wouldn’t get as, as intense emotions and anxiety anymore. So I’m like, okay, this seems to be working.

Kreuza: I kept doing it. So it was, yeah, it was, um, every day, maybe a little better than it would get a little worse and it would get better. So it was, it wasn’t a linear progression. It was like weeks and weeks of practicing this that I could see it was causing it, making a difference.

Martin: Yeah, and I think that’s really important to emphasize that this isn’t really like a kind of quick fix, you know, it’s not like an immediate change.

Martin: It’s, it’s a skill going back to what we were talking about before and skills take time to learn and to develop and everyone makes progress on their own timeline as well.

Kreuza: I want to mention it was a month and a half for me to start feeling some difference, not for me to be fine. It was, it was when I started to feel better and then took a little longer for me to actually start feeling and seeing myself as, okay, I’m actually okay now.

Martin: To, to kind of expand on that a little bit. Um, how long would you say it took you? from this, from the start of practicing this new approach to getting to a point where you felt that you were better able to Live your life independently of sleep and independently of whatever thoughts and feelings your mind might choose to generate when you felt like the struggle was kind of in the rearview mirror.

Kreuza: I remember very well it was September because it was when I came back to the States. So I would say about three months later. Um. Yeah, it was and actually if I maybe this is a silly thing to mention But when I moved back to the States and I was living with my brother He has a little dog that I was taking care of.

Kreuza: I was staying with him a little bit and she’s You know, very sensitive to noise so when she’d sleep on the couch with me and when she’d hear something she’d bark So it kind of made me feel like oh I don’t have to be so alert now because she’s here and if she hears something that she’ll wake me up So that all in fact having her there in conjunction with the techniques that I was already doing I felt like that’s what finally made me feel Um, better like a hundred.

Kreuza: Oh, not on maybe like 90 percent better worse where I was not thinking about sleep so much. It wasn’t interfering with my daily life. Um, it wasn’t, I wasn’t taking sleep into account when I would make plans or anything like that. And so, yeah, that I stay that month with the dog on top of the, the, yeah, the, the techniques.

Kreuza: Then I felt like, okay, now I’m fine, now I’m fine. Um, the thoughts still creep up even now, um, but I just know how to handle them now. And so it hasn’t spiraled like it did the first time, which when I didn’t know how to handle it.

Martin: If we were just to compare what an average night was like before, um, before you started implementing an approach more aligned with kind of acceptance and less resistance, um, To what an average night might be like for you now.

Martin: What was an average night like for you back then?

Kreuza: Oh average, it was very bad. Um, it I I didn’t feel like I was getting any sleep. And in fact, I felt hyper Aroused at night. I felt like I was more awake at night. I really don’t think I I don’t I mean for a few months I don’t think I was getting I’m sure I was getting some micro sleep and in the daytime In fact is when I was getting sleepy The daytime was hard because if, like, if I was watching TV and kind of distracted my body would sort of, you know, want to, you know, I would, I would, I would kind of fall asleep while watching TV and then I would jerk myself awake within, after a few seconds.

Kreuza: But at night time, I was really, I don’t, I mean. Seriously, maybe an hour if I was lucky, but very little and in fact, um, because it was so bad my My parents thought well, she needs at least a little bit of rest so they tried to give me like a sleeping pill just like once or twice and Well that actually didn’t work at all.

Kreuza: I took Sleeping, I took a sleeping pill twice, I remember, and both times I was awake all night. And so, that actually kind of scared me more because I realized that I had, I didn’t have that to fall back on. Other people said that they, it would help them at least, the sleeping pills or, you know, the anti anxiety medications.

Kreuza: That didn’t work for me at all. No difference, none whatsoever. So I knew that that wasn’t going to work for me at all. That wasn’t an option for me.

Martin: So fast forwarding now to kind of today, what’s an average night like for you now?

Kreuza: You know, it varies. Some nights I sleep great, other nights I struggle a little more.

Kreuza: I mean, but it depends also on just, What’s going on in my life? Uh, how much work do I have the next day? You know, I’m thinking about, I’m make, I’m actually moving. I’m gonna be moving in a week, so, uh, just so many. Yeah, I’m actually moving to the West Coast. I’m, I’ll be closer to you and Daniel .

Kreuza: Um, so yeah, a lot of changes are occurring and actually happy changes. I’m, I’m quite glad. So there’s so much excitement going on. So, you know, sometimes I’ll be, I’ll be up for, I’ll get less sleep, sometimes more sleep, anywhere between five hours to seven hours, you know, that’s, that’s the range, but it’s just not something that I’m.

Kreuza: It’s not something that I’m worrying about and it certainly isn’t impacting my life or my plans or my goals in any way. Even when I do get those scary thoughts, which sometimes do come up, especially like now that I’m kind of reminded of and I’m thinking about it, but, um, but yeah, um, I know how to, I feel calmer knowing that I have a technique that I know that works.

Martin: Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I think it’s important to emphasize that there’s still going to be some difficult nights from time to time. Um, sometimes there’ll be an obvious cause, sometimes there won’t be, and there’s going to always be difficult thoughts and feelings from time to time because that just comes with being a human being.

Martin: The difference now is, you know, the way you’re responding to it, the way you’re responding to difficult nights, the way you’re responding to difficult thoughts and feelings. Um, you’re able to respond in a different way. a way that keeps you away from getting tangled up in that struggle again, um, that helps.

Martin: That really, it just reduces the power and the influence that all of this stuff has over your life, right? So, it, it, it’s less likely to kind of hook you and kind of pull you away from the life you want to live and tangle you up in the struggle. It’s a little bit more like, um, you know, hot butter off a Teflon pan.

Martin: It’s still there. from time to time, but it kind of slides off rather than, you know, an egg just kind of getting stuck on a cast iron pan that hasn’t been seasoned and it just kind of gets stuck there and gets hotter and hotter and gets smoky and burns more and more and more. And before you know it, the whole house is burned down.

Martin: Um, and I think that’s the difference, right? It’s just the risk, the way you respond changes and as a result, the influence that these things have. Changes as well and it becomes less powerful and less influential.

Kreuza: It’s a great analogy. I like that one. Yeah And you know, I also just want to say that I was so convinced And maybe you remember when I first emailed you how much distress I was in.

Kreuza: I was completely convinced that I, there was no, that I wasn’t going to get better. Um, there was no way that I was going to get to this point that I’m in now. So, for anybody who’s watching this and they’re thinking the same thing, I just want to say that my, I was so bad, uh, so, um, anxious and so scared.

Kreuza: And so completely convinced that I wasn’t going to get better. So if I can manage to improve, I just feel like everybody can, um, just because of how bad my situation was. And also just the fact that I was so bad that, that even like pills didn’t Didn’t do anything for me. I mean, I would take them and I would feel like I, I took nothing because I’d be still up all night with the same amount of anxiety.

Kreuza: And, and so like, just to, just to give an idea of, of how anxious I I was and how hopeless I was. Um, so yeah. Um, don’t let that prevent you from trying. ’cause many times I actually did think that what’s the point of me even doing this techniques, that’s not gonna work for me. Um, especially because I wasn’t hearing success stories with somniphobia, just insomnia and, and, and somniphobia and insomnia are two very different, um, they feel like different experiences actually.

Kreuza: So, yeah, um, if something that someone’s experiencing, definitely, yes, it does work. Yes. Just have to stick to it and be diligent.

Martin: You might have already answered my, my last question here that I’m about to ask you, but I’m going to ask you again just in case you have anything else to add, um, because it’s also a question I like to ask at the end of every episode.

Martin: Um, and it’s this, if someone with chronic insomnia is listening, or maybe even someone that’s struggling with somniphobia, as we’ve been focusing on, uh, quite a lot of our time on this, on this episode, is listening, and they feel, you know, that they’ve tried everything. They’re beyond help, that they’ll just never be able to stop struggling with this.

Martin: Uh, what would you say to them?

Kreuza: First of all, I know exactly what you’re going through. And, uh, just be diligent. Um, know that this putting in the effort now is definitely going to pay off. Um, don’t look at how long it’s taking, just do the work. Just do the work, keep at it. And, and Be, be sure to be assured that it’s, it’s eventually going to work.

Kreuza: Um, but then your main focus should just be on doing the work and that’s it. Um, yeah, and I just encourage people to be diligent and, um, and patient with themselves and, and treat themselves with the same compassion that they would treat their child or someone that they love. Well,

Martin: I think that’s a great note to end on.

Martin: So thank you again for taking the time out of your day to come onto the podcast Krause.

Kreuza: Thank you very much. Thank you.

Martin: I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Insomnia Coach Podcast. I’m Martin Reed, and as always, I’d like to leave you with this important reminder — you can sleep.

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Rachel’s struggle with insomnia started in grad school. She tried everything from sleep aids to strict bedtime rules and routines to improve her sleep, but nothing worked. The harder she tried to fix her sleep and get rid of sleep-related anxiety, the more difficult things became.

The turning point came when Rachel changed her approach. She stopped focusing on trying to create the perfect conditions for sleep and she stopped trying to control her thoughts and feelings.

She started being kinder to herself. She practiced making space for difficult thoughts and feelings and she practiced building skill in bringing herself back to the present moment and being more aware of the present whenever her mind started to time travel.

Rachel’s story is a powerful example of how changing our approach to sleep and our response to insomnia can lead not only to significant improvements in our sleep, but also our overall quality of life.

Click here for a full transcript of this episode.

Martin: Okay. Rachel, thank you so much for taking the time to come onto the podcast.

Rachel: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me, Martin.

Martin: It’s great to have you on. Let’s just start right at the beginning without any further ado. Um, can you tell us a little bit about when your sleep problems first began and if there are any clues as to what may have caused those initial issues with sleep.

Rachel: Yeah, um, well, my first like where my mind first goes is. To my back to my first year of grad school, um, where like, at least one night a week, I felt it felt like I wasn’t sleeping at all. Um, and I would get really anxious about sleep, but I think that that was partly like being in grad school and feeling stressed about grad school.

Rachel: Um, and also, like, I had a shift shift. That ended late and so like the process of of unwinding and then having to be at work early the next day. Um, and the feeling would be anxiety about sleeping like, yes, there were things in my life that were stressing me out, but I think it was like the anxiety would be I’m anxious that I won’t be able to sleep.

Rachel: Um, and that that was well, that was long before. Before I reached out to you. But that, I think, is like the, I’m sure the sleep difficulties go back further than that, but that was like the first moment I can sort of remember.

Martin: Yeah, and roughly how long ago was that when you, uh, that kind of grad school period of your life?

Rachel: That was almost ten years ago.

Martin: And so what was your sleep like at that time? You mentioned there was a lot of anxiety about, is sleep going to happen? What’s sleep going to be like? What’s that going to mean if I have difficult nights or all those kind of thoughts? I think lots of people listening to this are going to identify with.

Martin: Um, how did that reflect in your sleep? Was it difficulty just falling asleep or was it just really interrupted sleep? What was there? Was there kind of like an average night? What was it like? Yeah,

Rachel: um, I, I think it was mostly getting to sleep, like, it would be from the very, like, I would feel really hopeful about the night, about like whatever, new homeopathic thing I had taken on or tried and then, like, thank you.

Rachel: Just the torture of being in bed and not falling asleep. And then periodically it would be like I would wake up in the middle of the night and like feel sleepy and groggy and then like not be able to get back to sleep. Hmm.

Martin: Yeah. And, and how about your days? Were you finding the, all this difficult stuff that you were experiencing at night?

Martin: Was, were you finding the days more difficult too?

Rachel: Oh, yeah. I, I mean. I’m sure we’ll get into it like around the time I reached out to you, but I can just like feel in my eyes, like, cause I would take, a sleep aid of some kind, either like something prescribed or something natural and like, I wouldn’t have slept through that.

Rachel: So then I felt groggy and just like almost that the ways your eyes can feel so tired that they hurt. Um, yeah, and just like down.

Martin: Yeah, absolutely. And so you mentioned the medication, whether it was homeopathic or over the counter or anything like that. Um, will you find in the They were proving to be helpful at night time, but then maybe giving you those some side effects during the day, or were you finding that they probably weren’t even really helping at night and they were giving you the side effects?

Martin: Like, what was that experience like?

Rachel: Yeah. Well, I remember in grad school, I like tried all these like natural things like magnesium, like whatever that calm stuff is. Um. And like, sleepy time tea, and, uh, lavender on my feet, um, or like Tylenol PM, um, and then around the time I reached out to you, then I was trying, like, Ativan,

Rachel: uh, Trazodone, marijuana, um, and what I found was that especially Around the time I reached out to you, those things would work the first time I used them, and I’d be like, great, I found a nice thing to use as needed. But then the second time I used them, my anxiety would keep me up through them. So It would be either like I had taken it and it worked, and then I was feeling groggy the next day, but then what really what it became was I would take it and my anxiety would keep me up through it, and then I would be like, have that hangover from whatever I had taken, plus not having slept.

Martin: Yeah, I think a lot of people listening to this are gonna really identify with that, um, that kind of process of trying different things. Um, and. Sometimes they, they work like straight away, you can find the, Oh, this is it. I found it. I found it. Everything is now fixed. I’m back on track. Um, and then a difficult night shows up, whether it’s the next night or in a few weeks or a few months, and then it.

Martin: It brings back all of those kind of anxieties show up again, right? Because it’s now it’s like, ah, now this doesn’t work. So something must be wrong. There must be something unique, uniquely broken or got something’s gone wayward here. I’m a unique case because none of this stuff is working. Now I have to try this new search and then it, the cycle just kind of repeats and repeats, right?

Martin: It was, it sounds like that was, that was your experience.

Rachel: Oh, yeah, it really was. And my friends, like, anyone, any roommates I’ve had, like, know that, like, I was so rigid about my bedtime. Like, we’d be in the middle of a conversation and I would, like, just abruptly leave because it’s like, well, I have to, like, start getting ready to bed in order to, like, attempt to control for this night.

Rachel: Um, so yeah, it was just, like, lots of, like, stress and anxiety about, like, Wanting to control my sleep.

Martin: Yeah, and like, like I always try and say, it’s completely understandable why we go that route. Because when, when something’s broken or when we identify a problem, we want to fix it. Right? And so many of the problems or obstacles in our lives.

Martin: So if we want a new career, then we might retrain and that takes a lot of effort, but we go through it and then we have that opportunity. Right? But sleep is one of these sleep and what we think and feel. I think of these outliers, the stuff that happens. Inside us, like under our skin, inside our bodies that we can’t directly or permanently control.

Martin: Um, and there, there are some things that we can do that probably can be helpful temporarily. Like if we drink, I don’t know, like a bottle of vodka, for example, before we go to bed, yeah, we’re going to probably be unconscious after that. Um, the, the argument is, is that sleep or is it something else?

Martin: But that’s, that’s probably a discussion for, for another day. Um, what happens is all of these things are temporary, right? They just they’re not really. Dealing with the root cause of the issue, so when it comes back, when all this stuff that we can’t directly control comes back, then we’re, we’re just repeating that process.

Martin: It’s almost like being stuck in the quicksand that we’re just struggling and struggling and struggling and just, maybe, maybe we’re either not moving or we’re just slowly sinking. We can feel really stuck and that’s when it can be a good opportunity to explore a new option or a new approach.

Rachel: Yes. No, that definitely resonates.

Martin: And I think, I think something that you touched upon as well, um, which is really, really common when we’re trying to fix, fix this problem is, Implementing those kind of rules and rituals around sleep in an attempt to control it, or to protect it, or to create the most perfect conditions possible for sleep to happen, is, they can come with some costs, right, in terms of not Like you said that you might be hanging out with friends, socializing with friends, but then, you’re checking the time.

Martin: Oh, I need to be back. I need to be back to prepare for sleep, make sure that all the conditions are good. So we end up getting pulled away from the life we want to live, which in itself can make things more difficult. And then we’re doing that in the pursuit of something that we can’t really directly or permanently control.

Martin: And the more we try, the more we can struggle. So then we’ve got the struggle, the difficulty with sleep, the struggle, the difficulty with anxiety, and we’ve also got the struggle and difficulty that comes with doing less of the stuff that matters to us. And that’s where it can just become so, so, so difficult.

Rachel: Yes. This is sort of tangentially related, but I was just remembering, um, from like this time in grad school up until us working together. So it was like five to seven years. Every night I would listen to this podcast called Sleep by Mary Phelan. It was like a seven to ten minute sleep podcast, but I would have to start it over like four to seven times.

Rachel: Like compulsively, um, not like just because I would get so anxious that like to make things just right to be able to fall asleep.

Martin: Yeah, and it’s, I mean, you’ve been in this experience yourself, so it’d be interesting to hear your thoughts on this. But I think what we can have This source of anxiety, right?

Martin: So let’s say sleep. So I’m, I’m naturally worried about, am I going to sleep tonight? Is tonight going to be really difficult? And that generates some anxiety, which is completely normal, completely natural. And sometimes I think what can happen is we can, because that anxiety doesn’t feel good, because we recognize it, we, we see it as an obstacle, as a barrier.

Martin: Whenever that anxiety is there, I’m not going to be able to sleep. So I have to get rid of the anxiety. Then we can develop anxiety about anxiety. So now we’re not just dealing with anxiety about sleep, but we’re also dealing with anxiety about anxiety itself. Was, was that, does that kind of relate to your own experience?

Rachel: Oh yes. Yeah. Like, I mean, this feels related, but Again, when I reached out to you, I had entered a new relationship and my poor sleep was, in my mind at the time, only when I was sharing a bed. But then what was happening was, it wasn’t just when I was sharing a bed, it was like bleeding into like, More and more nights of the week, but like the anxiety, like I, especially in on the nights or the days that I knew I’d be sharing a bed with my partner, I would just start, like, that would, sleeping would be on my mind from the time I woke up, like, of like, well, what will later look like?

Rachel: What can I do to make later right? Like, just already feeling Anticipating the night time and like attempting, working really hard to be present, not thinking about my anxiety.

Martin: Yeah. And how successful do you, now you’re able to look back, how successful do you feel that you were on being able to not think about certain things or not experience certain thoughts and feelings?

Rachel: Uh, not successful!

Martin: It’s really difficult, isn’t it? And I think there are some things we can do, maybe like going back to what we were talking about a little bit earlier, that can help temporarily. Maybe we can distract ourselves and that might work. Maybe for a few minutes or maybe a little bit longer.

Martin: But when it comes to thoughts and feelings, that’s what the brain does, right? There would be no brain without thoughts and feelings. That’s what the brain does. It’s just generating them all the time. And if we try to fight that or try to avoid it, Um, it takes, it takes a lot of effort, I think, first and foremost, takes a lot of mental energy, which can in itself be exhausting and create so much fatigue and what often happens because our brain’s number one job is to look out for us when it’s generating difficult thoughts and feelings.

Martin: It’s because it’s trying to tell us something and when we try and fight or avoid that. Then the brain can get really concerned that it’s giving us these really important messages. But instead of listening, we’re trying to get rid of them. Then the brain can panic a little bit, freak out, and generate even more intense thoughts and feelings.

Martin: And then we’re trying to push back again, and then it’s freaking out more and generating really intense thoughts and feelings to try and get us to listen. And it can just, we just get caught in that battle, right? Bit of China. Trying to control our minds or trying to control our thoughts and feelings and over the long term, it just again, where are we?

Martin: We’re back in that quicksand.

Rachel: Right.

Rachel: I think for so long I had existed with like these very rigid sleep preparation, like rituals. And, and if I didn’t get to do that, then I wasn’t going to be able to fall asleep in my mind.

Rachel: And I think I like started to loosen the grip on that of like, okay, if I don’t have like the exact. 45 to 60 minutes I want. That doesn’t mean I won’t fall asleep. It just means I don’t have that time right now.

Martin: Yeah, it’s, it’s really interesting with those rules and rituals. We can implement the really rigid rules and regulations that we can implement because we We can be struggling, right, with sleep, and so we implement all these rituals or rules to protect sleep, to create the most perfect conditions possible for sleep, and yet we still find ourselves struggling, so I think there’s this little voice in the back of our minds that Might every now and then be saying to us is, is this really helpful?

Martin: Is this really proving to be effective and useful? But at the same time, there’s probably another little voice that’s saying, well, yeah, we’re still really struggling. But what if we didn’t have these rules and regulations? Then things might be even more difficult. Um, how do you, how do you reconcile those two voices and take that leap into Moving away from all that pressure you might be putting on yourself with these strict rules and regulations, all the ways they might be pulling you away from the kind of life you want to live, and take that leap into Moving away from them being a little bit more flexible, living life a little bit more independently of sleep.

Martin: Is it just a case of just going for it? Is it a case of thinking of it as an experiment? Like, how do you make that leap almost into the unknown, which can be quite scary?

Rachel: Yeah, well, I, I, it was so helpful to have you as a coach and resource like because I think You know, I had tried consuming, like, my own self education and I was just too anxious to take it in because of exactly what you’re saying of like, intellectually, I understand that this works.

Rachel: But it doesn’t make sense to me. And what if it’s wrong? Like, just like giving up my way of doing things that clearly hadn’t been working, but I just felt really scared. And so I think it felt so helpful, like, as I was going along, to be able to take my worries to you and, like, help debunk them.

Rachel: Or like take the, what, because if you’re struggling with insomnia, like all these small things feel like, they start to become so big of like, what if I have to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night? Like, should I just ignore that? Or should I, like, should I push through and just try and fall back to sleep?

Rachel: Or should I get up? Like, that, like, question that feels so small, as it pertains to, like, sleeping, would, like, cause me so much anxiety and being able to, like, take that to you and Have you be like, no, like just, it’s okay, like, like the soothing presence really helped me, I think, like release the rules I had or like the myths I had about sleep.

Martin: I think an important point you made there or a useful point that people will probably identify with is We can, we can have this idea in place that there’s maybe what I’m doing isn’t proven to be workable or effective or helpful. We might discover that there’s a different way to do this stuff.

Martin: And when we read about it, for example, it can sound pretty straightforward. Let’s say, for example, let’s try going to bed later at night instead of earlier at night. Which. Can sound a little bit confusing, a little bit scary, but at the same time when it’s explained, it can also sound quite logical because the later we stay up at night, the more sleep drive we can build.

Martin: So the more likely, the better conditions are for sleep to happen. But I think it’s another thing to Take that and convert into action because it can be quite scary to take on this whole new approach. Um, because we might deal with thoughts like, well, what if this doesn’t work? Um, what if it makes things more difficult?

Martin: What if this is the last option available to me? It doesn’t work. And then I’ve got nothing else left to try. The brain can come up with all these different scary thoughts and feelings. So having that support, whether it’s from a coach or maybe a partner or a friend, um, can be, can be so helpful because this is really difficult and it’s hard to do difficult things alone as an individual.

Rachel: It really is. Yeah, I, like, I couldn’t get over just how. Much peace of mind it gave me to be able to get your feedback, to send you my questions, like, yeah, like, I think having some kind of buddy to do this hard thing with, I mean, for me, felt really essential because, like, the, because, I had bought books or was, like, starting to, like, like, look for things on the internet, but, yeah, the anxiety was too high just by myself.

Martin: Do you feel that you maybe got a little bit more comfortable with the idea of night time wakefulness either happening or being a possibility?

Martin: So instead of all your actions being centered around trying to avoid nighttime wakefulness or trying to get rid of it when it showed up, you started to feel a little bit more comfortable with the appearance of wakefulness or the possibility that it could exist. And that in turn maybe in itself created better conditions for sleep to happen.

Rachel: Definitely. Yeah. Like I think I, I remember, um, I remember it was falling asleep. If there was any interruption in my insomnia days to my falling asleep, I thought I was Screwed for the night of like, oh, I was like being low to sleep. I was just about to fall asleep. And then something startled me awake or I started myself awake.

Rachel: Um, and then felt like the night was lost. And then like, in the middle of the night feeling like if I woke up, that was a symbol of, something bad having happened in terms of like, in terms of sleep. Um, but I think in like, with the education you provided of like that, those are normal things. Like those happen to people that’s, that is within normal limits that does not preclude you from sleep.

Martin: Something a little bit related to what you just said, um, about, something might wake you, suddenly wake you up, or you might jerk awake, um, and then you feel like the night was lost, um, was related to nighttime noise, when we started working together, you mentioned that, There was maybe this kind of fixation, maybe bordering on an obsession with trying to eliminate all potential noises that might happen through the night, and if any noises did show up, that was it, the night was a disaster.

Martin: How, how, how did you end up dealing with that issue? Was it a similar kind of process or did that, was there a kind of different approach there?

Rachel: Yeah, that’s so interesting, because, yeah, I just imagine like any roommate I’ve ever had listening to this and being like, yeah, she’s like, such a stickler about noise and like all these things, but like, it’s become so much less of an issue.

Rachel: I think, um, I think in like both like in the understanding I was developing about how sleep worked, I think I developed like was also developing new ways of focusing my attention and like I’ll still do this as a way to relax of like going in between like an unpleasant stimuli and a more neutral stimuli.

Rachel: So like if there’s noise and it’s Disruptive or unpleasant like I’ll alternate between that and like maybe like the sensation of my hands like it just it doesn’t feel as much of an emergency, like maybe it’s still something I would prefer wasn’t there is unpleasant, but it doesn’t feel like it’s going to ruin my night.

Martin: That’s that’s really interesting. It sounds. It sounds a little bit like. You found a way to experience a noise, the appearance of a noise, maybe with a little bit less resistance, so you’re exposing yourself to maybe, Being more of an observer of that noise for a little while and bringing your attention back into your body, then observing the noise for a little bit and bringing your attention back to your body compared to all those thoughts and feelings are turning up about the noise and then you’re trying to suppress those thoughts and feelings, getting really mad about the fact there’s noise there and engaging in that battle in the middle of the night with all of this stuff that you can’t directly control.

Rachel: Exactly. Yeah, like, oh, I remember just feeling so much resentment and like, like quicksand, that quicksand feeling whenever there was noise out of my control. And of course, not that that doesn’t still sometimes come up, but it’s just. It’s just not what takes up as much of attention, or as much of my attention.

Martin: Yeah, I think that’s the key word, is how much of your attention it can consume. Because I’m trying to think of an analogy here. It would probably be something like, let’s say you’re lying on the beach, um, you’re listening to the waves and the birds and all that good stuff and then this family next to you pitches up a tent and they’ve got a Boombox, and then they start putting on the worst music imaginable.

Martin: Um, then what’s going to naturally happen is all your attention is going to gravitate towards that really annoying, horrendous music and how you wish you couldn’t hear it, how you wish it would just go away. Um, And when, when that is the focus of our attention, so now we’re just intently listening to this music, even though we hate it, we miss out on everything else, right?

Martin: Now we can no longer hear the, hear the, hear the birds. We can no longer hear the ocean. We’re no longer aware of the fact that it’s a beautiful day, that the sun is beating down on our bodies, that we’ve got a nice cold drink in our hands. 100 percent of our attention is this music. is really annoying.

Martin: And I think it’s a process, right? It’s a process of bringing our attention back. Like you just touched upon when you heard noises at night, you’d listen to it, accept its presence, even though you wish it wasn’t there and refocus your attention. And then you’d probably find that your mind drifted back to that noise again, or your attention will go back to the noise and you would just gently bring it back.

Martin: And it is a process because the mind is always going to want to focus on Obstacles, discomfort, um, problems, and it’s just a case of when that’s not helpful and that’s not useful, just refocusing our attention. Um, how was that for an analogy? I just made it from the top of my head. Do you feel like that’s what it’s like?

Rachel: A hundred percent. Yeah. Like, I often have that thought of like, maybe I’m sitting next to a trash can and the sight of it is unpleasant, but if I just, like, shift my posture to look the other way, it’s like there’s a beautiful tree. It’s like, it’s not that it’s not there, it’s just that, like, I can, I can know it’s there and, like, look elsewhere.

Martin: Yeah, exactly. So that’s a really important point too, because we’re not trying to trick ourselves that this stuff isn’t here because it is here and it does exist, but it’s just a case of kind of opening ourselves up to everything else that’s present other than that thing, other than the trash can, other than the boom box, other than all that unpleasant disruptive noise.

Martin: And when something becomes less of a focus of our attention, obviously it consumes less of our attention, um, and it can feel like it’s less of a problem, because it’s not consuming 100 percent of our attention anymore, so therefore it doesn’t feel like it’s 100 percent of the problem.

Rachel: Exactly, yeah, and it’s even, it’s just helped, because I even just like last week had One night where I didn’t sleep so well because I have a new roommate and I’m just like adjusting to her rhythms and I, I think it, I like was able to offer some soothing of like, your attention is here because this is new.

Rachel: Like, like this isn’t necessarily like a permanent state.

Martin: I think that’s a, that’s a really big insight too because whenever there is anything new. Um, the mind is going to be more aware of it, maybe focus on it a little bit more, monitor it a little bit more. And I think that also connects into these, these changes that we can make to. move away from really rigid rules and rituals and stuff like that when we do make a change, it’s going to be natural that at first the mind is going to be more focused on that, more aware of it, monitoring for the outcome, is this change instead of going to bed, for example, at nine o’clock at night and going to bed at midnight, the brain’s going to be more alert, right?

Martin: Is this helping? Is this going to do the trick? Um, what’s what’s going on here? Should we really do this? No, let’s go back. Let’s go to bed early. Let’s go to bed now. No, let’s go bed later. That’s all natural and normal, right? And that’s when we can also, maybe we’re more likely to get. Pulled back into the struggle again, trying to either get rid of those thoughts or going back to old behaviors that we know from experience aren’t workable, aren’t helpful, aren’t effective.

Martin: Um, and so I think it’s just something to be mindful of that anytime we do make a change or experience something new, there’s going to be more attention put on that. Right. And I think maybe what can be helpful is Trying to approach that from the mindset of being like a curious observer, like maybe being like a little bit of this kind of crazy scientist while I’m trying this new thing, or this new thing is showing up.

Martin: Let’s just see how that pans out. So instead of just having that initial resistance to it, because we wish it wasn’t there or it’s difficult, maybe we can become more of an observer of it. Um, and when we become more of an observer, I think that we naturally become a little bit less inclined to struggle with it.

Martin: To start battling with all that difficult stuff.

Rachel: Right. Right. Exactly.

Martin: So I think maybe something that’s a little bit related to this, is that when we have that kind of anxiety around sleep, um, It’s not only something that affects the nights, like you touched on earlier, it also affects the days, we find ourselves thinking a lot about sleep.

Martin: Maybe that anxiety about sleep shows up during the daytime as well, and we can develop this preoccupation, right? It’s almost like we’re trying to focus on something. Um, but our mind keeps pulling us away and time traveling off into the future, what’s tonight going to bring, or maybe it time travels off into the past, what was last night like, it was really difficult, I feel really bad today, lots of difficult stuff like that, and I think one, another one of your goals was to explore, is there a way of moving away from this preoccupation with sleep so that maybe it consumes less of my attention, um, so I can do more of the stuff that matters to me without it getting in the way?

Martin: How do you feel that you were able to move away from that preoccupation with sleep?

Rachel: I think a big thing I remember when I was like, my sleep was really bad, right before I reached out to you, or in the midst of, like, our work, is that I could have good days, even when I hadn’t slept.

Rachel: And I could have bad days even when I had slept that like feeling like there was so much anxiety like if I don’t sleep, then I’m gonna have a bad day. And it’s like, well, maybe, um, but also I’ve had plenty of bad days when I have slept and like have had low energy when I’ve slept it like you know it’s just like your energy is, it’s not so much something I think I’ve seen for myself that it’s like I can control.

Rachel: That those, like, energy, my energy levels will just fluctuate no matter what, and so I think, like, Loosening the grip of, like, uh, if I don’t sleep tonight, tomorrow will be, like, I’ll be so tired, or it’ll be a bad day. Like, just being able to reality test that a little bit, and, like, I, uh, yeah, like, helping, with the idea that, like, um, like, a bad night’s sleep didn’t mean, like, That everything had gone to hell, and if I did have a bad night of sleep, like I would get myself a nice coffee in the morning just like to cheer myself up. Um, I think all of that helped to, to not feel like, like sleep was. Directing the outcome of my day.

Martin: Yeah. Absolutely. And so I think that it’s really helpful to emphasize that really difficult nights can definitely make the days a lot more difficult, right?

Martin: We probably would never have worked together if there was no kind of consequence to how you felt during the day. And at the same time, um, there’s also the fact remains that even after a great night of sleep, we can still have. difficult days. So there’s a relationship there for sure, but a difficult night doesn’t have to guarantee that every second of the following day is going to be truly awful.

Martin: Um, and I think going back to what you were saying earlier about when you were refocusing your attention. And why I think that can be so helpful is when our days are really difficult and the mind does start to think and become preoccupied with, the burning eyes, the fatigue, the difficulty concentrating, it consumes all of our attention and it becomes Even more difficult for us to notice anything else that might be going on or to recall anything else that might have happened to us.

Martin: Um, that was maybe a little bit more positive or a little bit more pleasant. So we, by refocusing our attention also during the day. It can also be helpful too, because it can just help us notice that even when things are really difficult, there maybe are a couple of glimpses of better stuff that are happening during the day.

Martin: And often when we’re really struggling, we can miss that stuff. And it can really make it feel as though every second of every day is just a living nightmare. Um, and it can be really difficult. But, and at the same time, there might be Those little glimpses of good stuff that might go, get missed if we’re not engaged in that process of refocusing our attention to.

Rachel: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Like that, like, a conversation with a close friend could like, and going to like my favorite yoga class, like all those things can, are still beautiful things that I like got to experience. In that day.

Martin: Yeah. And I think that’s somewhere where we can sometimes also get pulled back into that quicksand again, right?

Martin: Is when we’ve, we just feel truly awful. Especially when we first get out of bed in the morning, which is often the most difficult part of the day. Um, and that can just lead us to withdrawing from all of that stuff. Like stuff that would be important to us. Stuff that keeps us moving toward the kind of life we want to live.

Martin: So we do less of that stuff, which in itself, um, might make the day more difficult because we’re doing less of what matters to us. And it gives us less opportunity to refocus our attention. Because when we’re doing less, what’s the mind gonna do? The mind is a little bit more idle. So it’s just gonna internalize and just start time traveling again.

Martin: It’s going to start coming up with all those difficult thought, those difficult thoughts, those difficult stories, and it’s going to emphasize all that difficult stuff because it has nothing else to focus on.

Rachel: Right, right.

Martin: So something that you talked about I think when we, right at the start of this conversation was When we identify kind of anxiety as this kind of barrier to sleep, I need to get rid of anxiety.

Martin: Otherwise, sleep just isn’t going to happen. And I think A really big insight that you uncovered when we were working together was you found that there were nights when anxiety showed up and you were feeling really unconfident, you just did not have any confidence that sleep would happen.

Martin: There was the anxiety was present and then you still ended up actually having. A good night or a decent night of sleep. Yeah. What did you learn from that experience and how do you feel that might have helped you?

Rachel: Oh, yeah, I, that’s so interesting. Like, yeah, because I think it comes, it goes back to, for me, like, Formally having the feeling that the conditions had to be perfect to sleep. And so if I had anxiety then, That was like then the state I was going to be in, um, and, uh, yeah, I think, I think it was a lot of the education about sleep of like that, that the, the one thing, but especially if you’ve built up, um, your, your sleepiness, like if you’ve been awake throughout the day, that the, uh, That the only thing in between you and sleep was fear, like, anxiety.

Rachel: And I think, knowing that, I could sometimes, like, recount that to myself. And that would help me relax. Or, like, partly knowing that a bad night of sleep, especially with these, like, behavioral measures in place. wasn’t gonna then ruin me for the rest of the week. It would be a bad night.

Martin: Yeah. Yeah. I think sometimes it can also be helpful when, if we ever have an experience like that, it can maybe sometimes serve as a good reminder that Maybe in an ideal world, we could permanently delete anxiety from our brains before we go to bed.

Martin: But if it does show up, it doesn’t have to guarantee that the whole night is written off and it’s going to be absolutely terrible. That it is possible to still sleep when anxiety shows up. And maybe what makes Falling asleep or falling back to sleep more difficult is when we engage in a battle with that anxiety when we try and fight it and we try and push it away.

Martin: Maybe it’s that struggle that makes sleep more difficult compared to just the presence of anxiety alone. Do you feel that, do you feel like that was reflective of your own, your own experience?

Rachel: Yeah, and I was, I was just having a memory to like, I think in. Time after we, soon after we were done working together, like, because for me, I think as soon as I feel any constriction in my chest as a sign of anxiety, that makes me, that used to be like a symbol of like, oh, no, there’s like a really bad night ahead because like the constriction has entered my chest.

Rachel: There’s no making that go away. And I think it’s, it was a lot of, like, what we’re describing of my attention of, like, alternating between that and something more pleasant, that or something more neutral, and, like, being like, that’s there, but, like, yeah, like, refocusing my attention from it.

Martin: And I think something else that is useful to just consider or, even better if you can pick it up from your own experience is that thing about sleep confidence. It’s great. It’s a great thing to have, but it’s not needed for sleep to happen. We don’t have to have sleep confidence for sleep to happen.

Martin: Just like we don’t. need to have breathing confidence for breathing to happen, it’s, it’s great to have, but it’s, it’s not needed. And it’s another one of those things we can’t really control, and it tends to be quite fluid confidence in anything can come and go. We can feel really confident about something and then maybe we make a mistake or something happens and that confidence can be shot and we start to build it up again just through our own actions.

Martin: Um, it can just be another one of those things. That can almost serve as a distraction. I need to, I need to get rid of anxiety. I need to create confidence. All these things we can’t really control. Um, and that can end up distracting us and creating more of a struggle. Sending us back into that quicksand again.

Martin: And talking about things that ebb and flow, ups and downs. So when we were working together, I think it was after a couple of months, or maybe six to eight weeks, something like that. Um, you felt you were doing really well. And then all of a sudden, this difficult night showed up.

Martin: So you found that because you’re a human being with a human brain, you had all those things. difficult thoughts and feelings turning up, fear, confusion, anxiety felt really powerful. Um, and I think you, you said to me that you felt like you jinx yourself because you’d sent me an email just telling me how well you’d been doing.

Martin: And then all of a sudden that difficult night showed up and it’s so. It’s so easy, so tempting to then get pulled back into all of our old unworkable behaviors at that point, right? Because the brain kind of forgets that this is a process, that there’s ups and downs. Um, and it can want us to go back into all the old unworkable actions because they’re more familiar, regardless of whether they’re helpful or not.

Martin: Um, how, how did you end up responding to that setback so that you didn’t get pulled back into the quicksand? Hmm.

Rachel: Well, I think like, first it’s like getting, I think I remember that exchange and getting your response and feeling like, just confirming what I was like, trying to tell myself in my head of like, this is normal, this happens and like, you being so not anxious about it of like, of course, like that happens sometimes.

Rachel: And just like thinking recently, like there was a, a couple months ago, I like had a really, like the, the week was turning into a bad week of sleep because, but like, it felt so much easier to identify the contributions to it. Like, I was really sick and like that was impacting my sleep. And then I think, like, the, the, being sick, that like just like took over the whole week.

Rachel: But I, I remember having the thought of like, once I’m. Feeling a little better, I can like get myself back into these routines that are so helpful and that I know work, um. So yeah, just like normalizing that bad nights of sleep happen and also I have like tools so accessible to me that I have seen really work in like normalizing my sleep.

Martin: So just briefly, because I know that I’ve already taken off a big chunk of your time today, which I’m really appreciative for. Um, if you were to reflect on, maybe the two or three changes that you made when we were working together that you found most helpful, um, what would you say they were?

Rachel: I think the getting out of bed every day at the same time, which really sucked. Um, and, and I don’t necessarily do anymore. Um, and, uh, I think feeling, like, Less anxious about that time before sleep of like, still having routines that help me unwind and like relax, but not feeling so regimented about them and really not taking any sleep aids.

Rachel: Um, because I now only see that they make me feel worse.

Martin: So we were only working together for a couple of months, and that was about three years ago now. Mm-Hmm. . Um, how long would you say that it took for you to get to a point where, sleep wasn’t something you were just really struggling with? Um, maybe you felt like you’d emerged from the quicksand, um, and you just felt better able to live your life independently of sleep?

Rachel: I, I think. By the, well, at least by the end of our six to eight weeks, my sleep had normalized or like, I, I wasn’t having the same insomnia or like sleep related anxiety, um, just like in the time of your program. And then I, like, I maintained the, be like, uh, the, the behavior changes that we’re describing.

Rachel: Like. For a long time, um, and I, and I’ll still fall back on them, um, or use them when I’m, like, going through rough bouts of sleep, but actually regaining the, what felt like the ability to sleep happened within six to eight weeks, and I, I guess, like, really reducing my anxiety, I think my anxiety was reduced by the six to eight weeks just knowing I had these tools, and then feeling like, I didn’t have to like use the tools exactly as they had been prescribed.

Rachel: Maybe like a year.

Martin: Yeah. That’s, yeah, I think I, I, I like to ask that question in more recent episodes because for people listening to this, it can really sound like, which we are, we’re performing miracles here, right? That within a few weeks we can completely eliminate decades of insomnia and permanently delete anxiety and stuff like that, which.

Martin: We can’t do. This is a process. Um, it’s all about removing ourselves from the process as much as possible, refocusing our attention, um, not being ruled by insomnia and sleep, being able to live independently of it. And that does take time. Um, and so I think it’s more realistic to think of this in terms of not so much weeks, but maybe more to do with months.

Martin: It is a process that doesn’t mean we’re still going to be struggling for months, but it just means there’s going to be more, maybe more difficult setbacks. The brain’s still going to want to try pulling us back into that struggle again. And it’s going to take time to build skill in responding to this stuff in a different, in a different way.

Martin: Um, because that’s really what it is, right? Like you touched upon this, these tools are in my back pocket, their skills and all skills take time to learn and develop.

Rachel: Yeah, exactly. And I think, like, that feels, that just makes more sense to me and feels more realistic than, like, a pill that is claiming to, like, solve your sleep, that, like, of course this will be, like, a thing you have to, one has to dedicate themselves to.

Martin: Yeah. Exactly. Well, Rachel, I’m really grateful for the time you’ve taken out your day to come on and share your story. I do have one last question for you, um, which I try and ask every guest, and it’s this. If someone with chronic insomnia is listening and they feel as though they’ve tried everything, they’re beyond help, that they’ll just never be able to stop struggling with insomnia.

Martin: They’ll never be able to get out of that quicksand. What would you say to them?

Rachel: Uh, I’m, I know that pain, like, and I can just, like, feel it viscerally, like, in my body, like, hearing that, and it’s just not true, like, of course, like, I don’t know any conditions a person might have, but, like, I, I really thought that I was just doomed and I, and I think, like, one has the ability to sleep.

Rachel: So there is hope I would want to share.

Martin: That’s great. Well, thanks again, Rachel. I think that’s a reassuring and comforting and positive note to end on. So thank you again for coming on to the podcast.

Rachel: Yeah. Thanks so much for having me, Martin.

Martin: I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Insomnia Coach Podcast. I’m Martin Reed, and as always, I’d like to leave you with this important reminder — you can sleep.

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Listen to the podcast episode (audio only)Jessica’s journey with insomnia began on a family vacation when she suddenly found it really hard to sleep. When she got home, her sleep recovered — until it was time to travel again. This pattern repeated itself, with sleep getting more difficult each time she traveled until insomnia stuck around even after she returned home.

In response, Jessica started to go to bed earlier. She tried supplements and medication. She practiced good sleep hygiene. And yet, night after night, her bedroom remained a battleground.

When bedtime approached, Jessica experienced a sense of impending doom and intense anxiety. She would feel a tightness in her chest. She worried how she was going to function during the day and feared making mistakes at work.

In this episode, Jessica describes how she practiced a new approach. Instead of fighting insomnia and the difficult thoughts and feelings that would come with it, she started accepting their presence. She started to be kinder to herself. Jessica noticed that it wasn’t being awake or experiencing certain thoughts and feelings that were the real problem — it was her judgment of those things and her ongoing resistance to them that made things so much more difficult.

As Jessica shares, her change of approach wasn’t easy. Progress was not immediate or linear. However, with ongoing practice she found that she was able to free herself from an ongoing struggle and reclaim her life from insomnia.

Click here for a full transcript of this episode.

Martin: Alright, Jessica, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to come onto the podcast.

Jessica: Yeah, you’re welcome.

Martin: Let’s start right at the beginning. Are you able to pinpoint the initial cause of your struggle with sleep? And how long ago did that all begin?

Jessica: It’s been over a year. Uh, maybe like a year and a half.

Jessica: And, uh, I have a distinct memory of when it started I, I was traveling and I was away like on a group kind of family vacation and I wasn’t able to sleep at all that night. Uh, it was very anxiety producing. The second night I cause it was like a two night, uh, trip, uh, the second night I was really anxious about sleeping and not being able to sleep.

Jessica: And eventually I fell asleep, but it was difficult. When I came back home, there was like another kind of off night, and then I, I was able to sleep okay. I then had another traveling plan maybe like a month later. And during that time I was fine, but then when I traveled, it was the same kind of story, where I wouldn’t be able to sleep, I was really, really anxious and just up all night.

Jessica: That happened one more time, I think, because I had multiple… Traveling episode, uh, traveling plans about, about a little less than a month apart and then each time it got worse. And then after that last travel, it, it stuck around even when I came home.

Martin: Did you, had you traveled in the past, like before that year or so ago and been able to sleep OK, and then it was…

Jessica: Yeah, I was able to travel. No problem. Uh, I had a lot of like life stressors going on, uh, leading up to that initial kind of episode. At the time, if you asked me, I would have been like, yeah, I’m fine.

Jessica: Everything is it’s fine and okay. I can look back now and, and see that I probably wasn’t fine. And that the travel was a bit of the tipping point, uh, uh, for me to deal with all of this. stressors that were going on or maybe not deal with all the stressors that were going on.

Martin: And so you mentioned that then you came home.

Martin: When you came home did you find that sleep disruption was sticking around or did it come and go?

Jessica: No, it, it rapidly progressed. What’s interesting is it started in, uh, like an August, so not this past August, August 4th. And And I was on a trip during Thanksgiving break, and that’s when it really stuck around.

Jessica: Even, even probably leading up to before Thanksgiving, maybe like in October or November it was. And it, like I was getting anxiety like during the evening hours leading up to going to bed when I was home. And I would just have this kind of feeling of impending doom. It wasn’t, it wasn’t fun at all.

Jessica: And I was trying to like white knuckle my way through it. And, uh, and then I went on that trip and then after the trip, it was really bad. What’s interesting is on that trip, I I didn’t tell you this, but I, I found like a recording of one of your podcasts. That you had done and so probably within a few months I there was this understanding that like I could make it better and I could do things to make it better So it’s not like it went on for years and years or something and then I tried to I signed up for like your newsletter or something, and I tried to do some of it just myself.

Jessica: Unstructured, and that did not go so well. I really needed your structured guidance, because I was having a lot of anxiety. And I wasn’t, particularly anxious like that before. But it really was around sleep and falling asleep, and I I would not be able to sleep at all. I was up for hours.

Jessica: Very, very anxious. You would think I was being attacked by like a, a saber toothed tiger or something. That’s how really anxious I was about sleep and trying to fall asleep.

Martin: Yeah, that anxiety can just be so difficult, right? We can, like you touched on, we can have anxiety about what the night is going to bring, and then because the anxiety itself is so difficult to experience, we can have anxiety about the potential of experiencing the anxiety. So we add that on top and it just gets so difficult. You mentioned that there was this impending sense of doom, as bedtime approached or as you were getting into bed and you started to get all these anxious thoughts related to Sleep.

Martin: What kind of things was your, was your brain telling you? Was it generating different stories or specific thoughts that you would find would regularly crop up?

Jessica: No, I, I tried to, to think what are the thoughts, and quite honestly, I didn’t Like, recognize any thoughts. I only recognize this feeling this tightness in my chest.

Jessica: I was like, I don’t even feel like I’m having any thoughts about it. I’m just having this anxiety feeling. It wasn’t probably till much later on that I could see that. I think my body was just starting to generate a response to the whole going to sleep process. What is that going to be like?

Jessica: How bad is it going to be tonight? Am I going to be up? Am I going to be able to function? Those common thoughts that people that have sleep issues think about. But I, I didn’t, I didn’t really notice a particular thought, which is the interesting part. I only recognized that feeling, which was, like, awful.

Martin: Absolutely. Some people can recognize specific thoughts showing up or can notice them. Other times it’s more the physical sensations that we… are more aware of. I don’t think there’s really any difference between the two. It doesn’t, there’s not really any meaning to draw from the fact that I don’t know what I’m thinking.

Martin: I’m just feeling it, whereas other people know exactly what they’re thinking that there’s stories coming up in their brain they’re having specific thoughts. I don’t think there’s really any meaning to draw from that. It’s all really the same thing which is the body or the brain doing its job ironically of trying to look out for us.

Martin: So it sees this approach of nighttime. As a potential threat because it’s learned that there’s going to be this battle, we’ve got all these troops coming up over the horizon, which is bedtime. Start getting that heart racing, maybe the shakes, feeling cold, feeling hot, all those fight or flight symptoms, right?

Jessica: Yeah, it was total, not flight. It was fight. Like I definitely felt it in my chest and my, I can see now that I was really just preparing for this big long battle of sleep and what it would be like.

Jessica: And All the thoughts about it and stuff, yeah.

Martin: I think just listening to your story there, we can assume that the nights are going to be really difficult. But were there any kind of common characteristics to what an average night at that time was like? Was it just really difficult to fall asleep?

Martin: Or would you find that you could fall asleep, but then you’d wake and find it really hard to fall back to sleep? What kind of things were you dealing with? As it comes to what sleep was like on those nights,

Jessica: Well, in the beginning, I think I would try to go to bed earlier. That’s silly thing though.

Jessica: Some of us do that. I’ll just get some more sleep tonight. So I’ll go to bed earlier. That, of course, is not helpful. But when I would get to bed, no matter what time it was I would have difficulty falling asleep. I could be up for hours just yeah. tossing and turning and getting really frustrated.

Jessica: Really feeling like I wanted to just jump out of my skin with, anxiety or stress. And then what I realize now thanks to my husband actually noticing this is that, uh, sometimes I would fall asleep. But I would fall asleep for five, 10 minutes or something, really, really short.

Jessica: Short enough that I didn’t register it as sleep. And I’d kind of like wake back up I’m ready to fight again. That kind of, uh, and I would feel as though there was a long, long period of time, like maybe 10 o’clock to, to three o’clock that I didn’t sleep. There’s probably periods of time that I was.

Jessica: And then eventually I would, I would fall asleep and then wake up for work. In which I’m getting up around 5 36. Sometimes I would, uh, sleep in a little bit. Obviously that’s before I started the working your program, but prior to that, I would sleep in a little bit more. But I can’t sleep in much past like 6, 630 because I have to get up and go to work.

Martin: So what kind of insights did you get from your husband sharing his observations? Was it you’d have a night where it felt like there was just no sleep happening whatsoever and your husband was sharing that insight. Well, actually, I saw a little bit of sleep happening and then maybe that was a little bit reassuring?

Jessica: Yeah, I mean he could see that I was really struggling he doesn’t have any sleep issues, so He kind of like stayed up when I said I’m just gonna stay up with you and support you He was just just trying the best he could you know to support me And and, uh, he was in this position where he was uncomfortable, but he froze because he saw that I was sleeping and eventually had to get out of that uncomfortable position.

Jessica: And it woke me up and he’s I knew it was going to wake you up. But in that moment, like later on that next day, I had a little bit of insight Oh, like he said, I was sleeping. But if you asked me, I would have said I wasn’t sleeping at all. Cause it felt like I wasn’t sleeping. So, and he, I mean, he just saw how anxious I was, but that provided me a little bit of insight.

Jessica: That I wasn’t completely broken because probably like a lot of people, I really felt like something’s really wrong with me. I don’t know how to sleep anymore. Like, why can’t I sleep? Those thoughts.

Martin: It’s really interesting that you said that because I think that’s one, that’s one reason why it can be, feel even more difficult.

Martin: It can become even more difficult is our, our brains can just tell us that No sleep happened on one night, and sometimes for sure that could be true. But other times that might not be true. There might be some sleep going on, but as far as our brain is reporting to us it’s nope, there was nothing.

Martin: There was no sleep, and then we get really concerned. You know that somehow we’ve lost the ability to generate sleep. But there is always the possibility and Quite often, it’s more likely than not that some kind of sleep has happened, even if it’s just tiny little bursts of sleep, that some kind of sleep has happened, and being aware of that, that there is that possibility that some sleep happened without us being consciously aware of it or able to remember it can be quite reassuring.

Martin: So it’s, it’s really good to hear that your husband was able to observe that first and foremost, and then share it with you.

Jessica: Yeah. Yeah. It was a good, good learning point for me. And this whole process has been, uh, like these tiny little insights um, And slowly uh, chiseling away at, what was insomnia to learning about myself and how the brain works and and, and how I work, uh, and melting away all of that, it takes time.

Martin: Absolutely. So you talked about. What the nights were like and the approach of the nights, were you finding that as you were tangled up in this really difficult struggle, that this was affecting your days as well?

Jessica: Truth be told, I actually don’t think it was affecting my days. I think I was able to go to work every day just fine.

Jessica: I, I did worry obsessively about it affecting my day at night, especially how am I going to work? How am I going to do this? I won’t be able to function. I had, uh, this study in my head that I had heard about that, uh, like residents I work in the medical field and, uh, that residents, uh, when they didn’t have sleep for whatever, 24 hours, their, their brain capacity is though like under the influence of alcohol.

Jessica: And so I had this. And I have this really like responsible job in which I take care of other people, and so I really, it really weighed on me and, uh, and I, and I had that thought like in my head, in my head, in my head, in my head but truth be told, Overall, I was fine. Now I probably wasn’t as jovial.

Jessica: I was my, my baseline personality was, was a little bit more subdued. And I had this kind of like little bit of nervous. Energy under the surface. That was definitely going on, but overall, I don’t actually think it affected my day except for the anxiety. I would start to feel that obviously affected things.

Martin: I think there’s 2 great insights. The key insights I think you shared there, and I think the first one is, we’ve got evidence that you’ve got one of those human brains that’s always doing its job, trying its best to look out for you, right? So you’ve got a job where you’re looking after other people it’s important, what you’re doing is important, and mistakes, for example, do have consequences, so your brain is firing up and looking out for you, because obviously, if you’re going to work the equivalent of being drunk.

Martin: That’s going to cause you issues. It’s going to cause your patients issues. And that’s not reflecting the kind of person you want to be or the life you want to live, right? It’s contrary to what you want to be known for, what you want to stand for, and the life you want to live. So I think that’s the first thing.

Martin: And I think that can be helpful to acknowledge that because often we can develop a really adversarial relationship with our brain when it’s doing things. that don’t feel good, or when it’s doing things that feel unhelpful, right? So, when it generates that anxiety, we want to get rid of it, we want to sleep, this doesn’t feel good, stop doing this, why are you doing this to me, brain?

Martin: But really, it comes from a good place. It’s your brain looking out for you, it’s just maybe it’s trying so hard, it’s getting in the way a little bit. Totally. And I think the second insight that you shared was that… The thoughts that might be getting generated by your brain can sometimes be different to the experience from your own experience.

Martin: Or different from facts. So sometimes the thoughts we can have are true, are facts, are helpful. And at the same time, sometimes they’re maybe less true, not really facts, not really that helpful. So your brain might tell you that if you don’t fall asleep tonight, then… You’re going to give a patient like the wrong medication for example or something like that and that’s terrifying But then you know from experience that well, hang on a minute.

Martin: I’ve done this I’ve had multiple nights like this, still to this day, not given a patient, for example, the wrong medication. I’m not sure what your career is or if you give people medication, but I’m just using that as an example because it’s something serious, right? And I think just knowing those two, just those two insights can be helpful, no matter how difficult what the brain is doing comes from a good place.

Martin: And second of all, that what the brain is telling us. Can be true and helpful and sometimes it might not be true and it might not be helpful.

Jessica: Yeah, totally. My brain was trying to help me. It just went a little haywire and It had the right setting and circumstances that just allowed that to occur. Yeah.

Martin: As human beings when we’re dealing with difficult stuff, we want to fix it, right?

Martin: We want to get rid of it. When you were still tangled up in that struggle, arm wrestling with all this difficult stuff, what kind of things were you trying at that time to maybe make sleep happen or get rid of wakefulness or to deal with those, that, that anxiety that you’ve already described?

Jessica: Yeah, so, I tried melatonin. Uh, I was taking like up to 10 milligrams a night. And and because I had used it in the past, like I would use it here or there if I. Wasn’t, wasn’t able to fall asleep and it was never like a problem because it was very like as needed. And then so I was like, oh, well, I’ll just keep using it because it’s as needed.

Jessica: Not understanding the bigger picture at that time. I used Benadryl, uh, that like in combination of the two. Because I was having such anxiety. I thought the anxiety was the problem which I think we should talk about because all of a sudden I had a ton of anxiety, and I thought that’s the problem why I’m not sleeping.

Jessica: Not the other way around, like the sleeping was causing, the not sleeping and how my brain was dealing with that was causing like anxiety. So I thought the anxiety was causing the sleep issues. Now, maybe not dealing with some of the issues, the stressors that was going on, I definitely helped set the stage for it.

Jessica: But in general, I, I look back now and I see that it was That the whole sleeping issue that was causing the anxiety. So I went to like my provider and I was like, I’m really anxious. They prescribed me Xanax cause I, cause I asked for it thinking if I just take care of the anxiety, I’ll be able to sleep.

Jessica: Like I could take a Xanax. I had doubled the dose. Benadryl melatonin. I was still like up, and ready to fight. So, it wasn’t definitely the medications did not help. Uh, so I definitely took those meds in the beginning, uh, for a few months. Again, I was lucky in that I, I found your information.

Jessica: Sooner than maybe some other people I didn’t do much of the sleep hygiene stuff Because I I could see that I was already doing that stuff like for the most part I have good sleep hygiene. Like I You know go to bed at a normal time. I wake up around the same time. I Not doing like strenuous things right before bed.

Jessica: My room was dark and cold. So I was kind of like, eh, like that stuff doesn’t really apply to me.

Jessica: So, uh, I say that like I was having this anxiety like reaction when I would go to sleep a few hours before bed.

Jessica: And I thought I was just… Like anxiety and stress was the problem if I just dealt with that, then my sleep would get better on its own. And that’s not really the case. I had a few nights of bad sleep. From a combination of probably a few months worth of some significant, life stressors that were going on and that was how my body like responded.

Jessica: It was like, we’re done. Like you, you are too revved up. And because I was in the thick of it and it was like a slow boil. I just didn’t. I didn’t recognize it like at the time. And so yes, dealing with life stressors is an issue. What I came to find out through starting therapy, in this process and talking with you and work and working through all these steps was that what I was doing with like life stressors in general, as I was just like white knuckling my way through them.

Jessica: Like I would be like, I’m fine. I’m dealing with it. Like it’s fine. It’s not a big deal. And I just keep busting through every day, all day long, work and kids and family life and stressors. And that has like a, a, a cumulative effect. If you’re not actually dealing with it, I like suppressed and pushed down emotions and I just blasted through every day and not really taking the time to honor my emotions or my thoughts.

Jessica: And that I think is what led me to, having this bit of, of initial insomnia. And then, and then it became the insomnia that was really the driving force of all that anxiety. Because I had a lot of thoughts about… Now I can see I had a lot of thoughts about in insomnia, like I shouldn’t be having it.

Jessica: I should be able to sleep. I used to be able to just go upstairs whenever I thought I should go to sleep and I would just fall asleep. And I never had any issues, so I shouldn’t have them now. And so I had a lot of thoughts about that, that they shouldn’t be occurring. The should, should, should, right?

Jessica: And, and I didn’t realize it at the time, but that it was that insomnia and my thoughts about insomnia that were really driving all that, that secondary anxiety, which is what I was really like responding to.

Martin: When you talk about like that white knuckling through it all, I think that might be connected as you touched upon, to, trying to just suppress certain thoughts, certain feelings, certain emotions, right? And a symptom of when we’re trying to suppress them can be all those stories coming up in our mind. Like, why am I having to do this? Like, why is everyone else able to do this but I can’t? Why am I struggling so much?

Martin: And then… We can get caught up in that attempt to suppress those too, right? So now we’re trying to suppress our emotions, then we’re trying to suppress our feelings, then we’re trying to suppress the thoughts and the stories and all of this stuff. And boy, that’s, that just takes so much energy, right?

Martin: And we’re engaged in that struggle to fight or avoid everything that’s going on inside our minds. On top of, if we’ve got busy human lives like most of us do, and all the stress that comes with just being a human being and having to get through every day, and it just all piles on top and makes everything so much more difficult.

Jessica: Yeah, yeah, it becomes like the knot of the Christmas lights, yeah, where everything’s affecting everything. Yeah, I definitely, it definitely wasn’t. I probably didn’t have the best just general stress management techniques and accepting what is, uh, and, uh, like honoring that feeling or emotion, accepting it and then moving on. I’ve gotten a lot better with that. Thanks to insomnia. Actually, now I look at it like it was like this gift to me that I learned so many valuable lessons that make me like a better, friend and spouse and provider, to like my patients. Uh, because I learned a lot of valuable things from this experience.

Martin: We’re going to try and mine your brain a little bit to get some of that, that good stuff out to help other people as well that might be listening to this. So, first and foremost, when, when this anxiety turns up whether it’s the physical sensations or whether it’s difficult thoughts and feelings that are being generated by the brain.

Martin: From your experience, what did you find was. a useful or a more helpful way of responding to them compared to how I think most of us are hardwired to respond, which is to try and get rid of them. What did you find was a more, a more useful way to practice responding?

Jessica: So I used to tell my, so it depends, if it was like at night when I was laying in bed the thoughts of I should be able to sleep right now. And I’d say, Oh, I’m just, I’m not right tired right now. I just have to respect my body. Like my body saying it’s not tired right now. So I’m going to have to, do the steps that you told me if I don’t feel good laying in bed, I’m going to get up and get out.

Jessica: That was of course after, going, going through your your course. And then I, or if I’d start to feel myself getting really anxious, I literally would, for me, it works good to talk back to the thought which sounds a little like wonky, but I would just say like you’re safe right now you’re in bed.

Jessica: You’re safe, there’s nothing else going around you’re okay and if you don’t sleep a little bit, you don’t sleep, you don’t sleep, or if you sleep, you sleep that practicing acceptance, or I would just say I feel anxious right now, and I would just try to take deep breaths and know and keep telling myself that it was, I was, I was okay nothing serious was going to happen to me and this is of course through stages.

Jessica: But those are the things that that worked well for me. And then of course doing your steps I learned that I. Had to wait till I was sleepy to go upstairs to go to bed because of like my brain learned really quickly that the bed and the bedroom and trying to sleep was like the enemy.

Jessica: And it ramped up this big, like response to it. It took time for that to, to resolve and get better. And it wasn’t always linear. So I, I would have to like, watch like some quiet show I watched all of Downton Abbey. I watched uh, uh, to call a midwife, these really quiet, like non, uh, energizing shows animal shows at night gentle talking to kind of like calm you down and took hours.Hours to calm me down and, and have my body and my brain in a spot where it was ready to actually go to sleep.

Martin: Did you ever have the experience where you’re hanging out, watching TV, or doing whatever you’re doing, you start to feel really sleepy, like you’re drifting, maybe finding it really hard to stay awake, then you go off to bed, and then it’s like this switch flicks, and you’re suddenly wide awake again.

Jessica: Definitely, like on the couch I could get sleepy and tired, especially 1, 2 o’clock, and then I would get to bed, and I would feel like right back awake again. And uh, definitely that happened in the beginning. And then very quickly, things got better for a bit and then they stayed in this weird zone where I, I felt like I was like walking on eggshells a little bit about sleep and I can’t ever talk about it with anybody cause then I’m keeping it alive and I can’t read a bed and I can’t do this and I can’t do that.

Jessica: I can’t live my life. And it’s all modeled around like sleep and not sleeping and cause it wasn’t like Really bad. I wasn’t having all this anxiety, but it wasn’t normal either.

Martin: How did you respond to that kind of switch being flicked? So you’re staying out of bed, till, say, 1 o’clock, 2 o’clock in the morning, finding it really hard to stay awake. You go to bed and then, boom, you feel wide awake again. How did you respond to that?

Jessica: I got out of bed and I went back downstairs and I’d watch more TV. And in the beginning, that was a lot. And then as time progressed that got better. And then as that kind of initial, I don’t know, six months where it was really intense, I had this ability to look back a little bit and see and understand, that it was just my brain looking at the bed as it’s time to be awake now. Like now it’s just time to be awake. And I could see that in, in how my body was responding and then the information that you get when you do your course.

Martin: To use that kind of battleground analogy again. I think it’s a bit like, we’re behind the, we’re behind the enemy front lines when we’re sitting on the couch, so we’re no threat there, so we feel that strong sense of sleepiness, then we move to the bedroom and we’re back on the front lines and the brain, I don’t think it’s necessarily an issue where the brain is oh, this is a place we have to be awake, so we’re going to be awake, but it’s a place where it’s like, Oh, here comes the battle now, we got the, the, the enemy is lurking here, so we’ve got to fire up everything to protect, to protect you from, from all these warriors that are about to face us down, so then we get feel wide awake, thanks brain, because you’re protecting us from this, this threat that you perceive is no different to a physical threat, it thinks that this is a real threat, so it’s firing up So really what we want to do is just to maybe train the brain that It’s okay that we’re awake, we might wish we were asleep for sure.

Martin: But it’s not a physical threat. It’s not the same thing as being on the front lines in the middle of a war zone. It can be really uncomfortable. We would much rather be asleep. But like you said earlier, we’re safe, even though it feels we’re not safe. We are safe.

Jessica: Yeah, my, I would have this kind of thought and it wasn’t like a loud thought. It was like this quiet subdued thought of, am I going to be able to sleep? When I go upstairs to bed, am I gonna, and I think that’s enough for your brain to start thinking about, are you, am I I don’t know. Let’s find out. And, uh, that, that would happen to me for sure.

Jessica: Yeah. Or, or I lay in bed and all of a sudden my brain, I think I would have that kind of, am I going to be able to sleep? And then my brain would just kick on. And it like a song I heard during the day, like the words would start replaying or like a conversation or a thought process that maybe I didn’t finish during the day what kind of kick back on.

Jessica: And that’s partially, and that stuff was going on, of course, in that like really intense period too. That’s why I thought it was, the anxiety piece of it Oh, my brain just won’t shut off. Like it just keeps generating thoughts. And I realized that there was like this one day where I had heard a song and during the day that this, the song was playing in my head, doing normal things and I was like, well, wait a minute. This song going on during the day in my head and doesn’t seem to bother me at all. But at night in my bed, suddenly now it’s a problem. Hmm. Like this doesn’t make sense to me. Like I realized that like my brain was actually doing the same thing.

Jessica: Uh, it was always doing generating thoughts and songs and this and that. And, but I was labeling it as bad in the bed. Oh, this is the reason why I, this is why I can’t sleep. My brain feels like it’s going. And I could see that it actually wasn’t like a problem, but I thought it was at the time.

Jessica: My brain said I thought this is a problem, but, and then, then it didn’t bother me anymore. So once I had that insight, I could have another song in my head play again and it didn’t bother me at all. Like I was like, that’s fine.

Martin: Yeah. That’s, that’s really interesting. And something I was curious to hear your thoughts on was, when you said that you were able to start getting more comfortable with listening to what your brain might have been saying, whether it was helpful or not and maybe having a little conversation with your mind when it was generating thoughts, feelings not necessarily to dispute what it was saying, but maybe just like more of a curious mind with some curiosity, or maybe just being like, yeah, that might happen.

Martin: Or why are we thinking this? What does, what’s the information? What’s the insight behind this thought? What is, what’s the meaning behind this? Is there some important information here? Were you able to share? Practice doing that when you were in bed and that’s, and the kind of brain flicked into like hyperdrive, overdrive.

Martin: Were you able to get any practice in with that whilst you were in bed, or did you find that you would just get out of bed and maybe, maybe work on responding to those thoughts and those feelings in a different way out of bed? I’m just curious to hear what your, what your personal approach was, just because everyone is different.

Jessica: Sometimes I was able to do it in bed. Like I… If I felt like comfortable, like I, I wanted to be in bed, but my brain was like, generating a lot of like thoughts. I would try to be like, well, is that really the case? Am I fine? Like I, I, I would just kind of like try to be more rational because, when you’re all worked up about something, usually that’s not the time that you’re very rational, right?

Jessica: Like they, you’re all upset, someone says, calm down, you don’t calm down. So I tried to have a rational, uh, and I tried to be more rational in the moment and question like with curiosity more than to get caught up in that. But I, I was able to sometimes and other times. I was still too revved up and I wouldn’t be able to and I would have to, wait till I calmed back down again.

Jessica: And that was probably, where I was on in my journey, right? And that maybe depended on the day, like how my day went or. What kind of other, uh, internal strings I could gather, like at that, at that day versus some other days that aren’t that great, you know.

Martin: Some people are just like, if I’m going to be awake in bed and it’s really unpleasant, I’m just going to get out of bed and do something more pleasant instead. Until I feel those cues for sleepiness again. Other people are just kind of like…

Martin: I’m just going to allow this to happen whilst I’m in bed. I’m just going to practice responding to this stuff. Maybe just observing it rather than trying to fight or avoid it. And, I don’t think either approach really makes much difference. It’s really about what our intent, what our goal is.

Martin: And as long as our goal is… Just to practice experiencing that wakefulness with less of a struggle. It doesn’t really matter whether we’re engaged in that process in bed. Or out of bed. What we’re really looking to do is to avoid moving away from that battle, right? From going to war with the wakefulness and the thoughts and the feelings that might be showing up.

Martin: And if we can practice responding in a way that involves less struggle, it probably doesn’t matter too much whether we’re… In bed or whether we’re out of bed.

Jessica: Yeah, I, I do remember my brain would sometimes say Uh, like you don’t know how to sleep or you can’t sleep. And I’m like, that’s not true. Like I slept three nights ago. You know what I mean? So I, I I didn’t try to engage too much, but there’s times where uh, that worked really well for me and I could relax right down, it’s that fight. It’s that like struggle. That can really keep you going.

Martin: Absolutely. So, something that you mentioned earlier, which I’m keen to explore as well is, So, when we’re tangled up in this struggle and then we feel like we’ve got this new approach that’s proving to be helpful, it can feel a little bit like, we’re walking on eggshells, we’re we’re noticing improvements, things are getting better, but there’s always that kind of residual nervousness or fear that it’s all going to come tumbling down like a big house of cards or something and we’re going to be back tangled up again. And then that can lead us to. Still acting in ways that might not be, we’re acting in this way because this is what we want to do. This is the life you want to live, but we might be getting influenced by, I’m going to act in this way to protect sleep or to avoid thinking or feeling in a certain, feeling certain ways.

Martin: So for anyone listening to this, you might feel like. Yeah, I’ve been making progress, but, my confidence is still a little bit shaky and maybe I’m still doing things in an attempt to protect my sleep or to avoid certain thoughts, feelings that might trigger insomnia.

Martin: How did you get through that last obstacle? So it felt like you weren’t walking on eggshells all the time. What was that process like for you?

Jessica: Well, I called you. Part of it is, like reaching out to people that are going to help you. Right. So, that was you, at that time, which I’m eternally grateful for.

Jessica: I, I was, wasn’t fully free yet. Right. But it was a lot better. And there’d be times where probably I was a little bit more stressed or just like life stress. Right. And then it would kind of like start to go the other way. And then I quickly start getting out of bed again and going to bed later. And then it would get better and it would just like wibble wobble between those two spots.

Jessica: But I wasn’t ever like better, better where I felt free to not worry. Right. And. And I was having behaviors that were, in a way, reinforcing that insomnia is something bad and, and serious. Like not reading in bed. I always read in bed before. Or, watching a scary show or something like that.

Jessica: Uh, I did those things before and it was like, fine. And so I was always really like fearful of it. Like it was like this dark, creepy guy, just in the, like the periphery, uh, of my vision. And I felt like I just wasn’t. There was something not clicking yet with me and when we spoke you, you insinuated or talked about Oh wow, you have a lot of uh, thoughts about, sleep still, like you still have a lot of thoughts about it and you have a lot of judgments.

Jessica: And I was like, I like started crying. I was like, Oh my goodness. I had another insight that I was judging my sleep if I was sleeping that night, how well I slept that night uh, and the judgments about it was packed with a form of nonacceptance. I had no idea like that was the case. I had no idea that as I was judging my sleep every night I was not practicing just accepting what is right and what, what’s going on.

Jessica: And that’s like a point of resistance. It’s a bit of the habit of white knuckling my way through things, it’s judging it and critiquing it. And when you do that, you’re not just accepting that you’re tired right now or you’re not and, and, that I realized. Was keeping it alive a little bit like it was a little bit of the fire or the the Oxygen for the fire and it was keeping it alive And since I’ve had that Realization things have gotten a lot better and and progressively better where I, I really don’t struggle with it anymore.

Jessica: There’s no struggle. I still have nights where I don’t sleep as great. Or I have a hard time falling asleep. Or maybe for some reason, like my kid wakes me up at 3. 30 and then I have a hard time falling back asleep. And okay, like it’s not a thing anymore to me. And that’s like a slow, a slow washing away.

Jessica: But I realized because I’m not judging it anymore. I’m not judging if it’s good or bad to sleep. I’m not judging how I did with sleep, right? Like I’m just accepting what is I didn’t sleep so good. Well, I was a little bit worried about something else or a little stress like, okay. Or I, there’s just this nonchalantness about it that I used to probably have on my episodic, sleepless nights or whatever. That I now have again. And I don’t have judgments about it. I don’t judge or critique it in any way. I just accept it for what it is. I’m constantly trying to do that with life because I’m always like, I’m a trier, I’m a doer, like I’m always like working really hard at something and with sleep, it does not work like that.

Jessica: If the more attention and focus and walking on eggshells around it and, and doing different activities. You’re just reinforcing that it’s like this big beast, and, and, and you’re not just saying, Oh, it’s part of life. It’s okay. It’s all good.

Martin: There’s so much great stuff there. I think when people sometimes hear the word acceptance, some people struggle with that.

Martin: Accepting. Like, how do I accept this? This is awful. This is like the worst I’ve ever felt in my life. How do I accept insomnia? How do I accept anxiety? How do I accept the fatigue that comes with it? How do I accept all the distracting thoughts and feelings? Why should I accept it? I don’t want to accept it.

Martin: How do we get our heads around this? Like, how is acceptance helpful? And if someone is listening to this and they’re thinking, I don’t want to accept it. How would you explain… The possibilities that acceptance might be a helpful approach.

Jessica: I would say I was there too. And when I was really like revved up about everything, I definitely was like, I don’t accept this. I, but again, that was part of my problem is I didn’t accept what was. And so I was creating a battle in that. I think I had an internal shift like an internal realization. And it was like a light bulb went off and I don’t think you can force that. Of course, you can’t force that on yourself, like you can’t make yourself realize this or see this it has to happen naturally, I think and I think it’s being open, open to the idea that what if this kind of concept of.

Jessica: What if that other person is right? What if, like what if Jessica’s right? What if I’m judging it or not accepting it? And then I’m doing things because I don’t accept it and that’s what’s keeping it alive. It’s this idea that what if I’m thinking about things incorrectly and someone else that’s been through it may have a different approach that works.

Jessica: I think that is like that kind of open curiosity is what can move you through the steps. For me, but I would say I was there like I had that big internal battle that I didn’t accept insomnia and I didn’t want to have it. And. I was probably ashamed, even I didn’t really talk about it with many people because I was like so like ashamed by it, like this big secret or something.

Jessica: But in that we’re, we’re giving life to it in a way, uh, yeah. I don’t know that you can force that. Again, you can’t force. You’re trying to like force things. There’s like this tension and pressure I’ve never done well in anything By really forcing that doesn’t mean I don’t work hard like for school or, or, or whatever.

Jessica: There’s a lot of things that I work hard for. I, I, I do the reading and I do the studying more, other kinds of examples like that, but I don’t force it. I do the steps, I do the work but if I try to force, force, force, force, force, that’s when things don’t happen. They don’t work well. It’s better when I like do what I, what I can do, do what you can control and let the rest go.

Jessica: That is where in my life in general, I’ve made any headways in growth, like as a human being. And, and in insomnia, it’s been the same way, from, it’s, it’s, my life has really followed that. And any time I steer from that is usually when I get a bit jumbled.

Martin: I think sometimes it comes down to controllability.

Martin: So there’s some things that we can control. But even when there are things we can control. We can’t necessarily control the outcome. So an example would be I’ve got an exam I have to study for so I can control studying. I can read the books, do the work, do the studying. But I can’t guarantee the outcome, right?

Martin: I can’t guarantee I’m going to pass that exam. I can’t guarantee I’m going to get a certain score on that exam. I can only control the act of studying for that exam. And I think that sometimes that’s where we can get tripped up, right? Is we can have this outcome or this goal that we want to reach.

Martin: And that’s usually helpful to have goals to work toward. But the actual goal itself, we usually can’t make happen. We can work toward it. And that’s where we can get a little bit distracted. And that’s where I think sometimes the word acceptance can be useful. Because it’s about really just accepting that there are, there is stuff that we can’t control.

Martin: There’s stuff we can control. And there’s stuff we can’t control, and it’s when we get tangled up into trying to control what we can’t control, that maybe we’re more likely to get caught up in that struggle.

Jessica: Definitely. Definitely. Definitely. Yeah, you can’t control a lot, unfortunately. Uh, and, uh, I definitely think I went…and probably still do a lot, go through life with this kind of, I’m going to control for everything. And to have it be the exact way I want it to be because that’s the way it should be. Right. And I was like that about sleep. I’m going to try to control it, because that’s how, how it should be.

Jessica: I should be able to sleep and I should be able to sleep when I want to sleep and I shouldn’t have this problem. And letting that go a little bit because I can’t control it. I cannot control if I’m going to fall asleep. Like I was a little nervous for the interview, today. So I didn’t, I didn’t sleep as well last night, but I feel fine, like I, and it took me a little bit longer to fall asleep and, and then I, my son woke me up and it took me like a lot longer that to fall back asleep and I’m like right back.

Jessica: But I was a little worried. I was like a little nervous. But it’s okay because I didn’t judge it. I didn’t try to control it. I was like, okay, like this is what it is. I’m just not gonna get the best night’s sleep that I want to, but in the end it doesn’t really matter. But it took me a long time to get there.

Martin: It’s so funny hearing you say about your night last night because I I’ve done like 50 of these episodes, and I still get nervous the night before and the day of when my mind’s generating all these thoughts and feelings about it. So I’m just lying there in bed thinking about it, and then my son wakes up.

Martin: He’s, uh, two years old. He’s a little bit under the weather right now. So he comes into the bed with us, and he sleeps sideways. He doesn’t sleep like a regular person. And so we’re in our bed. And I got my wife and my son is right across the bed and basically he’s, his legs are resting across my face.

Martin: And that’s the only way he will sleep when he’s, when he’s in our bed, cause he doesn’t feel good. And so I’m lying there and then I’m thinking, okay, so I’ve got, we’ve got this podcast we’ve got to do. We’ve got these emails from clients. We’ve got some other phone calls booked. Okay. We’ve got all this coming up tomorrow and then we’ve got to plan the weekend.

Martin: And then all that time I’ve got this foot. In my eyeballs but you know. It is, like you said, it’s about how we respond to it, right? Because I could have responded by just getting really mad, really self judgmental maybe cancelled everything I had planned for today, or I could have accepted that, yeah, this guy, I wish that I could maybe shut the brain off, but I know from experience I can’t.

Martin: It’s my brain doing its job looking out for me. I know from experience that even if I move my son, He’s going to go sideways again. I’m not going to be able to get him to fall asleep somewhere else tonight. So I’m probably going to spend quite, quite a good chunk of time awake. But it’s about acknowledging that, being kind to yourself when things feel difficult accepting that we can’t really control that stuff, and then committing to what we can control which, in this example, for you, it was, thank goodness, and I’m really grateful for it, for you giving up your time and still coming on today And, I had a difficult night too.

Martin: Here I am still. Just still doing those things because they matter to us. Not because we necessarily feel obligated to do them, but we’re just doing things that are important, things that matter. Those are the things that we can control even after difficult nights or even when there’s difficult stuff showing up for us that we can’t directly control and get rid of.

Jessica: Yeah, I guess before this course, I never realized how much our actions affect. Like our thoughts, I thought it was just thoughts to action. I didn’t Understand that it could go the other way too. So I definitely again one of the beautiful things that I learned from all of this Was that our our our actions can really?

Jessica: Influence our thoughts and that’s that’s really important it’s an important, important piece of this for sure. Yeah, and I definitely still have nights like that too. Just like last night.

Martin: I think most of us can recognize how our thoughts can influence our actions. I just feel like too tired, I can’t do this, then we don’t do something.

Martin: On the flip side, how did you find in your experience that your actions could also influence your thoughts or your relationship with your thoughts?

Jessica: Ooh, that’s a good one. So I think in general. It was always doing what I was going to do, like going to work every day in the very beginning when it was really, really intense.

Jessica: I like called out of work one day which is like super unlike me. And, uh, I, I was like, really, cause I was so anxious, like all day long, this anxiety all day long kind of thing. And, uh, so I think going and doing what your plan is and not. Skipping out. I, even when things were kind of like, okay, but not great.

Jessica: Because it wasn’t a hundred percent linear plan. There was like group vacations and trips and stuff that we had planned. And I was a little like, Oh, I don’t know if I’m going to go, I’m not going to sleep. What am I going to do? And like that whole thing. But I did it. I was like, you know what?

Jessica: I’m going to do it. I’m going to go. And if I don’t sleep, Oh, well. I’m going to go and I’m going to have fun. Even when I was in the throes of it, I still and it was really bad. I still went to have this big family trip and I went and suffered all night long. But I still did my thing during the day.

Jessica: So going and doing what you’re planning on doing is like a pinhole in a tire. You know what I mean? It’s, it doesn’t feel like a lot, but over the course of time. You’re leaking air out of that tire, if the tires insomnia, you it’s it’s leaking that air It’s leaking that life out of it.

Jessica: So I do think that’s really important stopping all the medications Was really important because to be honest, they they weren’t even really helping me. And, and I, and I say really meaning that they weren’t helping me at all. Like I could take a lot and I’d be like, still really wired. So slowly and rather quickly, I think weaning off of those so maybe it wasn’t slowly, it was rather quickly weaning off those.

Jessica: But I didn’t just stop them cold turkey, I guess is my point. Because taking the medicine is communicating to your brain that the insomnia is a really bad thing. And so that was helpful for me talking about it a little bit because when I, I’m a bit of a open book. Sometimes, and, and, and if I’m keeping things a secret from other people it’s kind of like keeping it like alive in a way.

Jessica: I’m not like kind of like freeing myself. So not like obsessively talking about it, but, but saying I had a hard night or something or when I was talking with a friend and just being open and honest about it For me, that was an action. That represented, uh, that it wasn’t a big deal, nothing to be ashamed of, right?

Jessica: Nothing to hide. I can understand there’s that whole process where if you keep talking and talking and talking about it all the time, you’re keeping it alive. But it was the other way for me, at least to not be like shameful about it.

Martin: The whole topic of medication is itself really interesting when it comes to sleep because some people say, feel that it is really helpful, other people find that it’s not helpful at all, other people find it’s helpful but they don’t want to be taking it other people find it helpful and they’re fine taking it, which is, which is fine, right?

Martin: We’re the experts on ourselves at the end of the day so if we feel like this is something we want to move away from, I think what you’ve, you’ve showing us is that it is possible first and foremost. But anytime we talk about medication, always good to talk to your doctor first before making any of those changes.

Martin: Now you’re able to reflect back on this whole journey, this whole process. If we had to put like an approximate timeline on it, like, how long roughly would you say that it took for you to get to a point where sleep wasn’t something that you felt was like this ongoing struggle, to use your word, you felt free from it, more free. You were able to act independently of sleep. How long did it take you to get to that point, would you say?

Jessica: There was an intense, probably like six months and then another six months where it was kind of like, getting a little bit better. I would say, like eight months. Cause I remember you sending me a thing like, Oh, it’s a year. And I was like, Oh wow. I don’t even feel like it’s an issue anymore.

Martin: I like to ask this question in more recent episodes, just because when we talk, talk these things through, we can, they sound a lot more simple when we’re just using words to just describe the process, but in reality, the actual.

Martin: The physical process itself usually takes time. There’s usually ups and downs. So I think when people put that into words, it was closer to months or maybe even a year rather than days or weeks that can give us a more realistic idea that this isn’t easy. It is often difficult.

Martin: It does take a lot of ongoing practice. And it’s not a quick fix and progress is very rarely linear, but we can get to that point where we free ourselves from that struggle. But it’s very rarely a quick or an easy journey.

Jessica: Yeah, that’s true. Uh, but you know, that’s life. Unfortunately, it’s rarely ever quick or easy.

Martin: I’m really grateful for the time you’ve taken out of your day to come onto the episode, Jessica. I’ve just got one last question for you which I’d really love to hear your insights on. And it’s this, if someone with chronic insomnia is listening and they feel as though they’ve tried everything, that they’re beyond help, beyond hope maybe that they’ll never be able to stop struggling with insomnia, what would you say to them?

Jessica: I would say to do your course. I, I would say, do the course. Or an equivalent course and say to yourself, what if it could get better if I tried a different approach, what, what, what would happen if I tried this approach? Can I try this approach, because that’s really what worked for me.

Jessica: And I think it could work for them too.

Martin: Thank you again, Jessica, for taking the time out to come on and share your experience.

Jessica: You’re welcome. Thank you for having me.

Martin: Thanks for listening to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. If you’re ready to move away from struggling with insomnia and toward living the life you want to live, I would love to help. You can get started right now by enrolling in my online course or you can book my phone coaching package. My online course runs for six weeks. It will help you make changes that can create better conditions for sleep, it will help you identify and get rid of any behaviors that might be making sleep more difficult, and it will help you respond to insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it in a more workable way. You can work through the course in two ways. You can choose the self-coaching option and work through it by yourself with the support of an online forum that is available only to clients.

Martin: Or, you can choose to add one-on-one email coaching and work through the course with me by your side. With the one-on-one coaching option, you get unlimited email access to me for eight weeks, starting from the day you enroll. Any time you have a question or concern, any time you are unsure about anything, any time you want to focus on the challenges you face or any difficulties that show up, you can email me and I will be there to coach and support you. You can get the course and start right now at insomniacoach.com.

Martin: With the phone coaching package, we start with a one-hour call (voice only or video — your choice) and come up with an initial two-week plan that will help you create better conditions for sleep and practice moving away from struggling with insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it. You get unlimited email access to me for two weeks after the call and a half-hour follow-up call at the end of the two weeks. You can book the phone coaching package at insomniacoach.com/phone.

Martin: I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Insomnia Coach Podcast. I’m Martin Reed, and as always, I’d like to leave you with this important reminder — you can sleep.

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Listen to the podcast episode (audio only)Eric’s insomnia journey began after he woke in the middle of the night and experienced a huge panic attack. From then on, sleep became very difficult.

As he tried to fix things, Eric stopped watching TV in bed with his wife — something they both enjoyed. He tried napping, even though he never used to nap in the past. He tried sleeping on the couch. He tried sleeping in a chair. He tried blue-light-blocking glasses. He stopped traveling. He isolated himself as he became convinced that his struggles were reflected in his appearance. He would beat himself up every time he had a difficult night.

Eric’s transformation began when he shifted his focus away from trying to control his sleep, his thoughts, and his feelings and redirected his efforts toward his actions.

He started to do more of the things that mattered — even after difficult nights and even in the presence of difficult thoughts and feelings. He started to accept the presence of anxiety as a necessary ingredient for a rich and meaningful life. Eric found that the more he did this, the less power and influence sleep and anxiety seemed to have over his life.

Eric was never into meditating but he started to practice meditation — not in an attempt to make sleep happen or to control his thoughts and feelings — but to practice and develop skill in making space for his thoughts rather than trying to fight or avoid them. He also gave himself permission to do something else during the night when he was awake, rather than tossing and turning.

Today, sleep doesn’t consume Eric’s attention. His focus now is on controlling his actions and doing things that matter rather than trying to control his sleep and what he might be thinking or feeling. As a result, insomnia no longer holds Eric back. By practicing a new approach, Eric got his life back from insomnia.

Click here for a full transcript of this episode.

TranscriptMartin Reed:
Welcome to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. My name is Martin Reed. I believe that by changing how we respond to insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it, we can move away from struggling with insomnia and toward living the life we want to live.

Martin Reed:
The content of this podcast is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. The statements and opinions expressed by guests are their own and are not necessarily endorsed by Insomnia Coach LLC. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied.

Martin Reed:
Okay, Eric, thank you for taking the time out of your day to come on to the podcast.

Eric Flanders:
Absolutely. Glad to be here with you.

Martin Reed:
Let’s start right at the beginning. If you could just tell us a little bit about when your issues with sleep first began and what you think may have caused those initial issues with sleep.

Eric Flanders:
Yeah, that’s a great question about what caused them because I think if I would have known that it would have helped out a lot, but I really struggled with that answer as to why. I know a couple of years ago. I had a couple of instances over the course of a year where I just was struggling.

Eric Flanders:
Like I would go two or three days and just not sleeping much at all. And it didn’t really bother me too much at the time. But I’ve had a little bit of anxiety over the course of my life. And the more it started happening, the worse I started to respond to it. And then I had family over to my house during the holidays and I had a rough night of sleep.

Eric Flanders:
I woke up in the middle of the night and I just was having like this huge panic attack. My heart was racing. I remember waking my wife and up saying, I think I need to go to the hospital. Like, I’m freaking out here. Everything is, it was really bad. And from that night on it Sleep became very difficult.

Eric Flanders:
And I think probably it added pressure to me because I had family staying at my house. And now I’m like, Oh my gosh, I’m not sleeping. My days were starting to get really bad. And that just led into a night after night. I had a looming doctor’s appointment as well coming up and I hadn’t been to the doctors in 20 years and my wife was forcing me to go just to get my blood drawn and I’m terrified of needles so that on top of everything else, it was just sleepless, sleepless nights.

Eric Flanders:
And that’s where it really started getting hard for me.

Martin Reed:
Were panic attacks something you’d dealt with in the past, or was this just kind of it just appeared in the middle of the night, out of the blue?

Eric Flanders:
Yeah, I mean, this was, I was 41 when this started happening, but when I was younger, around 17, I had lost my mom when I was younger, in my teenage years, and she battled heart disease her whole life.

Eric Flanders:
So I had some panic attacks at that point in time, thinking that I was Going to inherit those types of heart issues and anxiety can create some of those symptoms like you’re having some type of Health issues and so I did that for about I had it issues for like six months at that point in time And this was again when I was 17 and then but you know, but the doctor told me I was fine So that all went away Never had any issues, no panic attacks, no sleep issues, nothing like that leading up to this point in time.

Martin Reed:
Some people can really pinpoint the initial trigger for their sleep disruption, which then morphed into this longer term struggle or issue with sleep disruption and for other people, which it sounds like maybe is more aligned with what you’re describing. It doesn’t really seem to be this obvious trigger.

Martin Reed:
And so I think it’s really good to have. Both sides on both sides of that experience coming onto the podcast, because if we hear that people always can trace things back and there’s a clear and obvious trigger, then we might think, well, there’s something unique and unusual or vice versa. But really, the trigger itself, sometimes it can be obvious, sometimes not.

Martin Reed:
But largely it’s not that relevant if we find that the sleep disruption is sticking around for. More than just a few nights, it’s usually then becomes… Oh boy, it is. How we respond. Yeah. So on that note, when we’re talking about how we’re responding to it, how did you respond to that sleep disruption when it first started to show up?

Eric Flanders:
Yeah. I mean, at first it was just the usual stuff. I mean, my wife and I always watch TV in bed. It was always a thing of ours. I’m like, okay. Let me just stop doing that. Right. And again, this was one of my family was there. I’m not a napper at all. And I never have been. And I found myself, Oh, I’m just going to lay down in the afternoon and, try to get some rest so I could at least be, okay, while my family was there.

Eric Flanders:
But when I would do that, I would just. Obviously not sleep in there while I was trying to nap and that would just make me more frustrated. I didn’t do a bunch more because I had that doctor’s appointment coming up that I just talked to you about and so I had tried those things but now I’m going on like two weeks and I’m sleeping maybe a couple hours a night, if that.

Eric Flanders:
And I’m moving around. So now I’m trying to sleep on the couch and trying to sleep in the chair. I’m not even sleeping in the bed anymore. And now at this point, my family’s left and gone back to their home. And I’m still, now I’m really panicked. And so by the time I had my doctor’s appointment, I mentioned to him that, obviously I’m having these sleep issues.

Eric Flanders:
And so he said, well, I’m going to get you sleep and don’t worry about it. I’ll get you sleeping. And that’s when I ended up. With another challenge, which was going down a path of medication and trying to solve the sleep that way.

Martin Reed:
Back when all this was going on, the kind of, the origin of your experience were there any characteristics of a typical night?

Martin Reed:
What was an average night like when things were really difficult back then?

Eric Flanders:
Man, so I have I have a little issue with control, which I’ve obviously gotten better at, because you have to learn that you can’t control some things, and I’ve learned that sleep is one of those, but it took me a long time to figure that out, and so I would go to bed early, like, I’m going to bed at like eight o’clock at night, and that is unusual for me, and I would typically toss and turn in there.

Eric Flanders:
I mean, for a very long time, maybe three or four hours, and then I would move out to the front room and lay on the recliner and try to sleep out there and do the same thing. And, I would have these moments where, you’re sleeping, but you can, you’re not really sleeping. You’re like in between.

Eric Flanders:
That’s what most of my sleep was. And that was a typical night, every night. And it didn’t get much better for a very long time.

Martin Reed:
How about the days? What were the days like? Were you finding that it was also influencing the quality of your days or maybe what you did each day?

Eric Flanders:
Oh yeah. I’m a big workout guy.

Eric Flanders:
I like going to the gym. I stopped doing that. I had a very responsible job. I had a couple hundred employees at the time and I still went to work, but I found myself shutting the door a lot to my office and I’m a guy that’s always usually out and, with my teams and I was not doing that a lot.

Eric Flanders:
I was isolating myself a bit. And just trying to like, I didn’t want folks to see what was happening with me because I felt like everybody could see it on my face. Like, oh he looks, because I felt horrible, you just feel horrible. And so I would always think that, man, they’re going to see right through me.

Eric Flanders:
So it absolutely affected my days. I stopped traveling, isolated myself with my family at my house and I became terrified to go anywhere.

Martin Reed:
I think it’s really understandable why we end up doing all of these things, and you touched upon many of the reasons, right? We either, we don’t feel as capable or we feel like we need to get more rest in, so we do less of the stuff that we would normally do.

Martin Reed:
Yeah. Or we worry about what other people might think about us or what they might see in us.

Eric Flanders:
Yeah.

Martin Reed:
I’m curious to know did you ever ask anyone if it was noticeable? Like, could they tell that you’d had a difficult night? I

Martin Reed:
always asked my wife, right, if she could… How do I look? I feel like I, I look horrible. I know I look horrible. It’s just like, you don’t look any different at all. And what I found myself doing a lot is taking selfies. Like I can’t, I’m never like I was a selfie guy, but I would always take pictures of myself just to see what do I look like right now?

Martin Reed:
What do I look like? What do I look like? And I still have those photos on my phone. At the time when I saw those photos, I was like, Oh my gosh, I look like a wreck. But when I look at them today, I look completely fine. And so it was really just in my mind, I’d convinced myself that I must look the way I’m feeling.

Martin Reed:
And so I made a lot of decisions based off of that.

Martin Reed:
It’s really interesting that you said that and you’ve got that, that record of it that you can now look back and actually see. What you saw, but it’s different to what you saw, if that makes sense, like your interpretation of what you were seeing was different.

Martin Reed:
And it’s a concern that a lot of people have discussed with me. I’m really concerned about like the circles under my eyes or my eyes look really tired, I don’t want to look this way. What will other people think about me? And it’s all totally understandable. And I think one thing that can help is just as you described, maybe it’s not quite as noticeable.

Martin Reed:
As you suspect maybe what you’re seeing might be different to what other people are seeing. Yeah. But also, can we control that? Can we control what we look like? I mean, maybe to a certain extent, you might want to put some lipstick on or something like that. Who knows? Lots of eyeshadow.

Eric Flanders:
But you look the way you look!

Martin Reed:
Exactly. It’s one of those things we can’t really change. It’s the only thing we can really control are our actions. So maybe we can be kind to ourselves if we’re feeling that we’re not looking the greatest or not feeling the greatest, but then maybe do some other stuff that matters to us, even though we’ve got those big dark circles under our eyes.

Martin Reed:
And even though we might be thinking that other people might be judging us or making up stories about our appearance, we can’t control any of that stuff, right? We can only control what we do and I think maybe we’ll explore that a little bit more as we continue to talk, but I just found it really interesting that you actually have that photographic evidence that you can now look back on and be like, wow, I can’t really see any differences now, but back then it was real, right?

Martin Reed:
You saw differences. And that was like one of the concerns.

Eric Flanders:
Yeah, it’s amazing what it’s amazing how your thoughts can really work against you in a way, I mean, your, the mind is so powerful and your thoughts really can be your worst enemy or they can be your best asset. Right. And it’s just a matter of how you engage with your thoughts is what I’ve really learned over the last couple of years.

Eric Flanders:
And yeah, at that point in time, my thoughts were telling me that I, Must have looked horrible, right? And so that’s what I was believing.

Martin Reed:
On the role of thoughts. I think that’s a kind of good segue into talking a little bit more about the role they can have. As many people listening to this or struggling with insomnia are going to be able to identify that if only I could get rid of the anxiety or get rid of the worry or not feel so frustrated with all of this struggle maybe I’ll be able to sleep better. So then we focus on trying to get rid of all these thoughts and these feelings or challenging them or pushing them away when they show up.

Martin Reed:
Can you tell us a little bit more about your own experience with all those thoughts and feelings? And, did you find that they were? Making things more difficult. How did you initially try and fix that and reduce the influence of those thoughts and feelings?

Eric Flanders:
Yeah, I mean, they were really taking over.

Eric Flanders:
I have listened to many of your podcasts when I was going through this and they really did help me out a lot. And I heard a lot of people talk about feelings and thoughts and they were absolutely in my worst way I was for a period of there were I was really beating myself up and just thinking about it constantly, constantly thinking about it looking up stuff, which would just make it worse, and now it’s all I’m thinking about every day.

Eric Flanders:
Put me in a panic attack at night, I remember I, we had some email exchanges several times and, I was telling you, how do I get this anxiety to go away? It just won’t, it’s the same thing, eight, nine o’clock at night, bedtimes coming around and like, all of a sudden you think you’re going to go have to like present in front of 1000 people.

Eric Flanders:
And of course, you’re not going to sleep that way. And then you try to control it even more. And I tried to control that by just going to bed. That’s what I would do to deal with it. I’d be like, okay, I’m just gonna go fight this right now. And I don’t care if I don’t sleep, I’m just gonna go lay down.

Eric Flanders:
That’s what I did and that’s why I had a really hard time with some of the tactics was because I was just wanting to be in control. And so, In order to deal with these thoughts, I would just go lay in bed, and I’d lay there and toss and turn, have a miserable night, and beat myself up all night about it, but at least I was in control, and trying to deal with it that way, and they were very consuming though, it took, I mean literally I spent all day.

Eric Flanders:
For, I don’t know, a year, probably, thinking about it.

Martin Reed:
You mentioned that when you find your mind was just going into overdrive, like about sleep and anything else that it wanted to go off and think about, you were just right, I’m just going to go to bed now. So you just go off to bed.

Martin Reed:
I’m guessing that then you’d be in bed. And the kind of thoughts would still be churning around in your mind. So now you’re in bed, so you can’t get into bed again, right? How would you respond then to when all these thoughts started to reappear once you were in bed?

Eric Flanders:
I would wrestle with them all for a very long time.

Eric Flanders:
And instead of getting out of bed and dealing with just being awake, I would just stay in bed and would drive me crazy because I’d get in bed and like, if I’m not sleeping in two minutes, I’m already thinking, well, there we go. I’m not going to sleep tonight. And then that just spiraled into stuff.

Eric Flanders:
And by that time, my wife’s already asleep because of course she sleeps like a baby, just like everyone who has insomnia. Usually the person next to him sleeps like a baby. And yeah, I would just stay in bed. And that was a very hard piece for me to start to deal with was removing myself.

Eric Flanders:
And what happened is I started to hate my bed. I hated it. I hated looking at it. I would go in the room and I’d find myself, like, giving it the side eye, like it was somebody I just did not like. And it just did not find it… appealing at all. So it was a whole like having to relearn that whole thing for me.

Martin Reed:
How about we talk about that now, like that, that relearning process or exploring a different approach. So you mentioned that a change in your approach when things started to get difficult was you’d go to bed earlier. You found yourself wrestling with your thoughts. You implied that You were staying in bed, whereas maybe an alternative option that was available could be getting out of bed.

Martin Reed:
Curious to hear, the change in approach that you took and how, what that experience was like.

Eric Flanders:
For me cause it, it sounds like from everybody that I’ve watched on these podcasts and just the different groups I’ve looked at Everyone’s got a different thing that really hit home for them.

Eric Flanders:
And for me, it was the piece where you talked about, like, don’t change what your plans were the next day, or are the next day, right? So, go live your life to the fullest. And when I did those things, and I started to do those things, what happened is I… I started like being able to convince to myself that I was actually, my thoughts weren’t right.

Eric Flanders:
That, they were telling me that, Oh my gosh, I’m going to have a horrible day tomorrow because I’m not going to sleep. But then I found myself not having horrible days all the time and being able to enjoy myself. And so it was that piece. And then honestly, it was time. It was being able to have a great couple of nights of sleep, maybe not have a great night that third night, maybe not that fourth night either, but still living my life to the fullest, but then that fifth night I would have a great night of sleep again.

Eric Flanders:
And then just repeating that pattern over time, slowly it started convincing myself, like, sleep is not the end all be all. I mean, it’s important, but it’s really not the end all be all. You can absolutely live a great life and not have to be so concerned about your sleep. And over time, and challenging my thought processes, and challenging thoughts to just be what they are, and that’s, they’re simply a thought, right, they started to lose their power.

Martin Reed:
I’m curious to hear when you had this suggestion of continuing to do things that matter, or living your life as though. The insomnia wasn’t there, or living your life even though the insomnia is there. What that was like, because, the reason I ask that is because some of us, when we’re really struggling, we can just be 100 percent convinced that we just can’t, we just can’t do either everything we had planned, or some of the things we had planned.

Martin Reed:
Or certain activities and just the idea of doing some stuff, doing, following through with our plans or doing anything related to our plans or even just getting out of the house can just feel like it’s going to be impossible because we might have had two, three, four, five, six or more nights in a row.

Martin Reed:
Very little sleep. What was your experience like with that? Was this something that was a difficult change for you to make, or was it difficult to push yourself to, to stay active and do things that you had planned?

Eric Flanders:
It was one of the hardest things. I mean, I say it as it’s easy, but let me just add that challenging those things up front at first was very hard for me.

Eric Flanders:
I remember. Towards the end of, and I get to say the end, but towards the end of my insomnia days, where I was still really in the midst of it. I was living in Florida at the time, and my daughter and family is in California. My daughter is getting married. And I have not gone anywhere. in two years now, right?

Eric Flanders:
Because I’ve been dealing with this insomnia and I’ve really isolated myself and I know I have to fly to, I have to fly to California. I have to be out there for five days. I’ve got to walk my daughter down the aisle. All of these things. And I think I worried and freaked out about this and this trip for like six months from the day.

Eric Flanders:
She told me I was like, oh my gosh It’s coming. It’s coming. It’s coming and I remember getting to California and with my family and that first night we got here I didn’t sleep one minute not one minute and I was you know, we’re in a strange bed, And I’m up all night. I’m telling my wife. Oh my gosh, like this is gonna be a wreck And how am I going to do this?

Eric Flanders:
And the next day I just went throughout the day. My family was all with me in the in, we’re all together and challenged my, my, I forced myself to just be normal as much as possible. And you know what? That next night I slept and that was a big milestone for me. Cause I’m like, okay, wait a second.

Eric Flanders:
I thought I was never going to be able to sleep anywhere again. Right. And granted the first night was not very good, but the second night I slept really well. And then I’m like, I think I’ve got some going here. And then the next few nights I I had some decent sleep, but not complete sleep, but I was able to completely.

Eric Flanders:
Go to the wedding and have a great time. Walk my daughter down the aisle. So everything I told myself for that six months was not true. And had I not gone, because believe me, there were times where I said, I’m just not going to go. I would have just reinforced everything that was not true. And I would have, it probably would not have gotten better for me, but because I decided to go.

Eric Flanders:
Face that thought and challenge it. That’s what really helped me out. And that was a big breaking point for me. That was a big breakthrough. And then two months later, I sold my house in florida and I moved to California. Still having some sleep issues, but I mean, selling your house, moving across country, all of that goes in with all that stresses and all that.

Eric Flanders:
Still, I started challenging everything and the more I challenged it, the more I felt like I was Letting go.

Martin Reed:
There’s so much powerful stuff there. I think maybe the key insight there is that we can still commit to actions. Regardless of what our brain might be telling us, what the thoughts that are showing up might be.

Martin Reed:
So, even though you had all those thoughts, all those doubts, all those worries, maybe all those anxieties, or lack of confidence, I can’t do this, I shouldn’t do this. You should… Went ahead and did it, even though your mind was just churning out all those different and very difficult thoughts, feelings, stories, emotions.

Martin Reed:
And I think when we have that experience of being able to recognize that we can still control our actions, regardless of what our mind might be telling us. That can be really powerful to experience, that we have thoughts and we have actions and our thoughts don’t necessarily have to control our actions.

Martin Reed:
That’s something that we can still control no matter what our mind might be churning out.

Eric Flanders:
Yeah, and you know what else I was doing is… Is I, would have a night or two of bad sleep, or no sleep, and that would start the whole thought, which you know is wrong, is I’m not, I’m never gonna sleep again.

Eric Flanders:
I don’t know how many times I’ve told myself that, over and over again. Even if I would have a couple of good nights of sleep, the second I would have a bad night of sleep, I’m like, Not gonna sleep again. And for some reason that was a very believable thought even though I had been sleeping you know eventually you fall asleep and When you really start believing it and I again, I think it has to do with time and I say time Meaning that you’re not trying to do anything to fix sleep Like you’re challenging it 100 percent on your own without anything there to help you.

Eric Flanders:
Because once you add a crutch, then you start thinking the crutch is what caused it. You have, for me, it was about, I’m not going to do anything. I’m just going to go at it and then I started learning over time, and that’s what brought the anxiety down is, you start to your mind starts to learn that, hey, this isn’t right.

Eric Flanders:
That’s not that thought is not correct. And so now, I mean, if I have a bad night of sleep now, which I still do it’s totally fine. That’s totally fine. Tomorrow I’m going to the gym. I’m working out like crazy. And I’m gonna, I know I’m going to sleep eventually. And I do.

Martin Reed:
That’s another one of those places where there can be that disconnect, right?

Martin Reed:
So I just, well, we just both talked about that disconnect between our thoughts and our actions. Another one can be there’s often a disconnect between our thoughts and our experience. So our thoughts might be telling us something like. We’re never going to sleep again, ever, which is really scary. But our experience tells us that’s never happened.

Martin Reed:
We might have a thought that says, if I go into work after another night of no sleep, I’m going to get fired. I’m going to lose my house. I’m going to be homeless on the streets. Our experience tells us, well, that’s not happened. I mean, that’s not to say it won’t necessarily happen. Nobody can predict the future with 100 percent accuracy.

Martin Reed:
But often, this kind of stories our brain generates whilst it’s working really hard to look out for us and protect us and help us do what matters. There can be this kind of disconnect between what it’s saying. And what we know from experience to be maybe more accurate or more likely.

Eric Flanders:
Yeah, I’m not a big reader.

Eric Flanders:
But I found myself doing lots of reading on anxiety and things like that. Just trying to educate myself on it. And there was one thing that really stuck with me and that was there was this phrase initiate to generate, right? And that’s what I, you started doing. And this, you have to initiate.

Eric Flanders:
A situation in which you are going to feel anxious about in order to generate new learnings behind it, right? So it was initiate to generate so I started just saying to myself I’m nervous right now to go do this But then I said I’ll have to go do it because I can’t generate any new experiences behind that thought Until I do it and I had done these I mean, I mean I had anxiety about so many things because I took over at this point, because I was starting to believe in all of these thoughts and I had to really relearn a lot of different things.

Eric Flanders:
And the only way you can really do that is to go out and challenge those thoughts and see that it’s not all true and by doing that, yeah, I was able to really get out of that dark spot I was in.

Martin Reed:
I think another example of that whole thoughts versus experience, similar to what you were just describing, I think that’s another reason why we can so easily get stuck, just trying so hard to make sleep happen, or to wrestle with our thoughts and our feelings.

Martin Reed:
We get tangled up in that struggle. And our experience is telling us this isn’t working. This has been going on for a long time. We’re not really getting where we want to go. But our mind is telling us well, I’m a little bit out of ideas here. Maybe you don’t hear that part, but the brain’s out of ideas.

Martin Reed:
So it just says, well, let’s just keep doing what we’re doing and we’ll just try harder. So we’ll just try even harder to get rid of these thoughts, these feelings. We’ll try even harder to make sleep happen. We’ll try even harder to get rid of that wakefulness. So that’s just another one of those kind of disconnects, right?

Martin Reed:
So we can be convinced that we just need to keep doing what we’re doing. Maybe something will change, but our experience on the other hand. is telling us, well look, there’s nothing’s been changing up to this point. But it can be really hard because They, our thoughts can be so convincing, right? They can just seem like they’re 100 percent true.

Martin Reed:
They’re complete facts. And we trust our brains, right? We recognize that the brain has been with us our whole lives. Generally does a good job of steering us in the direction we want to go. So when we get these thoughts that, are scary, worrying. big obstacles to the life we want to live, we can just assume that they’re 100 percent true 100 percent of the time and that’s just another one of those areas where we can get a little bit tripped up.

Martin Reed:
That’s right. Yeah, I mean, it snowballs, I mean, you can, you start worrying about sleep and that can really get your fight or flight activated. Right. And now that transfers over to other things in your life. And now all of a sudden, your anxiety is just running, on superpower and at no fault of your own.

Eric Flanders:
Right. It’s just. It’s just that’s what happens and you’re and then it’s your mind can really become a little bit addicted unfortunately to worry and You can find yourself just doing it more and sleep could have been the cause of that Initially, or maybe that was the effect of you worrying about other things.

Eric Flanders:
I don’t know but either way You know that whole thought process is a game changer And being, and it’s helped me in other parts of my life, that would give me anxiety before now I’m, I just, I don’t engage with those thoughts like I used to.

Martin Reed:
Going back to that experiment that you said that you were doing I’ve forgotten the phrase, it was initiate to…

Eric Flanders:
Initiate to generate.

Martin Reed:
Initiate to generate. Yeah. Let me ask you a question about that. Did you find that maybe whilst you were engaged in those experiments that it… It reminded you or made you more aware of the fact that when we do things that matter to us… Even not completely unrelated to sleep, but just when we’re doing things that matter to us, things that are important, often some difficult stuff will come with that.

Martin Reed:
So, for example, off the top of my head, just the idea of walking your daughter down the aisle, oh, what if I trip? I’m gonna feel some anxiety, maybe some worry. Or if I want to advance my career, I have to do a job interview, so I get the butterflies, I get the anxieties. When you are engaged in that experiment, Was that something that you noticed too?

Martin Reed:
Did it reinforce this idea that in order to do things that matter, we have to make a little bit of space for some of that difficult stuff too?

Eric Flanders:
Yeah. Yeah, I still do that today. I mean, I, with my job, I do a lot of presenting. And even today I tell myself for an hour before I’m getting on camera, it’s like, oh my gosh, all of these things can go wrong, and I’ve done this my entire life with having to do that, but.

Eric Flanders:
Now it’s not so powerful. It’s still there and the thoughts are there. I mean, I don’t push them away or try to ignore them, but I just don’t engage completely with them anymore. Now I’ve learned that those things could possibly happen. Yes, they absolutely could possibly happen. But does that mean they’re going to happen?

Eric Flanders:
No. And that’s the difference. Not saying, they’re not going, not trying to remove them completely by saying, yeah, those can’t happen. Yeah, everything can happen, but it doesn’t mean it’s gonna happen. Like the worst case scenario type of thing.

Martin Reed:
Oh, 100%. And, just whilst you were describing that to me, I can just use this discussion that we’re recording right now, so an hour or so before, even earlier in the day today, I’m thinking, right, everything I’ve got to get ready for this discussion with you, right?

Martin Reed:
And then my brain is like, what if the batteries run out on this light that you’ve got up here? What if the power goes out? What if there’s a power outage? What if the trains will start going by? What if I completely freeze up and I forget all the questions that I plan to answer? What if I get a cough?

Martin Reed:
What if I lose my voice? All of this stuff is going through my mind, right? And, when, for the first few podcast episodes a few years ago, They would feel way more powerful than they do now because I didn’t have that experience to support that I can still do this even when the brain’s churning, barreling along at a million miles an hour.

Martin Reed:
But even to this day, with years of experience doing this, I’m still getting those thoughts. But the difference now is, I think it’s a skill. I’ve got more skill in acknowledging them and being able to just know from experience that, alright, this is my brain looking out for me. Thanks brain, you’re just keeping me better prepared for what I’m about to do.

Martin Reed:
And just maybe keep me a little bit sharper, maybe. But it’s not something that kind of hooks me, jerks me around, and makes it impossible for me to act anymore. It’s something that I can still do these things when my brain is doing all the things it chooses to do.

Eric Flanders:
Yeah, because your mind just wants to, it’s just trying to protect you, right?

Eric Flanders:
It’s trying to protect you from an embarrassing moment or from failure. And unfortunately, we all are really scared of failing these days. I mean, it’s just what we’re brought up with, right? Don’t fail. So yeah, everything that you’re doing, you’re, you convince yourself of that, but you’re right, you have to go put yourself in those situations, or at least I did.

Eric Flanders:
I had to really put myself in situations that challenged what my thoughts were. And it was the hardest thing ever, and it didn’t always feel good. And I think that’s the key, like sometimes you’ll go do it. You won’t want to do something, but you’ll go do it anyways. And sometimes it just doesn’t feel good while you’re doing it.

Eric Flanders:
But when you’re done doing it, even though it didn’t feel good, it’s still another learning experience. Like I didn’t die, it wasn’t the end of the world. It wasn’t the greatest of times, but it wasn’t the worst of times. It wasn’t the end of the world. And so. Just making sure you go and do those things is extremely important and it really helped me out with my my sleep.

Martin Reed:
I think sometimes it can be helpful to just maybe ask ourselves what the alternative is to whatever we’re doing, so if we feel like What we’re doing now isn’t getting us where we want to be. Is there an alternative approach? So for example, if we’re calling in sick to work on a lot of days, if we’re cancelling plans, we might just ask ourselves, is there an alternative here that we can even just experiment with?

Martin Reed:
If we’re spending a lot of our time battling with our thoughts, trying to push them away when they arrive, wrestling with them is there an alternative here? Because sometimes, you just like you touched upon when you said, I would just do things. I would still do things even after difficult nights, even when those difficult thoughts and feelings turned up.

Martin Reed:
Because if we don’t do that, what is the alternative? In that example, it’s doing less of the things that matter. And when we do less of the things that matter. We tend not to get to where we want to be or where we want to go.

Eric Flanders:
That’s right. Yeah. And then usually you’re sitting in your house obsessing over.

Eric Flanders:
What’s going on in the first place, and you’re not even allowing your mind to, to go somewhere else, right, or experiencing something else and that obsession can really become your life. And it certainly was my life for a good period of time.

Martin Reed:
You’ve talked about how you would, experiment with actually seeking out some difficult thoughts and feelings just to practice almost like an exposure therapy.

Martin Reed:
But basically by just complete, just allowing yourself to experience it. Maybe moving away from thoughts, directly influencing your behavior, being able to practice taking a step back when your thoughts might be saying one thing, taking a step back and then deciding how to respond to them. Was there anything else, that in your experience was helpful in terms of letting go of that struggle?

Martin Reed:
With the thoughts and the feelings that tend to show up either when you’re awake during the night or when your brain starts to think all about sleep and the upcoming night during the day.

Eric Flanders:
Really, for me it was really that. Piece that we’ve already touched on, which is just trying to challenge the next day and I really needed to convince myself that This wasn’t true because I tried everything You know I was staying up later.

Eric Flanders:
I was getting up in the middle of the night and I was even trying to be physically active and all those types of things, but I wasn’t doing it to the extent that I wanted to. And it really, the game changer for me was challenging it and allowing time and, not influencing it, trying to do something to influence sleep.

Eric Flanders:
That was the biggest thing I was always trying to do something to improve on it and I touched on the medication piece. I had I don’t know how many times things I tried but I had Returned a bag of medication to the pharmacy and I have never taken medication in my whole life ever I’m like an anti medication guy and Not to say that it’s not a good thing for some folks But for me, it just wasn’t the answer but I had a bag like that of different medications that I had been prescribed over the course of this year and a half through different doctors because I had seen therapists and primary care physicians and all of these things and the answer was that, but you know, as always, anything you try, maybe it doesn’t work.

Eric Flanders:
Maybe it doesn’t, but if it does work, it’s not going to work for long for me, right? It would work a couple of days a month at the most. And then it wasn’t. And then so I had this medication thing along the road with me for A year and a half and then, I finally said enough is enough and I needed to do this on my own.

Eric Flanders:
And so I just let everything go. I stopped trying to use medication as a supplement. I stopped everything, which was not easy. It was very hard. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life. Trying to get rid of all of that, but I did. And when I faced it on my own and I just let it run its course and just live my life the way I knew I wanted to do it and challenged my thoughts And I challenged them with my actions. That’s what really changed it for me.

Martin Reed:
It sounds like your approach to the medication You just recognize this was something that it was important to you not to take medication if it could be avoided.

Martin Reed:
So did you just make that decision? I’m just not gonna go down this route. This isn’t a path I’m gonna take anymore. I’m just gonna stop. It was like a cold turkey or I’m not even gonna go on it. Or was it like a tapering process? I’m just curious to hear a little bit more about that.

Eric Flanders:
I had tried both. I had tried, I tried tapering for a while and I found that it was just prolonging my experience, and I wanted to just be at my core and deal with this on my own at the time, and so, I’m not a religious guy very much either, I mean, but I have gone to church before, and so I, Went to church one day and I was sitting in there all by myself because it was in the middle of the afternoon and I was at a breaking point and I was breaking down obviously in church and by myself and I, whether it was a sign or not, but I just asked myself and I was speaking out loud and just said, what should I do?

Eric Flanders:
And I remember thinking about, should I just, Give up on all this stuff and let it go and feel comfortable. And the bells ring. I mean, it happened to be, the time the bells ring anyways, but it was assigned to me. And from that day on, I went home and I told my wife, I said, I’m done with this.

Eric Flanders:
And, again, one of the hardest things that I’ve ever gone through in my life trying to get away from that. But it was absolutely for me the right thing to do because I knew that I needed to be able to approach my sleep without anything or any help. And. It was making it more difficult.

Martin Reed:
Did, I’m just curious, did your doctor give you any kind of suggestions? Did you talk to them about, this is a kind of route, this is something I want to get away from. Did they offer you any suggestions on a useful way forward for that?

Eric Flanders:
Tapering is the safest way to do it and that’s always going to be the medical recommendation.

Eric Flanders:
But for me, it was, I was in such a bad place when I was on the medication and It was the same when I was tapering and I’m like, this can’t, this is so bad. I can’t do this for six more months. And that’s what I was thinking about. Like, this is going to be a six month taper and I’m not going to be able to do this.

Eric Flanders:
And so I just, I knew it was going to be very hard. I knew it was going to cause. Some hardships, just letting go of it. But I did, and I remember that day and it was hard. It was very hard and they recommended all kinds of things like go do yoga. Practice meditation.

Eric Flanders:
So I did start meditating which did help. I got an app on my phone and I had never been a guy or meditating type of person. I would totally have said that’s for the birds before, but it helped a lot because when you’re just sitting there I, that’s where I really learned that thoughts are thoughts, cause my mind, when you close your eyes and you just by yourself your mind takes over and.

Eric Flanders:
Then you can really recognize thought patterns and just let them be and not engage with them. And the better and more practice you, you do the better you get at just letting things go. And so I guess meditation did help in a way. I really don’t do it as much as I used to, but. It does help with thought patterns.

Martin Reed:
What was the medication that you were taking at the time?

Eric Flanders:
Oh man, I mean, I took all kinds of stuff. I took I took a Klonopin, which is a benzo, right? And I took that for a while. The other medications I was on… were more anxiety driven at medication. So the doctor was trying to help my anxiety go away.

Eric Flanders:
But all of the anxiety medications that I was trying were making my anxiety worse. And because I wasn’t handling what was causing my anxiety. And so, I took 20 different anxiety medications over the course of a year, which I would not recommend. But yeah, I tried hydroxyzine. That was something they prescribed to me at first, which is just like a Benadryl type of thing.

Eric Flanders:
That was for sleep. And then the Klonopin was later. I didn’t take that for very long, but all of these things I had to get off of. And then I ended up taking Mirtazapine, which is a older anxiety medication, which also can help her sleep. And so that was another one that I was taking at the end there, but I just let them all go.

Eric Flanders:
And I remember the doctor that I had who had prescribed those she was saying, look, if you’re not going to, if you’re not going to do what I’m telling you to do, like we just can’t see each other anymore. I guess we’re done. Because I just was not going to take the medication and that was what her only answer was.

Martin Reed:
It’s been great listening to you describe, your change in your approach to the wakefulness and the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it and doing things that matter and a lot of that is When we’re awake, it’s daytime, lots of distractions available to us. How does that translate to changing your approach at night?

Martin Reed:
Because fewer distractions, right, at night we tend to be more alone, less social, less of a social environment, fewer distractions. How do you change your response toward a day? difficult thoughts and feelings that can come with the wakefulness and that temptation to start wrestling with it again and tossing and turning and dealing with all that difficult stuff.

Martin Reed:
How do you change your approach there?

Eric Flanders:
Yeah, and those thoughts don’t go away. For me, at least they haven’t, right? So I still go to sleep at night. And I think if you’ve had insomnia, like really have had it, man, I don’t know if those thoughts ever go away because it’s like a very traumatic experience.

Eric Flanders:
It so when I go to sleep I still have those thoughts. They still are in my mind saying, I’ve been laying here five minutes, and and, but now I say, well, so what? I’ve been laying here five minutes, who cares? And that could turn into an hour. And it’s, I still, at this point, now am I’m totally fine with being awake.

Eric Flanders:
And, cause I know eventually I’m gonna fall asleep. And you will if your thoughts don’t create these emotions. That trigger all kinds of like chemical responses in your body where, now you got adrenaline going on, right? And your sugar levels start spiking and all of this stuff starts happening.

Eric Flanders:
But if you just let those thoughts be, and they still happen for me often it will be fine. Like you will fall, you’ll fall asleep. And I don’t find myself thinking about it very much though, before I get in bed anymore. So like, when it’s dark and it’s eight o’clock I’m enjoying my evening with my wife and my son.

Eric Flanders:
And sometimes I go to bed with my wife. Sometimes I stay up and watch TV. It’s no big deal anymore. But when I get in bed, I close my eyes, there’s the thoughts still happening, and it’s totally okay. And I would say it’s okay if those thoughts are happening. That’s what I would say to myself if I could.

Eric Flanders:
It’s totally fine that those thoughts are happening. It doesn’t mean anything, but that’s not easy when you’re going through it. Oh, man.

Martin Reed:
Yeah. Exactly, and I’m so glad that you do keep emphasizing that because it’s, I think it is one thing to say You know, yeah, I just have to allow these thoughts.

Martin Reed:
But the thing is, we don’t want to allow them, because they don’t feel good. Now, but what again, it’s going back to what’s the alternative, if we don’t allow these thoughts to just flow through us to come and go as they choose, the alternative is to battle with them. What does your own experience tell you there?

Martin Reed:
If your own experience is telling you that battling isn’t really helping, then maybe it’s time to experiment with that new approach. Yeah. And allow the thoughts to come and go even when they are really difficult.

Eric Flanders:
It is so hard to, yeah, I mean, I heard folks say that on these types of calls and I’m like, wait, that sounds amazing.

Eric Flanders:
Like, please, I just want to be that person. Like, how are they doing that? How does that just happen? And. Going back to what I said before it only happened for me when I started to just one night of no sleep, two nights, no sleep, three nights, no sleep, a couple, I didn’t care. I went and did what I wanted to do.

Eric Flanders:
It was very hard to do it sometimes, but I did it anyways. And so when I started laying in bed and those thoughts would happen now, I could tell myself like, what’s it matter? Like tomorrow, I’m gonna do what I’m gonna do anyways. It doesn’t really matter. Like I, I don’t need to have a sleep tonight. And that’s hard to, again, say when you’re sitting on the other side of it.

Eric Flanders:
But at the end of the day, if you get up the next day, stay up. You’re, you can go do what you want to do. You can. You can go do whatever you want. You’ll probably surprise yourself. And so the thoughts lost their steam after that, but when I wasn’t living the life I wanted to live, when I was purposely not going out, when I was not seeing my friends, when I wasn’t just going to the gym and doing all these things, not flying around, like I love traveling, not doing any of that, it really gave all those thoughts power.

Eric Flanders:
And so those thoughts become real powerless when you just, who cares? And it doesn’t happen overnight. I mean, this is a process.

Martin Reed:
Absolutely. It is a process. I’m keen to hear your thoughts on that. It was, if you are going to reflect back on when you were really tangled up in the struggle, and it felt really difficult to when you get to a point where it feels like, I can live my life independently of this stuff.

Martin Reed:
It’s not something that is always on my mind. I’m always trying to troubleshoot. If you had to put an approximate timeline on that process, on that part of the journey, how long would you say roughly that took?

Eric Flanders:
When I really started challenging my thoughts and doing what I wanted to do and live the way I want to, I really…

Eric Flanders:
saw slow progress over the course of maybe three or four months. And so I was constantly having to challenge things. And then it took about six months for me to start really feeling comfortable about those difficult thoughts. So it was not overnight. And I don’t think everyone’s timeline is the same.

Eric Flanders:
I will say that I, when I listened to some of the things I’m like, well, man, that maybe their situation just wasn’t as bad as mine, and so I would keep telling myself that. So I wanted to really tell everybody who’s going to listen to this. I was literally in the worst case scenario possible in my mind.

Eric Flanders:
Like it was that bad, just knowing who I am where I was at. And so it took longer for me. It wasn’t overnight. And but I kept at it. I kept doing it and doing it and just, wouldn’t let sleep prevent me from doing what I wanted to do and I took on another job.

Eric Flanders:
I got promoted, all these things happened while I was challenging all of this stuff. And Yeah, I’m here today because I did that.

Martin Reed:
Yeah, everyone’s timeline is different, but I think the one thing that they all share in common is they’re always longer than we want them to be. We always want to make that progress really quickly.

Eric Flanders:
They are longer.

Martin Reed:
Yeah, exactly. But it’s another one of those things we just can’t control, right? Just like we can’t control sleep itself. We can’t control what goes through our minds. We can’t control the timeline. We can only control. the implementation, the practice, the exploring a new approach if our previous or current approach isn’t working.

Martin Reed:
That’s the only thing we can control is we can control what we’re doing on the journey. We can’t control when we’re going to reach that final outcome. And it often takes longer than we’d like. That’s for sure.

Eric Flanders:
Yeah.

Eric Flanders:
And I’m not a patient guy, so it was really yeah, it was really working against me because of, control.

Eric Flanders:
I’m a little bit of a controlling guy, gotten better at that. No patience. Like, I mean, yeah!

Martin Reed:
Did you change your approach in terms of like when you would go to bed at night? Because I remember at the start of our discussion, you said you started to go to bed a lot earlier at night. Did you is that one of the things you change?

Martin Reed:
You started to go to bed either later at night or more closely to when you used to go back to when you used to go to bed before all of this struggle appeared.

Eric Flanders:
Yeah, i, I, so I had a hard time with it because. I knew that staying up was the right answer, but when I found myself being awake and of course you’re the only one awake when you’re doing this, right, your family’s sleeping and you want to be in there.

Eric Flanders:
And so I had a really hard time with being awake by myself and it would just make me more anxious. And so I would give into that anxiety and just go lay in bed, which would make it even worse. So I would stay up late. And then I would go to bed and then I would jump out and so, at first I was going to bed early and then I slowly started like extending my hours and then that changed over time.

Eric Flanders:
Now I, I just go to bed when my wife goes to bed. I mean, I moved to California, like I said, and hours changed, right? The time zones changed, all that changed and we still work on East Coast timeframes. So, I’m starting. work and my wife at 530 in the morning here, and that would have terrified me before.

Eric Flanders:
How am I supposed to do that? And now I like getting up early, which I would never have done before, but I actually enjoy getting up early and seeing the sun come up and having a cup of coffee, whereas when I was really overthinking everything, it was giving me severe anxiety getting up earlier.

Eric Flanders:
So yeah, the sleep times changed for me.

Martin Reed:
And how about responding to the wakefulness with actions during the night? Were you one of those people that found it helpful to get out of bed when your mind was in overdrive, or were you one of those people that prefer to stay in bed and just experience the thoughts, practice allowing them to flow?

Martin Reed:
I’m curious what your approach was there.

Eric Flanders:
Yeah, I towards the end, I got a lot better with getting out of bed and I became okay with being awake. And I, when I would get out of bed at first, I would start, I was doing things that were not natural to myself. Right? Because a lot of people just recommend we’ll do something boring, right?

Eric Flanders:
That’s not super engaging. And that’s exactly what it was. It was super boring and like doing crossword puzzles or word searches or things like that. I would do tons of those things, but that’s not something that I enjoyed. So it made my time awake. Unenjoyable and I was already not enjoying it. And so, I started when I wake up now, I would just turn the TV on, and I know the TV, I would always, I bought blue, the blue sunglasses, right.

Eric Flanders:
To block out the light from TV thinking, Oh man, the lights just allowing my serotonin is not working. Right. Because, so I started doing all these weird things. I was, I’d be the only person in my house wearing sunglasses at night, watching TV. And Yeah. That obviously didn’t help at all, but I was doing it anyways because I was looking for anything.

Eric Flanders:
But then now, if I wake up, I just watch TV and I’ll watch a show and then I’ll go lay down again and see if I fall asleep. And I usually do. But most times I’m going to bed with my wife and I’m sleeping pretty quick.

Martin Reed:
I think really what it comes down to is just that more natural approach, right?

Martin Reed:
There’s, you move away from the rules and the rituals, whether it’s I have to wear a certain type of glasses or I can’t watch TV. We come up with all these rules and rituals for ourselves, even though if we’re able to reflect back on a time in our lives when sleep wasn’t a concern. Will we engage in those rules and rituals back then?

Martin Reed:
And if not, maybe that tells us something. Yeah. There’s always some insights to be gleaned there. But, and I love, what I really like was the fact you touched upon a few times during our conversation was there are still some difficult nights from time to time. You’re not some kind of superhuman that’s having a great night of sleep every single night.

Martin Reed:
What’s different now? I mean, First of all, are you still having some difficult nights from time to time? And if so, what’s different in terms of how you respond to them now and the kind of influence they might have over you?

Eric Flanders:
Yeah, I you know, I thought you know over the course of my life. I’ve always been an amazing sleeper and But in reality, I was telling myself that when I was going through this not remembering that man Most people don’t sleep great every night and I was not anything out of the normal.

Eric Flanders:
I, I had nights where I didn’t sleep great, but I totally forgot about that when I was going through it. I was like, I went from zero to nothing or a hundred to nothing here today. I would consider myself. Not having insomnia anymore. That I would absolutely consider, but does that mean I don’t have a night once a week where I’m getting three or four hours versus eight?

Eric Flanders:
Yeah that absolutely can happen. I don’t give it any attention now, because I know And I’m confident, like I’m going to sleep great probably the next night and usually I do, right? I mean, that’s just what happens, right? Your body knows when to sleep and when not to sleep if you’re not trying to play around with it.

Eric Flanders:
And so, it’s not abnormal for me to have a rough night and it’s, I wouldn’t even consider it a rough night anymore. I would consider it, it’s just me laying in bed comfortably. I, maybe I’m just not sleeping and that’s totally fine. It’s okay for me now and it the bed is now a comfort for me You know, I enjoy being in there whether i’m awake or not.

Eric Flanders:
Whereas before it wasn’t and So yeah, it’s not like a you know All of a sudden I had insomnia and then all of a sudden i’m a perfect sleeper again That’s just not the reality of the situation And it could be circumstances Something i’m thinking about the next day right things happen in life where you have something really important the next day and that can keep you up you know There’s all kinds of things and explanations as to why maybe you don’t have a great night of sleep.

Eric Flanders:
And that’s okay. It’s totally normal. I think that’s what I finally understood is it’s totally normal.

Martin Reed:
Absolutely. Well, Eric, I’m really grateful for the time you’ve taken out your day to come on and just share your experience and your story and your insights. Great stuff there. I do have one, one last question for you which is a question that’s quite similar to my final question for every guest, so I’m gonna ask you the question too, and it’s this.

Martin Reed:
If someone with chronic insomnia is listening, and they feel as though they’ve just tried everything, that they’re beyond help, that they’ll just never be able to move away from this struggle with sleep, this struggle with insomnia, What would you say to them?

Eric Flanders:
I would say that I was absolutely right there where they are right now and absolutely believing that there was no hope for me either.

Eric Flanders:
And I say that from the bottom of my heart because it was, it’s absolutely true and being here today I am very grateful for it because I never thought I would be here today but I would tell anyone who’s sitting there listening to this and really having a hard time that to be, you said, kind to yourself and not beat yourself up over it because, if you could choose not to be in the situation you’re in, you would probably not choose to be there.

Eric Flanders:
And so it’s not your fault. You’re not doing anything wrong. And to go out and live your life the way you want to live it, no matter how hard it is to just do it. And. Especially do it those nights where it’s rough sleep. Go out the next day and do everything that you planned on doing.

Eric Flanders:
If you’re avoiding doing things, go do them. And it will be okay. It will be okay. You will, you’ll convince yourself that it’s gonna be okay by showing yourself it’s gonna be okay.

Martin Reed:
All right. Well, I think that’s a great note to end on. So thanks again, Eric, for taking the time to come onto the podcast.

Eric Flanders:
Yeah, I appreciate your time, Martin. Have a great night.

Martin:
Thanks for listening to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. If you’re ready to move away from struggling with insomnia and toward living the life you want to live, I would love to help. You can get started right now by enrolling in my online course or you can book my phone coaching package. My online course runs for six weeks. It will help you make changes that can create better conditions for sleep, it will help you identify and get rid of any behaviors that might be making sleep more difficult, and it will help you respond to insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it in a more workable way. You can work through the course in two ways. You can choose the self-coaching option and work through it by yourself with the support of an online forum that is available only to clients.

Martin:
Or, you can choose to add one-on-one email coaching and work through the course with me by your side. With the one-on-one coaching option, you get unlimited email access to me for eight weeks, starting from the day you enroll. Any time you have a question or concern, any time you are unsure about anything, any time you want to focus on the challenges you face or any difficulties that show up, you can email me and I will be there to coach and support you. You can get the course and start right now at insomniacoach.com.

Martin:
With the phone coaching package, we start with a one-hour call (voice only or video — your choice) and come up with an initial two-week plan that will help you create better conditions for sleep and practice moving away from struggling with insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it. You get unlimited email access to me for two weeks after the call and a half-hour follow-up call at the end of the two weeks. You can book the phone coaching package at insomniacoach.com/phone.

Martin:
I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Insomnia Coach Podcast. I’m Martin Reed, and as always, I’d like to leave you with this important reminder — you can sleep.

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Listen to the podcast episode (audio only)Gerry struggled with sleep for decades. The more he struggled, the more effort he put into sleep and the more effort he put into sleep, the more he struggled. Eventually, Gerry realized that trying to make sleep happen was only making things even more difficult.

With this realization, Gerry changed his approach. Instead of trying to force sleep, he practiced being kinder to himself when insomnia showed up. He practiced experiencing wakefulness and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that can come with it with less struggle by being more of an observer of those things rather than an opponent of them.

Gerry also practiced mindfulness to help build skill in being more present when insomnia and all the difficult stuff that comes with it tried to sweep him away.

Today, Gerry is not only sleeping better but — because he is less tangled up in an ongoing struggle — he is enjoying an improved quality of life. Sleep has become a natural part of his daily routine, rather than a challenge to overcome.

Click here for a full transcript of this episode.

TranscriptMartin:
Welcome to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. My name is Martin Reed. I believe that by changing how we respond to insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it, we can move away from struggling with insomnia and toward living the life we want to live.

Martin:
The content of this podcast is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. The statements and opinions expressed by guests are their own and are not necessarily endorsed by Insomnia Coach LLC. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied.

Martin:
Okay, so Gerry, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to come onto the podcast.

Gerry:
You’re welcome. Glad to be here.

Martin:
It’s great to have you on. Let’s just start right at the beginning. If you can just tell us a little bit more about when your issues with sleep first began and what you think might have caused those initial issues with sleep.

Gerry:
Well, it started when I was 27. I was in my, was it first year? No, second year of law school, and the year before was the first time that trying as hard as I could and not succeeding happened. In other words, I tried really hard, but law school, there’s a lot of really smart people in law school and my grades weren’t that great, and it seems to, in retrospect, have taken about a year to sink in to the point where the insomnia started kicking in. What I’m getting at is that I really started wondering if I was going to make it. No. No, I’m sorry, it actually started the beginning of third year when… Yeah. Yeah, I was actually almost barely on probation for academics, and so I thought, “Oh my God, I could get kicked out. I could fail at this.” And it just really rocked my world.

I grew up thinking that I had to produce to be worth keeping around, and when I saw myself not producing, I really wondered where that was going to be going. I was reminded often when I was growing up that you better toe the line or there could be really some serious consequences. I was threatened to be kicked out of the house and whatnot, so things really started to… I really felt like my world was starting to fall apart. I caution people though when I’m talking on the Insomnia Forum, because if they pick up on the fact that that was quite a while ago, and I guess this is a video, you can see I’m pretty far north of 27, I’ll be 72 here in a couple months, and I want to caution people to not think, “Oh my God, I’m going to be condemned to 40 plus years of insomnia.” That’s not the case at all.

I just happened to have some really serious childhood trauma I had to deal with and didn’t deal with it for many years, and so there was a lot of excavating that I had to do, so I don’t think anybody that is having a bout of insomnia ought to just totally freak out and think that they’re condemned to the rest of their life like that. In any event, that’s how it started. And then as it turned out, I graduated from law school and got a job and so on, and had some… Got kicked around like everybody does in life, but made it. I just kept plugging away and made it, but the insomnia, as we talked about in the forum, took on a life of its own. And so just because I graduated from law school and got a job didn’t mean it just went away. In any event, that’s how it started.

Martin:
Did you find that… Obviously you were going through a lot of pressure, there was a lot on your plate, so we often see some sleep disruption connected to that. Did you find that as you were working really hard to try to get through law school, do well in your career, were you also applying that same effort to sleep? Did you feel that you were putting pressure on yourself to fix sleep, to make sleep happen, or was that just purely this mystery byproduct of all the stress that you were under in other areas of your life?

Gerry:
Oh, I made sleeping better a big project. It took me a long time to get to the point where I realized that trying harder wasn’t going to work. Trying harder in law school… Well, once I focused a little better and used better techniques, the increased effort there helped. Not that I wasn’t trying hard before, but I think it’s clear that trying harder to sleep better just doesn’t work, but yeah, I went through the whole ball of wax. Over the counter medications, seeing doctors. Well, and certainly worrying about it, trying to think my way toward better sleep, trying to rationalize there’s no reason this should be happening.

It shouldn’t be happening. Yeah, I tried a lot of things and some of the things worked to some extent, basic sleep hygiene, don’t drink coffee at midnight and whatnot, but in retrospect, I since see it was a wasted effort in this, trying to make a project of getting to sleep. Building a house is one thing, you plan, you got to do the foundation and you got to put the framing, the electrical and whatnot, or hire people that know what they’re doing, but it doesn’t work here. That I know.

Martin:
And no matter how well you build that house, there might still be an earthquake.

Gerry:
Well, that’s also true. Yeah.

Martin:
It’s so interesting hearing you talk about that, that trying, how you made sleep a project, because I think our minds can really play tricks on us. We’ve all got this human brain that’s just wired to problem solve and to look out for us. Its main job is to look out for us. Any obstacles, any threats, whether they’re real, imagined, predicted, even in the past, it’s going to fire up to protect us and troubleshoot, and so when we’re experiencing some sleep disruption, obviously it’s going to fire up and look out for us and give us all these suggestions for things we can do. Let’s research. Let’s try a supplement. Let’s try a medication. Let’s try meditation. Whatever.

There’s millions and millions of things that we can try, and I think sometimes we can get a little bit bit trapped, a little bit caught up, a little bit stuck because we can try all these things and listening to our brain that’s generally guided us pretty well through life, so we’re listening to what it’s having to tell us. We try everything it suggests, and our experience might be showing that all these things we’re doing, all these things we’re trying aren’t working, but then our brain is still there being like, “Well, okay, do that stuff again, but try harder.” It runs out of ideas at a certain point, so then we end up putting even more pressure on ourselves doing these things, understandably, that our experience is telling us are keeping us a little bit stuck, but our mind is just like, “Keep doing it. Keep doing it, but try harder.” And then we put even more pressure on ourselves. Was that akin to your own experience?

Gerry:
Oh, very much so. Yeah, very much so. I don’t know culturally if it’s worldwide, I always thought… I read a while ago that this sort of thing can be a real kicker for Americans that think that maybe the positive side of the American mystique or whatever is a can-do attitude, which can be a good thing. Hey, we can get this done, or maybe I’m just talking about my older generation, whatever. But anyway, I was always brought up with the idea that, hey, we can get this done. And that’s true for a lot of things, but it doesn’t work here. In fact, I think it’s counterproductive because after a while I saw myself as a failure in terms of insomnia. I saw this thing as a monster. It’s way bigger than I am. I can’t deal with it. I’m beat, and that’s not a good place to be.

I found at times where I could lapse into a pretty serious depression. I had to deal with that. I had a serious psychiatric disorder as in got hospitalized for it. I checked into a 30-day voluntary inpatient for that, and that helped a lot, but it wasn’t like everything’s peachy keen after that. That was 30 years ago, but what I did find out was ways to recognize it happening, and when it comes to insomnia, what I find is that… And I can still do this, I did this early this morning when I woke up too early. I can find myself… It’s very easy to start going down that rabbit hole and real depressive rumination, and I am pretty well adept at recognizing it now, and I know that… I think that people that find themselves in that space and they just can’t seem to get out of it for a couple weeks and all they can think about is suicide or whatever, it’s definitely a time to get some professional help. But yeah, it can really do a number on you. It really can.

Martin:
Something you touched upon there is we can be really hard on ourselves when we’re going through this difficult stuff. That brain fires up again and starts telling you, “Well, maybe you’re not trying hard enough. Why can’t you fix this? Why can everyone else make sleep happen but you can’t? You are a failure. You can’t achieve this, you can’t do that.” And that doesn’t really make things any easier, does it? I think it takes effort and intent, intention, real intention to actually be kind to ourselves when all this difficult stuff shows up.

Gerry:
Yeah, I totally agree. I’ve been reading something about this idea of self-compassion and that ironically, a lot of people that are the more compassionate toward others are hardest on themselves apparently, the research is showing that the… Well, for example, today I find myself looking at the stuff on my plate, we’re doing this podcast and then I’m going to do a choir practice at 6:30. I’m lucky right now I’m retired, so I don’t have as many things on my plate, but still, even if I had more, I would think I would look at, okay, what do I absolutely have to do today? And then try to work with that and then even talk to people that I’m working with that, well, maybe I’m not sleeping that great, but let’s see what we can do. And I don’t feel like I… Well, like anybody, I’ve got a bunch… Even retired, I’ve got a bunch of stuff on a to-do list, but I’m not going to beat myself up if I don’t do a whole bunch of it today.

That said, I agree with you on your prior comments about don’t let the insomnia rule your life to the point where I’m going to… Oh, I’m just not going to do this, this, or any of those things because I’m just… Well, I have insomnia, therefore I’m just going to drop out of life. It’s a balance of not dropping out, but on the other hand, not working myself to the bone and beating myself up. Yeah, I think it’s just like if you have a really bad cold, maybe you can ease up and be able to have some chicken soup or something that maybe if you’re… I didn’t sleep all that great last night, or even for a few nights, to realize that, hey, I’m going to do the best I can. And that’s it. Just give it your best.

But yeah, just don’t beat yourself up. I did that for a long time. I’ve got to get over this. I’ve just got to do this, I’ve got to do this, and then actually, I had migraines even before insomnia, and they probably, for the longest time I didn’t get both on the same day, but after a while, and I think it was probably from beating myself up year to year to year and just getting worn out, after a while I started getting both at the same time and it just makes it worse. Yeah, definitely go easy. Yeah, I’m sorry if I’m rambling.

Martin:
You’re not rambling at all. It makes my job a lot easier because I prefer to hear my guests talk rather than myself, and I’m sure my audience probably prefers… They’re probably a bit tired of my voice too. If we reflect back on sleep itself, that struggle with sleep, what was an average night like? Was it difficulty falling asleep? Would you just regularly wake up during the night and find it hard to fall back to sleep? It was a combination of both? What was your actual experience with the nights like?

Gerry:
Oh, my typical one has always been early morning awakening. I generally just about always can get to sleep right away and then try not to watch the clock too much, but over the years, it looks like if I’d wake up after about four hours, three to four… Well, about four, maybe four and a half, and then not be able to get back to sleep. And last night it was a little bit more than that, I probably got about three hours, but yeah, it’s definitely early morning awakening, which I know is a clinical sign of depression. I think for me, I don’t see myself as really depressed anymore, but I think maybe… I’m not a neurologist or anything, but I suspect that there’s probably a neural pathway that got ground in there that some people are predisposed to whatever little ailment. Maybe mine is just predisposed to this. Sometimes it’s just not going to sleep, maybe it’s just a bad habit I picked up and I obviously rather wasn’t there anymore, but I don’t have to make a huge deal out of it.

And sometimes I can recognize that there was a situational insomnia, last night I woke up… Sometimes I’ll wake up and realize there’s really something on my mind, and last night it was a… I’ve had a couple of social events that got canceled just because of any COVID outbreaks, and I was just bummed out about that a little bit. And then you think, “Okay, well, I’ll resolve that,” but then now I’m awake and then… But I try not to… One thing I learned over the years is just don’t toss, and for me, I just don’t toss and turn and go, “Oh my God, I can’t believe I… Why can’t I get back to sleep?” And just staying there. I just get up and go downstairs and play guitar quietly and not wake up my wife, hopefully.

Martin:
It sounds like there’s difference in your approach there, so now maybe you’re doing something else with that time when you’re awake instead of tossing and turning.

Gerry:
Yeah, it went back and forth because I thought, “Well, gee, if you get too efficient, I might think, “Gee, this is my time. I think I’m going to automatically wake up now so I can have this quiet time.” But I don’t think that’s been an issue. Instead, for me, it’s been… I felt better during the day knowing that… Not to sound too accomplishment-oriented to an extreme, but well, I use the example of guitar.

For me, I really want to learn it, and I’ve found that to really get there, for me, there’ve got to be times when I’ve got to do it even though I don’t want to. And so if I can get some time in during the morning, great, and okay, okay, okay, if I didn’t get enough sleep and I do it, then fine. But I just feel better by say, here we are mid-morning, and I just feel better that I played earlier rather than just stare out the window and mope about how I can’t sleep and my life is shit and just spinning nowhere. And that would just make it worse, so I feel better just getting up and doing stuff.

Martin:
What’s the difference here? Back when you were still really tangled up in the struggle, how was your approach different then? You mentioned tossing and turning and battling with your mind, things like that. How would you respond to that wakefulness in the past, and how is that different to how you generally respond to it now?

Gerry:
Well, back then, for a long time, I think of all those years, slow learner I guess, but I saw it… Well, I was working, and so I had to keep my job, do the best I could to do that, and so I saw it as more of a endurance contest. And I was in my late 20s, 30s, 40s, and I guess had more energy than I do now, but I just saw it as something I just got to suck up and just get done. And now I find myself a little bit more easy going about it, and that’s not always the case. I can find myself reverting back to letting the thoughts just go crazy and the thoughts will just be zipping through there about the more negative ones, and I’ve got to get over this and that sort of thing.

But for the most part, I’ve gotten to just more of a place of… I don’t want to say giving up with it, but living with it like… Oh, I don’t know. Well, maybe it’s akin to… I got a little bit of arthritis and instead of just giving up and saying, “Well, I just can’t deal with this,” and, “Oh my God, this hurts,” just getting up and doing the best you can and just not letting it run my life.

Martin:
Would you say that’s acknowledgement, acknowledging the presence of stuff that turns up that’s really difficult? Maybe acknowledging difficult stuff that we can’t control rather than getting tangled up trying to control the difficult stuff that we wish was gone, but we probably realize that we can’t directly control it? At least maybe our experience suggests that.

Gerry:
Yeah. Yeah, I think so. I think so. Yeah. I think I’ve gotten to more, not giving up on it or anything like that, but more of a, well, life’s difficult. Everybody’s got something. My foot’s sore sometimes from arthritis. Well, what are you going to do? I have that attitude, so like, “Well, what are you going to do?”

Martin:
I think this is sometimes where we can get a bit tripped up when we hear the word acceptance because it’s quite easy to confuse acceptance with just throwing in the towel, giving up on everything, admitting defeat, resignation. But really I think acceptance in some circumstances can be quite empowering, quite liberating, because it can free us from a struggle. For example, if we have something that we can’t really control, let’s say for example, arthritis, like you mentioned, we can either throw in the towel and withdraw from life and cancel everything that adds meaning to our life and really try somehow to battle it, to fix it, which might to some extent be helpful, but at the same time, it probably can’t be directly solved just by our own efforts. Acceptance might just involve just accepting that there is going to be some difficult stuff that we cannot control, so it’s more to do with accepting that there’s stuff out there that’s difficult that we can’t control rather than just accepting this is something I have to suffer with. And I think that’s the difference.

Gerry:
Yeah. Yeah, I agree. And also, I don’t want to get into this ongoing constant battle with arthritis or insomnia or something where it just runs my life.

Martin:
And I think it’s so linked to what we were talking about a little bit earlier, about that kindness, as being kind to ourselves too, in addition to accepting that this is present, that we might not be able to control it, being kind to ourselves and not being mean to ourselves and making it even more difficult.

Gerry:
Yeah, I agree. Totally. Yeah. And I have to remind myself about that, being kind to yourself. I tell that to other people, but I have to remind myself.

Martin:
You mentioned that back in the day when things were really difficult, lots of tossing and turning when you’d wake during the night, lots of pressure, putting pressure on yourself to sleep. Our brains make that link, especially if we put a lot of pressure on ourselves to perform during the day, we make this link, I’ve got to perform well at night, I’ve got to sleep well in order to perform well during the day. And that’s one of those intentions or efforts that can make things more difficult because as you know from experience, sleep doesn’t respond well to effort. The more we try to make it happen, the more difficult it usually becomes. Something we touched upon earlier, and that I’m keen to explore with you a little bit further, is that role of that brain, that human brain and all the thoughts and the feelings it can generate.

And this is one reason why I really wanted to get you on the podcast, is you’re so active in the forum, offering some great advice and support to other people out there, and a common theme that you talk about is this role of our thoughts and how when we’re struggling, all these difficult thoughts and feelings are going to turn up. And although we can’t really control those thoughts and feelings, they’re going to show up no matter what, we can choose how we respond to them. And I think that’s key really because our response to them determines whether we are engaged in a workable response or an unworkable response. What have you found is a workable way of responding to all the difficult thoughts and feelings that can show up during and even after difficult nights?

Gerry:
What I found over time was that indeed they’re just thoughts, and so all those thoughts those are branches going by in the river and just sitting by the riverbank and just watching them go. They’re not pleasant, but just watching them drift on by. Instead of jumping in the river and trying to wrestle with them and try to work them out and try to rationalize with them.

It’s just drifting on by. I can acknowledge the thought, I don’t deny it, but I don’t have to react to it. I don’t have to freak out about it all over again for the 50 millionth time. And I still have times where I goof and forget that and go down the thought train and I might find myself in the river and going around the bend and then I hit a log and then realize, “Oh, whoa, here I am in the river.” And then I get out of the river and try to dry myself off and go, “Okay, well, that was a bummer, but we’re through that and we realized that happened a long time ago, and here we are right now and I’m going to get on my bike later today.” Or we got a fun project at work to do, and that’s going right now. Let’s go with that.

Martin:
What your response comes down to, if I just were to sum it up, is it started with acknowledging so you acknowledge the presence of that thought rather than just immediately trying to push it away or trying to avoid it from even turning up in the first place.

Being more of an observer of it, being maybe a little bit more curious about its presence rather than putting on a big suit of armor in its presence and being kind to yourself in return, because a lot of this stuff is really difficult. I think you’ve touched upon this in the past that when you first hear this phrase from all the gurus that thoughts are just thoughts, it can be quite offensive because these thoughts are difficult and they’re real. But when we practice and when we practice acknowledging them, observing them and being kind to them, we can get a little bit distance from those thoughts so we can recognize that they are there, they are present, but that’s what they are, they’re thoughts. They’re separate from us, they aren’t us. They’re thoughts that we’re experiencing.

Gerry:
Yeah, I’ve gotten to the point now where I’m pretty good at not getting into the, oh, I’m going to get rid of that thought because that’s a conscious thought that I can recognize fairly quickly that no, that’s not going to work. But as far as getting caught up in thoughts, that can still happen for sure. If it’s just really powerful, you just get gobsmacked, and I have ones that just will just wham, even from years ago. All of a sudden it just hits that hard and it can take a while. Maybe it’s akin to being in a martial arts match or boxing or something, and man, you just get hit and for a second there you’re not really sure what’s going on. And so it can rock my world a little bit, but I find that with some practice it’s not too long. I might find myself in that river, but not in the river too long before I go, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. No, this isn’t working. I’m getting jacked around here.” Yeah.

Martin:
Yeah, that is such an important point, I’m really glad you made it, that none of us get to, I don’t think at least that anyone gets to this guru level where we don’t deal with difficult thoughts, where we don’t get caught up in the struggle with them again. Even if we are practicing for years moving away from struggling with them, every now and then we are going to find ourselves dropping into that river, as you put it, getting swept away, and I think that’s normal part of being a human being. What matters is the more we practice, the more we’re able to notice when that’s happening, and… Maybe not the easier it is, but the more skill we have in noting when it’s happening and refocusing our attention and bringing ourselves back so we don’t quite get tangled up in that big struggle quite so fast.

Gerry:
Yeah. Yeah, I think if anybody’s thinking, if I can just get to the point I have total serenity, I’m going to be at total peace, I’m going to sleep well, nothing’s going to ever bother me, no, that’s not going to happen. Not on this earth. I’ve never met the Dalai Lama, but I doubt very much he would say that everything is just peachy keen for me all the time.

Martin:
It’s really interesting because as human beings, I don’t know whether we are hardwired or it’s culturally ingrained upon us, just this pursuit of happiness, we should be happy all of the time. We shouldn’t feel fear, we shouldn’t feel worry, anxiety, stress, anger, frustration, so we’re taught that we should only experience one emotion, one feeling, and that everything else, that implies that everything else that comes with being a human being, all the other thoughts, feelings and emotions are somehow wrong, that we have to get rid of them. We are hardwired to struggle with all this difficult stuff, so it does take a lot of practice to understand or to acknowledge or just to realize that that’s normal, being a human being, doing things that matter comes with difficult thoughts, feelings and emotions. Happiness is just a transitory state and we can’t reach any moments of happiness without some struggle along the way.

Gerry:
Yeah, true. I think that’s true.

Martin:
I think that’s a great summary of your changing your relationship with your thoughts. One from where there was understandably that big attempt to control, to fight, to avoid, which consumes all of our energy, our focus and attention, and can make things more difficult, more to a place where we practice, maybe not always achieve, but we practice acknowledging our thoughts, being more of an observer of them, being kind to ourselves when they show up, and responding to them in a way that’s maybe more workable. Where we do things that matter to us even when they’re present. And these don’t have to be huge things. They’re just things that are important to us that represent who we are, who we want to be, kind of life we want to live.

Because I think with repeated practice, when we just continue to do that, then we’re still living the life we want to live even when this difficult stuff is present, and that in turn might help reduce the influence of all this difficult stuff, or at least reduce the focus of all that difficult stuff. It’s like looking at our difficulties through a magnifying glass. It’s hard to see anything else when we are looking through a magnifying glass. If you can practice putting the magnifying glass down, that stuff we were looking at is still there, but now we’ve got this whole field of vision around us and we might recognize that there’s more available to us, more things to do and more that makes up our world than just what was once visible through that magnifying glass.

Gerry:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think so. I think so. I think it’s so easy to get too focused on stuff, maybe too much media consumption or social media or something, just getting down a rabbit hole of negativity or getting on Instagram or Facebook or whatever where it looks like everybody’s just… Everyone else is just doing great when they’re all probably looking at it thinking everybody else is just doing great, and I’m not. These illusions, and maybe there’s something in our culture that’s like, “Well, I should be happier, or what’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with everything that I’m not happy?” And well, there’s good and evil in the world, and it’s a hard world. It’s also a beautiful world, and I can acknowledge both.

Martin:
Something else that can maybe set us up for a little bit more difficulty with the difficulties that come with being a human being is the kind of sharing culture that we have mainly online, so like social media, social networks and stuff where we have friends or acquaintances and we’re scrolling through our feed and everyone’s posting pictures of themselves smiling on vacation or with their kids or with a new car. And everyone’s obviously posting content that reflects happiness or where they would like to be in life, but the truth is that can lead to a bit of a distorted view, like you touched upon. We can then believe that everyone around us has got this great life, they’re not dealing with any struggles, there’s no pain or difficulty just because it’s constantly reinforced through where a lot of us spend a lot of our time on these devices. We’re just seeing everyone else that we know having this great life, but the truth is no one really posts about their struggles and all the difficult stuff. We generally post when we’re having a good time.

Gerry:
They’re not telling you about the surly kid at home or getting laid off or the hassles at the grocery store, and I can’t find this or that, or my car broke down, but it’s all happening.

Martin:
Yeah, exactly. It’s all happening behind the scenes, and I think that… I wonder if that might even just be an act of self-kindness, just recognizing that it’s not unusual or abnormal to be finding things difficult. It’s almost a guarantee that everyone you interact with each day is dealing with their own struggles too. I don’t think there’s anyone out there that’s got a perfect life, 100% happiness I don’t think is an achievable feat.

Gerry:
No.

Martin:
One thing that I think that might be a bit of a theme to what we’ve been talking about, and I’m curious to hear your take on this because it’s something you’ve mentioned a few times in the Insomnia Coach Forum, is mindfulness. And you touched upon sometimes it can feel like it’s a bit of a fad, even though it’s actually been around for a long time and a lot of people have some confusion about it as a result, like what is mindfulness? What does it mean? What’s the goal of it? Can you tell us about what you feel mindfulness is and how it’s helped you?

Gerry:
I think mindfulness has to do with just being aware of the present moment, and by itself, it just sounds kind of weird. I even have a friend who’s a mental health therapist herself, but she just thinks, “Ooh, that just sounds woo woo, and what’s that got to do with anything?” Just the fact that I’m aware of that this fingertip is touching this thumb or something like that. What’s that got to do with anything? But the best thing I can think of is, well, you can either be focused on the present or the past or the future, and so where are you going to be? I can be ruminating about the past or reliving the past a lot, not to say you don’t think about memory sometimes, but I can live in the past or I can be in the future. And there’s lots of ways to get anxious about that because we don’t know what’s going to happen, and meanwhile, miss the present.

Oh, it’s been attributed to John Lennon, probably some other people too, but life is what’s happening while you’re busy making other plans, and there’s just a lot going on in present life, and so for me, what I try to do is, yeah, I do some practice, listen to some meditation tapes. I’ve got some favorite sites and I have sometimes listed some, and I tell people that if you get on there and you find somebody you’re just not really… It’s just not working for you. Don’t just say, “Well, to hell with mindfulness.” No. Instead, just look around and… It’s almost like music, such and such musician, you resonate more with this artist or that. But it’s just a way of just appreciating the present. Like right now, I’m just looking out over the screen here and seeing this beautiful flower in our yard, and I’m not going to leave our podcast now and just focus totally on that, but I’m just noticing that just for a second.

When it comes down to the actual practice, it’s really trying to just be aware of what’s going on right now, whether it’s my body or what thoughts are going through in my mind. I’m not trying to force anything out, I’m not trying to think happy thoughts, I’m just being aware, and it’s hard to put in words. It’s almost like I found this… I even have a note in my dresser and it refers to both mindfulness and guitar. I can think about it, watch videos about it, read about it, talk about it, or I can do it, and at some point it comes down to just doing it and to really try to get a feel for what it can bring.

For me, what it brings is, especially in difficult moments, realizing that, okay, what’s going on right now is I have to do maybe X, but it doesn’t mean I have to do X, Y, Z and everything all at… Life doesn’t have to be a flood that I have to deal with everything right now, just what’s going on right now. Life doesn’t seem so as overwhelming, I can say that, and life can also be more fuller. Instead of driving home and realizing that I can’t really tell you a thing that I’ve seen from point A to point B and getting home and not even realizing anything, instead just being able to appreciate where I am or even little basic things, like I can find that I really appreciate the fact that I’m healthy, that I can move, that I own this car.

Martin:
Where I feel that mindfulness can be really helpful, just as you described, is our minds like to time travel, so I’ll just use one of my own examples. Kind of like yesterday, had a lot of podcasts to prepare for, I had to call the bank, I had to do all the other stuff that comes with being a parent, working, being a human being, and I felt the heart racing. I felt really tight and stressed, and that’s because really what my mind was doing, it wasn’t focusing on, okay, right now I have to work on this. It was thinking, “Oh, but then I’ve got to do this, this, this, this, this.” I was getting stressed about something that hasn’t happened yet, it’s in the future, so it doesn’t even exist.

And the fact of the matter is the task that I was working on at that moment is the same task whether I had 20 other things to do after it or zero things to do after it, but if there were zero things to do after it, I would be doing that task, just my mind would be traveling thinking, “Oh, I can relax after this, do whatever I want,” but instead my mind was like, “Oh, but then you’ve got to do this, this, this, this, this, this.” And one thing that mindfulness can help us do is keep us a little bit more present or at least to notice when our mind starts to time travel and bring us back to the present, help refocus our attention.

Gerry:
Yeah. Yeah. Maybe I can give you an example of my own. Lately I’ve found that I’ll wake up in the middle of the night and I’ll wake up, my mouth will be kind of dry, my neck is a little sore, and so I go in the other room and I lay down and I find, and I just… Okay, I am awake and I’m walking into the other room and I’m laying down, and now I’m stretching my neck to the left, now I’m stretching to the right, and instead of ruminating, oh my God, I wonder if I’ll get back to sleep, what’s going to be like tomorrow? When’s this ever going to end, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. Instead, I find myself just focusing on the present and with practice I find that I can do this a little bit more, not always perfectly, but just stretching this way and then going back to bed and then laying there and realize, “Okay, I’m just laying here and I’m just breathing.”

I can feel myself breathing. I can feel the pillow. Totally in the present. And I’m just going to do this and just do that instead of, oh my God, I wonder if I’ll get back to sleep. And it doesn’t always work. Sometimes I don’t get back to sleep and it’s like, “Oh, well, I wish I did, but okay.” And then just focusing on, okay, now I’m going to get up and I’m going to do this, and just being… Yeah, and just… It’s nothing really fancy or earth-shattering or anything, it’s just… Yeah, it’s just like where are you going to be? Are you going to be in the present, the past or the future? You pick.

Martin:
And the mind still wanders anyway, right?

Gerry:
Oh yeah.

Martin:
Especially if we are new to this practice, so we might be like, “Okay, this sounds like something I could try and experiment with,” so next time, let’s say whether you’re lying in bed or if it’s just a moment during the day when you’re getting really distracted or you find your mind time traveling-

Gerry:
Yeah, my mind will be wandering, like I say, when I’m stretching there or I’m laying back in bed, the thought might be going through my mind and I’ll find myself saying, “Oh, I’m having the thought that I might not get back to sleep, and it’s just going to be a real bummer, and…” Well, there’s the thought going by and then try not to glob onto that thought, just let it drift on by.

Martin:
It comes down to that control. The mind is still going to wander off. What we are doing is just looking to practice bringing it back to the present again, because it’s always going to drift off to the future or the past away from right now.

Gerry:
Yeah, and don’t beat yourself up when it wanders, like, “Oh my God, I’m really a bad meditator. What a flop I am.” No, it’s going to do that. Our minds wander for reasons that drive us crazy like we’ve been talking about, or they can lead to really creativity. I read somewhere where the guy that came up with what, silicon chips or something, it’s just the idea popped into his head when he was taking a shower. What kind of thought that was, I have the slightest idea how anybody could think of that, but apparently he wasn’t consciously thinking about it, he was just taking a shower and all of a sudden this idea popped into his head, so go figure.

Martin:
Going back to these themes of mindfulness where you said one of them is the time traveling, being more present, noticing when our mind is time traveling, just bringing it back to the present moment with kindness and recognizing that just because you brought it back once, it doesn’t mean it’s going to stay there. It’s going to drift off, especially if you’re new to this. This is a skill and no one ever is able to keep their mind anchored 100% percent in the present 100% of the time. It is something that requires ongoing practice, but another benefit you touched upon or another part of mindfulness, another benefit of mindfulness is the brain likes to run on autopilot a lot of the time. You gave the example like if we’re driving a car. We can just be driving along, before we know it half an hour has gone by, we can’t remember what the speed limit is.

When we are noticing ourselves on autopilot, we miss out on stuff, and so when things are difficult, when we’re struggling, it can feel as though that’s the only thing that’s present. But like you just mentioned, you’d notice just in the background, out the window there was this beautiful flower. These things can seem quite small and insignificant, but the more skill we can gain through practice of just noticing the good stuff around us, disengaging autopilot when we find that we’re doing stuff without really thinking about it, can really open us up to more of the good stuff that’s also present even when the difficult stuff is present with us too.

Gerry:
Yeah, you’re going to be having a really tough day and gulping down coffee and not really noticing it or be having a really tough day, but still noticing, wow, this coffee tastes really good, so at least there’s a little bit of bright spot if you can notice it. But it’s there. It’s there.

Martin:
And it’s amazing what’s out there, and I think children are great at this. Children are experts in this. They want to… You take a child out for a walk, they want to look at every rock, look at every leaf, and there are limits to this. As adults, we do still have to get stuff done, we can’t just be walking around in a philosophy of amazement, wonder and curiosity all of the time, but maybe if we can just take a little bit of that childhood magic with us and just stop every now and then and just notice what’s around us. Is there anything we’re missing out on?

Gerry:
And not to mention learning from kids, relearning from kids about sleep because kids are doing all that stuff and then after a while they just conk out. They don’t sit and think, “Well, I really hope I can get to sleep,” or, “What should I do to sleep?” And thinking it through and… They just conk out.

Martin:
Exactly. Yeah, there is a lot, and as a parent, I learn a lot from my kids every single day. It is quite amazing how much of those childhood insights we lose as we get older. We obviously gain a lot, but we also can lose a lot as well.

Gerry:
Yeah. Yeah.

Martin:
Well, Gerry, I really appreciate the time you’ve taken out your day to come on. I really like the way we really dug into the thought processes that can be involved when we are struggling with insomnia and how we can easily get caught up in a battle with them that can make things maybe more difficult and how there is an alternative approach that can help us move away from the struggle, but that’s that’s not something that’s easy. It does require ongoing practice and just being kind to yourself when things are difficult. If someone with chronic insomnia is listening to this conversation, listening to your great insights that you’ve shared, but they feel like I’m that person, I’ve tried everything, I’m just beyond help, I’m just never going to be able to move away from struggling with insomnia, what would you say to them?

Gerry:
Right now you’re having these thoughts that I’m stuck, I’m never going to get better. I realize that’s a really powerful thought and I can understand where you would be coming from, how that thought would develop and lodge into your brain because of all, unfortunate, the suffering you’ve had. But I can’t emphasize enough that the thought is powerful, I totally acknowledge that, but as hard as it might seem to acknowledge, I can tell you the thought is not true. It’s not true. You’re not stuck, you’re not condemned to it. Going back to that thing about the kid that conks out. Over time, if you don’t eat… You’re not hungry right now, say, but over time, eventually you’re going to get hungry and over time you’re going to fall asleep. If you say, “I just can’t sleep, I can’t sleep,” well, you will acknowledge that you can’t just get in your car and try to drive across the United States. And you know eventually you’re going to fall asleep at the wheel.

And so the things that say I can’t sleep, your brain is… I know that’s a powerful thought, but it’s simply not true, and if you can try to give yourself a break, maybe realize that, hey, I’ve really been working hard on this, I’ve really been trying, but maybe if I can not take my thoughts so seriously, even though they seem like they must be true because they’re so powerful, but if I can acknowledge that sleep is a natural process and that therefore something is getting in the way, and you know what, it could be that the thing that’s in my way is my thinking that I can’t sleep, that I am stuck, that there’s nothing I can do, that I’m a failure, that this is my life and my life is hell, and I wish I was dead and so on and so on. Believe me, I’ve been there and it’s easier said than done, and no, it’s not perfect, and like I said earlier in the podcast, turned out I didn’t sleep that great last night, but hang in there and also realize you’re not alone.

A lot of it, there’s millions any given night. Last night probably in the US alone, there was probably what, 20, 30 million people easy that didn’t sleep that well. A lot of us are walking around kind of blitzed, we could use some more sleep. You’re not alone, and this isn’t a death sentence or a life sentence to insomnia. Things can get better. I would really urge you to stick with… Well, the Insomnia Forum, and see what people are going through and get some tips and share some ideas, and Martin’s podcasts, emails and whatnot. And things can get better. If this sounds like just some sort of goody two shoes pep talk, it’s not. We all have different journeys, but on the other hand, there are some similarities, and I think that I’ve got a pretty good idea what your… In this part of your journey, I got a pretty good idea what that is like because it’s tough, it is tough. And maybe also give yourself credit. Here you are, you’re still here, and you’re not alone. You’re not alone.

Martin:
I think that’s a great note to end on, Gerry, so thank you again for taking the time to come out onto the podcast and to share your thoughts, your insights, and your experiences. Really appreciated.

Gerry:
Well, thanks for having me on. Appreciate it.

Martin:
Thanks for listening to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. If you’re ready to move away from struggling with insomnia and toward living the life you want to live, I would love to help. You can get started right now by enrolling in my online course or you can book my phone coaching package. My online course runs for six weeks. It will help you make changes that can create better conditions for sleep, it will help you identify and get rid of any behaviors that might be making sleep more difficult, and it will help you respond to insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it in a more workable way. You can work through the course in two ways. You can choose the self-coaching option and work through it by yourself with the support of an online forum that is available only to clients.

Martin:
Or, you can choose to add one-on-one email coaching and work through the course with me by your side. With the one-on-one coaching option, you get unlimited email access to me for eight weeks, starting from the day you enroll. Any time you have a question or concern, any time you are unsure about anything, any time you want to focus on the challenges you face or any difficulties that show up, you can email me and I will be there to coach and support you. You can get the course and start right now at insomniacoach.com.

Martin:
With the phone coaching package, we start with a one-hour call (voice only or video — your choice) and come up with an initial two-week plan that will help you create better conditions for sleep and practice moving away from struggling with insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it. You get unlimited email access to me for two weeks after the call and a half-hour follow-up call at the end of the two weeks. You can book the phone coaching package at insomniacoach.com/phone.

Martin:
I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Insomnia Coach Podcast. I’m Martin Reed, and as always, I’d like to leave you with this important reminder — you can sleep.

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Listen to the podcast episode (audio only)As a business owner, Anne-Claire began overextending herself and her sleep started to suffer. She reduced her workload and experimented with supplements and medication but her sleep seemed to get even worse.

After deciding that she didn’t want to continue using medication, Anne-Claire began to explore whether changing her approach to sleep and her response to insomnia might be helpful.

Like most people, Anne-Claire had tried to fight or avoid the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with insomnia — and this got her tangled up in more of a struggle with them. In a change of approach, Anne-Claire began making space for them to exist. She would greet and welcome her thoughts (even the difficult ones). She practiced being more of an observer of them, rather than an opponent of them.

As she did that she realized that many of the thoughts her mind generated didn’t match her own experience. This helped her realize that there was no need to battle with her mind — that her mind will generate all kinds of thoughts and feelings, some of which might be true, some of which might not be true. Some of which might be helpful and some of which might not be helpful.

As she started to implement and practice new habits, Anne-Claire also realized that the more effort she put into sleep, the more difficult it became. She found that by maintaining a consistent out of bed time in the morning, regardless of how she slept, she was better able to do things that mattered and she was more likely to experience better sleep on subsequent nights.

She also discovered that comparing her sleep to anyone else’s or trying to achieve a certain amount or type of sleep was not helpful and was likely to pull her back into a struggle.

Today, Anne-Claire no longer struggles with sleep. Thanks to her willingness to experience insomnia, sleep has — once again — become effortless.

Click here for a full transcript of this episode.

Martin Reed:
Okay. Anne-Claire, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to come onto the podcast.

Anne-Claire France:
My pleasure. My pleasure. Very much.

Martin Reed:
Can you tell us a little bit more about when your sleep problems first began and what you think might have caused those initial issues with sleep?

Anne-Claire France:
I think they began right around 2015, and I think the primary cause was, I’m kind of an overachiever. And I run my own business and I overextended myself and had way too much going on. And so I, in order to be able to meet my standards of what I wanted to do for my clients, I was doing a lot of long nighters, all-nighters, all that kind of stuff. And I’m an analytical type of person, so I was always thinking about what was going on and not really taking a lot of time to give my mind a break. Even when I was trying to rest.

So I think a lot of the time while I was in that sort of overextended time period, I was just almost recalibrating my body clock. And without knowing that I was doing that. And then when it was sort of waning, I just wasn’t able to get back onto something normal. And of course life intervenes all the time. So you start thinking about lots of stuff and I was just sort of hyperaroused more than I probably should have been. And so that just carried on for quite some time and then I realized I probably needed to be doing something different.

I’ve always been a light sleeper, but I could sleep. And so sound would bother me and things like that. But that was easy to take care of. But no matter what was going on, I usually would get enough sleep and I was not one to think, oh, I need 12 hours or 8 hours. It was just, what do I need to feel good? And I’d say that… I mean, I did certainly have some sleep issues probably in 2010, 2011. So when I went through menopause. There was all those kinds of physiological things that were going on, but I could attribute them to that. And then in about 2015, as I mentioned, when I really overextended myself and was just burning the midnight oil all the time and not really resting and keeping my mind going all the time, and then being sort of the one people look to in the family to solve all that as well.

I mean, it was just sort of go, go, go. And I just felt like I needed to be doing all those things and really neglected being on any sort of set schedule other than accomplish, accomplish, accomplish. And so once all that sort of died down a little bit and I could really get back onto more of a regular schedule, I think I had completely recalibrated my body clock. And I didn’t understand what all that meant. And so when it was time to sleep and I was still thinking about things or, why can’t I sleep? Which would also require me to be thinking more about, well, what do I need to do in order to sleep? Which of course wasn’t helpful at all to be doing anything to try to fall asleep. And I did try several things by the time I reached out to you, I believe in 2020.

Martin Reed:
There’s lots of great stuff there. Just to unpack it a little bit. It sounds like you kind of attribute a lot of the initial sleep disruption to that really busy, stressful lifestyle that some of us have. And that also I think some of us are just that high achiever personality. We put a lot of pressure on ourselves to perform all the time. What we would usually expect to see, if we weren’t talking about insomnia, we were just talking about life and stress and all that stuff that gets in the way is when we’re able to take a step back and maybe a little bit less of burning the candle at both ends, then everything will get back on track again. We can just expect sleep to just kind of take over and go back to the good old days the way it was. But as you were describing, when you were able to take a step back and have less pressure in your life, the sleep kind of didn’t seem to get on track. Did I hear you right? Was that what your experience was like?

Anne-Claire France:
That’s correct. That’s correct. And so I felt like I probably needed to go see somebody. Or there’s something wrong with me. Or something like that. And so I went to see my primary care physician who also does a lot of homeopathic types of things. And so she said, “Well, let’s try some supplements.” And things like that. And I can’t even tell you. I mean, there was the usuals like melatonin and stuff, and valerian. And there were some other ones that didn’t work at all.

But I think in looking back, I was sort of putting all my hope in the particular supplement in sort of being something like magic. As opposed to me making any changes in my behavior. And so that went on for some time, which was very frustrating. And then I ended up getting to the point where I was so sleep deprived, I mean, really sleep deprived. There were many nights I would go with zero hours. And so I said, I really do need to have something that’ll help me sleep. And so we moved to sleep medication, which I was not happy about at all. But again, it was really more relying on something external as opposed to me making any behavior changes.

Martin Reed:
I think it’s a well-trodden path that you just described. Something that a lot of people identify with because going back to what we were talking about earlier, often we can recognize that when sleep disruption first shows up, maybe there’s an identifiable or obvious cause. Sometimes we can control that cause, sometimes we can’t. But we kind of understandably believe that once that trigger, that cause is no longer present or relevant, then everything will get back on track. And normally it does. But in the case of insomnia, sometimes it doesn’t. And that can make it feel really mysterious and unique and unusual and lead to a lot of confusion and worry and anxiety and all the difficult stuff that comes with that concern that we’ve got about our sleep. The truth is there’s never really any mystery to it, to insomnia. And from person to person, it’s almost identical from person to person.

And it often comes down to the change in our approach to sleep once we’re experiencing that sleep disruption. And sometimes we get caught up in this change without even realizing it or we are just completely approaching sleep completely differently. Understandably, because we see it as a problem that we want to fix. So we engage in some changes, behavioral changes, maybe our thoughts about sleep have changed as well. And it’s all those changes that we understandably adopt in response to that sleep disruption that are almost like opening that oxygen valve to insomnia and just supplying it with the oxygen that it needs to survive.

When you talked about going down that route of exploring supplements and talking about medication and things like that, you touched upon the fact that now you’re able to look back and recognize that your behaviors had changed in a way that maybe wasn’t helpful. But at the time, had you noticed that your behaviors had changed? Had you noticed that your approach to sleep had changed when you were kind of tangled up in that struggle? Or did it just all seem very mysterious still?

Anne-Claire France:
It really was very mysterious. And to be honest, I wondered if it was more about the aging process. Maybe my body is changing and a lot of us think about, “Oh, I wish I could do what I did when I was younger.” Blah, blah, blah, all that kind of thing. And I thought about that. And I thought, well, maybe this is just part of the normal aging process. People talk about when you get older you don’t need that much sleep. But I certainly did realize you need some, which I wasn’t getting. But what really occurred to me is that, and what was afforded to me when COVID hit, and we were in essentially lockdown as I thought, I can now pay attention to me and really take a look at what is going on here. And so I wanted to completely get off any kind of non… I wanted to get off any kind of pharmaceutical mechanism to help me with my sleep.

I wanted to do something different about it. And so I started reading a lot more and really discovered this whole idea of cognitive behavioral therapy. And being a scientist myself, I really enjoy reading about that kind of stuff and realized, well, maybe I can talk to somebody who really knows what kind of therapy we’re talking about here. So I did go see someone in person in my hometown. And for a couple of sessions to really learn more about it. And realized that the type of behavioral changes that were going to be required that I know you’ve talked about like sleep restriction and the stimulus control wasn’t anything that I had ever thought of before. It was almost counterintuitive. And of course gathering the data and all that.

But I certainly realized that I had potential. And as long as I was willing to learn about myself and learn about what was going on with me with some help from someone, that I would be able to have those changes. And whether the sleep was like it was when I was younger didn’t matter to me as long as it was enough for whatever I needed to be doing and feel good. That’s what I went for. So I actually looked around for a coach. And I discovered Insomnia Coach. And I thought, I want a coach because a coach will really help me learn about the potential I have. And unleash all that. As opposed to saying, “Here’s what you have to do.” It’s really more, “Here’s what the potential is and I can help you get there.” And so that’s when I reached out to you in December of 2020.

Martin Reed:
In terms of what that sleep was like when it was still difficult for you, were you finding it was difficulty just kind of first falling asleep or was it more to do with you fall asleep fine and then just wake up and find it impossible to fall back to sleep? Or maybe it was a bit of both.

Anne-Claire France:
It was primarily just falling asleep. And then as I’m sure everyone who has had any kind of insomnia issues, if you will, or in their life knows, if you find yourself having trouble falling asleep, you get anxious about it, which of course makes it even more difficult to fall asleep. And then you become such that even the thought of having to go to bed to go to sleep is anxiety producing. So you sort of, just that whole idea of even trying to be a normal sleeper… And of course I’m married to someone who can sleep anywhere. So that was tough. It’s like, oh, I wish I could do that. And of course, I have a cat who sleeps like 23 hours a day. Was even envying the cat. So it was primarily falling asleep. And so there would be nights where I would have zero hours.

But what was very interesting is that even when I had zero hours of sleep, it didn’t really keep me from doing what I needed to do during the day. Although I would worry about that. That, oh, if I don’t get enough sleep, then I won’t be able to do X, Y, Z. But that really wasn’t the case. I mean, I was definitely tired and maybe didn’t have quite as much energy, but I didn’t realize until much later after having my sort of online conversations with you and going through the course that it is the case that most people can do a lot of things without a lot of sleep. But I wasn’t really recognizing that as being a good thing. It was really more of a, wow, I can still do this, but I’m still worried and anxious about not being able to sleep even though I was functioning pretty well.

Martin Reed:
Yeah, that’s interesting you say that. Were you finding that even though when you recalled your own experience and were like, “Well, yeah, I can still do these things that are important, that matter to me independently of sleep.” Were you finding that your brain was still maybe telling you other things that were different to your own experience? Maybe your brain was telling you things like, “You won’t be able to do those things.” Or, “You’ll really struggle to do those things.” Even though your experience told you something different?

Anne-Claire France:
Yes, and… In that, yes, it would tell me that, but then if I did make a slight error or something like that, my brain would always say, “Oh, that’s because you didn’t get enough sleep.” Not because it was just some normal thing that anyone might make, but it was always the reason for anything that was not quite the outcome I wanted was attributed to potentially not getting enough sleep. Which could have or may not have had anything to do with that. So yeah, my brain was right in there letting me know that my sleep issues were… It was telling me it was probably more of a problem than it actually was.

Martin Reed:
I think that’s one of those places where we can really get tripped up when the brain starts kind of firing up, doing its job and looking out for us and generating all these full range of thoughts and feelings. Some are helpful, some are not helpful. Some make us feel good, some don’t make us feel good. And when those difficult ones show up, because they don’t feel good, I think as human beings, our default response tends to be to try and fight them or avoid them. Because they don’t feel good. We recognize that they’re not helping us. We just want to get rid of them. And that’s what can really kind of tangle us up in a big struggle with the mind that can make everything more difficult. Because the brain then is doing its job, looking out for us, and we are trying to fight what it’s doing. Or we’re trying to avoid or trying to ignore or push all that information away and then the brain is like, “This is important. Why are you not listening to me? I’m going to yell even louder.”

And then we’re trying to fight it even more. And then it’s yelling even louder and we just get caught so easily in that vicious cycle. Where we experience more of that difficult stuff, more difficult thoughts and feelings. So we fight even harder to get rid of it. And then that stuff gets even harder and we fight harder and before we know it, we’re completely exhausted, completely distracted from everything around us and the things we want to do. And what happens? The thoughts still come back anyway, right? So really what can be useful is, which I’m sure we’re going to move on to discussing is, figuring out a way where we can break that cycle. Where we can respond to all this difficult stuff that our mind is telling us maybe in a more workable way. In a way that doesn’t involve so much struggle.

Because as most of us know from experience, that stuff’s going to show up anyway. What if we don’t add the struggle on top? Maybe that might make things just a little bit easier to deal with or a little bit better, help us feel a little bit better, if we just imagine that our brain is on the other end of a rope and we’re engaged in this huge tug of war battle.. What if we just kind of drop that rope? So all that stuff is still there, but now we’ve just freed up so much of our energy and our attention because we’re not just tugging on that rope all day long and all night long. Maybe now we’ve freed up to do more of the stuff that matters to us. Was that a journey that you found yourself on? Just responding to all the stuff that your mind was telling you maybe in a different way?

Anne-Claire France:
Yeah, for sure. As a matter of fact, I was thinking about, well, these are just thoughts and they’re transient and it’s not like the thoughts are going to do anything harmful to me. And certainly as you mentioned, it became such that if I would spend energy in trying to eliminate those thoughts, then it just became more of that struggle. And so I just decided that I need to be willing to accept that I have these thoughts and they’re just thoughts. And so I actually started doing guided meditations, actually in the morning. That really taught me a lot about what to do with sort of reframing those thoughts into something innocuous.

And I like to sort of think of a lot of those thoughts as sort of mind clutter. It’s like how do I clear out the clutter, but not with a heavy, powered tool, but just with a little swipe of a little feather duster or something like that. So I mean, one of my favorite images was thinking of some of those thoughts as some rambunctious little puppy that is bouncing around in my mind. That’s so cute and makes me smile.

Or I had one where I could imagine some of those thoughts in a parade on some of those banners and they’re just marching along and then disappear. Someplace to put them in, so that they weren’t really very arousing and things like that. And just to sort of reframe them in ways so that it almost got to be a habit, that I could reframe most arousing thought into something really more useful and more exploratory about what was going on with me. And then just sort of put them aside. But that took some practice. That took quite a bit of practice. So anyone who’s listening out there, that’s not something that you’re going to master overnight. It takes some practice, but well worth it. Well worth it to sort of reframe those thoughts into something that is just very normal.

Martin Reed:
I think one way of moving away from that struggle or building skill in moving away from that struggle… And skills require practice. If someone handed me a guitar right now, I’d sound atrocious. It would take me years and years and years to build skill in playing a guitar, for example. And this isn’t really that different. It’s a skill, it’s a new skillset. If we recognize that we might benefit from a different approach to all this difficult stuff, then it probably make sense that it’s going to require practice, it’s going to require us developing a new skill.

And that does take time. Listening to you describe your approach, it sounds like you practiced going away from trying to directly fight or avoid the thoughts that were turning up and more towards observing them. And you thought to yourself, “Well, how can I observe these so they feel maybe less threatening or I’m less likely to get thrown around by these thoughts?” And you’ve used that example of, “Well, I kind of imagined these thoughts were like a rambunctious puppy.” So the thoughts were there, but they took this form that’s a little bit less threatening, and then you just kind of observed them.

Anne-Claire France:
Oh, I would even greet them. I would say, oh, yeah. It’s like, oh, well, hello thoughts. And you’re there and not fight it. It’s just like, well, hello there. And you are what you are and welcome. And sort of really put a positive spin on them. So that there wasn’t a reason for them to stick around.

Martin Reed:
So because you weren’t going to war with them, then maybe the brain didn’t feel like it had to keep on pushing this on you harder and harder and harder.

Anne-Claire France:
That’s right, that’s right. Well, it’s, okay, you’ve done your job. Now it’s like, “Okay, I’m going to go away.” So that was part of this practice and really retooling in my mind about number one, even welcoming disturbing or arousing kind of thought, and then just allowing them to be and reframing them until they just sort of faded away. And so that’s the part that does take a little bit of practice.

Martin Reed:
Yeah, exactly. And I think one area where we can get tripped up is when our goal is, “Okay, I’ll do this. And my goal is to get rid of them.” Because then we are just still tangled up in that struggle of trying to fight or avoid them. So we really… We’re almost like we’re setting ourselves up for struggle. So we’re not really going to get where we want to be if our goal is still to get rid of these thoughts and feelings.

It really is just about practicing responding to them without that struggle. And sometimes there’s a bonus, they might just disappear. But really what we’re doing is moving away from the battle because when we’re engaged in a battle with our minds, as far as our brain is concerned, we’re at war. We might as well just have that huge suit of armor on, riding the war horse with a big sword in our hand. The thoughts aren’t going to disappear when we’re at war. And second of all, how likely is sleep going to happen if we’re engaged in this huge medieval battle with our minds in the middle of the night?

Anne-Claire France:
Yeah, yeah, very much. As a matter of fact, It got to the point where getting rid of those thoughts didn’t occur to me anymore. It was really more, oh, there they are. Again. Well, hello. And then I guess they would just get bored and go off.

Martin Reed:
You mentioned that you practiced a lot of this in the mornings. Did you ever practice it in the middle of the night or when you first got into bed and you were struggling to fall asleep? Did you ever get any practice in with that kind of approach at that time?

Anne-Claire France:
I did, but at the beginning I thought, well, I’ll do this when I’m trying to fall asleep. But see, I just even said that I was trying to fall asleep, which implies effort. And so the more I would do towards a goal of trying to fall asleep, it was almost paradox. So I found that if I did my guided meditation in the morning and then practiced a lot of that during the day, when I was up and around, and we all have lots of opportunities during the day to chill out a little bit and maybe reframe some things that are happening, that it got to be a habit. So that when I was in bed I didn’t even have to try to do things. So it was sort of a part of the way I was thinking. But I did try that at first, but again, as I mentioned, it had that paradoxical effect of putting effort into trying to sleep. Which is, I think you’ve mentioned, that’s the one thing that usually putting effort into something is a good thing, but when it’s for sleep, not a good thing.

Martin Reed:
It’s great that you were able to even notice that because I think so much of the struggle can come from, we just don’t even notice when it’s happening. When we’re actually tangled up in that struggle. When our goal or our intent is maybe that roadblock that’s stopping us from reaching that goal. Because just like you said, the more we try to make sleep happen, the more difficult it can become. It’s kind of like the more we try to breathe, the more confusing it all becomes, right? It’s just, breathing is this natural process. And if we kind of decide, “Okay, today I want to take a certain number of breaths. I want to be able to inhale a certain volume of air in my lungs with every breath and average a certain intake of gas every day averaged over a week.” Breathing’s going to get really confusing and stressful. And sleep is really the same.

It’s kind of that the more attention we give it, the more we try to intervene, the more difficult it can all become. And I think if we could just notice that that’s what we’re tangled up in, then there’s that huge opportunity. That word you used right at the start of this conversation, you notice that there’s that opportunity to change. And the process of change isn’t easy. It does require ongoing practice, but there’s that opportunity there to respond, to approach this in a different way. And just knowing that opportunity exists can sometimes be a little bit comforting and reassuring in and of itself. And listening to these kind of discussions as well from people that have been tangled up in that process and unraveled from it can be really reassuring too.

Anne-Claire France:
And really the epiphany I had was there’s really two parts to the cognitive behavioral therapy. There’s what do you need to do to get your body physiologically attuned for sleep with sleep drive and things of that nature, and the various exercises if you will that you have folks do. But then there’s the arousal part. And the mind arousal part. And it was like no matter what I did with all the physiological exercises I did to get my body in tune, arousal would win over every time. So I thought I have to focus on that to try to really give my body and mind every opportunity to do what should come naturally. And just do everything I can to just promote sleep without putting a lot of effort into it by sort of retooling a number of what’s going on cognitively, psychologically as well as physiologically.

Martin Reed:
I like to think of it as this kind of two-pronged approach. So we have the behavioral side of things in terms of our habits around sleep or our behaviors around sleep. And then we have all the stuff that goes on inside us. The thoughts and the feelings and how we respond to those. And I think a lot of people do really well just changing that one prong, the behavioral approach. So they might notice that, “I’m going to bed at eight o’clock. I’m really struggling. Before I had any issues with sleep, I used to go to bed at 10 o’clock, 11 o’clock at night. Maybe that’s a change. I can kind of go back to my old way of doing things. Maybe going to bed really early isn’t helping me, or maybe staying in bed really late in the morning isn’t helping me. Maybe trying to nap during the day isn’t helping me.”

And that approach for a lot of people is all that’s needed, just that behavioral change. Change in their behavioral approach, new habits. But then for some people, that’s a great way to set the stage for sleep, but there’s still that battle going on in the mind. So if we’re not falling asleep in a certain amount of time, the brain’s like, “It’s going to be another one of those nights. You’re not going to be able to sleep, you’re not going to be able to do anything tomorrow. You’re just going to be sitting on that couch. No one’s going to want to talk to you because you’re going to be so miserable.”

All that stuff starts coming up and then we start trying to fight it, distracting ourselves, pushing it away, getting mad at ourselves, being mean to ourselves, “Why am I thinking these thoughts?” And I think that’s where exploring a new way of responding to all that difficult stuff that’s going on in our minds, that second prong approach is really, is kind of like the cherry on top of the cake. If we can also go down that route as well, which I think to be honest is more difficult. Often more difficult. If we can get down that road too, then really we’re setting ourselves up for success. And by success I mean living the kind of life we want to live independently of sleep and regardless of the difficult thoughts and feelings our brain is generating while it’s doing its job of looking out for us.

Anne-Claire France:
For me, I needed to do the whole hog, if you will. I had to do the physiology as well as the sort of the mind body connection. And I really had to have the willingness to have full commitment. I mean, I thought, okay, I’m just going to do this and make the time for it and do the things that were even uncomfortable. Such as the sleep restriction, was very, very helpful for me. And very interesting to recognize how that worked. And then at the same time, working on what’s going on from the arousal standpoint. And naturally sort of all that mind clutter that I mentioned that we have a lot of times.

Martin Reed:
You touched upon sleep restriction a couple of times now. Can you tell us a little bit more about how that approach panned out for you? Just for someone that’s listening maybe has never heard of sleep restriction before, maybe you could just explain what it was or your understanding of it in your own words and how you implemented it and what that process of implementation was like for you.

Anne-Claire France:
Yeah, I did some reading up on it of course, and to be honest, I think it should be called bed restriction instead of sleep restriction. Because it has not as great a connotation as what’s going on. But as a scientist, I’m used to collecting data. And so I was all for logging really what my sleep was for a couple of weeks to see how much sleep I was actually getting and how much time, from the time in bed, all those kinds of things.

So for everyone out there, you keep track of how much time you’re in bed and how much time you’re awake versus asleep and various other data points as well. And then a sleep window, if you will, is constructed for you so that you don’t go to bed until a certain time. And then you only stay in bed a certain amount of time. And so really what you’re doing, the whole point is to stimulate sleep drive. And so I will say that the one thing that was one of the biggest helps to me was because I had been on a long-term sleep medication, I had lost the ability and did not realize this, but I had lost the ability to recognize true sleepiness because I would just fall asleep by virtue of that medication that I was taking.

And so I would misread tiredness for sleepiness. And you can be tired but be wide awake. As opposed to having that sleepiness. And so what sleep restriction, bed restriction did for me was allow me to discover what truly feeling sleepy meant. And so it was a much more natural thing to go to bed. I’m sleepy, therefore I’m going to sleep. So that was very, very helpful for me. And I know it probably sounds funny for a lot of folks, but being able to distinguish between tiredness and true sleepiness was pivotal for me. And a big, big help for me early on in the sleep restriction exercises that we were doing. And so then I was able to extend the number of hours and so forth. Yeah.

Martin Reed:
It’s something I hear really quite common that, “I kind of lost this sensation of sleepiness.” Or, “I might feel sleepy earlier in the night, but then it’s time for bed and then all that sleepiness just seems to disappear.” And I think a lot of people with chronic insomnia do mistake fatigue or tiredness for sleepiness. I think a lot of people without insomnia probably do too because we often use the words interchangeably, but there is a difference. Now you’re able to reflect on that yourself. If I’m going to put you on the spot and ask you to describe the difference for you, because everyone is different, but what was that difference like? What’s the difference between feeling tired and fatigued, which might not indicate that you’re ready for sleep compared to sleepiness, which might indicate that your body’s ready to start generating sleep?

Anne-Claire France:
Well, tired is really more of a fatigue, and you might want to go, “Well, I just feel like not doing much.” And just maybe sitting around and watching some TV or just hanging out. Whereas sleepiness, you get that true where your eyes start drooping and you can just feel the sensation in your brain of true wanting to fall asleep. Whereas in tiredness, you don’t have that at all. But where your eyes again, start drooping and you can almost start nodding off. And so when you’re tired, you don’t necessarily do. But that sort of nodding off sensation I was like, oh, I couldn’t remember the last time that I had that happen to me and it was just delightful. It’s like, oh, yes, now I’m recalling what this is and this means that truly my sleep drive is kicking in and this is an opportunity for me to actually get some sleep.

Martin Reed:
I think that’s a great way of describing it. And for people that aren’t sure what we mean by sleep drive, it’s almost like hunger, but for sleep. Like biological hunger for sleep. So we wake up in the morning, most of us are pretty hungry because we haven’t eaten all night. So we’ll eat some breakfast, then we’re not hungry anymore until around lunchtime and then maybe not until dinnertime. And what can happen when we have insomnia and we really want to chase after sleep and make sleep happen is we might start going to bed before we’re sleepy, which is a bit like sitting at the dinner table at three o’clock in the afternoon waiting to get hungry for dinner at night. The chances are we’re just going to be sitting there doing nothing for a long time until biologically the body’s like, “Okay, I’m ready to eat.” Or, “I’m ready to sleep now.”

And so with a sleep window, all we’re looking to do is, all right, if I’m averaging X amount of sleep over the course of a week or two, then I’m going to allot roughly that much time to be in bed. So we’re not taking sleep away from ourselves. That’s why sleep restriction is probably really unhelpful terminology. Because it implies that we are restricting sleep, but what we’re doing really is just restricting the amount of time available for wakefulness.

Because if we know from our own experience that we’re averaging three, four, five hours of sleep, then by spending 8, 9, 10 hours in bed, we’re setting ourselves up for long periods of wakefulness and we’re more likely to be going to bed before the body is actually ready for bed, before it’s ready for sleep to happen. And really that’s all there is to it. It’s not one of these things that can make sleep happen. It’s not one of these things that guarantees we’re not going to spend time awake at night, but it just helps us move away from chasing after sleep, trying to make it happen in a way that makes it more difficult for sleep to happen.

Anne-Claire France:
Yeah, I mean I think your analogy of it being like hunger is great. There was a saying I read somewhere where, sleep to live, not live to sleep. There are a lot of people, “Well, I just like to sleep.” It’s like, well, if your body is not ready for it… And it also, the other really epiphany that I had was that you need to do what your body needs as opposed to what you want. And it’d be nice if you could just, well, I’m going to sleep whenever I want or do whatever things when I want. But if your body’s just… That’s not what it needs, then you need to respect that and perhaps alter your thinking on your approaches to certain things. Whether it’s eating or sleeping or any of those other things that we do for sustenance and health.

Martin Reed:
We talked about that sleep restriction as one part of the behavioral changes that you made, just giving yourself an earliest possible bedtime and getting out of bed a reasonably consistent time every morning as well. Were there any other behavioral changes you made that looking back upon reflection you found were useful too?

Anne-Claire France:
Well, the one thing that you just mentioned that I didn’t allude too much on, but it turned out to be critical, was the consistent time of getting out of bed. That no matter what time I went to sleep, I always got out bed at the same time. So even if I was up till two o’clock in the morning and my get out of bedtime was five, I would get up at five. And whether it was the weekend, vacation, whatever, it was just really important to have that consistent, get out of bed time. And not try to catch up on sleep. A lot of people think that that’s a good idea, but it definitely… Maybe it was at one time, but certainly was not helpful.

Martin Reed:
That catching up on sleep, that idea of, “I need to catch up on sleep.” Why sometimes it’s not helpful, we can kind of go back to that hunger analogy again, right? Because it would be like, “I really want to eat. I really want eating to happen. I really don’t like feeling hungry. I want to feel full.” So four o’clock in the afternoon we have this huge three course meal, and then we’re kind like, “Yes, I’ve caught up.” And then at eight o’clock or nine o’clock at night when everyone’s kind of already eating dinner, you’re still not eating dinner yet, you’re kind of sitting there, “Oh, I want to eat now, but I’m full.”

And it’s kind like that when we’re catching up on sleep. It can feel great at the time, “Yeah, I’m catching up on sleep.” Or, “I’ve just fallen asleep at four o’clock and my alarm’s gone off at five, I’m just going to sleep in until eight or nine o’clock.” Well, yeah, it can feel great at the time, but then we’re kind of setting ourselves up for difficulties later on.

Anne-Claire France:
Oh, absolutely. I actually look back on just my life in general in that I would tend to work all week and then I’d sleep in on Sundays. Till nine in the morning. And then looking back, I always wondered why I couldn’t fall asleep on Sunday night. Well, because my body had as much sleep as it needed. And is like, well… Then I’d have to get back on track before I ever had… This was before I ever had, quote, “insomnia”. I would not sleep well on Sunday nights because I would sleep in on Sunday mornings. So another two and two together.

Martin Reed:
And sometimes it’s worth it, right? It is just like everything that helps us live a rich and meaningful life tends to come with some downsides and some difficult stuff, and sometimes it’s worth it. Sometimes we’ll be like, “Yeah, I want to have a lie in on Saturday or Sunday. That helps me live the life I want to live. It might lead to some sleep disruption on the next night, but I’m okay with that.” And that’s fine. It’s just being aware of the fact that our choices that we make, they’re going to have consequences. And it’s down to us as individuals, we are the expert on ourselves to know if that’s a trade off we’re okay with. And if we are, then fine. There’s no need to change anything.

Anne-Claire France:
Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. But I did make that connection. I laughed about it actually. Went, well… Oh, well, that was fine.

Martin Reed:
When we are dealing with chronic insomnia, there can be so many insights to be gained from reflecting back on what our approach to sleep was before it all seemed so difficult. I think there’s so many valuable snippets of information from our own experience that we can use to our advantage there. Because when we are really caught up in the struggle, the brain’s looking out for us and it’s just laser focused on fixing the problem. And it’s that trying to fix the problem, which is often what gets us caught up in that quicksand, caught up in the struggle. And the more we try, the more we keep sinking. If we are able to reflect back, “Well, how did I approach this before?” Whether that was one year, 10 years, 50 years ago, we might be able to get some little insights there that can help us as we move forward.

You talked about you were implementing the sleep restriction or the sleep window. So what was that actually like? Because it’s one thing to talk about, “All right, I’m not going to go to bed before a certain time. I’m going to get out of bed no matter what at say, five o’clock or six o’clock in the morning.” Whatever your lifestyle is, the time that works for you. Let’s just kind of go back to night one. And you kind of set this up for yourself. What did that look like in practice? Was it something that you found really easy to do? Did you find that you were immediately just falling asleep as soon as your head hit the pillow and just sleeping right through the night? What was that actual experience of implementation like?

Anne-Claire France:
Oh, no. It was challenging. It was challenging. And that was one of the first things where I said, I need to be willing to commit myself to do this because I knew that it was probably going to take some time for something to happen. So no, that first night I was probably awake the whole night. And so I just told my husband, here’s going to be what’s going on. And so it was helpful that he was very supportive of all this. But it was probably, I’d say about a week went by of it being pretty tough. But I hung in.
And then I would make sure that of course, that I didn’t take any naps. Even though I got, quote, “sleepy” during the day. I was not going to take any naps because I didn’t want to use up if you will, some of my sleep drive. I wanted it to build up as much as possible. And I remember, believe it or not, I remember being so excited when I got a full hour of sleep. And I mean, that was a big improvement. And then it was an hour and a half and then two hours and then three hours, and I would have awakenings, but I would fall back asleep.

So I did that for quite some time and realized that the whole idea of needing, of this… There’s a lot of advisement out there that you need to have seven to nine hours of sleep, well, that’s a recommendation, but however for me, I seem to do just fine at six. And so when I was at six, I was very, very happy to get six hours. And again, I would wake up during the night. That was fine. And then go back to sleep. But over time, my sleep time has increased. But I was at six hours for a long time and felt great with that. I mean, my body felt great. I was clearheaded, the whole nine yards. But as I’ve managed the arousal part that we talked about earlier, I’ve extended my sleep hours by at least… Oftentimes it’s seven to eight now. Again with awakenings. Just awakenings. Yeah.

Martin Reed:
And have you found that, going back to that change of approach to the arousal, the thoughts, the feelings, all that stuff that often comes with wakefulness, as you’ve become more skilled in responding to that in a different way when it shows up, do you find that when wakefulness shows up, when you’re just awake during the night, you have kind of a different relationship with that wakefulness now?

Anne-Claire France:
Yes, yes, very much. First off, what was important was realizing that having awakenings was very, very normal. And that just with the cycle of sleep, you’re probably going to wake up most likely every 90 minutes or so, whether you know it or not. So just knowing that that was a physiological normal thing to do was very helpful. And then the fact that I had been sleeping and then waking, before I would’ve gotten a little panicky about, oh, no, I’m now awake and I’m not going to be able to go to sleep, and oh, my gosh. And things of that nature.

Whereas it evolved into, oh, this is just a normal thing for me to wake up and then just enjoy the wakefulness. I actually said, oh, I can think about some nice things while I’m here. Or maybe do another little mind exercise for myself just for enjoyment or something like that. And as I got more and more skilled at that then my awakenings were more on the lines of I’d wake up, but I’d feel sleepy still as opposed to being really wake. But I know I was still sleepy and then I would fall back to sleep pretty quickly.

Martin Reed:
Maybe it comes down to that willingness, like you’ve mentioned a few times. When we are more willing to experience the wakefulness or when we are more willing to experience the thoughts and feelings that come with being a human being, especially the difficult ones, we become less responsive to those things when they show up. So like you just mentioned, maybe in the past you would wake during the night and kind of the brain would start flashing that red light and the sirens would be going off, here’s the wakefulness, everything’s going to be a disaster now. And then you’re all tense.

Compared to when we are more willing to experience the wakefulness it’s kind of, we wake up, “Oh, there’s that wakefulness.” There’s no more alarm bells. There’s no sirens going off. But I think it’s one thing to say, “Oh, I need to be willing to experience this.” It’s quite another to actually be willing because it is unpleasant, especially when we’re really caught up in the struggle. If someone’s listening to this and just thinking to themselves, “Willing to experience insomnia, no. I don’t want to be willing to experience insomnia because it’s awful. How am I going to be willing to experience something that is this unpleasant?” I’m putting you on the spot a bit here, but what would you say to someone who’s feeling that way? Because I think most people with chronic insomnia are like, “No, I’m completely unwilling to experience this because it’s very unpleasant.” How do we get from there to this place of more willingness?

Anne-Claire France:
I think part of it is to accept that everyone, whether you’re quote, an “insomniac” or not, everyone’s going to have wakefulness. It’s not just unique to folks who think who have insomnia per se. And everyone, even good sleepers, if you will, are going to have difficult nights. I mean, that’s just the way it is. So there’s a lot of company out there, and being awake is really just a natural part of the 24 hour cycle in our lives. And I think that some people think that acceptance or willingness to do something is similar to resignation. And I think resignation is when you feel defeated and there’s nothing you can do about this. Whereas acceptance and willingness is, “I can do something different. Perhaps I can learn some things with a coach or something like that to help me get the potential to promote my sleep.”

So the willingness to be awake and play around with that in a good way, in a positive way, and learn from that is all part of that whole exercise to get to where you want to be. And it’s really the positive end as opposed to, “There’s something wrong with me. There’s nothing I can do about this.”
But if you can transition that to being willing and accepting, then that’s a, “No, I can do something about this and reach my potential.”

Martin Reed:
What was the process like in terms of progress? Everyone always wants… As human beings, we always want to kind of measure our progress against other people. And I always try and steer people away from that because especially with sleep, it’s something we can’t directly control. So we’re kind of trying to make something happen that we can’t control because someone else was able to make something happen that they couldn’t control on a certain time period, and we’re trying to match that.

But I think what can be helpful is recognizing that progress is very rarely linear. It usually comes with ups and downs. And progress is really different from person to person. I think what’s more useful is just focusing on what we can control, which is the practice. Practice rather than progress. Because if we are practicing a new, more workable approach to all this difficult stuff, then the progress will take care of itself. And we can’t control the progress. We can only control the practice. So when you were implementing all these changes that we’ve been talking about, what was that like for you in terms of progress? Were you finding that each night was just better than the last and that you were just kind of on this straight line uphill where everything was always getting better, or were there some bumps in the roads and some ups and downs and difficulties too?

Anne-Claire France:
Oh, yeah. It was anything but linear. And I’ll say that when I graduated from your course, it wasn’t like everything was hunky dory and we were all done. I thought, I now have the tools, the skills, the information I need along with everything else I’ve been doing to do what I need to do to try to make improvements. And so things would go well, then I’d have a setback for a few days or whatever. The big difference for me, that was so important was that when I had a setback, I didn’t panic. It was really more of a, oh, I know what’s happening. Here’s what I need to do.

And so the two years since I graduated from your class to now were much better than before. But there was sort of that up and down, but my whole attitude about it was completely different. That, well, I know what to do. I know exactly what’s happening. I can do this or that or pay more attention to this or that. And that didn’t mean I had to disrupt my life or anything like that. It was really more of a, oh, yeah, I forgot and I got a little lazy on some things. For example, I might’ve slept in or I took a nap or whatever. I could attribute things. And so it was really more of a, I know what to do now when I do have those setbacks. And it’s just been within the last few months or so where I haven’t had any setbacks whatsoever, without something that I could attribute it to.

Like there was a very loud noise or something that was going on wherever I was sleeping. But it’s not a linear process. I think everyone who does something like this it’s, their progress, if you will, is going to be unique to them. And to try not to compare yourself to anybody else. As long as you have the tools and you can just go back and refer to them, reference them. I think one of the great things that you do for folks is you allow everyone to keep all the material that you had so you can go back and listen. And then of course you have podcasts and various other things for people to listen to. So just refresh your memory and your skills and put them into practice and it’ll work out.

Martin Reed:
How long do you think it took for you to get to a point where sleep wasn’t something you were just kind of endlessly struggling with? It wasn’t kind of on your mind, crowding out all the other things that you wanted to think about or pay attention to, and you just felt better able to live your life independently of what happened at night when just your general relationship changed and you felt, “Yeah, I don’t feel like this is a struggle anymore. I might still have some difficult nights, but it’s not something that’s kind of consuming my attention, my life.”

Anne-Claire France:
I would say at least six months. It was probably at least six months. And my attitude about it really… And again, it wasn’t a sudden attitude change. It was really an evolution in my attitude change, in that, oh, this is just… And my perception of the insomnia part of me was, oh, that’s just that. And I don’t have to worry about it. It’ll come and go. And I would even… People if I was on vacation or visiting with people and they’d say, “How’d you sleep?” And I said, well, for me, I don’t sleep like everybody else, but that’s just me. And it’s just kind of normal.

And I didn’t attribute me being an insomniac anymore. It was really more of a, my sleep patterns are evolving over time. And what’s normal for me is not going to be normal for somebody else. And so my normality, if you will, my normal state has evolved as well as I think my body has now become accustomed to getting what it needs as opposed to me saying, here’s what I want. And me paying more attention to that. And sometimes I’m not sleepy. So if I’m not sleepy, I’m not going to try to go to sleep. But if I’m sleepy well… Like in the middle of the day, I’m going to do my best maybe to have a cat nap for 10 minutes as opposed to sleeping for an hour. Being respectful of the sleep drive that I’d like to kick in later on. But it took me a while to get to that point.

Martin Reed:
As human beings, we always want to make progress really quickly. We always want to develop new skills immediately, but they require work and effort and ups and downs. It’s just a normal part of the journey. So I think it’s helpful to hear from other people what that process was like for them. Because it’s really easy to hold ourselves to these impossibly high standards.

And it’s so ironic that we can hold ourselves to these high standards, but we can’t even directly control reaching those standards when it comes to sleep. Because there’s no magic sleep switch that we can find hidden away in our brain that we can just activate upon command. So it’s really helpful to just hear the more realistic experience from people like you coming on, saying, “Yes, there are ups and downs. It’s not easy, is difficult. It requires commitment, it requires willingness. And it requires time. It’s not a quick fix. It might take months, it might take even longer. It’s ongoing practice.” And it’s that ongoing practice which really is the key because it’s so easy to get disheartened and the brain is telling you, “This isn’t going to work. Give up. Go back to all the old stuff that you know from experience doesn’t work, but maybe try that stuff even harder.” So it’s really easy to get pushed off track. And so it is a case of just keeping on going. Persevering.

Anne-Claire France:
Yeah, it really is like a journey. It’s like a journey. And included in that journey is you have to say goodbye to some old habits. And we know about habit formation. That’s very challenging to change, something that’s a habit. Because we just do that without even thinking. And you do your habits without even giving it much thought, but realizing that something that could be impacting your sleep is a habit. And you’re like, “Oh, my, that’s something I have to change.” And that can be tough at first, but when you realize the benefit of that, then all the other habits that you may have to change, you’re like, “Okay, I understand why I may have to make those changes.” But yeah, it’s a journey I think. And I am more attuned to a potential habit that might creep in. I’m like, oh, I know where this is going to go. So maybe not.

Martin Reed:
So Anne-Claire, I really appreciate the time you’ve taken out your day to come on and just share your experience. I do have one last question for you, which would be great if you could answer, because I think you’d feel a bit left out if I didn’t ask you because I tend to ask this question or something similar to it to every guest. So here we go. It’s this. If someone with chronic insomnia is listening, they feel as though they’ve just tried everything, that they’re beyond help, that they’ll just never be able to move away from that struggle with sleep, with insomnia. What would you say to them?

Anne-Claire France:
I think I’d say, be willing to step back and learn about what sleep really is all about. That it is a natural state. And most likely the reason why you’re having struggles is because you are doing things that are disrupting your natural state. And if you can learn about what all those things are as well as what promotes the natural state, then everyone has potential. And the best way to do that is not to try to figure it out all yourself, but perhaps reach out to someone like yourself to say, “Here are the tried and true types of things that you can do, and I’m willing to help you along. And ensure that you can reach your potential.” But be willing to be patient. You have to be patient and make the commitment to make those sometimes large, but often small changes that can add up in the end.

Martin Reed:
That’s great. Well, I think that’s an excellent note to end on. So thanks again for taking the time out of your day to come onto the podcast Anne-Claire.

Anne-Claire France:
You’re welcome. It was my pleasure.

Martin Reed:
Thanks for listening to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. If you’re ready to move away from struggling with insomnia and toward living the life you want to live, I would love to help. You can get started right now by enrolling in my online course or you can book my phone coaching package. My online course runs for six weeks. It will help you make changes that can create better conditions for sleep, it will help you identify and get rid of any behaviors that might be making sleep more difficult, and it will help you respond to insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it in a more workable way. You can work through the course in two ways. You can choose the self-coaching option and work through it by yourself with the support of an online forum that is available only to clients.

Martin Reed:
Or, you can choose to add one-on-one email coaching and work through the course with me by your side. With the one-on-one coaching option, you get unlimited email access to me for eight weeks, starting from the day you enroll. Any time you have a question or concern, any time you are unsure about anything, any time you want to focus on the challenges you face or any difficulties that show up, you can email me and I will be there to coach and support you. You can get the course and start right now at insomniacoach.com.

Martin Reed:
With the phone coaching package, we start with a one-hour call (voice only or video — your choice) and come up with an initial two-week plan that will help you create better conditions for sleep and practice moving away from struggling with insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it. You get unlimited email access to me for two weeks after the call and a half-hour follow-up call at the end of the two weeks. You can book the phone coaching package at insomniacoach.com/phone.

Martin Reed:
I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Insomnia Coach Podcast. I’m Martin Reed, and as always, I’d like to leave you with this important reminder — you can sleep.

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Jessy experienced sleep disruption due to the stress of COVID and the breakup of her community. Initially, she found it difficult to fall asleep. Then she started waking during the night and found it hard to get back to sleep.

As her sleep got progressively worse, Jessy started to feel scared and worried that she was losing control of her life.

She tried medication but it didn't help. She felt desperate and alone.

After finding the Insomnia Coach podcast, she found hope in the stories of others. That encouraged her to start taking her life back from insomnia, even while it was still present. She did more of what mattered. She moved away from struggling with her thoughts and feelings. She stopped trying to control sleep.

Today, Jessy considers her sleep to be normal and she feels that her experience with insomnia gave her the opportunity to recognize her own resilience and that gave her the confidence to move forward in life.

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After experiencing anxiety and panic attacks and not sleeping for 72 hours, Maria thought she had lost the ability to sleep. Medication wasn't working. She withdrew from life. She couldn't focus on anything other than sleep.

Feeling completely stuck, Maria changed her approach. Instead of trying to fight or avoid insomnia, she allowed it to show up whenever it chose. Instead of trying to fight or avoid the difficult thoughts and feelings that often come with insomnia, she allowed them to come and go as they pleased.

Maria also started to do more of the things that mattered to her, even when insomnia was present and even when her mind was telling her she couldn't leave the house. All these actions stripped insomnia of its power and influence and allowed Maria to redirect her energy and attention away from an ongoing struggle and toward living the life she wanted to live.

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Listen to the podcast episode (audio only)Leah’s insomnia showed up around puberty and was a consistent presence throughout her teenage years. As an adult, Leah found that insomnia would often come and go in response to the stress and anxiety that comes with being a human being — until it showed up and stuck around for several weeks. What that happened, Leah found it harder to be the person she wanted to be and live the life she wanted to live. Sleeping pills no longer seemed to be the solution and she found herself really struggling.

Like most people who struggle with chronic insomnia, Leah felt stuck. And that was because so many of the things she did to try to fix her sleep and deal with all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with insomnia just weren’t working. They weren’t getting her where she wanted to be. The more she tried, the more difficult it all became.

So Leah decided to pursue a different approach. She moved away from trying to control sleep. She stopped chasing after sleep. She stopped putting pressure on herself to make sleep happen. She would remind herself that her body knew how to sleep and so it was pointless to put effort into sleep. Leah also worked on detaching herself from her thoughts — with ongoing practice she was able to become more of an observer of her thoughts and remain more present when they swept in and tried to push her around.

Leah also realized that canceling plans and staying home after difficult nights didn’t make things any better. So, she committed to going about each day, independently of sleep — and she started to notice that even when she felt exhausted she could still do things that mattered and she could still focus on things other than sleep — even if only for a moment. Leah found that by committing to actions that kept her moving toward the life she wanted to live she was able to start freeing herself from all the mental chatter she was experiencing.

Leah’s life is no longer controlled by how she sleeps or by the thoughts her mind generates. Sleep now feels more natural and all the energy that was once consumed by an ongoing struggle with insomnia is now being used to do more of the things that matter to her. Things that help Leah live the life she wants to live, independently of sleep.

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Martin Reed:
Welcome to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. My name is Martin Reed. I believe that by changing how we respond to insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it, we can move away from struggling with insomnia and toward living the life we want to live.Martin Reed:
The content of this podcast is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. The statements and opinions expressed by guests are their own and are not necessarily endorsed by Insomnia Coach LLC. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied.

Martin Reed:
Okay, so Leah, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to come onto the podcast.

Leah Werner:
I’m excited to be here. It’s nice to be on the other side of it.

Martin Reed:
Yeah, you’re not the first person to say that. Someone finds the podcast and then one day they’re a guest themselves, and I think that’s the ultimate success story. Let’s get started talking about your experience and your story. Can you tell us about when your sleep problems first began and what you think may have caused those initial issues with sleep?

Leah Werner:
I first started having insomnia issues in puberty. I was probably 12 or 13 where I would toss and turn until the wee hours of the morning and be so upset and anxious that I would wake up my dad and he would walk me back to my bedroom. His mantra always was, “Even if you’re not sleeping, your body is resting.” That was his mantra. It was pretty much a consistent issue all through my teenage years and then kind of cycling in and out of it as an adult, definitely impacted by stress and anxiety and just kind of the goings-ons in life. It’s not an everyday thing, but it’s definitely been a struggle on and off since I was about 12. What I learned from you, Martin, is that some people are just predisposed to it. I don’t think it was any one given thing when I was 12 years old or 13, but when I learned that from working with you, it really helped, like, this is just kind of how I’m wired and I’ve got to kind of learn to live with it.

Martin Reed:
Yeah. What prompted you to start working with me or to decide, “I need to take action”? Because it sounds like you experienced lots of periods of insomnia throughout your whole life. Were you going through a particularly difficult patch? What was that motivation to try something different?

Leah Werner:
I was going through what I would call an acute patch in that it wasn’t just one or two nights, but weeks of insomnia and my functionality was severely diminished. I wasn’t able to think at work, my emotional threshold was incredibly low. I was really, really struggling. I was all-consumed every day with, “Am I going to sleep, am I going to sleep?” I knew that just popping sleeping pills, and I’ve tried a million different varieties, over the counter and prescribed, didn’t necessarily guarantee a night’s sleep and I knew I needed a different approach. That is when I found your podcast and then checked out your website. It was just several weeks of just pure misery.

Martin Reed:
Yeah. What was sleep like for you at that time? Was it just every night, just kind of different, just lousy? Or was it, “I’m always having difficulty falling asleep” or “I’m always having difficulty staying asleep, waking, finding it hard to fall back to sleep”? What was the difficulty?

Leah Werner:
The difficulty was it was taking me hours and hours and hours to fall asleep, if I fell asleep at all. Sometimes I experienced the waking up in the middle of the night insomnia after falling asleep pretty easily. But it doesn’t trigger the anxiety and kind of the train of negative thinking that just tossing and turning for five, six hours and then obsessively checking the clock, which I don’t do anymore, which is really helpful. That was that acute episode, just either getting one to two hours or no sleep for weeks on end. That’s what led me to you.

Martin Reed:
Yeah. Since you had such a long history with insomnia, lots of experience with it, I’m guessing that over the years, lots of different things that you tried. You already mentioned that you tried the medication route, sometimes helpful, sometimes not, maybe over the long term wasn’t proving to have the effect that you wanted. What other kind of things had you tried in a bid to kind of fix things and to put this insomnia behind you?

Leah Werner:
I tried praying about it, no lie, straight up, and I’m not the most spiritual or religious person, but I was desperate for help. I tried making myself as exhausted as possible with working out really hard, things of that nature. Mostly my go-to was sleeping drugs that, as I said, sometime worked. More often than not, it just made me super hungover the next day, which in and of itself on top of the fatigue and the side effects from just being exhausted and then being drugged over top of it and hungover, made life even worse.

Martin Reed:
Yeah. I remember when we were working together, one of the first changes you made was connected to the amount of time you were spending in bed, or just allotting for sleep each night. I’m curious to hear in your own words more about that change and what that experience was like for you.

Leah Werner:
Well, I thought you were crazy, Martin, because people who suffer from insomnia, all you want to do is go to bed and sleep. I believe it was 11:30, you told me to go to bed at 11:30 and wake up at 5:45 or 5:30, and I was like, “But that’s hardly any time in bed. This isn’t going to work. This isn’t going to work.” It was a pretty significant mental lift to get on board with you with that technique specifically. But I was so desperate because obviously my other attempts at trying to alleviate this chronic problem weren’t working. So I was like, “Okay.” So my whole family would go to bed, my wife would go to bed, my kids in bed, and there I am on the couch 10:00, 10:30, 11:00.
By the time I did go to bed, my eyes were so heavy and that is when it really started to change things for me because I was tossing and turning a little bit, but it was not five, six hours of it. It was much more condensed, because I had built that sleep drive, to use your term, throughout the day and kind of pushing the limits of my exhaustion so that when I did go to bed it was much more fruitful. But I thought you were crazy.

Martin Reed:
You’re not the first person to tell me that. It does sound completely illogical, doesn’t it, when we really want more sleep to happen so we spend more time in bed and then we hear either from me or from somewhere else, “Well, how about we spend less time in bed?” It’s just the complete opposite of where we normally go. Like you said, all we are trying to do here is more closely match the amount of time we spend in bed to our current sleep situation, because we probably know, like you probably knew from your own experience, that the amount of time you were spending in bed up to that point wasn’t usually generating more sleep, only leading to more nighttime wakefulness. So what we’re doing is we’re just reducing all that opportunity for long periods of nighttime wakefulness. We’re helping to build that natural sleep drive because you’re out of bed for longer.
We’re also preventing you from chasing after sleep, putting more effort into sleep, because now you’ve got this earliest possible bedtime, so you’re not going to be going to bed earlier to chase after sleep. You’ve got a kind of consistent morning out of bed time, so you’re not going to be… Well, you still might, but you’ve got this plan in place to not then chase after sleep in the morning too by sleeping in. It’s like all these different parts of a jigsaw can kind of just fall into place just through that behavior change, that new habit of just allotting less time for sleep, which for most people is going to bed later or maybe getting out of bed earlier in the morning.

Leah Werner:
It really does feel like a jigsaw because that wasn’t the only piece of it when the instruction to get out of bed if you’re tossing and turning also really, really helped because it mitigates the frustration that starts to build in your head. Instead of just being continually frustrated and that heightened arousal getting more and more exacerbated, you’re like, “Oh, I’m feeling that frustration. That means I need to get out of bed.” And I would get out of bed, and at first it was a little bit of a leap, like, “I don’t want to get out of bed.” But I would go downstairs, the house was to myself. I would only read, I wouldn’t watch TV. I didn’t want any more stimuli coming at me. When I started to feel my eyes getting heavy, I would go back upstairs. Sometimes I did that five times a night, but I was so desperate to overcome this or have new tools to work with it that I committed myself to it. That was the other piece of the jigsaw, to use your expression, that really started to change things for me.

Martin Reed:
Yeah. Do you remember how much time you used to spend in bed or allot for sleep before you kind of changed tact there and got closer to six, six and a half hours? Do you remember what it was before that?

Leah Werner:
It was 9:30 to like 7:00, which is crazy. I mean, that’s crazy. It’s funny, since working with you, I naturally go to bed later now by an hour, hour and a half, so that’s an interesting outcome that I wasn’t expecting. But way too long in bed, especially when it only is exacerbating my anxiety and kind of the train, the compulsive thinking about how, “This isn’t working, this isn’t working.” That was truly very helpful.

Martin Reed:
Yeah, so that was a very big change for you to make, and like you just touched upon, you thought I was crazy. Your mind’s generating all these thoughts and feelings like, “This makes no sense. How’s this ever going to work? This is going to be a disaster.” But you did it anyway and I’m curious how. How were you able to just commit to making that change when probably almost every sinew in your body was like, “This makes no sense. How is this going to work? I’m going to be depriving myself of all these hours, opportunity for sleep.” How did you go about just making that change regardless?

Leah Werner:
I think what helped me is listening to your podcast and listening to other people’s experience with implementing these same techniques and how fruitful they were, reading the testimonials of people that have worked with you on your website. It gave me the inspiration and helped me dig in. Once again, I was really looking for answers that were sustainable that I could take with me anywhere I go. That was not about sleep medication because it consistently disappointed. It just kind of doesn’t work. The support group helped as well, just providing that inspiration that really was like, “I’m going to work this to the fullest extent possible,” because I really wanted some sustainable answers.

Martin Reed:
Another technique that you touched upon earlier was that process of getting out of bed. So, I think there’s a few different ways people can implement them. Some people find it helpful one way, other people another way. Some people like to kind of estimate chunks of time, 15 minutes, 20 minutes, half an hour, and then use that as a cue to just get out of bed and do something else. For other people it’s just like, “It’s okay for me to be awake in bed for as long as that feels comfortable. As soon as it starts to feel really unpleasant, I’m just going to do something more appealing instead, because I can’t control sleep, can’t control how I think or how I feel, but I can control what I do. If being in bed doesn’t feel good, I’m tossing and turning, struggling, I’ll just do something that makes that time that I’m already spending awake anyway more pleasant.” It sounds like that was something that you found helpful. Did you find it helpful right at the start? A lot of people tend to find it’s a bit of a drag at first…

Leah Werner:
Oh, it’s a drag.

Martin Reed:
… they have to get through that mental process of, again, “How am I going to sleep if I get out of bed or do something active during the night?” But that’s not our goal. Our goal is just to make that wakefulness more pleasant so that we are not fighting, trying to make sleep happen. I’m just curious to hear a bit more about your experience with that and when maybe you felt that it was proving to be helpful.

Leah Werner:
Yeah, it was hard, because your body is telling you to lay there, but what I learned is that the longer I toss and turn, the higher my anxiety goes, the higher my obsession with falling asleep goes, knowing full well that when I get to that super-duper heightened sense of super arousal, that there’s no way on God’s green earth I’m going to fall asleep. So being able to reflect on the connection between excessive tossing and turning, making my mental and emotional state worse is actually working against me in terms of my ability to naturally fall asleep, recognizing that this is something I can’t control and my body is meant to fall asleep.
Making those connections really helped me start to piece together how what I was doing was actually working against me, and that only reinforced my commitment to getting out of bed. And I was covering up every single clock in the house, which in and of itself is an amazing technique. You don’t need to know what time it is, you don’t need to know what time it is, it doesn’t matter, and I’m truly on board with that now. But getting up and doing something a little bit more pleasurable, as you say, is so helpful because it starts to decrease the mental chatter, it starts to decrease the anxiety. Yeah, you might not want to be sitting on your couch at 3:00 in the morning, but you definitely do not want to be tossing and turning in bed obsessing about sleeping either.

Martin Reed:
Yeah, and I think that’s the comparison, right? It’s like we don’t want to be on the couch at night, but we don’t want to be tossing and turning either, so we kind of just choose the better option, so “What’s most appealing to me at the current time? I’m lying in bed, tossing and turning. I’ve got a choice. I can stay here tossing and turning, hope the sleep comes, doesn’t sound pleasant. Or I can get out of bed and do something else instead.” That probably doesn’t sound pleasant either, but maybe that’s a little bit more of an appealing option. If it’s not more appealing to do something else, then by all means just stay in bed, right? We’re just looking to give ourselves the opportunity to make that wakefulness more pleasant. That’s really all it comes down to, because that’s the only thing we can control.

Leah Werner:
Now if I start tossing and turning and I… There’s always like a moment where the anxiety and the starting to think about sleep clicks in. I know that is the exact moment I need to get out of bed, the exact moment. Because you can flip-flop for an hour and be like, “Yeah, okay, it’s taking longer to fall asleep tonight.” Most times that’s kind of the attitude that I have now. I’m kind of at peace with nighttime wakefulness, but the second I sense my anxiety’s starting to rise and the mental chatter of “I’m never going to fall asleep” starts to come across my mind’s eye, I’m like, “Oh, it’s time to get out of bed, time to get out of bed.” Because I know it’s such a powerful tool, it’s no longer a leap to commit to that when that does happen, which is very infrequently now.

Martin Reed:
You talked about covering up the clocks and just not checking the time at night. You said that was quite empowering. Was that something that you did before we started to work together or was that a change that you made once we were working together?

Leah Werner:
Well, sometimes I would turn the clock around, but then I swear to God, at 3:00 in the morning I’d be like, “What time is it?” And I’d turn it right back, so it was a little bit hit or miss, but I wouldn’t cover up all, like the microwave clock, the clock on the stove, the clock in the living room. Me and my wife every night while I was working with you and after would cover up every single clock in the house, so that when I would come downstairs after tossing and turning and noting the anxiety and mental chatter rising, when I would walk through the house, there was no reference to what time it was. That alone frees up so much negative mental chatter because there’s kind of no context. It’s dark outside, the house is quiet. There’s kind of no sense about what time it is leading up to when the birds start chirping. I don’t do that anymore, but I was all hands on deck with that. “I do not want to know what time it is anywhere in this house,” and stay committed to that for a long time.

Martin Reed:
Did you find that was an easy change to make? I ask that because I’ve had clients who say, “I just cannot make that change. I just can’t imagine what it would be like not to know the time during the night.” For lots of people, it can be a really hard change and they feel like it’s going to lead to more mental chatter, “Because now my brain’s going to be like, ‘but what time is it?’ Now my brain’s just going to be fixated on wondering what the time is.” I’m just curious if that was something you experienced or you were just like, “No, I’m not going to-

Leah Werner:
It was liberating. The hardest thing was the going to bed later and the getting out of bed, but I just committed to it, and then we adapt easily, I think, after a while, humans do. So then I was like, “Oh, this is what I do.” But covering up the clocks was liberating. I did not struggle with that at all.

Martin Reed:
Well, you really went all in there looking for every single clock and just covering it all up.

Leah Werner:
Oh, I wasn’t playing, Martin. I wasn’t playing.

Martin Reed:
You weren’t. People listening to this, some people might think, “Yeah, I can get behind that. I’m going to go and every night now I’m going to cover everything up.” Other people might be like, “No, that sounds like too much.” I don’t think it matters. I think it comes down to the intent. If we’re actively seeking out the time at night, that might not be a helpful behavior because it just leads to what I call those mental gymnastics. Now your brain is thinking, “All right, how much sleep have I got?” Or “How long have I been awake? How much time do I have left before my alarm goes off?” All that stuff. All because we’ve checked the time. That’s the usual outcome in my experience of checking the time during the night. The best outcome is probably neutral, just has no effect on us.

Leah Werner:
Right. There’s no positive outcome.

Martin Reed:
Yeah, I’m inclined to agree. I just think that’s just one of these small changes we can make, that for some people can sound a bit scary, but can be worth experimenting with just not checking the time, not seeking out the time. You don’t have to necessarily block every single source of the time out. If you think that’s helpful, go for it. If not, if that sounds like a bit too much work, it’s just intent. It’s just that seeking out the time, let’s not seek out the time. Maybe let’s just put our alarm clock or our phone on the other side of the room so we’re not tempted to reach out for it. If we get out of bed during the night, let’s not walk past with laser vision past the microwave.

Leah Werner:
It’s so true. It’s so true.

Martin Reed:
Or all the other stuff that has the time on. It can be really helpful, a really helpful change.

Leah Werner:
I think the other thing I learned is that the nights that you’re getting four hours of sleep or three or two or 30 minutes, I had nights that, or zero, then weighing in on how you’re feeling the next day, you really start to see the impacts of what we say is awful, categorically awful when you have insomnia. How I felt after four hours of sleep versus having no sleep are vastly different. Because of that, because now I have that awareness about how I feel emotionally and physically and how I can think at my job and perform on what people would categorically say is an awful night’s sleep, having an appreciation of the nuance of what nighttime wakefulness is and how much sleep you’re getting is, I think really helps you detach from the need to know the time.
Because if you have five hours left to sleep, I feel pretty good after a five-hour night of sleep now. You know what I mean? I think it helped me detach from the desire to know the time because I have a greater appreciation for the impacts of sleep on me or the impacts of wakefulness at night on me and appreciate how I really do feel okay somewhat and can function and experience joy and live my values, as you say, on what people would deem is not enough sleep, so it helped disconnect the desire to know the time.

Martin Reed:
Yeah, and that’s a great point because a clock doesn’t know when we’re sleepy. A clock doesn’t know when we’ve had enough sleep. A clock doesn’t know anything. All the clock knows is the time. The fact of the matter is we can’t really do anything in the middle of the night with that additional information. “Oh, it’s 2:00 AM.” What can we do with that? There’s nothing we can do with that. So why put ourselves through that? We’re kind of just setting ourselves up for more of the gymnastics, more of the difficult thoughts and the feelings, more of the sleep efforts. Perhaps if we just eliminate that as one piece of the jigsaw of insomnia, frees us up to maybe just do something more pleasant instead at night, rather than just watching that clock ticking endlessly all night long.

Leah Werner:
I strongly encourage that technique alone. It was really, really helpful.

Martin Reed:
Something else that I remember we were discussing when we were working together that’s related to that sleep drive, the idea that the longer we spend awake, the more we build sleep drive, and therefore the more likely sleep is going to happen, was the daytime naps. It’s something that a lot of people with insomnia struggle with. We either nap, get some sleep during the day, but then set ourselves up for some sleep disruption at night because of that lowered sleep drive, or we try and nap during the day, then maybe fine, we can’t nap, and then leads to more worry about our ability to sleep. I remember that you were taking some daytime naps.

Leah Werner:
All the time.

Martin Reed:
I think you were quite successful at those daytime naps as well. But that was something that you-

Leah Werner:
I was. I would pass out cold.

Martin Reed:
Yeah, but that was something that you wanted to move away from. I’m just curious to hear about your experience with that and the process of moving away from maybe a reliance or having the naps as a set part of your daily routine.

Leah Werner:
That was hard to give up because I’m a great napper, which is ironic, right? It’s still sleep, but because it’s happening in the middle of the day, it’s easier, that makes no sense. That was hard to give up. I did carve out times just to be still, do some meditation, maybe do some stretching, something that was kind of disconnected from my day-to-day to have a built-in reprieve during the time that I would traditionally nap. But I will tell you that those days when I was getting no sleep the night before, I was like, “I just want a nap.” And I would hear your accent in my head, “Don’t do it. Don’t do the nap.” I think I cheated a couple days, I’m not going to lie, but overall, you really do start to see that connection with how you are during the day and its connection to building the sleep drive.
The advice to commit to your day, no matter what, the getting up and working out, the cooking for my family, these values that I hold dear really are connected to building my sleep drive and not napping, being connected to building my sleep drive. When I started to make those connections, it gave me kind of the commitment and the chutzpah to be like, “There’s nothing I want to do right now but sleep, but I would rather sleep tonight, so I’m going to commit to my day. I’m not going to nap.” All of that, all of those techniques start to decrease the mental chatter, which is the thing that actually exacerbates insomnia. You’re predisposed, that’s fine, but it’s the mental chatter that makes it so much more, so much bigger than it actually is.

Martin Reed:
One area where I can, in my own experience, just seeing when naps can become problematic is when we kind of use that time that we might otherwise use to do stuff that’s really important to us, like the values that you just mentioned. Regardless of whether those naps are successful or not, we might kind of block out that hour in our day that we might be able to spend doing things that are really important to us that move us towards the kind of life we want to live. But because we are so kind of desperate maybe to catch up on sleep or to chase after sleep, we kind of substitute that time to lie down, either try and sleep or to sleep. Sometimes that can end up moving us away from the kind of life you want to live, which doesn’t usually have a good outcome over the longer term.

Leah Werner:
Definitely, definitely. If you’re not successful at napping, then the negative train starts in your head, “Well, if I’m not going to be able to nap at 2:00, I’m definitely not going to be asleep at 10:00.” Then you start the obsession about sleep and by the time 10:00 rolls around, you’re so filled with anxiety how you’re never going to… I would literally think I’m never going to sleep again, which now looking back seems absurd, but when I was in the thick of it, it feels like gospel truth. It can totally backfire. The napping and not being able to sleep while you’re napping can totally backfire and make the nighttime desire to sleep all the more difficult to attain.

Martin Reed:
And I’m keen to talk about all those thoughts and those feelings and all the emotions that come with insomnia because they can be a really big, maybe even the number one source of struggle. Like every human being, you yourself, you found that your mind, just as you touched upon, it would wander away from the present, just like it loves to do. It either looks back on previous nights or previous days, thinks about what the next night might be like or what the next day might be like. Of course this can make the days more difficult because we’ve got a mind that just seems like it just doesn’t want to focus, it wants to worry, it wants to ruminate. The same thing for night times as well, it wants to worry and ruminate and that doesn’t feel good.
So we end up putting pressure on ourselves to sleep so they go away or we put pressure on ourselves to try and fight, to try and get rid of all those difficult thoughts and feelings, and all of these things tend to make sleep more difficult, tend to make those thoughts, feelings, and emotions more powerful. I’m curious to hear how you changed your relationship with your mind, how you managed to bring it back when it would wander away, and how you changed your relationship with all the difficult thoughts and those feelings that come with insomnia.

Leah Werner:
That has been the biggest hurdle to overcome. All those tools and tricks and techniques you taught me were so helpful. But the thing that has really spoken to my long term success is that, and I swear, and this sounds so trite almost, your mantra that your body knows how to sleep totally started switching it up for me. Firstly, I never thought of it in that way, ever. When I would talk to my doctor about my insomnia and be struggling and she’s just tossing medication at me, those words were never spoken, nothing like that was ever said to me. It seems so intuitive now, but it really blew my mind, so I literally used it as my mantra. “Your body knows how to sleep, your body knows how to sleep, your body’s meant to sleep, your body knows how to sleep.”
So I would start, when I would have the thought pop up into my mind’s eye, “You’re never going to sleep again,” which was consistent, and I’ve heard other people voices on your podcast, I immediately went to the thought, “My body knows how to sleep,” to the point now, and it was a discipline to conjure it up. It’s a mantra, you have to be intentional about it. But now, like last night I had kind of a, eh, night sleeping. It took me a while to fall asleep and I started to have some negative thoughts and immediately I had the “your body knows how to sleep” and I’m like, “Oh, right, right.” It immediately brought me into the moment. You gave me some other kind of mindfulness techniques about how to drop into your physical body, so you’re kind of shutting off your mind.
You’re like, “Let me feel my toes and my ankles and move all the way up and kind of check in with how my body is feeling and kind of move through that kind of meditation, if you will.” Those two things really helped me get out of my head. Now that the mantra is so ingrained in me that, it’s almost like I have created a new channel in my brain that now my thoughts are, “Of course my body knows how to sleep. I know how to sleep. I’m going to fall asleep naturally,” has really helped make the radio of insomnia dissipate quite dramatically.

Martin Reed:
Yeah. I think, now, correct me if I’m wrong, I’m just curious to hear your thoughts on this, why you feel that just reminding yourself that “my body knows how to sleep” seems to be helpful. Do you think it’s maybe because it helps you just remember or identify the fact that you don’t have to put effort into sleep because after all, your body knows. You’re reminding yourself that your body knows how to sleep, therefore, “I don’t need to be involved in the process, I can kind of exactly untangle myself from all that effort.”

Leah Werner:
Insomniacs, myself included, we put a ton of effort into falling asleep, right? You’re like, “Okay, I’m not going to do blue screens. I’m going to make sure there’s no light in my room. I’m going to go to bed early. I’m going to cover myself in lavender oil,” whatever it is. There’s so much effort into controlling sleep, and I too was trying to control sleep. But that preoccupation with trying to control sleep makes sleep more elusive, so you’re actually working against yourself. So that mantra, “Your body knows how to sleep,” really flip that on its head, that it kind of took the pressure off. Yes, you still want to sleep. I still feel that way and I feel for everybody listening to this podcast, you do. You just want to sleep. You don’t want to be awake. You need it, you need it for so many different reasons, but taking that pressure off, that helped relieve that chatter.
There’s absolutely nothing I can do, aside from don’t drink a giant thing of coffee at nine o’clock at night. I mean, there are things you could do that will promote sleep or detract from sleep. But the sense of “I’m able to control this natural processee,” that mantra helped me release that belief and that belief, I didn’t know it was deeply entrenched in me that I kind of am responsible for this, so to speak. It helped me take that pressure off my mind and my emotional health, like, this is not something I can control.

Martin Reed:
Sleep doesn’t do well being micromanaged, just as us ourselves as human beings don’t respond well to micromanagement, right?

Leah Werner:
Amen, brother. Amen.

Martin Reed:
I remember one of my first jobs when I was a teenager, it was working at a travel agency and I would have to pack up all their brochures, all the holiday brochures advertising the resorts. But after they got printed, there was always new inserts that had to go on, new properties that had to go in, certain things that had to be photocopied. They had to be packaged all in a certain way. So I’d do my training. They’d say, “Okay, this is how you do it.” Seem pretty straightforward to me. Just leave me to go about it and I’ll just get it done. But it was like there was always someone over my shoulder, “Oh no, that wasn’t quite straight enough. That was the wrong… There’s a fold in that paper there. You can’t do that.” This person was putting all these rules and regulations. I struggled to even get five of those brochures in a box by the end of the day. Whereas if they’d have just left me to it, I probably could have got 500 in that box.
I think sleep’s the same way, when we’re trying to micromanage it. “You need to be falling asleep now” or “You can’t be waking up now, you can’t be thinking this, you can’t be doing that. That wasn’t a good sleep. Oh, this was a good sleep. Do that again.” When we try and micromanage sleep, what happens? It’s like me as a 16-year-old, I’m just getting overwhelmed in that travel agency and I’m not getting anything done. I think that’s what it comes down to with sleep.

Leah Werner:
Yeah, so true, so true. I’m so grateful for that mantra, and you probably wouldn’t even called it that, but I’m so grateful because that was one of the critical pieces of the puzzle that helped me kind of overcome the mental hurdle of insomnia, and that’s really what it’s about. It’s the mental hurdle of it.

Martin Reed:
Yes, I totally agree. I think that the biggest part of that hurdle is our struggle with it because the wakefulness doesn’t feel good, because the thoughts, the feelings, the emotions that come with it don’t feel good. As human beings, we don’t want stuff that doesn’t feel good near us, so we try and get rid of it. We try and fight with it. We try and avoid it, and that’s the struggle. That is the entire struggle. It’s our human desire to get rid of all the difficulty in our life. But unfortunately, we just cannot control sleep. We cannot control what we think. We cannot control how we feel. We cannot control our emotions. Probably can temporarily, read a joke book, we might laugh for a few minutes, but we’re talking about the long term.
If a thought keeps popping up in our head, the more we try and get rid of that thought, the more it’s just going to keep popping back. The more we try and feel happy and get rid of anxiety and worry, the more that worry and that anxiety is going to kind of push back and get more powerful and have more influence over our lives. It’s really about trying to recognize what we can control, what we can’t control, and just relieving ourselves, just withdrawing from that battle, that ongoing, endless exhausting struggle with all the stuff we can’t control, and just accepting that we can’t control that stuff. Not trying to kid ourselves. It sucks, we don’t want it to be here.

Leah Werner:
Oh yeah, it still sucks.

Martin Reed:
Yeah, but we know from experience that we can’t push it away and all that energy, if we just remove ourselves from that struggle, we get so tangled up in it, we free up all that energy to do something else. Even in the presence of all that struggle and all that pain, we might do something, for example, during the night, more pleasant. We might have a little bit more energy during the day to do stuff that matter to us because we’ve got more energy in reserve because we haven’t been engaged in a horse fighting duel all night with that thought and that worry and that anxiety. It’s still there, but now we’ve got more energy to do what matters, and so all that difficult stuff then has less influence over us.

Leah Werner:
Yeah. It’s interesting, committing to your day, regardless of how much sleep you got in and of itself is a really powerful technique. Because when I would cancel plans, I would take a nap, I would get depressed because I canceled plans and I wasn’t seeing my friends. Then my daytime focus was all about accommodating exhaustion, so then it would just reinforce the mental chatter throughout the day. My nighttime was about mental chatter around insomnia, anxiety around insomnia, and then canceling my day as much as I was allowed to cancel would do the exact same thing. Committing to your plans is a way to start freeing yourself from that mental chatter, because when you’re in the moment doing what you need to do about your day, the fun stuff, the professional stuff, the family stuff, I found myself…
I went to a happy hour with one of my favorite coworkers, and I had hardly gotten any sleep in days. This is when I was actively working with you. I remember there was a moment that I realized while I was talking to her that I forgot I was exhausted. I totally forgot. I forgot I was exhausted, I forgot I hadn’t slept in four days. And I was driving home that, and I was like, “That’s why Martin advises you to commit to your day because it gives you a reprieve from the mental chatter of insomnia.” That is so connected to me, to overcoming the compulsive thinking and the heightened state of arousal both day and night, if you just are like, “I can work out when I’m tired, I can do my job when I’m tired,” and not feeding the beast by accommodating all of what I need to do around the fact that I’m not sleeping.

Martin Reed:
Yeah, and it makes such a difference when we’re engaged in something, even when we don’t feel good, when there’s all this difficult stuff going on in our mind. And that’s where I think it can just be so helpful to just make that commitment, which I think it does take, and the effort that it can take to just commit to doing things. They don’t always have to be these huge milestones, but just doing things that are important to us during the day, no matter how big, no matter how small they are, and just giving ourselves that opportunity to just keep moving toward the life we want to live and give ourselves those opportunities to feel engaged, to feel enriched, to feel like we’re living the kind of life we want to live.

Leah Werner:
Exactly. Exactly. It’s so fascinating because it really is a multifaceted approach. I don’t think just using one of these techniques would have been the answer for me, but the combination of sleep restriction, my new favorite mantra, committing to my day, covering up the clocks, which I don’t do anymore, it was kind of like the perfect combo to really kind of change my brain and its interpretation of what it means to not sleep, which at the end of the day helped me sleep more. It’s so fascinating.

Martin Reed:
It really is. Yeah, I completely agree. Well, one thing you touched upon was something that you did during the nights when the mind was just kind of kicking off was to try and come back into your body. I’m curious to just hear a little bit more about that process, because I just know that people listening to this are going to be curious as soon as you said that. Can you just tell us a little bit more about that, how it works, what the goal is, what the purpose is?

Leah Werner:
Well, it’s a mindfulness meditation. I first learned about it years ago reading some Buddhist works by Pema Chödrön, and it really is, you’re laying there in bed and you’re totally attached to your thoughts. Those thoughts are not good. They’re not helping you relax, most definitely. They’re only contributing to that heightened state of arousal, which of course is counter to your ability to fall asleep. You have to get out of your head because it’s what’s going on in your head that’s actually keeping you awake.
So getting out of your head is the body scan, which is you can start at the top of your head or your toes, and you literally are like, “I feel my toes” or “I’m checking in with my toes” or “how do my toes feel” and then “how do my arches feel,” “how do my heels feel” and you don’t broad stroke it. You move up your body meticulously, “My calves, the back of my knees, my thighs, my hips.” You go through all the pieces and parts, getting up to the top of your head, and it should take some time, if you really break down every kind of piece and part of your body, just checking in. “How do I feel? How do I feel?”
Because of course the back of your heels likely feel just fine, right? It’s the head that is causing you the angst. It provides you the space between what you’re compulsively thinking about and what’s actually going on in your body, so that’s one technique. There’s some other techniques that I have found helpful where you picture your thoughts as clouds and your peace and equanimity is a blank blue sky. When you have a cloud, pass your mind’s eye, a thought past your mind’s eye, that, “I’m never going to sleep tonight.” You just like, “Oh, that’s a fear cloud.” And you start to disassociate who you really are from the thoughts that you generate, and I found the body scan and kind of the cloud blue sky metaphor meditation to be really helpful to help me start to disassociate this compulsive thinking from what was actually happening in the moment. What was actually happening in the moment is “I, Leah, am laying in bed, my body is laying in bed, my head is on a pillow.”
All the stuff going on in my head is not reality. It is not what’s really going on, it’s just compulsive thinking, and there’s a million other types out there. But it starts to create that separation between compulsive thinking and what the moment is actually presenting. That exercise and that awareness can be truly beneficial to all aspects of your life. This is the only moment we have. There’s no future, there’s no past. There’s no predicting my night’s sleep tonight based on two weeks of bad sleep. It’s like this is the only moment. Some of those mindfulness techniques I found very, very helpful.

Martin Reed:
Yeah, I think it’s important to recognize too, just from your description there, that your goal is never to control what your mind is doing, not to get rid of a thought or a feeling or an emotion. It’s just to bring you present and to recognize thoughts for what they are. We’re kind of the container of our thoughts. We’re not the thoughts themselves. So when you’re doing that muscle relaxation, there’s all this stuff going on in your mind, but at the same time, there’s still a body here that you have full control over and that you can bring your attention back to. At the same time, there’s all these thoughts that are being generated by the mind. We can’t control them, just like we can’t control a cloud. A cloud might come along, it might sit overhead for a while. It might be a really dark, scary cloud. Eventually it’ll move on. It might reform, might come back.
But it’s not about controlling our thoughts, it’s just about changing our relationship with them. It’s not about trying to control sleep, “Okay, I’m going to do this muscle relaxation tonight to make me fall back to sleep. I didn’t fall back to sleep. It didn’t work.” We can kind of get a bit tripped up there. Really, our goal is to just change our relationship with what’s going on inside our mind. I think that’s really what it comes down to. It does take practice because I think it’s a skill. We’re hardwired to want to push all that stuff away. I think it takes a lot of practice repeatedly for us to get to a place where we are able to become more of an observer of all that difficult stuff.

Leah Werner:
You don’t attach yourself to the thought, it’s just a thought. It’s about that detachment. It’s not who you are. That is a revolutionary shift, if you can get there. It is a practice. I mean, every day I practice, it’s not just around sleep, but in other parts of my life that thoughts are fleeting and they are not actually who you are. You just let the cloud pass your blue sky, just let it pass, name it what it is, fear, joy, whatever, and then release it. That has been really helpful with insomnia.

Martin Reed:
That’s great. I think that’s really powerful stuff there, for sure. I’m curious now, Leah, what’s an average night for you these days, if there is such a thing?

Leah Werner:
For the most part, I’ve been sleeping really well. I still wake up really early. When those birds start chirping, I’m awake, so like 5:30. I don’t necessarily get out of bed. I go to bed after 10:00 now. I wake up a few times a night and typically fall right back to sleep. But then nights last night, I tossed and turned for a while. I didn’t have that moment of “Ah,” which would’ve triggered me getting out of bed. I was just kind of like, “Oh, I’m not sleeping.” I didn’t make it mean that I wasn’t going to fall asleep. I didn’t make it mean that I wasn’t going to fall asleep tonight. I just was like, “This what’s going on right now.” And I didn’t attach anything to it.
But for the most part I feel like I kind of made it through, for sure, through the darkest part, which led me to you. Then on nights like last night, they’re somewhat infrequent where I don’t feel like I got enough sleep. I feel tired and kind of dragging today, but I can still function. I still committed to my day. On average, my sleep has significantly improved since working with you.

Martin Reed:
What about the kind of medication cabinet, the pharmaceutical cocktail, list? How are we doing with that?

Leah Werner:
Oh my God, I tried everything. I was taking a daily prescription that I weaned myself off of. When you really think about it, I’m sure people who listen to this podcast can say “amen” to this, that it’s not a guarantee of sleep. It is not. The techniques I learned in working with you have been far more successful in helping me sleep than all of the medication I have taken in my entire life combined.

Martin Reed:
Wow, that’s amazing. What about your days? Because I think it’s easy to, at least people that don’t ever have any experience with insomnia, to think that insomnia is a nighttime problem, a challenge that only exists at night, but it really does make the days difficult too. I’m curious to hear how your days are different now as well.

Leah Werner:
I don’t think about sleep. I don’t think about sleep, and I used to think about sleep all the time. I would either change my day to accommodate fatigue. I would obsess about it. “Am I going to sleep tonight?” Use the past to predict the future. It was a constant chatter in the back of my mind, and now I don’t think about it at all, which is, unto itself, is I can’t even believe I’m vocalizing this to you. I don’t think about it at all. I start to think about it like at 9:30. I’m like, “Oh, go put on my PJ’s and brush my teeth and wash my face.” Just those normal protocols before you go to bed. But I don’t think about it. That in and of itself just sets you up for better sleep because you’re not using all this energy causing all this anxiety and hyperarousal and obsession that will only make sleeping that night more difficult. So I’m free from that, I’m free from kind the daylight obsession about “Am I going to sleep tonight?” Tonight will unfold as tonight will unfold, so I’m definitely free from that.

Martin Reed:
I’m curious to hear, because you had such a long history with insomnia, once you started to make the changes that we’ve been talking about in this episode, how long that process took do you feel like from getting started making new changes, exploring your relationship with your thoughts, implementing new behaviors around sleep. How long was that process from “insomnia is still this major issue in my life” to getting to that point where you feel like it’s more in the rear-view mirror, it’s more behind you, it’s far less influential over your life now?

Leah Werner:
I’d say about three to four months. I mean, I started seeing improvements within that second week of doing sleep restriction, covering up the clocks, et cetera. But really feeling like kind of free from the shackles of it, so to speak, was about three to four months.

Martin Reed:
I’ve just started to recently ask this because I think sometimes when we’re only talking for about an hour, and it can become easy for people to listen and think, “Okay, if I just do this, this and this, within a couple of weeks, things will feel great again.” Or “That’s the kind of story I’m being told or sold on here.” But that’s definitely not the case. What it is is about learning new techniques, right? Learning new skills, new ways of developing our relationship with what goes on in our mind, and it does take time.

Leah Werner:
It does take time, and it does take commitment, and I think it takes commitment to all of the puzzle pieces. It’s not going to be one singular thing necessarily that really helps people. It’s committing to all of it. It’s committing to all of it. I think because I was so committed to all of it is why in hindsight it seemed like it didn’t take that long. Three to four months really isn’t that long of a period of time, especially when I think about my whole history of struggling with insomnia since I was 12, and I’m 46 now. Three months is nothing. But it definitely does not happen overnight. It does require that commitment to…
Just try all the techniques, just go all in. There’s nothing to lose. If you’re already not sleeping, there’s nothing to lose in trying all the techniques, even if you’re fearful of trying them, even if you think they’re going to be a giant pain or they’re not going to be helpful, once again, that’s just a thought. We’re just letting it pass our mind’s eye. We’re not attaching doubt to it. We’re not going to attach our fear. We’re not going to do any of that. I think that’s really what it takes for these techniques to be successful for you. It’s tough. It’s tough, it’s hard being exhausted all the time. It really is hard, so I have a lot of empathy for people who are still in active struggle with it.

Martin Reed:
It is important to recognize that, that it is hard and that it is a struggle and that it is difficult. It’s so easy listening to these success stories, these transformations to think, “Oh, this sounds so easy.” But it’s not. We’re just talking about specific techniques, which are easy to talk about, but the implementation is usually far from easy and it can be difficult, and it takes a lot of practice and it takes time and commitment and effort. It is a process.

Leah Werner:
But you’ve seen this time and time again, Martin, that it works. It does work. I mean, how many people have you interviewed on this podcast? How many people go through your program, your free two-week online course? I mean, the proof is out there that it works, so yeah, commitment and patience, it does take some time for you to kind of get through the forest to the promised land.

Martin Reed:
Definitely. All right. Well, Leah, I’m really grateful for the time you’ve taken out your day to come on and just share all this fantastic information. You’ve shared some really good insights I just know people are going to get a lot of value from, whether that’s motivation, hope, encouragement, empathy, all that good stuff that you’ve shared with us. But there is one question missing, which I ask every single guest, so I don’t want you to be the odd one out. So I’m going to ask you one more question, and it’s this. If someone with chronic insomnia is listening and they feel as though they’ve tried everything, they’re beyond help and they just can’t do anything to improve their sleep, what would you tell them?

Leah Werner:
I would advise them to work with you, whether it be the one-on-one that I did with you after the two-week online free course. I think the truth of the matter is, as someone who’s struggled with this for so long, the techniques that you presented to me, no one has ever presented to me. I think there are techniques out there that have not been tried that really can benefit you. I think you have seen that people have been very successful using these techniques. I know when you interact with your primary care doctor and you’re getting your scripts of drugs, there’s no conversation that I have had like I’ve had with you about sleep, and that was such a welcome reprieve from modern medicine not knowing what to do with insomniacs. I know it can feel like you’ve tried everything. I probably would’ve said that before I talked to you, but I don’t think that’s probably true.
I think there are some techniques that might be new to people to try that I learned from working with you that really have been the secret to my success. Without finding you, I don’t think I would’ve ever learned about these techniques that make sense to me now and seem kind of intuitive now, but most definitely, that wasn’t the case a year ago. So being open to the fact that while it might feel like you’ve tried everything and it had been unsuccessful, that there are actually new ways of thinking about this and working this issue that could give you some reprieve and to have some success. I feel like there are answers out there to help people get through these waters, because it is really tough.

Martin Reed:
Well, that’s great. I really appreciate that and I appreciate your time coming on and sharing all your wisdom and your experience, so thank you again, Leah.

Leah Werner:
It was great to see you and chat with you, Martin. Take care.

Martin Reed:
Absolutely. You too.

Martin Reed:
Or, you can choose to add one-on-one email coaching and work through the course with me by your side. With the one-on-one coaching option, you get unlimited email access to me for eight weeks, starting from the day you enroll. Any time you have a question or concern, any time you are unsure about anything, any time you want to focus on the challenges you face or any difficulties that show up, you can email me and I will be there to coach and support you. With either option, there is a 30-day money back guarantee. If you don’t find the course helpful within 30 days of starting, just let me know and you’ll get your money back. You can get the course and start right now at insomniacoach.com.

Martin Reed:
I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Insomnia Coach Podcast. I’m Martin Reed, and as always, I’d like to leave you with this important reminder — you can sleep.

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Listen to the podcast episode (audio only)Amanda slept well through high school, college, and her early professional life. Her experience with insomnia began when a number of different stressors all showed up around the same time. She had a baby. She relocated. She had to get a new job. She had to deal with a toxic parent.

Even when things settled down, Amanda found herself struggling to fall asleep. She felt as though her own mind was working against her. She started to panic and didn’t know what to do.

After finding that CBD gummies, melatonin, over-the-counter sleep aids, alcohol, and the many sleep rituals and rules she implemented were not helping, Amanda realized she needed to explore a different approach. That was when she found the Insomnia Coach podcast, recognized her own experience in the stories of others, and started working with me.

Amanda realized that the more she chased after sleep, the more she craved it, the more she tried to make it happen, the more difficult it became. So, she started to move away from chasing after sleep and from trying to fight or avoid nighttime wakefulness and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that came with it.

She started to acknowledge her thoughts — even the really difficult ones — instead of trying to control them. As she did that, she found that her thoughts weren’t always true and that she always had control over her actions, regardless of what her mind might have told her.

As she practiced this new approach, Amanda started to notice more of the good stuff that was present in her life and she started to do more of the things that mattered to her. And, as she moved away from the insomnia struggle and expanded the focus of her attention, she found that she started to sleep a lot better, too.

As Amanda shares in this episode, the process was not easy. There were ups and downs. Her new approach took time and ongoing practice. However, as she started to get more comfortable with experiencing nighttime wakefulness, as she gained skill in allowing her thoughts and feelings to come and go as they pleased, and as she committed to doing things that kept her moving toward the life she wanted to live each day — independently of sleep — she was able to reclaim her life from insomnia.

Click here for a full transcript of this episode.Click here to hide the transcript.

Martin Reed:
Okay. So Amanda, thank you so much for taking the time out for your day to come onto the podcast.

Amanda Kramer:
I’m so happy to be here.

Martin Reed:
I’m really excited for everything that we are going to cover. Let’s just start right at the beginning. Can you tell us when your sleep problems first began, and if you can remember or if it was obvious what you think caused those initial issues with sleep?

Amanda Kramer:
Sure. I actually did have a little bit of insomnia when I was a child, but had gotten over that very quickly and became a really good sleeper. I was a great sleeper through high school, through college, through my whole early professional life in New York as a performer. I didn’t have to even think about it. I just looked forward to sleeping. And then my daughter was born, and I was dealing with all the new natural stressors of becoming a parent and not sleeping well.
And on top of that, we had just moved up to the Bay Area. So we were dealing with the housing market, and new jobs, and new bosses. And so there was a lot happening at once. A lot of stress happening at one time. And that probably would’ve been enough to set me off. But there was one extra layer of stress, which was having to deal with a very toxic parent.
So my stress was just through the roof, and I was dealing with these very deep feelings throughout the day, throughout the night. And once my daughter settled in and started sleeping again, my husband started sleeping again just fine. And I was awake. I was up in the night and unable to sleep. So everyone else was settled in, and I just found myself unable to fall asleep. And I didn’t have the tools that I have today. So I didn’t know what to do with myself. I just sort of panicked and unsure of what was happening.

Martin Reed:
So it sounds like you went down that well-trodden path of, I can recognize probably where this all began. Either I was always a lousy sleeper, or there were some clear triggers for some sleep disruption.
And I think most of us, we accept that when we have some difficult nights, if there’s that clear cause, there’s not a whole lot we can do about that. Hopefully once that cause, that trigger is no longer around, or it’s no longer relevant, we’ve adapted to it, our sleep will get right back on track. But sometimes it doesn’t. And that in itself can be a big source of difficult thoughts, emotions, feelings about sleep. And we can start engaging in all those behaviors to try and chase after sleep, to put effort into sleep, try and make sleep happen. And it’s really that response, which is what at this point is keeping the insomnia alive. It’s the oxygen for that insomnia.
But we don’t know that at the time. When we are caught up in this struggle, we want to fix it. We don’t know why it’s happening. It feels very mysterious, very unusual. So we start to try. And all these things that we try, they’re often well-intentioned and logical when we think about them. But they can kind of backfire on us. And then that just leads to more effort, more worry, more difficulty.
You mentioned that you were finding it really difficult to just fall asleep. When this sleep issue was feeling really mysterious, and it stuck around long after everything in your life had settled down outside of sleep, what kind of things did you try to get things back on track?

Amanda Kramer:
Tried a lot of different things. I started off by just trying to clean up my sleep environment. I thought maybe it was the mattress’ fault. So I got a new mattress, and got some blackout shades, and earplugs. And just tried to clean the environment, which was good. It was helpful for a couple days, but then I was still not sleeping.
So I was trying those CBD gummies because everyone was pushing them on me. And I tried that, and it really did not work. It in fact made me feel very wired at night. And so that was a no.
Melatonin, I tried that during the time and that also was okay for maybe a couple nights. But it was like the novelty wore off, and it was back to not being able to fall asleep. So I didn’t know what to do. I ended up taking some over-the-counter sleep aids. I was having an extra nightcap. Anything that would make me feel sleepy. I was just desperate to feel tired.
I got to the point where that made me feel very uncomfortable. I did not want to be taking anything. I did not want to be relying on something outside of myself to fall asleep. But I didn’t have the tools. I didn’t know what to do. And I think the last thing I tried was calling my doctor saying, “Help, I’m not sleeping.” She didn’t know what to do with me. So she prescribes another set of pills, and I was very reluctant to go pick them up. But I did. And I knew that I didn’t want to take them. I was like, “This is not the answer.” But I got the pills, and got home, and locked them away in a cupboard. I did not touch them.
But wow. I was at square one. I didn’t know what to do. I felt like I had tried everything. So on a walk one afternoon, I picked up my phone and I did a search for insomnia and podcast. And I started listening to your advice and all of the interviews. And I really connected to what you were saying and their experience. And I thought, “Yes, this is it. This is what I want to try. I don’t want to be taking pills. I don’t want to be taking drugs. I don’t want to be doing any of that.” I was worried about what that was doing to my health, to my liver. And I just knew that I was stronger than that. I could do it with the right support.

Martin Reed:
One of the things that I kind of remember when we were working together, I think it was within the first couple of weeks. You actually shared some great insights with me. And a really memorable one was you said to me, “I’ve had some good nights, even when my mind was starting to race and was telling me, ‘You haven’t fallen asleep yet. You’re going to be awake all night. This is going to be a really difficult night.'”
Especially on those days before you were due to go into work to teach, because we often put a lot more pressure on ourselves to sleep, because we have this strong connection between how we sleep and our ability to perform during the day, or to live the kind of life we want to live, to feel how we want to feel. Can you tell us a little bit more about that insight, where you found that the mind was telling you all this really difficult uncomfortable stuff about sleep, but then some good sleep happened anyway? I’m just curious to hear a little bit more about your experience with that.

Amanda Kramer:
Yeah. That was really mind opening, because I was so accustomed to hearing the thoughts you’re not going to sleep, and then not sleeping. So very early on within the program, I stopped taking naps. And I had really started to build really strong sleep drive. I was feeling more tired than ever in a good way, once night came. Because I was taking away those naps and waking up at the same time every morning. And some of those days were a little challenging because I was tired. But oh my gosh, it was beautiful. At the end of the day, I was exhausted and ready for sleep.
So in that sense, even if those little worries or anxieties about sleeping crept in, I would generally fall asleep, even though they were there. Because I had this really strong sleep drive that just ended up overriding all of the anxieties. I think that was key for me really, was to take away the naps, and to stop trying to make up for a bad night. Because then I was just not tired enough that night.
But if I was really good at sticking to waking up at that same time, and honoring the day, and honoring all my commitments by the night, I was really blissfully tired and ready for sleep. No matter what my brain was saying, and no matter what the little chatter was, I was tired enough for those words to dissipate.

Martin Reed:
So up to that time, you mentioned that you just removed all those naps. What was your napping routine or structure like? Were you napping every day? When were you napping? How long were you naps? I’m curious to hear a little bit more about that.

Amanda Kramer:
Yes. After a bad night, I would sleep in a little bit if that was possible to try to make up for the night. And then the napping would usually come in when my daughter went to sleep. I would sneak in a nap around one or two, and I was just so desperate to take the pressure off. So the napping, it was pretty daily. And then I was not yet tired enough that evening to go to sleep. So that was pretty clear to me that eliminating the naps was a very good, important thing to do.

Martin Reed:
So did you find it quite easy to sleep when you set yourself up for a nap?

Amanda Kramer:
Yes. Actually, it was. I was so tired and depleted at that time. I don’t remember any difficulty taking those naps.

Martin Reed:
Yeah. I think that in itself can sometimes be a really good insight. Because after all, if you’re able to sleep during the day, then that means that you must be able to sleep at night too. There’s just some kind of obstacle or barrier getting in the way. The fact that we’re able to nap during the day shows that we can still sleep. We haven’t lost that ability to sleep.
But where these naps can often be a double-edged sword is when we have chronic insomnia, we are taking a nap because we just want that sleep to happen. We’re kind of chasing after sleep. We’re so desperate to get that sleep in. We’re chasing after it, so we’re going to be like, “Okay, I’m going to go down for a nap and try and make some sleep happen.”
And what can often happen is then, we find it really hard to sleep when we try to nap as well. And then that can generate all these difficult thoughts and feelings about that ability to sleep. “Oh my goodness. I can’t sleep at night, I can’t sleep during the day.” But really the obstacle, the whole barrier is all the same. It’s all the effort that we’re engaged in. That desire to avoid nighttime wakefulness. So the brain’s firing up, being hyper alert to protect us from that wakefulness.
So I just find it personally really interesting, the kind of relationship we can have with naps when we are experiencing chronic insomnia. Because on the one hand, we can try to nap, find it really easy to nap. And that in itself can be quite reassuring. But usually not that helpful over the longer term. Because when we relieve that sleep pressure, less time awake during the day means we might get less sleep at night.
Then on the flip side, if we try a nap and then no sleep happens, we can become even more concerned, and engage in even more effort, and battling with all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with what we feel is just our inability to sleep. So it was great to hear you describe your personal relationship with naps, and that you found it helpful to just cut them out. Which I’m guessing wasn’t an easy change to make. How did you manage to make that decision and stick to it?

Amanda Kramer:
I had watched a lot of your tutorials, and so I knew you had mentioned this so many times over, that eliminating naps is really important, creating natural sleep drive. And so I was happy to do it, because I really wanted to try everything.
In fact, I found it to be empowering to take the nap away, because I always had to make sure I had to create the space, make sure that… It was almost a lot of work to find the space to nap.
But when I realized it was actually working against me, I thought, “This is great. This opens up the day. Now I can follow through with everything that I need to do.” Because I know that was one of your pieces of advice was no matter if it’s a good night’s sleep or not, you honor your commitments. You go to work, and you do your exercise, and you socialize.
And that to me was unbelievably liberating, because I was always trying to figure out how to get out of this or get out of that, and try to conserve my energy. When I had made the commitment to honor all my commitments, then I got to enjoy the day. I got to let go of the idea that I had to cancel and really be present in the day, no matter that I might be a little tired. It wasn’t a big deal. I was committed to the day. And even sweeten the deal by doing something nice for myself on a day that might have been exhausted. I take my daughter for a walk or get a treat.
So the quality of those days ended up becoming quite good and nice. Because I was so committed to making the days good, and not allowing the sleep to really drive whether or not it was a good or bad day.

Martin Reed:
Yeah. And I think that was something you touched upon when we were working together as well was, I can’t remember at what stage it was. But you had this kind of realization as you were going through things, that how you sleep at night doesn’t always dictate or predetermine the overall quality of your day. That there are other things that influence you. I mean we’re not sugarcoating it. You probably feel better during the day if you had a great night of sleep. But it’s not like a hundred percent of your day is a hundred percent determined by your sleep, a hundred percent of the time. I’m curious to hear when that happened, how that insight affected you.

Amanda Kramer:
That was the big one. I started to realize the quality of the day was really not dependent on the number of hours of sleep the night before. I could have a decent night’s sleep and then have an awful next day. I could have had a few hours of sleep, but I woke up with gratitude because I had the day. I was going to make the best of the day. I was really committed. After the experience of trying to cancel this and cancel that, I was stepping into the day with a commitment to honor everything. And it gave me a new sense of gratitude.
It was tiring. Some of the days were hard, but there were these beautiful moments that ended up happening because I was aware. I was more present and understanding that I was dealing with fatigue, but that it was okay. And I created some really beautiful moments, and then I would look back on the diary and realize this is something that’s happening. The number of hours of sleep is not running parallel with the quality of day. And that really took the pressure off of having the sleep perfectly every night. So that was definitely something that helped take pressure off.

Martin Reed:
Yeah. Did you find it really hard, especially when you first made this commitment, to pursue stuff that’s enriching, important to you during the day, independently of sleep? Because when we are caught up in all the fatigue, and the anxieties, and all that stuff that comes with insomnia, usually our brain is screaming at us, “You can’t do this stuff. We’ve got to stay home. We’ve got to conserve energy. We got to withdraw. We got to maybe try napping.” All these things it tries to do that can end up distracting us and moving us away from the kind of life you want to live, which then leads to more pressure to sleep and to fix the problem, control what we can’t control. But how did you make that commitment to do that stuff, even when you were feeling really not good?

Amanda Kramer:
I think it was because I started to trust the process, because I had seen already firsthand how my sleep was getting better, and how it was getting better pretty quickly. So I trusted the structure, and I just felt so committed to the process because I was so tired of insomnia. That I was in it a hundred percent. And I wanted to experience joy. I wanted to make that choice to experience the day in all of its color and vibrancy, and not let a bad night’s sleep take that away.

Martin Reed:
Yeah. I think it can be really helpful. We don’t have to do huge things, especially if we’re feeling like we’re in a lot of pain, a lot of struggle. I like how you touched upon being kind to yourself. So it might just be going out for a treat with your daughter or by yourself. Just doing something nice for yourself.
It’s so easy when we’re struggling to end up getting completely distracted by the struggle, and that just becomes our entire focus. And it’s understandable, because struggle doesn’t feel good. But it can just be so distracting and lead to us engaging in actions that aren’t aligned with the person we want to be, that aren’t aligned with our values. We end up becoming the person that we don’t really want to be, not doing the kind of things we want to do. And that generally doesn’t make us feel any better. And it gives that weight of insomnia. It gives it even more influence over our lives.
So I think being kind to ourselves, committing to doing things that are important to us. They might not feel as good. They might not even feel good full stop when we are really struggling. We can’t control how we feel, right? But we can control our actions. So the most important thing is just the fact we are doing these things. We’re doing things that are important to us.
And like you touched upon, even when we are really in the depths of the struggle, there are often a couple of moments… Maybe only one moment. But there’s usually a couple of moments during the day that are a little bit better, even if it’s only fleeting. And I think it can help to just be more attuned to those positive moments, to open ourselves up to them. Because so much of our lives, whether we have insomnia or not, we are engaged in autopilot, right? Because we’re thinking about, “All right, I’ve got to wash these dishes. What’s next? Then I’ve got to put the kids to bed, then I’ve got to do this.” We are always off somewhere. Our mind is always off somewhere, and not a hundred percent engaged in where we are and what we’re doing.
And the fact is there’s good stuff all around us pretty much all of the time, if we’re able to notice it. So even when we don’t feel good, maybe we can just look around or just give ourselves the opportunity to notice one good thing. One thing that is beautiful, or enjoyable, or makes us feel good, or is interesting. Just one thing to remind us that there is still some opportunity for good stuff, even when we are really caught up in that struggle.

Amanda Kramer:
Absolutely. Looking back on the beginning stages of the process, the program with you, I do have some very beautiful memories of those tired, tired days. These little gems that appeared, like just that walk along the lagoon with my daughter. I remember feeling so tired that day and after picking her up, I was like, “Let’s go home.” No, let’s not go home. Let’s enjoy the day. And we took that moment, and I will always remember that moment.
Maybe there’s something pure about those experiences. Because of the exhaustion, you kind of shed everything else. You shed whatever other daily chatter goes on. It’s like those moments, even though it was during a very tired time, it’s a very positive memory, those little treats or gems that come through on those days.
One more thing that really helped me get through those tired days was the information about how there’s not necessarily medical evidence that supports the fact that not getting a lot of sleep is bad for your health or somehow damages you. Because I always thought that when I wasn’t getting enough sleep, that I was somehow doing harm to my body. So knowing that all that stuff out in the internet, all that information is pretty misleading, and that there really isn’t any evidence that it hurt you or harms you. That really started to take the pressure off too. “It’s okay. You’re tired. You’re tired, but you’re not really damaging yourself by not getting enough sleep.” That’s really helpful.

Martin Reed:
Yeah, exactly. As long as we are giving ourselves the opportunity to sleep, the body’s always going to generate at the very least, the minimum amount of sleep it needs to survive. A lot of the headlines and the news articles out there, I think some are downright just misleading. And others are just really easy to misinterpret. A lot of them aren’t looking at people with chronic insomnia. A lot of them aren’t even using human beings. They’re using animals, and extrapolating their best guesses from there.
And a lot of them are using sleep deprivation. They’re taking people and then deliberately interrupting their sleep, and then seeing what effect that has. So they’re not letting these people sleep, and then they find out that leads to worry, depression, and anxiety. Well if someone kept waking me up every hour, then yeah, I’m sure I would feel that way.
But chronic insomnia itself is different. Because people with chronic insomnia, they’re giving themselves opportunity to sleep. Often an excessive amount of opportunity for sleep. People with chronic insomnia tend to be going to bed way earlier than an average sleeper, staying in bed later in the morning, napping during the day more often. Engaging in all this additional opportunity for sleep to happen.
But the fact of the matter is we don’t have one study that has found chronic insomnia to cause any specific health condition whatsoever. We have studies that associate sleep duration or insomnia with different things. But none have found that it specifically causes it. So that can be a big source of difficulty, and confusion, and worry, and anxiety when we come across all this stuff.
Which is another reason why sometimes, it can be helpful to free up all that time that you might be spending engaged in ongoing research. That endless ongoing research that’s so easy to get caught up in, because we’re so desperate to fix the problem. And maybe just use that time in a way that might be more helpful to us in terms of living the kind of life we want to live. Living for now, rather than living for what might be in the future.
Many of us have done a lot of research. It’s probably unlikely we’re going to uncover anything brand new. We’ll probably just end up getting caught up in that rabbit rabbit hole of despair, and difficult news articles and stories that you just touched upon. How about we just free ourselves from that? Just do something more important to us instead. That can be so helpful.

Amanda Kramer:
Yeah. It was recommended that I talked to someone early on, talk through the issues. I know I had dealt with some issues, but I really felt like most of them had settled, and I didn’t really need to open up those issues again. I really needed somehow to just work on the sleep. I didn’t think that it was something I needed to talk to a therapist about. So that was a confusing moment. Even the doctor had pressured me, “Speak to someone. Talk to someone. Talk through the issues.” And I thought, “Well, that would’ve been helpful maybe a few years ago. But now I’m here, and I’ve healed from a lot of that stuff. I’m just still not sleeping.”

Martin Reed:
So I think after we’ve been working together, I think it was towards the end of the time we were working together. I think we were about six weeks or so in. You mentioned that you were finding it quite remarkable, the fact you were experiencing a number of good nights of sleep, consecutive all in a row. You said you were feeling better during the day, more productive. Feeling more optimistic than you may have done before.
But you’re a human being, so you still had some difficult nights from time to time. At this point, did you find that when those inevitable difficult nights happened, that your response to them somehow changed? Maybe they had less of an effect or an influence on you. I’m curious to hear how you dealt with those nights as you went along.

Amanda Kramer:
Yeah. What I had decided to do was to set up a little corner for myself. No matter if it was going to be a good night or a bad night, didn’t matter. I just set up a comfortable chair with a book and a lamp. And so I knew that I had this spot to go to if I needed to. And that really gave me a source of comfort.
So getting up is never easy. It’s hard to do. But knowing that there’s this comfortable, safe space to go to with a good book that I enjoy. I mean, it’s not half bad. It’s quiet, I’m alone, and I get to read a good book, and then eventually get back to sleep, or go back to bed.
So really setting up that space helped. Because at first, I didn’t really know what to do. I was okay trying to figure out a project that would be quiet. So I decided that really, I got into biographies. I really started to read a lot of them. And so okay, I’m going to pick a couple, and I’m going to put them on the table, and they’re there if I need them. So it actually ended up being quite enjoyable. I mean, it’s hard to get up. But then once I was there, it was quite enjoyable. And that made it easier. And again, trusting the process. Trusting the process because it was working for me.
So it was really no panic involved in the nights and getting up on those off nights. Because it was working, I was sleeping better, and there was a plan. I felt like I had a plan in place, and I was falling back on it. And that really, really helped.

Martin Reed:
So it sounds like what you’re referring to there is maybe before in the past when you’re having a difficult night, a lot of wakefulness. You’re just kind of at loss. “What do I do?” And our usual default human behavior I think is to try to achieve what you want to achieve. So when we are really struggling with all that wakefulness, we’ll maybe double down and try even harder to fall asleep. Put pressure on ourselves to fall asleep, a lot of tossing and turning. A lot of unpleasant wakefulness.
And like you just touched upon, we do actually have an alternative option available to us. And that is to just do anything else that’s more pleasant when being awake doesn’t feel good. Because I think most of us know from experience at that point that sleep is unlikely to happen right at this moment. And it doesn’t feel good to be tossing and turning here. So how about we just do something else that we know is going to be a little bit more pleasant? It might not be super enjoyable. It might not even be enjoyable. It just has to be something that’s more pleasant compared to what we’re currently doing.
So it sounds like for you, you found it really helpful to just have a plan in place. “If it doesn’t feel good for me to be awake, I’m just going to get out bed. I know where I’m going to go. I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to read this book. And then when conditions feel like they might be better for sleep to happen, I’ll return to bed.” And just kind of repeat the process. Okay to stay in bed when we’re awake for as long as it feels okay to be awake. But then if it starts to feel unpleasant, we’ve always got that opportunity to do something instead. Am I getting the gist of it right? Was that the kind of approach that you took?

Amanda Kramer:
Yeah. And that approach worked anywhere. I was always very nervous about traveling, going to someone else’s house, or being in a hotel. What if insomnia strikes? What am I going to do? But I worried less, much less about it because I had this plan. Which was just a book and a comfortable place to sit. So I just made sure that I had those things with me. And then before heading to bed, I would set up the little corner and know that it was there. And that really helped so much.

Martin Reed:
So did you find that you were a bit like a human yo-yo getting in and out, in and out of bed throughout the night? Or were you just out of bed, read a few chapters, and then you just go back to bed? Or was it just all different every single night, and you didn’t care as long as reading was more pleasant than struggling?

Amanda Kramer:
Early on in the process, it was a lot of up and down for sure. Few times a night, maybe. Again, less panic though. Less stress associated with being up because I had that plan that I could fall back on, and I really trusted it. “So here we go up. Get out of the bed because bed doesn’t feel good right now.” It felt so much better to be outside of bed. My heart rate went down. “Okay, I’m here. This is pleasant.” And then once I started feeling like, “Okay, I think I could enjoy the bed again,” went back. At the beginning of the process, there was a lot of up and down, but not stressful.
I really got to the point where if a bed wasn’t feeling good, I would get out, read, and then come back to bed and fall asleep. So all of a sudden, I can’t remember exactly when the transition happened. But I realized that it was really just one time getting out, and that’s all I needed. And then I started to build confidence at that point. “Okay. So if it’s not happening, then maybe it’s just one time out. But maybe not.” My confidence started to build, so it got easier and easier.
But the beginning stages are hard. Really hard. Really hard to get yourself up out of bed when you’re so exhausted and you just want to sleep. But it really does in fact feel so much better to be out of bed on those nights.

Martin Reed:
Yeah. I love how you described it, that it’s not easy. But it’s often more appealing than what the alternative is, which is to just stay in bed when it really just doesn’t feel good to be putting ourselves through that, in the hope that maybe sleep will happen. When we stay in bed, it doesn’t feel good. And we often fall into that trap of trying, putting effort into sleep, or trying to push away all the difficult thoughts and feelings that our brain is going to be generating as it tries to protect us from what it thinks of wakefulness as this physical threat. The brain doesn’t know the difference between a physical threat and an imagined threat. As far as the brain’s concerned, when you are trying to sleep, it thinks there’s an alligator under the bed about to get its teeth around you. The brain doesn’t know the difference. It’s trying to protect you, but it’s generating all this stuff that doesn’t feel good. Trying to push it away engages us in a battle. Trying to sleep never really works because we can’t control sleep anyway.
Also, all we want to do is just remove the effort, kind of untangle ourselves from that struggle. And what can we control at the end of the day? The only thing we can control are our individual actions, our own bodily movements. So if we are struggling, we’re not feeling good, unfortunately we can’t control how we feel. Not sleeping, unfortunately we can’t control sleep. But what we can do is maybe get out bed or even stay in bed if we prefer, but just do something that makes that wakefulness more pleasant. And that’s really all we can do is engage in actions that are more appealing, more helpful than the alternative option.

Amanda Kramer:
Yeah, it sure does beat just lying in bed flipping and flopping, and waiting and stressing. Just the act of getting up out of bed feels good. “Okay, I’m going to try something else.”

Martin Reed:
Going to something you were talking about earlier on where you said maybe reducing the amount of time that you allot for sleep was something that was helpful. Which basically, all it comes down to for people not completely familiar with it is we are just looking to spend an amount of time in bed quite close to the amount of sleep we’re getting at the current time, rather than the amount of sleep we want to get. Because often, our temptation is to spend more time in bed, to give ourselves more opportunity to sleep. But often, all that does is just set us up for more nighttime wakefulness. There’s more opportunity to spend time awake at night. So if we’re, for example, averaging let’s say five hours of sleep, let’s see if we can get the amount of time we spend in bed closer to five hours rather than seven, eight, nine, or 10 hours. And often, how that helps is it prevents us from chasing after sleep because now we’ve got that earliest possible bedtime. We’ve got a consistent out of bedtime in the morning.
But where I think it can really help is often, it brings back a sense of sleepiness rather than just fatigue as bedtime approaches. I think it’s really easy to misinterpret fatigue and sleepiness. Feeling really run down, worn out, exhausted, groggy. Sometimes that might not be sleepiness. That might be fatigue, just exhaustion, feeling worn out. And that doesn’t always lead to sleep. The only thing that leads to sleep is sleepiness itself. And when we get back that sense of sleepiness like, “I’m actually finding it hard to stay awake now,” I think that can just be so empowering.
I remember one exchange that we had was you had a lot of these things that you felt you had to do in the evening to invite sleepiness to happen. And that was one of your concerns. You said to me, “I really want to move away from all these rituals and activities I’m kind of imposing on myself in an attempt to get sleepiness to happen. But I’m kind of nervous that if I start moving away from them, then I’m never going to feel sleepy.”
Do you feel that having that sleep window helped you with that transition from moving away from all these additional rituals and routines you were putting on yourself, because the sleep window itself was helping you rediscover that sense of sleepiness in the evening?

Amanda Kramer:
Most definitely. And that really happened right off the bat. Really feeling a sense of sleepiness come in. At the end of the night, I had not experienced that in so long. I was always so up at night. But when we started to implement the sleep window and taking away the naps, I started to feel this natural sleepiness come in, in the evening. And it just felt like a sweet relief. I didn’t have to try to bring it on. It was naturally happening. “Okay, the body knows what it’s doing if you allow it to do it.”
And yeah. Like I said earlier, that deep sense of sleepiness was overriding that any sort of nervousness there might have been otherwise it really took over. So sleep was much easier.

Martin Reed:
Exactly. As I like to say all the time, sleep always happens in the end. So the longer we are awake for, the harder it becomes to remain awake. And that in itself can be so reassuring, because it’s so easy to believe that I’m feeling anxious, for example. Or I feel my heart racing. And because I’m feeling those things, sleep just can’t happen now. But the truth is sleep can still happen. If we’ve been awake for long enough and the body needs sleep to happen, the sleep will still happen.
These things can make sleep more difficult. If we’ve got a lot of that worry and that anxiety, maybe that kind of hurdle that sleep has to get over is up here instead of down here. But the longer we’re awake, that sleep drive builds and builds, eventually no matter what, it’s always going to get higher than even the most intense anxiety or physical sensations of arousal.
And I think just recognizing, like we were discussing earlier, the presence of difficult thoughts or difficult feelings, difficult emotions, don’t mean that sleep won’t happen. You can experience that stuff and still even have good nights.
I think what can definitely make sleep really difficult is when we engage in a battle with all that stuff. These thoughts are really difficult, so we might try not to think them, or we might try and push them away when they come into our mind. And all those emotions as well, often they don’t feel good. Especially in the middle of the night when we’re all by ourselves. So again, we try to fight them, try to avoid them.
And I think engaging in that battle and that struggle is probably what’s more disruptive to sleep than just their presence. If we can get to a point where we just allow them to come and go as they want, which is obviously easier said than done. But if we can get to that point where we just allow them to sit there, drift in and out as they want, rather than getting involved in that battle, they become far less influential over our sleep. And what we do during the day too.

Amanda Kramer:
And just a couple of nights experiencing the anxiety come up in that anticipation of not sleeping and then sleeping. And even though there was that stress and anticipation or whatever that was, that sleep still came that night. That happened maybe once or twice, and that started to really build my confidence. That’s not going to determine if I sleep or not. That’s not necessarily going to determine whether or not I sleep. And that was very powerful.

Martin Reed:
Yeah. Have you found that over this whole process, just looking back on everything, that your relationship with those thoughts and those feelings, those emotions as and when they occur has changed? Because my guess is that you still experience some difficult thoughts, feelings, and emotions because you’re a human being. So you’re going to experience the full range of the human experience. But has there been a change just in the way you kind of respond to them or the effect that they have over you, the influence they have over you? And why do you think that is, if there has been that change?

Amanda Kramer:
That’s a good question. I see the thoughts now. I see them. I tell them, “I see you. You are not me. You don’t define me. You are separate from me.” I really do kind of almost have a conversation with these thoughts. You’re like, “You’re trying to disrupt me, and I see you doing that.” And in a way, doing that makes them sometimes disappear. Makes them less powerful by seeing them as separate.
And what has helped me too, a lot, just find a sense of peace, and quiet that chatter is taking that last hour or so before bed, and finding a quiet seat, and taking time to read those books. I slipped into this routine where I’m just, doesn’t matter what time it is. At some point, I’ll just let go of the clocks altogether because it’s just late enough. And it’s a nice quiet moment to take in the night and then go to sleep when I feel sleepy. And it really just takes the pressure off. And if there is any of that chatter about not sleeping, or what if you don’t sleep and that kind of stuff it’s, “I see you. I see what you’re trying to do. But I’m going to take myself over here and have just a relaxing moment with my book. This is my time, my space.” And just trying to really stay empowered, because we have so much power and control.

Martin Reed:
I love that sentence that you said. Just saying, “I see you.” I think what it comes down to is acknowledgement. You are just acknowledging that thought, or that feeling, or that emotion is present. “I see you.” You’re saying it. Whether it’s in your mind or out loud, you’re acknowledging its presence.
And I think that in itself can just be so helpful. Because just the fact that we’re acknowledging something that we’re thinking or feeling, even when it’s difficult, first and foremost tells the brain, “Okay, you are listening to me. So maybe I don’t have to yell quite so loud so you are listening.”
But then just the act of acknowledging. Especially when we’re able to say, “Okay, this is a thought or this is a feeling. This is an emotion.” It’s not me, but it’s something that’s happening in my mind. My mind is generating this thought, this feeling, this emotion. And now I get to choose how to respond. Is that helpful? Is this thought going to help me right now? Is it actionable? Is it about something I have control over?
If it is, great. If it’s not, then maybe we just, “All right, well thanks brain. I’m listening. I see you. I acknowledge what you’re telling me. But now I’m going to move on and redirect my focus or my attention on this instead.” But I think that acknowledgement is key, and your description of just saying, “I see you.” I think that’s a great way of just acknowledging what we’re thinking or what we’re feeling, and not getting caught up in that really exhausting struggle with trying to get rid of what we are thinking or we’re feeling.

Amanda Kramer:
You made the comparison of insomnia being like a bully that wants to come back and try to wreak havoc. And if you give that bully the time of day, then they’re going to get off on that, and they’re going to keep going. If you don’t let the bully phase you, then they might disappear and try to bother someone else. I love that analogy.

Martin Reed:
I think that that’s a really helpful way of exploring our relationship with our thoughts and our feelings. So many of them don’t feel good when we’re caught up in insomnia, so we want to fight them.
But over the long term, I just don’t think it’s a battle we can win. We can maybe distract ourselves in the short term, or try and convince ourselves to think differently in the short term. But in the long term, I don’t think so. If we could do that, then we would be able to just fall in love, and genuinely love that person, and live happily ever after forever and ever, for the rest of our lives. We might be able to fool ourselves for a little bit of time, but probably not for the rest of our lives.
Because we just can’t control those thoughts and those feelings. And some make us feel good. Some don’t. But when we don’t get caught up in the battle with them, they tend to hang out. Then they disappear, then they might come back. They might hang out for longer, then disappear. But they’re always transient. It can feel like they’re always there, but they come and go when we are able to free ourselves from that battle with them.

Amanda Kramer:
And taking the day like we talked about before, really enjoying the day, and finding the joy in those moments. I feel like it’s strengthening our drive to help to get rid of those bullies. Because you’re not taking all the anxiety about, “Well, it’s nighttime. Am I going to sleep?” And no, you’re present. You’re present. You’re arrived in your day, and you’re not allowing that anxiety to enter in and stay there.

Martin Reed:
Yeah. Especially if we can do all that stuff even when the mind is giving us all this difficult stuff to deal with. So it could be during the day, the brain’s like, “You’re too exhausted. You can’t do that today.” So it could just be like, “All right, I see.” You might even name that thought. That’s the doom and gloom thought, or it’s the you’re too tired thought. “Thanks brain. I know you’re looking out for me. But you know what? I’m going to do this anyway. Let’s see. Maybe I can, maybe I can’t. But I’m just going to give it a try.”
And the more we can do that, we just separate the thoughts that we have from our actions. The thoughts that we have don’t always have to dictate our behaviors. We are in the middle of that. We always get to choose. And it can be so helpful. I think it can be empowering.
Because we realize that no matter how difficult or intense the thought or a feeling that we have, we always get to choose how to respond. And really, it’s how we choose to respond that determines whether we engage in a struggle, which is really exhausting, and can kind of distract us, and take all of our energy from us, and we end up moving away from the kind of life we want to live. Or whether we kind of redirect our attention on what we have control over, even when all this difficult stuff’s going on. We make that conscious choice that I’m going to do something that helps me take the other path towards the kind of life I want to live. And I just think it can be really empowering, and it can just free up so much of our energy to do what matters.

Amanda Kramer:
Yes. And there are also some very well-meaning people that might give that advice too. Like, “You’re too tired. You should rest. You should stay home.” There might be those supportive people in your life that’s giving you that advice. So it’s important to stay true and stay focused, and committed on the path.

Martin Reed:
It also goes back to what you were saying earlier is we need to be kind to ourselves too. We don’t have to be a superhero every day. “I’m going to do every single thing on my list no matter what.” We might have a day where we just need to take care of ourselves, whatever that might mean for us. Just being kind to ourselves, whether it means talking to ourselves in a kind way because we can be so hard on ourselves when we’re caught in a struggle. Just talking to ourselves kindly. And behaving in a way that’s kind to ourselves.
And there might be days where we need some rest or we need to treat ourselves. Let’s do that. We don’t have to be a superhero every day. We’re human beings. What can be helpful is just being kind to ourselves, and just engaging in things that are important to us, no matter how small those things might be.
So we’ve talked about a few different things. A few different changes that you made while we were working together. As I talk whilst this freight train is just running behind me in the background. But we talked about the sleep window that you found helpful. Just allotting and amount of time for sleep that’s more or less aligned with the amount of sleep you tend to be averaging at the current time. You gave yourself a plan for responding to nighttime wakefulness. If you’re awake during the night, that’s okay. But if it doesn’t feel good, I’ve got the opportunity to do something else, and I’ve got a clear plan in place so there’s no ambiguity.
So if it doesn’t feel good to be awake, I got that little corner set up somewhere. I’m going to read a book. That’s where I’m going to go. If things start to feel more appropriate for sleep, then I’ll go back to bed. Repeat as needed. I’m going to get out of bed around the same time each day. I’m going to avoid those daytime naps. I’m going to acknowledge the difficult stuff I’m feeling, rather than trying to battle with it. I’m going to do stuff that matters to me during the day. Whether that’s just being kind to myself. Or engaging in activities that are important, enriching, meaningful, aligned with my values.
And avoid the daytime naps as well. So we’re just removing ourselves from all that effort to sleep, to chase after sleep, to make sleep happen. That’s a lot of stuff we covered. Was there anything else that you wanted to mention that we haven’t covered?

Amanda Kramer:
I really find a lot of solace in the buffer hour that we have before bed. That has become still so important to me. Even though I’ve become a very consistent sleeper for the most part now, I am just really true to this beautiful time before bed.
And it’s not this time that I use to prepare for sleep. It’s not like in preparation for sleep. It’s just this space that is for me. Daughter’s asleep and husband’s usually asleep. So I get to just take in that little bit of night. I really love that it’s there, and it’s given me a nice relationship with the nighttime. I try not to put pressure on that time, because it’s not really about going to sleep. It’s just about enjoying that quiet, peaceful part of the night.

Martin Reed:
Yeah. I’m glad that you mentioned that again, because it’s something that can trip us up. And we talked about it a little bit earlier, about how we can… I think a lot of it comes to either well-intentioned advice from friends or looking online, “Do this before you go to bed.” Whether it’s take a shower, turn off all the lights, turn off the TV, drink a warm glass of milk, or some sleepy tea or stuff like that. It’s so easy to add all these rituals before bed.
But the truth is there’s no ritual that’s going to make sleep or sleepiness happen. All we’re doing is just engaged in more effort around sleep, and that’s completely counterproductive. But what can be helpful is just giving us ourselves time in the evening before going to bed, that’s just for us.
So let’s say an hour. An hour before we’re planning on going to bed, that’s just me time. I’m just going to do stuff that I want to do, that I personally find relaxing or enjoyable.
And I think that’s as far as we need to go with it. It just needs to be time that we enjoy, to help us make that transition between our wakeful lives, with all that pressure and struggle that we have to deal with. To getting to a place where we just can decompress a little bit. And it can be just so powerful to have that time for ourselves, to do whatever we want to do before we go to bed.

Amanda Kramer:
There was a moment in time where I was really trying to figure out what to do during that hour, which kind of goes perfectly alongside trying to figure out what to do to set yourself up well for sleep, the whole day trying to set. It’s like that’s not really what it’s about, is it? It’s not about doing the perfect thing. It’s really just about doing something enjoyable, whatever that is. It was stretching, it was writing, or it was reading. It changed, it morphed, and it wasn’t necessarily one particular thing. But for a little while, I was trying to seek the correct activity, which was really counterproductive.

Martin Reed:
It’s so easy to look back on it now, isn’t it? And just recognize all those things that we were engaged in, that we’re able to reflect on and be like, “That wasn’t helpful.” But at the time, we’re engaging all these experiments because we want to fix the problem that we’re going through. And sometimes, we might feel like, “I did that and then I slept well. So now as long as I keep doing that thing, I’m all good.”
But then what tends to happen is because that thing wasn’t what generated sleep, when we then have a difficult night, we’re left scrambling for a new thing. We just get caught up in that rabbit hole.
It’s a process to get to that point. I don’t think there’s an easy magic switch that just overnight, we have this big revelation, and we’re able to drop all that temptation to engage in rituals, and safety behaviors, and chasing after sleep. I think it is a process, and it takes a lot of practice. And there’s ups and downs along the way.
Using your experience from when we started to explore these changes to you getting to the point where you felt, “I don’t think that insomnia is this big influencer over my life anymore. It feels like it’s kind of in the rear view mirror now rather than a huge movie screen in front of my face, blocking out everything else in my life.” How long would you say that process took?

Amanda Kramer:
Maybe six months, for me. It got better and better. I mean, I felt like I was on a good trajectory, with some disruptions here and there. But really in order for me to feel okay, I have given myself now all of the space during the day to do what I do, to care for myself, to care for my family. All that, do my work, and not have to constantly be figuring out how I’m going to be sleeping, or what’s going to happen. Because that took up so much of my thinking.
I think that was about half a year. But it was such a clear progression of sleeping better and gaining more and more confidence. The more better nights I had, the more confidence I had. So I felt like I was becoming stronger and more trusting of myself.

Martin Reed:
Yeah, that’s great. I asked you that because I was suspecting that you were going to say something along the line of months. I think it’s helpful because we have to recognize that it’s a process. It usually takes time. Just as it took time for the insomnia to develop, it’s going to take time to pick away at it, and to change all those habits, or rituals, or routines that we’re currently engaged in to kind of unstick ourselves. And it takes time. And we often experience ups and downs along the way. And during those difficult times, the brain starts firing up again, telling us, “You’re struggling.” Generates all those difficult thoughts and feelings.
But that stuff we can’t control. What we can control is our actions. So if we can just stay committed to ensuring that our behaviors are helping to set the stage for sleep, that’s really all we can do. And that our behaviors are just helping us move toward the kind of life we want to live, even when all this difficulty and struggle is still present. That’s really all we can do.
And as long as we can stay committed to that, we tend to find we are not getting rid of difficult thoughts and feelings. They’re always going to be with us. But they’re going to have less of an influence over us. And then in turn, the insomnia or sleep and wakefulness, regardless of what that looks like, tends to have less of an influence over us. Because our focus now is on all the things we can control, and all the things that free us up to just live the kind of life we want to live. And when we do that, all the difficult stuff still there, but just maybe a lower volume. A progressively lower volume, and less influential over our behaviors.
So Amanda, what would you say an average night is like for you these days? If you had to reflect on what a typical night is for you, what would that be like?

Amanda Kramer:
Typical night, I would around 10:00 or so, just turn down the house and have, again, that hour. Pretty quiet, very relaxing time. And then when I’m sleepy, feel sleepy, I go to bed. And I’ve been getting maybe seven hours of sleep at night. Seven typically.
And I don’t need anything. I don’t take anything. I don’t need any of those pills. I don’t need any of that outside stuff. I just rely on myself. And generally, nights are good. Generally, I sleep well. Every now and then, there’s a little disruptive evening. And I deal with that, and then I’m generally back on track.
And I am feeling more energetic during the day. I feel like I have more clarity during the day, because I’m not taking all that stuff. I remember pretty early on actually in the program, I felt like I could see colors and hear sounds differently, clearer. There was this clarity. So really beautiful stuff, and a real gratitude. Because I know what it feels like to not get good sleep. So then to get the sleep, to wake up to know, “I did it. I’m proud of myself. I didn’t need to take some pills. I didn’t need to do it. I did it myself. My body knows what it’s doing.” I still do. A year later, I wake up feeling proud every morning. “I did it.” It feels like a real accomplishment, and I carry that with me.

Martin Reed:
That’s great. Well Amanda, I’m really grateful for the amount of time you’ve spent with us just talking about your own story, your own experience. I know everyone listening to this is going to get some value from it. I’ve got some value from it myself, just hearing you describe certain things. I love the way you acknowledge those thoughts and those feelings by just saying things like, “I see you.” I thought that was great.
But before I let you go, I did have one last question for you, which I ask every guest. So I don’t want you to feel left out. And it’s this. If someone with chronic insomnia is listening and they feel as though they’ve tried everything, that they’re beyond help, that they just cannot do anything to improve their sleep, what would you tell them?

Amanda Kramer:
I would say that I understand what they’re going through. The loneliness at night, those feelings of isolation. And that I really totally understand how hard it is, but that they’re not alone. They might feel like they’re alone, but they’re not.
And that the human body and brain is so strong and resilient. And I really believe that it can readapt. It can be reconditioned. And that’s just exactly what this program did for me. In the darkest days, I did not think I’d be able to fall asleep again. I just did not think I could do it on my own. I thought I’d be just taking pills for the rest of my life. But everything’s dumped, and I’m doing it. And it’s because this program helped to just reshape some of my habits and my thinking around sleep.
So it works, and it’s powerful. And it takes a lot of work, and it takes a commitment and a little bit of pain upfront. But it is so worth it in the long term. You will sleep again, and you’ll do it on your own. I’m a big believer, so take the leap of faith.

Martin Reed:
That’s great. I think that’s a fantastically positive note to end on. So thank you again, Amanda, for taking the time to come onto the podcast.

Amanda Kramer:
It’s my pleasure. Thanks Martin.

Martin Reed:
Or, you can choose to add one-on-one email coaching and work through the course with me by your side. With the one-on-one coaching option, you get unlimited email access to me for eight weeks, starting from the day you enroll. Any time you have a question or concern, any time you are unsure about anything, any time you want to focus on the challenges you face or any difficulties that show up, you can email me and I will be there to coach and support you. With either option, there is a 30-day money back guarantee. If you don’t find the course helpful within 30 days of starting, just let me know and you’ll get your money back. You can get the course and start right now at insomniacoach.com.

Martin Reed:
I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Insomnia Coach Podcast. I’m Martin Reed, and as always, I’d like to leave you with this important reminder — you can sleep.

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Listen to the podcast episode (audio only)Eddie struggled with sleep for over 10 years. During that time he would experience a lot of ups and downs — whenever he thought his sleep was back on track, things would get difficult again.

The more difficult sleep proved to be, the more he would struggle. And, when he struggled, he found himself doing less of the things that mattered to him.

Eddie’s transformation began when he moved away from chasing after sleep and practiced habits that helped create and maintain good conditions for sleep. Perhaps most importantly, he also took the time to identify what insomnia seemed to be stopping him from doing. What it seemed to be taking from him. And then he started to do those things, to take them back, even after difficult nights.

As Eddie shares in this episode, the process wasn’t easy — but having a clear plan in place and committing to that plan, even when things were difficult and even when his mind was trying to distract him and pull him away from that plan, kept him moving forward.

Eddie now reflects on his experience with insomnia as something that was actually quite empowering. In Eddie’s own words, he’s not happy he went through this experience but he’s not sad that he went through it, either.

Click here for a full transcript of this episode.Click here to hide the transcript.

Martin Reed:
Okay, Eddie, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to come onto the podcast.

Eddie Vaisman:
Oh, you’re welcome. Yeah, it’s good to be here.

Martin Reed:
It’s great to have you on. Let’s get started right away and start at the beginning. If you can just tell us a little bit more about when your sleep issues first began, and if you are able to recollect what caused those initial issues with sleep?

Eddie Vaisman:
Yeah, of course. They began, God many years ago, and it was at a time, it’s interesting, it was at a time when I didn’t really have that much going on in my life. I had made some pretty good money and I was pretty financially secure. And I was able to, this was a weird angle on the thing, but I was able to take a lot of time off and I didn’t have to really work really regularly. And that gave me the freedom to develop bad habits, and that’s where it started. It was for me having the freedom to do whatever I wanted with my day and then actually misusing that freedom in a way that led to sleep problems and stuff like that.

I started napping at odd hours, having a really irregular schedule all over the place, and then started having trouble every once in a while. Then started having trouble regularly with it, and then you could say it kind of spiraled from there into becoming a factor in my life that actually started to undermine me and make things a lot more difficult and challenging, so yeah.

Martin Reed:
It is really interesting you say that you feel it all began when there was probably the least amount of pressure you’ve ever had on yourself to sleep because you didn’t really have that set schedule anymore. And I think that’s really interesting, because I’ve worked with a lot of people that have told me that they slept fine until they actually retired, and it was when they didn’t have that set structure around their day anymore that they tended to find all these sleep issues occurred. I think it’s really interesting, and I’m keen to explore this further with you because I think a lot of people might think that sleep issues come, because we put all this pressure on ourselves to sleep because of that structure that we’ve got in our lives. “I’ve got to be up at a certain time for work, or I’ve got this plan to meet up with someone, or I’ve got to get this done.”

But I think it can just as easily happen when we have a complete lack of structure, whether that’s like a self-imposed, we no longer have that structure because either we’ve retired or we’re not working, or we’re on vacation or something like that, or whether it’s something like we are struggling and so we withdraw from all that stuff that would otherwise give structure to our lives. And so it is really interesting once that influence between sleep and our day is our daily structure and the things we have to do, the things we want to do and the things we actually do. There really is that two-way relationship between daytime activity and nighttime sleep.

Eddie Vaisman:
That was definitely the case for me. As soon as I noticed that that was happening, I started to make efforts to put structure back in my day and started noticing how that was actually helping me. And so now I work as a school teacher, obviously. Well, I mean, not obviously, and I sleep worse when I’m on vacation, oddly enough, because-

Martin Reed:
Wow.

Eddie Vaisman:
I have that, because we have a lot of vacation as school teachers, and that can be some of the most challenging sleep time when I don’t really have any pressure, when it’s like I can do whatever I want with my day. I don’t have a lot going on and stuff like that. And then the mind starts to play little tricks on me here and there, you know what I mean? Starts to, I don’t know, obsess about stuff that normally you wouldn’t think about. So yeah, it can definitely work that way. And that was the way that it worked with me. It wasn’t because of stress, or because of a health issue or things going on in my life. It was just the time to think about things that maybe shouldn’t be thought about that much.

Martin Reed:
Back when you were really tangled up in that struggle, what were the nights like for you? Was there an average night? In what way were you finding sleep to be difficult? For example, was it just first falling asleep, or waking and then finding it hard to fall back to sleep, or a bit of both? Just curious to hear what those nights were like.

Eddie Vaisman:
Okay. Yeah. Well, I mean, through the years you can experience any … I mean, really one of those types of things. Sometimes difficulty falling asleep, sometimes difficulty staying asleep, sometimes a combination. But initially it was difficulty staying asleep. I would always fall asleep really quickly, like within five or 10 minutes, and that had never been a problem for me. But then staying asleep, and I think it was partially because I wasn’t super tired and I had napped three times that day, so my body wasn’t really like, “Oh, I need a ton of sleep anymore.” So, if I’m only sleeping three hours at night, well, you already took three naps today, so it kind of made sense when you really looked at it. But back then I thought, “Oh wait, there’s something wrong here. Why am I not making it through the night?”

And I think it was because I was just rested, I just didn’t really need. Although, it didn’t feel like that, it felt uncomfortable during the day, so there was a lot of bad aspects to it. But overall it’s like I was training my body to sleep in little bits, instead of sleep in a big block. And I didn’t know I was training myself to do that, but that’s what I was doing unconsciously and through these habits and then through ways to correct them. And then you’ll try to correct them with the normal stuff, like sleeping pills and stuff like that and doesn’t work, might work for a little while, then stops working and stuff like that. You kind of go through all of those things. You go to the doctor, the doctor tells you there’s nothing wrong with you. I guess it’s probably, I don’t know, the normal protocol a lot of the times.

I was really struggling with it and I was really fighting with the whole thing because it felt like something had switched, something had broken that wasn’t broken before, and it was just, again, it’s like your mind plays tricks on you. You keep thinking that there’s something wrong with you, but there really isn’t. Your focus is not a supportive one of you and is not an empowering one, it’s … So, that’s really what was happening to me. But once I learned tools to turn that around and stuff like that with your help and with a bunch of things that I’ve done, I finally figured it out, so yeah.

Martin Reed:
What were your days like? I think that’s a great description which a lot of people are going to really identify with, that nighttime struggle, waking, and then finding it hard to fall back to sleep and everything that goes on in the mind as a result of that. I’m curious to hear what kind of effect you found this was having on your days too?

Eddie Vaisman:
Well, I was tired all day. I mean, I was fatigued all day. I found it hard to do everything. I think the biggest part was the psychological aspect really, wasn’t just the fatigue, because I can be tired. Maybe I go for a weekend in Vegas or something like that and I stay up late, but I experienced probably deeper levels of fatigue at those times, but they don’t bother me, I’m not necessarily bothered by them. But this was a fatigue that kind of dragged on all day, especially as a result that I didn’t have much going on, that compounded it. This fatigue was like, I just carried it around from the moment I woke up in the morning and into the moment I was trying to go to bed, whatever time that was.

And one of my biggest mistakes was really going to bed early. If I said I made one big mistake that I would consistently keep making over and over again. It’s weird how you can trip over the same crack in the sidewalk over and over again, but that’s exactly what was happening to me. I kept going to sleep early. I kept trying to make up for this. I kept trying to compensate by going to sleep early. That was my method, you know what I mean? And it wasn’t, and sometimes it would work and sometimes it wouldn’t, but it would keep me on this cycle, for sure. I could never break the cycle, because especially for me, I don’t know about other people, but especially for me, part of the thing that made it such a challenge was that it would cycle so much. I would go through periods where I was sleeping like a baby, and then I would go through other periods where I was, it was just tragic.

So for me, the cycling nature of it was a thing that made it most challenged, because sometimes it would get fixed and sometimes it would get broken. If it was broken consistently, then I might have been more motivated to stay on a certain track. But since it would slowly sometimes slip back into good sleep, that kept me on almost like on an uneven ground where I didn’t know if this was an issue or not. Because sometimes it would be an issue and other times it wouldn’t be an issue where. So for me, that back and forth I think made it especially hard to tackle it, because it just wasn’t consistent one way. It wasn’t always broken. Sometimes it was fixed and sometimes it was broken. And that was a challenge for me.

Martin Reed:
Those ups and downs can be really difficult. And I think one of the problems when we experience those ups and downs is, it can leave us less motivated to do things like going to bed later on, not trying to chase after that sleep consistently too. Because we’re thinking to ourselves, “Well, why should I be making all these changes developing new, more consistent and different habits if my sleep is just all up and down anyway?” There doesn’t seem to be that correlation between making some consistent changes and enjoying some consistent results.

But I think, and something that, I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, but something which I think you noticed was, there’s always something going on behind the scenes. As long as we can focus our attention on what we can control, so consistent implementation of some habits that help set the stage for sleep and not always responding to differently each night according to how we sleep each night, things do tend to eventually become more consistent. And I think there’s always going to be some ups and downs. For as long as we’re human beings there’s going to be some ups and downs, but if we’re able to implement some changes and commit to doing that consistently, we tend to create better conditions for that consistency in our sleep too. But it is a process and there are always ups and downs along the way, which can definitely be a struggle. And it can be really demotivating too. Was that your experience?

Eddie Vaisman:
Absolutely. I mean, you said it. I mean, the up and down is what really makes it hard to put your finger on it. And really, because I never took it seriously enough until I reached out for help. I was always in, I was always lying to myself a bit about it. I wasn’t being honest with myself about the level of trouble that this was causing me. I always wanted to pretend it wasn’t a real issue. It was almost like a weird, you could almost equate it with almost like an addiction type of thing. I just wanted to pretend it wasn’t playing a significant role in my life, where it really was, it was really undermining my forward progress in life in a significant way. And I never wanted to give it that type of importance. I wanted to pretend like, yeah, that’s something that I struggle with, but yeah, it’ll go away on its own or something like that. It’s nothing that I need to really deal with and address.

That was, if I would have jumped on it sooner, I could’ve caused … I could have saved myself a lot of pain and discomfort and frustration and aggravation and anxiety and all that stuff that goes with it, and fatigue and lack of motivation and all that stuff. I could have saved a lot of that if I would have taken steps earlier. But I just, I did it. I let it sit as this background noise in my life for way too long. And then once I did start to get serious about handling it, that’s the first thing that came to my mind after that, because then you … It’s hard to not beat yourself up a little bit and go, “Oh, man, I should have done this way earlier. What was I doing? Why did I wait this long?” It’s hard to not have, it’s hard for me anyway to not have that reaction to it where it’s like, you want to beat yourself up a little bit about not handling it earlier.

But it’s okay. It was all a learning process, and I’ve learned a lot through that as well. That’s one important thing from the whole experience is that you can actually make these lemons into lemonade. I mean, you can actually use it for your growth in a way. And that’s something that I didn’t come to until way later. It’s like, “Okay, this is an unfortunate thing. I’m not happy that I’m going through this. I wouldn’t wish it on anybody and blah, blah, blah.” But the switching gears to turning it into something that can actually benefit to you, that’s a key point right there. When a person hits that point where they go, “Oh, okay, this sucks. But how can I use this to my advantage somehow? Are there ways I could use this to my advantage?”

Maybe I can learn sleep techniques that the average person doesn’t know and actually possibly become better at sleeping than the average person. Maybe I can really, maybe it’s something that I can really master in some sense and a skill that I could develop as if I was developing any other skill. And that’s how I look at it now. It’s like now I look at it as a skill that I’ve worked on and I can actually call upon whenever I need to, let’s say enforce it or something like that. It becomes like a tool for you at some point where I can pretty, it’s crazy how good I can sleep now. I can pretty much produce good sleep whenever I want to at this point.

I know that we’ll get there in the conversation later, but the skills that I’ve developed, a couple nights ago I had an espresso and then went to bed within an hour later, and I slept like a baby that night. Just to give you just a little precursor to how good you can develop these skills. It can be that, it’s like a light switch now. It’s like, “Okay, I could just turn it on and off whenever I want.” It’s really empowering. And the fact that it’s so empowering, it makes you go, “What else can I be empowered in this way about in my life?” It can really expand into other areas, which we briefly touched on earlier.

Martin Reed:
You’re not the first person to say that. Once we’ve emerged from all of that struggle and put insomnia behind us, many people feel that they’ve come out of it stronger or a different person and got an aspect of a positive experience from it, which can sound crazy for anyone listening now that’s really struggling. How could any of this be positive? But once we get out of that and it’s behind us and now we are moving forward, a lot of people have told me just what you’ve said, that it’s changed me. I feel like I’ve got more confidence, not only in sleep, but maybe even in other areas of my life that maybe I once struggled with. And I’ve just come out of the whole experience as a stronger, different person. And there has been a little bit of a silver lining to the whole experience.

Eddie Vaisman:
For me, that’s 100% the case. I feel quite empowered coming out of that experience, and I feel like I have better control of my emotions. I’ve developed, I’ve worked on meditation and just gotten to a really good place with those types of things. So again, I’m not saying I would want to go back to start in square one or I would necessarily call it a happy journey, but the light at the end of the tunnel is that it could morph into something that … Into skills that you didn’t anticipate you’re gaining out of it, so there is a positive thing out of it.

And I think that that’s also something that I struggled with a lot. The whole idea that, “Well, why am I going through this? Why am I struggling with this and blah blah?” And just the psychological aspect of, “Why am I being tried like this or what?” It can just be frustrating and it can make you get a little bit down on yourself and stuff like that, and it can have a depressive effect on your psychology and things like that. For me it really taught me how to develop an emotional base and a dedication to something. And it just brought out a strength and skills in me that I would not have developed otherwise. And it’s hard to go as far as to say that I’m happy I went through it, but I’m not sad that I went through it. I’ll go that far.

Martin Reed:
Yeah, I think that’s fair enough to say, for sure. I think very few of us would wish that upon anyone. All we’re really just trying to say is, once we come out of that journey, often there are some things we can reflect back on from the experience as a whole that maybe have been beneficial. But of course, in an ideal world we would probably never experience all of that struggle in the first place. One thing that you touched upon, which you definitely would like to explore more is, as you said, everything that goes on in your mind, the difficult thoughts, the difficult emotions that come within insomnia. And I remember when we were working together about four weeks into it you shared this really big insight with me and you just said, “Look, Martin, I feel like I’m putting way too much effort into sleep. I’m just trying too hard. I’m trying so hard.” And it’s all that effort that seems to actually be the big source of all that anxiety. Can you tell us a little bit more about this?

Eddie Vaisman:
Yeah. Well, again, it’s the mind thinking about things that it’s not beneficial to think about. It’s like if you were obsessing about, I don’t know, a heartbeat or something like that, it’s like the body knows how to handle those things, so I’m going to jump right to the most powerful technique that helped me stop putting effort. The sleep restriction with that terrible name that it has, with that scary name that it has, the sleep restriction was once we really talked about that and got into that with your coaching, for me that was a huge part of it. I can’t even explain how powerful that technique was for me.

And I’ll give people a little bit of insight into how powerful it was for somebody who hasn’t tried it. It’s so powerful and it works so well and it gives you so much confidence in your ability to sleep that it’s easy to slack off on it. And that’s what I did, because it works so well that you start going like, “Oh, I can implement this whenever I want. I don’t need to be so rigid about the rules anymore. I can take a nap and I can do this and I can get lax as far as the rules go.” I’m telling you, don’t do that, because the reason that it works is because you stay strict with it. Even though it’ll give you the confidence that you can actually not implement it and be totally … And kind of be okay with it that, so the reason that I bring that one up is because that’s the thing that really taught me how to not put effort.

That’s where I really learned how to not put effort is when I did the sleep restriction. Because the sleep restriction, it’s such a powerful technique that it just takes over all of that thought process of putting effort, not putting effort. It just overrides all of that stuff. I mean, that was my experience with it, and it really starts working quickly and it’s effective. And it taught me what it felt like to get into bed and forget what it’s like to fall asleep. Because before that, when I would get into bed it would be a process to fall asleep. It would be like I would be thinking about it. It would be something that I was putting effort, oh, how do I feel? Am I relaxed?
There would be a lot of dialogue that was going on, but with the sleep restriction, it overrides all of that stuff. When you get into bed, you don’t know what happens. Just like you didn’t know what happened when you were a kid and you just get in bed and you just kind of disappear. And then, however many hours later, I mean that the sleep window is, so you just reappear at that time and you go, “Oh, well what happened?” And you could have sworn that it was, I don’t know what amount of time, it could have been 10 minutes. But six hours I’ve gone by and you feel rested and you go, “Oh wait. Okay, that’s what it’s like to not force things or to not put effort or to not do these things. Okay, that’s what that felt like.”

Martin Reed:
I think one thing you mentioned as well was that you found helpful was you just gave yourself permission to not fall asleep as soon as you got into bed. We can easily put a lot of pressure on ourselves. If we get into bed, if we don’t fall asleep within a certain amount of time, then we start to get worried, “It’s going to be one of those nights, what can I do? I’ve got to try harder to fall asleep.” And something that you told me that you found really helpful is just giving yourself permission for it to take time to fall asleep. And that’s okay.

For people that maybe aren’t familiar with sleep restriction and may not have ever heard of that, really it’s just one of these tools, these techniques that we can implement that help just create better conditions for sleep to happen. Because for many of us, when we are caught up in the struggle of chronic insomnia, we really want sleep to happen, probably more than we’ve ever wanted sleep to happen in our lives, so we tend to chase after it. We might start going to bed a lot earlier than we ever did before, or we might start staying in bed a lot later in the day than we ever did before. We might start adding naps during the day, something we might not have done very often before. And all these things just put more pressure on us to sleep.

But they also can mean that we go to bed before we’re actually sleepy enough for sleep. And because fatigue, just feeling worn out and exhausted, which is a common symptom associated with chronic insomnia, can easily be mistaken for sleepiness. We might then go to bed when we feel all that fatigue, struggle to fall asleep and then become concerned by it. Whereas the truth is, we might just not have been sleepy enough for sleep. So, with sleep restriction, which is an awful name, it really should just be called bedtime restriction. We’re just restricting the amount of time we spend in bed or a lot for sleep, so it more closely matches what our current situation is. If we’re currently averaging five hours, for example, but spending 10 hours in bed, we’re setting ourselves up for five hours of wakefulness. If we are averaging, say, five hours, how about we spend, let’s say five and a half or six hours in bed? So we’re more closely matching the amount of time we’re allotting for sleep with our current situation.

And often that can lead to this big increase in that sense of sleepiness, like real genuine sleepiness before going to bed where we’re actually finding it hard to stay awake. And that’s something that many of us are kind of lost that sensation and just the return of that sensation alone can be so powerful. And some people can get results really quickly just from changing the amount of time they allot for sleep. For other people it takes longer, and there’s all other different techniques that we can explore too. But really all we’re doing is just reducing the amount of time available for nighttime wakefulness, and we’re preventing ourselves from chasing after sleep because we’re giving ourselves an earliest possible bedtime and a consistent out of bedtime in the morning morning. And that can just be really helpful over the longer term for creating better conditions for sleep to happen.

And you touched upon at the start of our discussion, you mentioned those ups and downs. They happened before we were working together and they happened whilst we were working together. And I did just want to spend a couple of minutes talking about this, because it’s easy to believe that when we start to make these changes, we should just experience consistent improvement every night should be as good as or better than the last. But the truth is, we’re human beings, so there’s going to be some ups and downs. There’s going to be difficult nights, just like we have some difficult days. Every day isn’t always as good as or better than the last day. And the same thing goes with how sleep goes, how the nights go. Now you’re able to look back. What do you think is the best way to deal with all those ups and downs?

Eddie Vaisman:
Well yeah, people I think should write that down somewhere is that progress is not linear in this game, unfortunately. That I very much experienced that progress is not linear. There were ups and downs, but if you stick to the techniques, the ups and downs start being, you just start having less and less of that and you start to have a different experience of it. It’s funny, because when you expect that something’s not going to go great or smoothly for a while, you’re in it, you’re committed to it, it’s not as bad. But if you have all these expectations that sleep needs to be X, Y, and Z, and this many hours and stuff like that, you’re going to have rougher nights that way.

I think starting on a course of helping yourself heal through this and having that commitment to it makes the rocky road more bearable. Because if you’re on a journey somewhere and the road is rough but you know you’re going somewhere and you’re committed to it, then it’s more bearable for some reason. But if you’re just traveling aimlessly and you’re on a rough road and you seem to be making no progress and it starts to wear on you psychologically in a very different way. I think the commitment to get better, and for me to work with somebody was key, because I had hired people as coaches, I mean, to do all types of stuff in my life. As far as everything from therapy and meditation and exercise and stuff like that.

So, hiring a coach to help with the sleep thing did not seem all that weird. Even though, I mean, on the surface it sounds like, “Wait, what? You’re hiring a coach for sleep?” Well, that’s a little bit unusual, but the dividends that it can pay, and the happiness that it can contribute to your life of having good sleep, it’s well worth it, and I would do it again in a heartbeat. So, it’s more about that. It’s more about changing the mindset from, “Well, this sucks and this and has been going up and down for years or months or whatever it is. And I don’t know where this is going.” To a mindset of, “Well, yeah, this sucks and this is rough and stuff like that, but we’re going somewhere. I got a coach, I’m working with them.”

And then you start to see a payoff. You start to get, “Oh wow, that was better than I thought that that would go.” You start to have some of those going on, and then you gain that confidence and you work from there. So again, it’s just another mental switch that you just have to now look at it differently, that you’re doing something here. You’re not letting the condition control you, you’re controlling it. You’re not controlling it, but you’re taking responsibility for it.

And I think that was a big thing for me. I never took proper responsibility for it. I remember a friend telling me before, I was complaining about it to a friend, and my friend telling me and me getting mad at my friend, but my friend told me, “Well, you must be getting something from it because you keep doing it.” And I was offended at that, of course. I was like, “Well, what do you mean I keep doing it? I don’t keep doing it. It keeps happening to me.” That’s important too for me. That was huge for me, taking responsibility for my position and taking the steps to rectify. Because we can really develop habits that we are unhappy with and stick to them unhappily for some odd reason.

I mean, again, the mind is a funny thing. You know what I mean? And that’s why this experience, it brings out these pitfalls and these traps, these psychological traps that a person might fall into. And again, you can use those for other areas of life knowing, “Oh yeah, that’s just my mind sending me in the wrong direction again. And maybe not being on my side totally.” Or that might be not the right way to put it, not on my side, but I can’t let it lead. The mind is, it’s a valuable tool, but it’s not the boss. I have to be the boss in this whole position. I’m sorry, I’m not trying to go spiritual with the thing, but there’s a little bit of that there. There’s a little bit of the separation between the mind and who you really are that really clicked as far as the way that I looked at it.

You know what I mean? The mind will tell me all kinds of fibs about the dangers of not sleeping, and this and that, and it’ll send me to dark places. But it’s up to me to shift my focus and my attention and go, “No, no, no, no, no, no, I’m not going to play that game.” You know what I mean? “I’m in charge. If I sleep four hours tonight, I sleep four hours. I’m still going to do what I’m going to do tomorrow. I’m going to get up, I’m going to go to work, I’m going to go to the gym. I’m going to spend some time outside. I’m going to do the things that I need to do, regardless.” And then you keep just pounding at it like that. Yeah, that’s for me. It was, again, it’s a bit of a, maybe spiritual is too strong, but it’s something there like that that was part of my process.

Martin Reed:
I think what it comes down to is the fact that we can’t really choose the thoughts, the feelings and the emotions that our brain generates. It’s just going to do that, is completely out of our control. But we can choose how to react. I think sometimes it’s helpful to just, when the brain generates something, to just take a step back to listen, and then decide how we’re going to respond. Is that useful information? If the brain says something like, “If you don’t fall asleep in the next 10 minutes, tomorrow’s going to be ruined. You’re going to lose your job, you’re going to miss your mortgage payments, you’re going to be homeless.”

We can just, that’s overwhelming. That just is naturally going to generate a lot of fear, a lot of worry, and a lot of anxiety. But what if we can just take a step back, maybe just take a breath, just acknowledge, “All right, the brain’s saying this because it’s trying to look out for us at the end of the day, but it’s just trying so hard to look out for us. It’s generating a lot of stuff that doesn’t make us feel good.” But it’s heart is in the right place. It’s trying to look out for us. So what if now we can just take a step back, “Okay, how helpful is this? Is there anything I can do in response?”

Well, when it comes to falling asleep, no, because the more pressure we put on ourselves to fall asleep, the more difficult it is to fall asleep. How about we just take a step back and just be like, “All right, thanks, Brain. I realize you’re looking out for me. You’ve told me that if I don’t fall asleep in the next half an hour I’m going to lose my job. I’m going to lose my house. I’m going to be homeless. I appreciate that you’re saying that because you’re looking out for me, but now I’m just going to do something else instead.”

And if we get all these difficult thoughts and feelings during the day, again, we can just take a step back, acknowledge them, the brain’s doing this for all the right reasons. Acknowledge what we are feeling, acknowledge what we’re thinking, and then decide, “Is there anything useful here that we can use right now?” If there is, great. If there’s not. “All right, thanks, Brain. I appreciate your suggestion. Now I’m just going to redirect my attention onto where I am, what I’m doing, all the things that I can control.” Because really, even when we’re in this big whirlpool of really difficult thoughts and feelings and emotions, we can still, at a basic level we can still move our bodies. We can still engage in actions, no matter how small, that just help us keep living the kind of life we want to live.

Those actions might not feel as good right now when we’re caught in all those difficult thoughts and feelings. But we can still do things. We can still move our bodies. And it’s definitely more difficult and we might not get the same level of enjoyment, but that’s really all we can do. Because that’s the only thing we have control over. We don’t have control over any of the stuff that’s going on inside of us. We only have control over what we can do, our actions. And I think it can be difficult to get to a place where we realize that, just because we are conditioned pretty much from birth to get rid of difficult thoughts, to get rid of difficult feelings, to get rid of difficult emotions, and to live a life where we’re all happy a 100% of the time. But unfortunately, that’s just not what life is. Life comes with pain and difficulty and struggle. That’s a normal part of life.

But we still get to make that choice so we can allow all those difficult thoughts to completely control our behaviors and distract us and push us away from the life we want to live. Or can we still do some things that help us move toward the life we want to live, even when there’s all that difficulty, even when there’s all that challenge and pain and struggle? And I think if we can do that, all those difficult things, they might not disappear. They might still be there and they might still come back, but they might have less of an influence over our lives. And when they have less of an influence over our lives, we tend to become less concerned. They tend to be less powerful. Is that something that you feel may not necessarily completely mirror your own experience, but something you can identify with now you’re able to look back on your own journey?

Eddie Vaisman:
Yeah. I mean, one of the things we talked about is I like to go to a boxing club, because it’s just, I don’t know, something that I’ve been doing for a long time. I really enjoy boxing, and I remember mentioning to you, “I’m so tired, blah, blah, I don’t think I can go to boxing.” And then you go, “Well, what if you go anyway and just see what happens? What if, just see what happens, it might work out.” And then I go, I would just make excuses of why the sleep should overrun my desire to go to boxing. Well, no, because the sleep thing has to be handled first. Things have to come in a certain order, and I have to handle this sleep thing first before I start living, whatever that means for somebody.

And that was definitely another hangup for me. I thought the sleep thing was something that had to be as solid as can be before I started to move forward with these other things. And that’s something, again, that you brought to the table. It’s like, “Well, don’t you just try these other things and just see how they go, regardless of what step you are in the sleep journey right now.” And I started doing more of that. And even on really bad nights, I realized that, “Hey, I can always still go for a walk. I can always still do things outside. I can always do something.” And again, that commitment to doing something every day, regardless was key for me. I made a list every morning of the things that I hoped to get through that day, and I made that list, regardless of what happened the night before. And that list wouldn’t change.

And now I can say those things and I sound like I’m a tough guy or something, but I wasn’t. That came through a lot of pain and trial and discomfort and stuff like that, that commitment to always make that list, “These are the things I’m going to do today. I’m going to get this form of exercise today. I’m going to walk, I’m going to get this done at work and blah, blah.” And just so the commitment to go on with life and what that looks like for each individual is different. But for me it was making the list every morning of the things that I was going to get through. And so just like that chipping away at it, having good sleep habits, not letting it get in the way of my life, not letting it mess with me psychologically. Making sure I wasn’t telling myself things that were making the situation worse. Like, “Well, this is going to be the end of you,” or I don’t know, whatever it happens to be, you know what I mean?

And so it’s kind of like you have to be on all points. You have to, at the beginning you have to monitor multiple things. Well, where am I letting this slip into my life in a way that’s not productive? And let’s find all of those things and let’s change those. It might sound like a tall order, but it’s worth it, and it’s something that, I don’t know, that was my way to do it. I had to battle it on multiple fronts. But the first and foremost was having the good sleep habits, that made a huge difference. The commitment to have good sleep habits, and then just tackling it on multiple angles.

Martin Reed:
And I like how you touched upon, this might sound like I’m some kind of superhero, but it is difficult. It’s really hard, especially when we’re having successions of difficult nights and difficult night after difficult night after night, to then have that motivation to actually do things. Our brain is just screaming at us, “Let’s just lie on the couch. Let’s just rest and conserve energy today.” But it doesn’t usually help us feel much better, especially if we’re going to be spending all that time doing nothing, instead of doing something that’s maybe a little bit more closely aligned with our values and just is a little bit more closely aligned to the life you want to live. But it’s not an easy process. It does take commitment, and I think that is the key word that you used as well.

We have to commit to taking some actions. They don’t have to always be huge. They can just be really small, but just some actions that help us engage in things that are important to us during the day, and to commit to actions that just help set the stage for sleep. For example, I’m not going to go to bed tonight until I feel a strong sense of sleepiness, or I’m going to make sure I get out of bed in the morning around the same time each day, no matter what. Because without that consistent out of of bed time, it’s hard to enjoy a consistent sleep and wakefulness cycle. But yeah, I think it’s important to emphasize that it is difficult and it does take commitment. I think it’s really helpful that you stress that in our discussion.

Eddie Vaisman:
Yeah, let me just make one more point about that. And that’s, it forced me to look at my life and take a step back and really think about, “Well, are you really doing the things in life that you really want to do? Are you really, why does this thing play such a big role in your life?” And I really had to answer some difficult questions about myself. So again, it worked as a catalyst to look at myself and take responsibility for not just for how I was sleeping, but for life in general. I expanded that to be able to go, “Well, it’s time to, well, you have your ideal version of how you sleep. I might have my ideal version of what that looks like. I don’t know. Maybe it’s seven hours a night between this and this hour. Okay, cool. Are you doing everything to support that? Okay, yeah, you are. Okay, cool.”

Now, you can expand. “Okay, this is what I did.” I expanded on. I go, “Well, if I have my ideal version of that, I have some kind of an ideal version of life as well and how I want to live. Are you checking all those boxes as well? Are you handling all of that stuff like the sleep thing?” “Well, no.” “Oh, okay, so we got things to talk about.” And so that’s how I use that to expand to other areas and really look in the mirror and go, “Okay, let’s become an adult. Let’s handle some of this stuff.” That was me. It led me down a path of really looking at myself and where I was going and if I was happy and if I was doing everything that it took to get to that. And so just wanted to throw that in because that was important for me as well.

Martin Reed:
That is really powerful. And I think what does it all come down to? The reason why we don’t want to have insomnia is because we see it as something that’s going to stop us from living the kind of life we want to live. It’s going to make us feel uncomfortable. It’s going to generate difficult thoughts and feelings and emotions, and this is going to prevent us from living the life we want to live. I think that’s what it comes down to. And what we can do is start doing things that help us live the life we want to live, even when that insomnia is still present. So, we’re not waiting for the insomnia to go away before we start doing what we really want to do. We just start doing that stuff that’s important to us now, even when the insomnia is still here.

And maybe that then puts insomnia down the list of priorities that our brain thinks of as a big concern, as something that has to be fixed, that it has to put all this energy and effort into that. We have to be engaged in that battle, because if something exists, it doesn’t feel good. But if at the same time we’re doing all this other stuff that we have control over, that’s important to us, that’s meaningful to us, then all this stuff, it might still be there, but it’s just way down on the pecking order now. It’s way less influential, has way less of a difficult effect and an influence on us, and we can just free up all of that energy onto all that stuff we can control. And that has a really direct influence on the kind of life we want to live.

Eddie Vaisman:
Right? Because if it has, if it’s so high on the pyramid of wellbeing, if we put it at such a high place, what are we putting at a lower place that maybe should be more up there? What are we ignoring? If we’re focusing on that, we’re probably ignoring something else. And what are those things? And let’s work on that as well. It can be, and yeah, in a way it can be very, I don’t know. It can be cathartic in that experience of it. It definitely was for me.

And I still have occasional bad nights. I had a bad night last Wednesday or Thursday night or something like that. I got home late from work, and I just couldn’t knock out at my normal time, blah, blah, blah. I just couldn’t get sleepy. I got into bed. I wasn’t sleepy, but I got into bed because it was usually when I go to sleep, which is not ideal. And I was just up and I couldn’t knock out and stuff like that. And then I only slept maybe three or four hours, but I got up the next day and I went to the gym I normally do before work, and I went to work and I did my normal day. And I was tired and I was fatigued and stuff like that. But the next night I slept better and it was just only one bad night. Whereas in the past one bad night could have snowballed into who knows what length of trauma. But now it’s like, yeah, you just developed a different level of confidence and commitment to it. And again, expect that type of stuff.

It’s like one time I went snowboarding, and that’s very taxing, and I didn’t sleep good after snowboarding. I said, “If I can not sleep good after snowboarding, it’s like I could not sleep good after, no matter what occurrence.” I mean, because that is, I mean, that’s tiring. That’s exhausting. That’s long, tough days, I mean, skiing and snowboarding.” And then I thought other occurrences were I would get in bed and then now not worry about how I was going to sleep or anything like that and just fall asleep like a baby. So, it’s really about where your mind is with the thing. So yeah, it just has to commit to getting better, and anybody can get better. I wouldn’t have believed that before, but now I strongly believe it.

Again, I think the most important part, for me, what was most key is being okay with this unfortunate, whatever you want to call it, circumstance. So making peace with it. Getting to a place where I was at peace with the situation that I was in, accepting it for what it was, and then moving forward out of that situation. Instead of staying in a negative mindset of, “No, this shouldn’t be happening.” Or frustration, or “Why is this?” Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter what led me here. Doesn’t matter. It’s time to move forward. And then figuring out what that means for each person. Again, I’ll say it again with the sleep restriction, that was really key for me, that did a lot of the work. And I still use it, as a matter of fact.

I’m very disciplined about my sleep. I don’t let it go all over the place. I handle it as if I was handling food, I’m very good about my food, what I eat, what I put in my body. I’m very good about sleep as well too. I’m very good about, “Oh, okay, handle it in the most mature responsible way and it pays off.” And to me that’s worth it because I feel so good during the day and I never get tired, and I just have a ton of energy. So for me that’s worth it. Maybe some people would say, “Oh, but I want to sleep in more. I want to go to bed earlier.” Okay, cool. For me those things are never worth the consistent sleep that I get on a night nightly basis now that I’ve refined it and really dialed it in. Yeah, that’s key for me, just that.

Martin Reed:
That’s great. Well, Eddie, I really appreciate all the time you’ve taken out your day to come on and talk about your experience. But there’s just one last question that I’d like to ask you, because I ask every single guest, and it’s this, if someone with chronic insomnia is listening and they feel as though they’ve tried everything, that they’re beyond help, they just can’t do anything to improve their sleep, what would you tell them?

Eddie Vaisman:
Well, I would direct them to you. Because for me, I needed a coach. I needed somebody on my team that I could ask questions to, that I could nag when I wasn’t feeling up to myself, when I wasn’t … Somebody that I could, I just needed that handholding, for me. Maybe some people don’t need that, but that made a huge difference. Because then I could talk to you about the ups and downs and I could lean on you when I had to. So, that’s a no-brainer. I would definitely, that would be what I would do.

Martin Reed:
All right. Well, I appreciate that, Eddie, and I really appreciate your time coming on and sharing your story. It’s going to help a lot of people, so thank you so much.

Eddie Vaisman:
Good. Thank you as well. My pleasure.

Martin Reed:
Or, you can choose to add one-on-one email coaching and work through the course with me by your side. With the one-on-one coaching option, you get unlimited email access to me for eight weeks, starting from the day you enroll. Any time you have a question or concern, any time you are unsure about anything, any time you want to focus on the challenges you face or any difficulties that show up, you can email me and I will be there to coach and support you. With either option, there is a 30-day money back guarantee. If you don’t find the course helpful within 30 days of starting, just let me know and you’ll get your money back. You can get the course and start right now at insomniacoach.com.

Martin Reed:
I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Insomnia Coach Podcast. I’m Martin Reed, and as always, I’d like to leave you with this important reminder — you can sleep.

I want you to be the next insomnia success story I share! If you’re ready to improve your sleep using evidence-based techniques, click here to get my online insomnia coaching course. We can get started right now.

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Listen to the podcast episode (audio only)Jeannette thought of herself as a great sleeper until 13 years ago when she moved and her work schedule become less consistent. She started to stay up later and sleep in later and this led to some sleep disruption. When Jeannette tried to fix this, she ended up going down the insomnia rabbit hole and started researching how to get rid of her insomnia. The more research she did, the more she tried to fix her sleep, the more rules and rituals she engaged in, and the more she found herself struggling.

After working with me, Jeannette’s sleep improved — but one night she woke up and found that she couldn’t fall back to sleep and all her old fears returned. She felt that something must be wrong with her as she found herself waking and finding it impossible to fall back to sleep night after night.

This pulled Jeannette back into her old safety behaviors that she knew from experience weren’t helpful because she just didn’t know what else to do.

In this episode, Jeannette describes how she moved away from the insomnia struggle; how she became more comfortable with nighttime wakefulness, how she stopped chasing after sleep, how she started to allow her mind to generate whatever thoughts it chose to generate — even the difficult ones, and how she started to be kinder to herself when things were difficult.

Perhaps most importantly of all, Jeannette’s story shows that ups and downs are normal and to be expected. Just as we will have difficult days from time to time, we will have difficult nights from time to time. What truly matters is how we respond.

Click here for a full transcript of this episode.Click here to hide the transcript.

Martin Reed:
Okay. Jeanette, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to come onto the podcast.

Jeannette Stojcevski:
You’re welcome. Glad to be here.

Martin Reed:
I’m really looking forward to our conversation, so let’s just get started. I’d like to start right at the beginning. So can you tell us a little bit more about when your sleep problems first began and what you think may have caused those initial issues with sleep?

Jeannette Stojcevski:
Yeah, so my sleep problems, I never had problems sleeping in my teens, my 20s. I was a great sleeper, a really great sleeper. I brag about it. I needed to get my eight, nine hours. So I was always a little obsessive about it, but I was a great sleeper. And then right about 13 years ago, I was living in LA and I’m a personal trainer, so my job was pretty consistent as far as the schedule. But around 30, I moved to Hollywood. I wanted a change, I moved to a little city outside of Hollywood that I liked. And I commuted to work three days a week. And on the other two days, Tuesdays and Thursdays, I worked from home, like an online job that kept me pretty busy, but I could start it at whatever time I wanted. So my insomnia started right around this time because looking back, I had a schedule when I was personal training before I had moved.

And then when I had gotten this online job, on those days, I would sleep in and I would generally go out maybe the night before and not know why I was having trouble waking up at, because I had early clients. So on the other days, I had to get up at 4:30 in the morning and I could no longer fall asleep on the nights before. And it was just because I believe my schedule was completely erratic. So some days I was waking up at 4:00 AM, other days 10:00 AM, 8:00. So then my sleep just started to struggle from that point on, and I didn’t know why. I just thought, “Oh my gosh, what was going on with me? Why can’t I fall asleep anymore?” And that’s when the search started. That’s when I just started down the rabbit hole and it never stopped.

Martin Reed:
So why don’t you tell us a little bit more about that? Because whenever we are faced with a problem as human beings, we want to fix that problem, right?

Jeannette Stojcevski:
Yes.

Martin Reed:
But sleep is one of these outliers that tends not to respond well to effort, which we all know once we’ve gone through that journey and come out the other side. But when we are really trapped in that struggle, boy, we’ll do anything to get out of it. And that usually involves lots of experiments, lots of rituals, lots of efforts. So yeah, why don’t you tell us a little bit more about your experience there.

Jeannette Stojcevski:
Sure. So just like so many other people, I immediately started researching, started going to the internet looking for things I could try. So it started with just the sleep hygiene. Keeping my room cold or blackout curtains, eye mask. I developed a lot of rituals. Then I started to do acupuncture. I’m living in LA, so there’s a plethora of holistic doctors. So I just started seeing just random healers, people that told me that something in my past life was contributing to the problem. I wrote all of them down. I did hypnosis, I spent a lot of money on hypnosis. I bought a machine, it’s called… I just tried so many crazy things. This thing that you put around your head, it’s called tDCS, some sort of stimulation for your brain, which I think can be actually dangerous. I tried sweat lodges, everything I could think of, crystals.

And then I started taking sleeping pills. That’s when I went down the path of, “Okay, I don’t know what else to do.” I started smoking marijuana and I started taking sleeping pills. But I had no idea what I was actually taking. I got them from a family member who was able to get them from Europe, and I did not know, and he didn’t know what I was taking either. So I eventually ran out because it wasn’t a prescription. So I eventually ran out, and now I’m dealing with, which I didn’t realize at the time how dangerous it was, I’m dealing with rebound insomnia. So it was even worse at that point where I didn’t sleep for days. I actually slept in my car one night. So I can’t even be in my apartment anymore, I’ve got to leave. So I went to my car and actually fell asleep that night, which was interesting.

And so after about five days of that, I stayed at a friend’s house and then I was able to sleep after that. I was able to get a good chunk of five, six hours. So I knew that I could sleep again, I knew my body was able to do this, but I still didn’t know why it was happening, so I sought out the help of a holistic doctor out there. And it was a wonderful experience, I started to sleep better, but I thought at that time it was because of the supplements. I thought, “Wow, I’m on this program, he balanced out whatever was going on with me, I’m good.” But in reality, looking back, I think my sleep got better at that time because I just started to, because I didn’t go out anymore, I wasn’t going out at night, so I wasn’t sleeping in as much. So I think everything regulated and I started sleeping better for a while.

And then it never really left me. I was always worried about it, I always thought about it, I obsessed about the way I looked like, “Is this affecting my appearance, is this affecting my workouts?” I just continue to worry about it, so that fear never left me. And then in December of 2020… Now I’m living in Michigan. I moved back to Michigan and I got COVID in December of 2020. And I got it pretty… I lost my smell, and so it was a pretty difficult time. I got a little depressed around that time. And my sleep suffered naturally, but of course… And I was having problems every so often before that. But it really, really suffered after I got COVID and I thought, “Oh no, this is different. This is the worst it’s ever been.”

And that’s when I started working with you and I got better. But then I think it was September of 2021 that I just started to get worse. I don’t know what the trigger was, it was just a night where I couldn’t fall back to sleep. That’s what it was. I woke up around three in the morning and then I couldn’t fall back to sleep after that. And then I was like, “Oh no, it is back.” But that’s never happened to me, usually I can get back to sleep. So I’m thinking it was worse than it has ever been, something must be wrong with me. And then I started going down another crazy rabbit hole.

I considered going to a rehab at that time like, “Do I need to go somewhere where somebody just has to take care of me for a while?” I considered going to the ER psych ward. I was just out of my mind thinking something was really wrong with me because of course, the following night it happened. And then I’m waking up and unable to go back to sleep every night of the week. So instead of going back to what I knew I should do, which is just stay calm, it usually passes, I just went down another rabbit hole where I started smoking marijuana again, I started looking for the supplements, and I started just doing the things that I knew weren’t going to work, but for some reason I just didn’t know what else to do at that moment because I just felt so bad.

And I think the reason why it was hard for me to go back on the program was because at that time I just felt so physically bad. But then that’s when I think I reached out to you or you reached out to me and I just decided, “Okay, I’m going to do this again. I’m really just going to give this a real shot again.” And I did. And of course my sleep started improving, I started to be able to fall back asleep again. And there was an interview you did that really inspired me.

I’m a big watcher of your podcast with other people because that’s really what fueled me during those dark moments. Just knowing that, I think there was a lady who had it pretty much her whole life, and she said something and it stuck with me, “There’s things going on behind the scenes.” It feels like it may not be working at first but I remember I just kept saying that to myself, “Behind the scenes, Jeannette. It’s going to work. This takes time, this takes a minute. You’ve had this and you’ve had some deep psychological changes around your thoughts around sleep, so this is not going to be an overnight thing.”

And I always thought, “Oh, by the third day, I should be sleeping better.” And that’s not the case. For me at least, it wasn’t. So I just started to stick to the program better too, because before the problem I think I had was I just couldn’t stick to it. I just had a really hard time getting out of bed. Yeah, but when I finally just committed and I just dived into the podcast and videos and it helped me so much on this last round of my last relapse.

Martin Reed:
Yeah, there’s so much great stuff there to just unpack because I think a lot of people will recognize that journey that you just described. Insomnia from person to person, it is pretty much identical. We have a trigger for sleep disruption. Sometimes it’s really memorable and obvious, but sometimes not. So we experience that sleep disruption. Normally, a lot of the time we don’t think much of it, but if it sticks around for longer than it might have done in the past, then that triggers the worry, the stress, the anxiety, or the research. Again, completely normal reaction. We have a problem, we want to fix it.

So we then really what it comes down to, we engage in effort. We try harder to sleep than we ever have before, we put all this effort into sleep, we might engage in rituals, experiments. Again, all completely understandable why we do that. But it actually ends up giving insomnia the oxygen it needs to survive, that attention, that effort, that strong desire to avoid being awake at night. That’s what keeps insomnia going. And just as you experienced, some of this stuff can give a short-term relief. It can generate some improvements in the short term, but what can happen is when we then try and move away from those things, we are back to where we started because we never really got to that root issue, which is addressing that really strong desire to avoid being awake.

I think what it comes down to is if we are willing, if we can get to a place where we are more willing for insomnia to exist, it tends not to exist, but when we are really desperate for it not to exist, it’s really likely to exist. So all of that, and it’s like, it’s also important to recognize too, that the worry and the anxiety, and the stress, and all those difficult thoughts and feelings, they’re not necessarily a cause of insomnia. Just because we’re stressed or anxious or worried, that doesn’t mean that we’re going to have a really difficult night. But when we start to struggle with that, when we try and push or fight or avoid all that difficult stuff, all those thoughts and emotions, I think that’s what then definitely can generate some difficult nights.

Jeannette Stojcevski:
Yeah, absolutely.

Martin Reed:
And again, it’s our human nature. We don’t like feeling anxious or worried or stressed, so we want to try and push that stuff away. But just like sleep, we can’t control what goes on inside our minds. And the more we try, the more we get tangled up in this endless struggle. And I don’t need to tell you, and I don’t need to tell anyone listening, that struggle is so exhausting, and we tend not to make that much progress.

Jeannette Stojcevski:
Yeah, it is exhausting. And I think that was my struggle, just the struggle of not wanting to be awake. It’s still a little bit difficult. I’ve definitely improved so much, but in the beginning, I just was really uncomfortable with getting out of bed. I didn’t like the idea that I was awake during the night, I was always trying to catch up on sleep, catch sleep, laying there with my eyes closed, just hoping it’ll come. So I was very, very uncomfortable with the fact that I had insomnia and that this was my life for right now, or I just wasn’t comfortable with that. So that part was very hard for me to do, get out of bed and just accept the fact that I’m up and stay calm about it. I would, just like so many other people have experienced, go into sweats, and just be hot, and anxious, and just be tossing and turning and every which way.

But for some reason, I just couldn’t muster up the strength to get myself out of bed. Or if I did, I would, it would just be to go to the bathroom and then right back into the bed, or just a temporary quick break out of my bed. I would sit up and then get back into it because I was just like, “I don’t want to be off. It’s night.” But now I know looking back, that just fueled my issue. It just fueled it. There’s no reason to have a reaction like that unless you just… It’s a habit, it just became a habit for me that I was unable to break.

Martin Reed:
Yeah. And I think then when we are engaged in that struggle, it’s so easy to fall back into all those old safety behaviors. Again, just like you mentioned, when we found short-term relief from something, whatever it is, when we are struggling again, it’s so easy to reach back for those things again, to try. What are we doing? We’re just engaging in that effort again, which again is understandable because we don’t like what we’re going through. It’s all that effort, although all that trying to avoid the wakefulness, all that trying to make sleep happen, really is what causes all the struggle. And really, if we just take a step back and just think, “What is insomnia?” It basically comes down to we don’t want to be awake at night, so we put all this effort into trying to make sleep happen. The brain detects us engaged in all these efforts.

So what does the brain think? “Oh, you’re trying so hard to avoid being awake at night. Being awake at night, it must be a danger, it must be this threat. It’s like a very real physical threat and a danger to you, so I’m going to be alert to protect you from this danger of wakefulness.” And obviously that alertness makes sleep more difficult. So all those efforts that we engage in, they can give us some short-term relief sometimes, but what are we doing? We’re kind of reinforcing that belief in our brain that this wakefulness is a real danger, that it has to be alert to protect us from, because the brain isn’t doing all this stuff to make us feel bad. It’s doing all this stuff to look out for us, but it’s just trying so hard that it often ends up getting in the way.

Jeannette Stojcevski:
I know. I didn’t understand that until recently, that whole concept, like how the brain is trying to protect you from this. I just didn’t understand that, but it definitely made sense the more I started to think about it, I’m like, “Yeah, that’s definitely what’s going on.” I can definitely understand that.

Martin Reed:
Yeah. And so because the brain is trying to look out for us and it’s sending us all these warnings which tend not to feel good, like worry, and anxiety, and fear, and stress, and all that stuff. Because they don’t feel good, we normally want to kind of ignore it or push it away or pretend it’s not happening, or try and distract ourselves. But then the brain thinks, “Okay, there’s this danger. Now I’m trying to tell you about it, and now you’re ignoring me?” So the brain then freaks out even more and it’s like, it has to yell even louder, right?

Jeannette Stojcevski:
Yes.

Martin Reed:
It’s like if we see someone about to cross the street and there’s a truck coming towards, and when we yell at them, “There’s a truck coming, don’t cross the street,” and they just kind of wave at us and carry on going, what are we going to do? We’re going to yell even louder, right?

Jeannette Stojcevski:
Yes.

Martin Reed:
And louder, and louder, and louder. So I think what can be so helpful is just acknowledging all that difficult stuff that the brain is generating rather than as we’re all hardwired to do, trying to push it away or fight or avoid it, just acknowledging it. Just even something as simple as just being like, “I recognize that I’m feeling anxious right now. I’m feeling worried, I’m feeling scared.” And just acknowledging that you’re feeling that can just be one of those things that lifts a little bit of that weight off your shoulders because now you are not trying to deny it, you’re not trying to push it away. Unlike a beach ball, the more you push it away, the more it pushes back. You’re just acknowledging it. And then if you continue practicing this, you might be able to get to a point where you allow that stuff to exist, even though it doesn’t feel good, you just let it kind of sit there and make a little bit of space for it.

Maybe it will just hang out for a while, maybe then it will go away, maybe then it will come back. But we’re just not engaged in that struggle anymore, we’re not trying to push it. We’re not trying to push it away, we’re not trying to distract ourselves, which is so exhausting. We just let the mind do what the mind wants to do and focus on what we have control over, which are always our behaviors. No matter how bad things are, no matter how difficult they are, we can still move our body. We can do things that can make unpleasant wakefulness a bit more pleasant, and we can do things during the day, these don’t have to be huge things, but we can always do some things during the day that are aligned with our values and that just help us keep moving toward the kind of life we want to live, even when all this stuff is going on in our heads, even after we’ve had a difficult night.

And if we do that, not only does it help give us the opportunity to make the days and the nights a little bit better, but it also helps train the brain that maybe this wakefulness isn’t quite as much of a threat. Certainly not a physical threat, like a bear waiting for you under the covers because you’re making that wakefulness a little bit more pleasant by just doing something else instead of struggling. And then during the day, you’re still able to do some things that help you live the kind of life you want to live. And I think that’s all part of the journey that we have to go through in order to enjoy this long-term improvement where we just see that insomnia more in the rear-view mirror than something that’s controlling our lives.

Jeannette Stojcevski:
Yes, I agree. What also helped me in regards to just allowing the thoughts to come in it. I think I mentioned in the email I was trying a little bit of, during my relapse, I read about Acceptance Commitment Therapy, ACT. And I thought, “Okay, I’m just…” It really made sense to me, like letting the thoughts come in and come out and being mindful. But I also think that it led to a little bit more of a struggle for me because I thought, “You know what? I’m just going to lay here in bed instead of get up, because that’s what normal sleepers do.”

And it didn’t work for me. I liked the concept of being mindful and letting the thoughts come and just letting them come in, but I needed the structure of the sleep window, a real sleep window. I liked the discipline of that. For me, that was very important. So both together, I think combined helped me. And I think just letting go of the sleep window was probably a really bad thing for me that I was starting to let go of it, because I would spend long periods of time in bed too, I forgot to mention that. And I was that person nine, 10 hours, just sleep in till whenever. And I wasn’t even sleeping, just to catch up, but that didn’t help. So the structure really helps me. Structure.

Martin Reed:
Yeah. So let’s talk a little bit more about the kind of changes that you made when we were working together or after, because it was a while ago that we were actually working together, so there’s been a lot that’s happened in the intervening period. And one of the first changes that we talked about was what are your thoughts on spending a little bit less time in bed? Because the temptation always tends to be, “I really want sleep to happen, so if I spend more time in bed I’m giving myself the opportunity for sleep to happen.” But often this can kind of backfire on us and just lead to more time awake at night, which is one of the things that we recognize as being an unpleasant part of having insomnia.

So how about you tell us a little bit more about your experience there. You already mentioned that you were spending a lot of time in bed. How did you reduce that? Why did you reduce it? And how did you find that experience?

Jeannette Stojcevski:
That was a very difficult part of the program for me, just reducing the time in bed. So normally I wasn’t affected by the going to sleep time. I know a lot of people are like, “Oh, I had to stay up until one.” That was not a problem for me because I like the night, I’m a little bit of a night owl. So my sleep window wasn’t incredibly late, started at about midnight, 12:30. But because I was spending so much time in bed, I don’t work mornings and I have structured my life that way, that’s one way insomnia has affected my life, it’s like no more morning activities. Instead of nighttime activities, for me, it’s morning. So I was going from a 12:00 to 9:00, 10:00 AM window to a shorter window. And even seven hours seemed pretty scary to me. I know some people start out with even less. So mine was like seven hours, 7:15. And it was very scary and I was unable to follow it for a while.
So I would some days, and then if I had a bad night the next day I would sleep through my sleep window maybe over an hour. And then I would just beat myself up. In the beginning when I was working with you, I would beat myself up and just be so critical of myself like, “Yeah, you can’t do this. You’re a trainer and you’re telling other people to do things.” But it also gave me compassion for myself and for my clients because I know what they’re going through in a way. Even though I don’t have weight issues, I have this issue that’s so hard, it was so, so hard for me to stick to the program. So I have so much more compassion now for my clients, which has been great. But the sleep window was definitely very challenging. And you recommended something that was very helpful. And when I would hear like, “Oh, you have to get up and get out of bed 7:00 AM.” That was daunting. I feel like a zombie. Sometimes I actually feel sick from lack of sleep.

But then you said, “You don’t have to make it this event. You don’t have to get up and do a five-mile run. You can get up and sit on the cozy couch with your blanket, with your cup of coffee or whatever, and start your morning out that way.” So that’s what I started to do. I remembered that. So just started to pull myself out of bed, not beat myself up if I slept in a little bit, 30 minutes, that’s okay. I would just get myself up. And I did what you mentioned, just start my day really slow. And slowly but surely I started to feel better in the morning, because I had a lot of nausea in the morning, whether it was from actual lack of sleep or I think it was more of my reaction to it. Of course, we all feel a little not so well after a poor night of sleep, but the way I felt was just I wasn’t able to eat sometimes, but that started to get a little bit better.

And then I actually just started just jotting. I wanted to let go of the charting. I didn’t like that because I don’t think that was helpful for me because I’m already a little bit of an obsessive person, but I would journal about just how I felt that day and the little improvements I was making. Like, “Oh, today I didn’t feel like… I was able to eat within an hour of waking up. That’s an improvement.” So I just started thinking about, instead of looking at all these negative things that were going on, I just started tracking my improvements. What has improved today and what have I continued to do during even some of the bad times? And nothing in my life really fell apart, so I think that was really helpful, just slow start to the morning, have just journaling my successes, because somebody else, I think this was another person, because I had spoke to many, many people over the years, that was just a snippet.

Like over the 13 years I had it, I saw quite a few sleep doctors and somebody recommended, “Oh, maybe you should schedule an exercise class in the morning, some things like maybe yoga or something.” I’m like, “That sounds horrible for me to get out the door. I mean, even if it’s yoga, that sounds horrible. So no.” And of course, I never took the yoga class in the morning because that just wasn’t going to work for me. And so this suggestion really helped and I still do it that way, not get up. And I never really was, even as an athlete in college, we had 6:00 AM practices. I was never, “Oh, I can’t wait to get off.” I was just slow as molasses in the morning, but my roommate loved mornings. So we’re all wired differently. It’s so interesting. But yeah, I’m still slow in the morning and that’s okay for me.

Martin Reed:
Well, I think I’m the founding member of that club. I’m the slowest person in the morning. I’m terrible. So it’s just how we’re wired. Some of us are wired like that. And I think that’s another one of those traps that we can easily fall into as well when we’re struggling with sleep is when we wake up and we are feeling kind of lethargic and groggy, we can assume that that’s a complete reflection of how we slept. If I feel pretty groggy and pretty out of it, then that must be because I had a really difficult night. And it definitely could be, but I know from my own experience, and it sounds from your own experience that a lot of us, we just feel crappy in the morning no matter what. And what can just be so helpful is just getting up, just getting the day started, even if we started really slowly, just getting it started, just getting life going that day.

And often we start to feel differently as the day progresses in response to the time, what we’re doing, where we are, and stuff like that. I mean, I like to think that when I first wake in the morning, that’s the low point of the day, that’s the crappies I’m going to feel all day long most of the time, so I’ve got a big improvement to look forward to as the day progresses. And I think that’s where just getting out of bed around the same time every day can be helpful because often just lingering in the bed doesn’t usually help shake off all those difficult, that fatigue, that grogginess, but kind of moving, getting the day started no matter how slowly, often can be more helpful. And it’s another one of those things too, where we are not chasing off to sleep because we are getting out of bed around the same time.

And we don’t have to be super strict. Like you said, maybe one day we fancy like an hour lying or a half an hour lying. That’s fine, we’re human beings. But just getting out of bed around the same time, we are not chasing off to sleep, we are not saying to the brain, “Look, I got to get sleep, I’ve got to get sleep because being awake is a real danger. You need to protect me from this danger, be really alert at night to protect me from being awake, we’ve got to get sleep.” And when we’re out of bed, we tend to be moving around, engage. We are more likely to be engaged and doing the kind of stuff that’s important to us. And that’s really what life comes down to. Life comes with pain, and struggle, and difficulty. Life is what we do when we’re awake. It’s all the actions that we are engaged in.

So as long as we can just continue to do things that are aligned with our values, that are important and meaningful to us, even with all that difficult stuff going on, that’s really all that matters. In a hundred years, we are not going to look back on all the great nights of sleep we had. We’re going to be looking back on all the things we did when we were awake, even when we felt crappy doing them.

Jeannette Stojcevski:
Yes, absolutely.

Martin Reed:
Just the fact that we were doing them, I think that’s really important.

Jeannette Stojcevski:
Yes, it is. And I think it’s so easy to forget when you’re going through a long bout of insomnia or a short bout of insomnia, we forget that, and I think a lot of insomniacs tend to be perfectionists and they want everything perfect all the time. And for me, I know that I got into this mindset that I had to feel perfect all the time. And I forgot how I used to, like when I was a teenager, of course there was nights when I didn’t sleep, but then I was always waking up at the same time every day to go to school. And I think that’s why I just kept that good sleep pattern. And even in college, I think back, I was living in Chicago, I was tired all the time just being from being an athlete. We weren’t practicing twice a day, school, I worked. I remember just falling asleep sometimes on the train on the L, and I would end up at a different stop completely outside of my dorm because I was just so tired.

But I didn’t think about it, I didn’t sweat it, I wasn’t freaking out about it. It’s just life comes with lots of ups and downs. So yeah, I think when you’re in the crux of it, you just think, “This is not how I should feel.” And in reality, yeah, there’s going to be some days that won’t be so great, but really what are you doing during the day? Are you having joyful moments? And really, most of the time, like you just said, the mornings are the worst times of my day. But even on those nights I only slept a couple hours, by the evening time I’m tired, but I’m actually feeling okay. And I would always remember that, I reminded myself of that on those bad mornings like, “Jeannette, by seven o’clock tonight, you’re going to be feeling fine. Just let’s get through this day, stay calm, stay relaxed. Yeah, it’ll be okay.” So it’s just so crazy how we just can forget and want to just have this perfect little sleep in life and it doesn’t exist.

Martin Reed:
Yeah. And I think it’s really important to recognize like you just said, just to look back on all the important stuff we’ve done in our life. Probably none of those things happened without any kind of pain or struggle or difficulty because that’s what life is. Life comes with all that difficult stuff along with the good stuff. And it’s hard to achieve the good stuff without also experiencing the difficult stuff. So for example, if we’re studying, if we go to college, or maybe we’re still at high school and we are doing all that study and we’re feeling exhausted by it, that struggle.

If we are training to be an athlete, you’re putting your body through all of that training, you’re feeling fatigued, but you recognize that in order to reach the level you want to reach to live the kind of life you want to live to reach your goals, there’s going to be that fatigue. It’s not all going to be plain saying. There’s going to be difficulty, there’s going to be struggle. And if you’re training for a marathon, I’m sure you’re going to be getting blisters, maybe some pulled muscles. There’s going to be pain.

Jeannette Stojcevski:
Yeah.

Martin Reed:
Right? There’s going to be pain in order to reach what you want to reach. For us to live a life that’s aligned with our values, pain comes with it, but that pain is necessary to serve our values, to help us live that life that we want to live. And I think it can be helpful to just recognize that because it’s so easy to fall into that trap and just wanting to feel good all of the time, to want to have the best night of sleep every single night, but that just doesn’t happen. And I think opening ourselves up to be more willing to accept or to just experience the difficult nights, to experience difficult feelings, to experience difficult emotions and thoughts, just opening ourselves up to allowing that to happen and realizing that that stuff can all happen at the same time as we are doing what matters. We are doing stuff that helps us live the kind of life we want to live. I think that can be really important to just reflect on and to recognize.

Jeannette Stojcevski:
I agree. Absolutely.

Martin Reed:
So we talked about the sleep window, we’ve talked quite a lot about everything that goes on in the mind when we’re going through this. You also touched upon how to respond when you’re struggling during the night. And for you, it sounds like you found it helpful to practice getting out of bed during the night if it just wasn’t pleasant to be in bed and sleep wasn’t happening. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Jeannette Stojcevski:
Sure.

Martin Reed:
Before you made any changes, were you one of those people that would you stay in bed tossing and turning, trying to make sleep happen? And how did you get to a point where you thought, “Oh, maybe I could change this and do something different instead”?

Jeannette Stojcevski:
Yeah, I was one of those people who struggled with getting out of bed. I tossed and turned pretty much all night, except for my frequent trips to the bathroom. For some reason that was just, I think, anxiety-driven. I really didn’t have to go, but I would just go to the bathroom, get back in bed, toss and turn more. And then sometimes I would fall asleep, but I never was able to fully commit to just getting out of bed. Then it’s funny because I have a friend who doesn’t sleep well, and it’s sad because he is very stuck in this, I’ve tried everything and he said something, he’s like, “Oh my gosh, my bed, it looks like a mess in the morning. The sheets are off, the bedliners, everything is messed up.” And in my head I was like, “Oh my gosh, I was doing exactly what you’re doing and I know the reason why he’s not getting better.”

And then after that conversation with him and then a couple more podcasts or interviews with people, I realized, “Okay, I really need to give this a shot. I think it’s not helping me because I’m ending up with sore, achy muscles anyway.” I really started to get real serious with myself and say, “If you don’t try something, if you don’t do something, this is going to be your life for the rest of your life.” Because I think I was, and I am still, disciplined. This is one area of my life where I feel like I lost discipline. I couldn’t just do this, so I just had some real good talks with myself just like I would before a race or something like, “You know what? This is something you have to do. You can do this, strong.”

And it was just a lot of positive self-talk like, “Come on Jeannette, let’s go. Get up, let’s do this.” So for me, it was just realizing that I really had no other choice If I wanted to get better, that laying in bed was not serving me. It was making me more anxious, more irritable, more sore, sweating. I felt like I was having hot flashes. I’m like, “I’m going through perimenopause.” That wasn’t it. It was just anxiety. So just with being able to reason, again, my journaling, I was able to start making those changes in the middle of the night, but I didn’t get up and read a book. That was never something that felt good or I never was one to get up and watch TV. I didn’t want to do anything that was just too much effort for me.

So for me, it was just stretching, laying on the ground, getting up. I actually got up, but I would come to my couch and then just sit on my couch or sometimes just listen to a YouTube station that has an image with rain or just something very relaxing, but not in an effort to fall back to sleep, just to stay calm. So I started doing that, just started removing myself from the bed, either stretch or just sit somewhere else, but I wasn’t necessarily doing anything. And that felt good to me, that did feel good to me. And eventually I did have a big fear of my bed for a long time, actually. I slept on this good old couch for a long time. So at that point I was going back to the bed though, and it all started just slowly but surely, but it took time.

Again, this is not something that worked for me in five days, it took weeks and weeks, and I feel like haven’t lost the fear completely of getting up in the middle of the night, like I’m still sometimes like, “Okay, I’m up.” But I know I’ll get there, to the point where I no longer even think about it. It’s just a blip and then I go back to sleep. So it is a process.

Martin Reed:
Yeah, it is. And I think that’s one reason why it’s so easy to fall back into all these old safety behaviors that we know from experience aren’t helpful over the long term, but they tend to give us that short-term relief, whether it’s medication, marijuana, alcohol, or anything, any kind of external thing, because those things promise quick fixes. And maybe in the short term they might help that way, but we just end up kicking the can down the road, we know it’s just going to come back sooner or later. Whereas this stuff, changing our behaviors, the stuff that we can control, it takes practice and it takes time, it takes a lot more effort, a lot more discipline, a lot more commitment. There’s going to be blips along the way, there’s going to be struggle, but I think it is one of the best things we can do if our goal is to do better over the long term, because really like we touched upon earlier, insomnia is just… It exists because of all the effort, all the things we are doing to try and make sleep happen, to try and avoid that wakefulness.

If instead we can do the opposite. So for example, with the sleep window allotting less time for sleep, what are we doing? Ultimately, we’re just preventing ourselves from chasing after sleep. So that’s a big sleep effort dropped right there just by giving ourselves an earliest possible bedtime and a consistent out of bedtime in the morning. Now we’re not chasing sleep and the process of getting out of bed during the night, I often get asked, “Isn’t that in itself a sleep effort?” I think it’s the opposite of a sleep effort because if we’re getting out of bed, we’re not going to fall asleep at that moment as the physical act of getting out of bed. Again, what are we doing really? We’re just not chasing sleep, we are not putting effort into sleep. So if we’re in bed and being in bed doesn’t feel good, we are just going to do something that’s going to make being awake more pleasant.

So we are not putting all that effort into sleep, we’re not struggling to get entangled up with our thoughts, and our feelings, and our emotions. We’re just going to do something to make being awake more pleasant. And again, not only are we not chasing after sleep, if we are able to do something more pleasant, the brain’s like, “Wait a minute, I thought wakefulness was this physical threat or this danger. How can that be if now this wakefulness is starting to feel a little bit more pleasant than it used to?” And so we chip away at it. And like you said, it’s not something that works within 48 hours or in three days, or necessarily within a week or two. Often it takes a lot of commitment to just avoid falling into that trap of trying to make sleep happen, trying not to think something, trying not to feel something, and just focusing on what we can control. But what we can control won’t necessarily give us immediate relief, but it’s usually more helpful over the long term.

Jeannette Stojcevski:
I agree, I absolutely agree. I’m a testament to it. Yeah, it takes time. It does.

Martin Reed:
So before I move on, I did just want to ask you about dealing with those ups and downs, because they always happen, everyone has difficult nights as we live life, but were there any other changes that you made either when we were working together or since then that you found to be helpful that maybe we haven’t discussed or mentioned yet?

Jeannette Stojcevski:
Another change I made, it wasn’t necessarily a change, but I dived into, and this may not help other people, but it was really important for me to hear other people’s stories and to know that what I was doing was going to help me because for some reason I just had a hard time believing that this was going to work for me, or that after a week if it didn’t work, I would start to lose hope. So I just started adding more information. Again, my brain, I needed to hear it from other people that went through years of insomnia that this helped them. So I started just listening to more of the interviews and I just started to relax even during the day and do more during the day, I dived into workouts again. So before when I didn’t feel that great, I would skip my workout.

And that was also a huge thing for me, catastrophize like, “Oh, am I going to lose my job because I’m going to become overweight?” Whatever, it was just horrible thoughts. But then I just started to really just live my life normally, which means doing my workout that I had scheduled, even if it didn’t… Some days it wouldn’t feel as good or I couldn’t lift as heavy or whatnot, but I still committed to that. And I just started living more, going out with people. Even when I felt dead tired, normally I would’ve canceled. I would even cancel a phone call because I just didn’t have the energy like, “Oh, I’m just too tired for it.” And I stopped doing all that stuff. I started living my life more true to how I wanted to live it.

And little by little I started journaling that too like, “Well, I did all my workouts this week.” And then I would really reflect on all the new things I started to add to my life, which is just going out to dinners with friends. For me, going out at night, I wasn’t afraid of it because I need to get back home because my bedtime was already pretty late. It was just more, “Do I have the energy to do this? I just feel so crappy or whatever.” And in reality, when I went out with that person, I always felt better, I was able to shake off the fatigue and have a good time. So I think little by little, just living life started to add up for me. And also being mindful of the days. That was something that I picked up too, is just being mindful on those days I wasn’t feeling my best. And also being kinder to myself, I started being kinder. That’s something I did.

Whereas I was really abusive before. I would just constantly in my head, “I’m a failure, I can’t do this, why can’t I do this? Other people have done this.” And I just decided to stop it, just be kind on those days. “Okay, so you didn’t wake up on time. All right. So you didn’t have a great night. How do you feel?” I just checked in with myself a little bit more and that was really helpful, that was really helpful for me. Just checking in during the day. I’m just doing more living.

Martin Reed:
Yeah, I think all of that is so, so important, and especially the thing that we often miss is just to be kind to ourselves, because what we are going through is difficult, and I think we can be really supportive to other people when they’re going through struggle, but when it comes to ourselves, often that all flies out the window and we are really mean to ourselves.

Jeannette Stojcevski:
Oh yeah.

Martin Reed:
“I shouldn’t be feeling this way, or I should have done better at that.” But the truth is, we are human beings. We have good times, we have difficult times, and I think it’s helpful to recognize that and to be kind to ourselves. It’s very easy to forget that and I think it does play a really important role in the healing process because if we are just going to be angry at ourselves or disparaging to ourselves because we’re struggling with something, it puts more pressure on us to do better. And often, that thing we’re trying to do better at is something we can’t even control. And yet we’re so hard on ourselves when what happens isn’t aligned with what we want to happen. So yeah, I’m really glad that you mentioned that as something that you found to be helpful, just being kinder to yourself.

Jeannette Stojcevski:
Yes, it’s so important, it’s monumental, especially for those who are critical. Yeah.

Martin Reed:
Yeah. So as I said, I just wanted to quickly touch upon the ups and downs that happen because I think it is important to recognize that there’s always going to be difficult nights from time to time. There’s no such thing as a life without difficult nights, just as there’s no such thing as a life without pain and struggle. What I usually find, just in my experience working with people with chronic insomnia is when that first bout of sleep disruption comes back, it’s the most difficult because all those old thoughts, feelings, worries, come back. And often we are tempted to engage in all those old safety behaviors and rituals that aren’t usually that helpful over the long term. Then perhaps we get through it, then perhaps the sleep disruption comes back later on. And it’s still disruptive, still something we don’t want to happen, but maybe it has a bit of less of an effect on us then we do well than something else happens.

So I’m curious to just hear your thoughts. Did you find that you followed a pattern that worked a bit like that?

Jeannette Stojcevski:
Yeah, so when I would relapse, it was always fairly scary to me, but this last relapse I think was the scariest for some reason. And even though I had gone through this so many times before and insomnia wasn’t new to me, and I knew most people’s insomnia are the same and there’s not really many special cases out there, but for some reason it really freaked me out. And worse than before, like all my other relapses, I was able to get out of them, but because I was only getting a couple hours of sleep, I really felt more desperate than ever to find out what was going on with me. But as soon as I realized, I think how I came to the realization that it was pretty much the same as any other relapse that I’ve had was again, through the education.

It was really important for me just to become, I went back because I have a lot of books on insomnia, and I just kind of reeducated myself on things I already knew, things I had already read. And I think sometimes when you’re struggling with something that’s so just kind of embedded in your brain, it’s very hard to get out of it. But for me, just continuing to work on just the thoughts around the fact that, “I am not different, I am the same as all these other people, this is not a different type of relapse, you’re going to get better.” That was helpful to me. And it wasn’t like I did anything too different. It was more just educating myself again. I didn’t try any new techniques or anything, it was just more of the education like, “Okay. All right, this person recovered. Oh, this is why this is happening. I’m hyper aroused.” That word, I just kept remembering that word.

“This is hyper arousal. This is nothing more than that. You’re aware that you’re awake and now because of this awareness, your brain’s trying to protect you.” So just understanding logically what was going on was helpful for this last relapse. I think before, I didn’t quite get into the education as much as I did this last time, and it did help. It really did. All of the interviews are so helpful. I want to shake every person’s hand who’s done an interview because each one has something like a snippet, and at some point you have to let them go too. You can’t just listen to videos all day long for the rest of your life, but I think as long as it’s helping, and I didn’t see anything wrong with that, so for me that was education.

Martin Reed:
Yeah. And the education can be such a huge component because it just strips away any mystery, all those question marks, because insomnia can feel really mysterious and we really caught up in a struggle like, “Why is this happening to me? Why were the nights once like this and now they’re like this?” For example, something I often hear is, “My trouble always used to be falling asleep, but now I can fall asleep okay, but I’m waking during the night. I’m finding it hard to fall back to sleep, whereas that was never the case.” It’s all the same thing, it’s all insomnia, it’s all down to that hyper arousal, just like you touched upon. It’s down to the brain looking out for us, it’s just trying to protect us from being awake at night.

All we can do is train it that it’s okay to be awake at night. And to do that, we have to be more willing to experience nighttime wakefulness. We can do that by making it a bit more pleasant when it doesn’t feel good and avoid all those sleep efforts, all those things that we might have been doing with the goal of creating sleep or creating sleepiness. They’re never usually helpful because we’re putting effort into sleep, and sleep doesn’t respond well to effort. And we are reinforcing this idea in our brain that wakefulness is a threat, that it has to be avoided, that, “Okay, brain, I’m tasking you with being alert at night to protect me from wakefulness.”

And so as soon as we’re engaged in those efforts, sleep becomes more difficult. So yeah, the education lifts that veil. And I think another big part of that education is giving ourselves the opportunity to continue doing things that are important to us, even when we’ve had difficult nights, just like you were talking about, because it reduces the kind of influence the sleep, wakefulness, or the difficult thoughts and feelings have over our lives. We’re not necessarily getting rid of them because these are things that we can’t control. The only thing we can control are our actions. So as long as we just continue to engage in actions that help us move toward the kind of life we want to live, all this difficult stuff has less of an influence over us.

I mean, it still doesn’t feel good, but there’s nothing we can do about that. We can’t make ourselves feel great, but what’s important is that we’re just doing stuff that matters, that’s important to us, even when all this difficult stuff is going on. And I think that’s really key to these long-term transformations like we are talking about here and that we have other guests talking about on the podcast.

Jeannette Stojcevski:
Yeah. It may not seem like it’s working at first, but it is. There’s things going on that are helping and we just have to remember that. I told clients, I’ve trained so many people over the years and many people with mind-body issues. And I tell them like, “I’m not a doctor, but these are the recommendations. You’re not going to feel the effects of drinking enough water for it may be months or eating better or your energy won’t improve right away, but trust me, it will happen.” And this is the stuff I tell my clients. I said, “But if you don’t start to do this, you’ll probably feel this way for the rest of your life.” And it’s the same thing with this program or insomnia. It may not seem like it’s working at first, but I had to remind myself, “It is working, just give it some time, keep doing the groundwork, laying the foundation.” And little by little your thought patterns do change, your mind does start to relax about sleep, and it just starts to improve little by little, day by day. And I feel like I’m still improving. Yeah.

Martin Reed:
Yeah, that’s great. I’m just, like you said, I think these discussions are so helpful and I’m really grateful that you came on to share your experience. So like you were saying, you just want to shake everyone else’s hand. You can shake your own hand too, because you’re on here too and your story is going to be really helpful to a lot of people, but there is still one question that I haven’t asked you yet, which I ask every guest, so I don’t want you to feel left out. And it’s this, if someone with chronic insomnia is listening, they feel that they’ve tried everything, that they’re just beyond help, there’s nothing they can do to improve their sleep, what would you tell them?

Jeannette Stojcevski:
I would tell them to hire a coach, number one if it’s something that you really feel like you’re struggling with. I did know about this stuff and just for some reason I just didn’t do it, I wouldn’t do it. So give it a real shot, really follow the protocol and give it a shot. And if it’s too hard like it was for me, hire somebody. It’s well worth every dollar spent because I have tried everything, maybe not everything, but thousands, and thousands, and thousands, and thousands, and thousands of dollars on things that didn’t work. Not one thing worked, not one pill, not one potion, nothing worked.

But this does work, and it’s worked for many people. So if it’s too difficult, if you just can’t seem to do it on your own, hire somebody, it’s the best investment you can make. And give it a real shot. Don’t just say, “Oh, that won’t work for me because I did that too.” But usually those people may not be doing it in the way like just give it a shot. That’s all I can say. It works, it really works. I’ve been through a lot with insomnia, and I feel so much better, and I’m just continuing to get better. So yeah, that’s what I have to say.

Martin Reed:
That’s great. Well, I think that’s a great note to end on, so thanks again, Jeannette-

Jeannette Stojcevski:
You’re welcome.

Martin Reed:
… for taking the time out to come on and share your story.

Jeannette Stojcevski:
My pleasure. Thank you.

Martin Reed:
Or, you can choose to add one-on-one email coaching and work through the course with me by your side. With the one-on-one coaching option, you get unlimited email access to me for eight weeks, starting from the day you enroll. Any time you have a question or concern, any time you are unsure about anything, any time you want to focus on the challenges you face or any difficulties that show up, you can email me and I will be there to coach and support you. With either option, there is a 30-day money back guarantee. If you don’t find the course helpful within 30 days of starting, just let me know and you’ll get your money back. You can get the course and start right now at insomniacoach.com.

Martin Reed:
I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Insomnia Coach Podcast. I’m Martin Reed, and as always, I’d like to leave you with this important reminder — you can sleep.

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Listen to the podcast episode (audio only)Like many people with chronic insomnia, Eric found that the more he tried to make sleep happen, the more difficult it became. Although he didn’t have any real issues falling asleep, he would regularly wake during the night and find it hard to fall back to sleep. His mind would start racing and he would experience a lot of anxiety.

Eric found himself getting obsessed with sleep. He was thinking about it all the time and no matter how hard he tried to relax and no matter what he tried, things just didn’t improve.

When we started working together, one of the first changes Eric made was to reduce the amount of time he allotted for sleep to more closely match the amount of sleep he was getting at the time. This allowed him to rediscover the sensation of sleepiness rather than fatigue and that proved to be both reassuring and motivating.

Eric also started to respond to nighttime wakefulness in a more workable way. Instead of tossing and turning all night, trying to make sleep happen and trying to relax, he decided to draw instead. This helped make wakefulness a bit more pleasant and helped train his brain that wakefulness wasn’t a threat that it needed to be alert at night to protect him from.

Finally, Eric committed to doing things that mattered to him — to live the kind of life he wanted to live — independently of sleep.

Eric experienced rapid improvements in his sleep as he changed his response to insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it. He no longer takes sleeping pills and today, more than one-and-a-half years after we worked together, Eric is no longer engaged in a daily (and nightly) battle with his mind and he continues to sleep well.

Click here for a full transcript of this episode.Click here to hide the transcript.

Martin Reed:
So, Eric, thank you so much for taking the time out for your day to come onto the podcast.

Eric Myers:
Yeah, thanks for having me.

Martin Reed:
It’s great to have you on. I’m really looking forward to everything that we are going to end up talking about today. So let’s just start right at the beginning. Can you tell us a little bit more about when your sleep problems first began and what you think may have initially triggered that sleep disruption?

Eric Myers:
It was the spring of 2020, so this is when the beginning of the COVID hysteria and stuff. And I think I had some health anxiety. I tried not to get caught up in all that stuff, but I think, I don’t know, I have a tendency to be a little bit of a hypochondriac anyway, so I probably didn’t help. I remember it was starting to interfere with my sleep. I wasn’t sure what was going on. I remember talking to my doctor about it, and at some point I started focusing more on the sleep, I guess, because I just was like, “Ah, I got to get some sleep. This is ridiculous.” And once I started worrying about that all the time, then it just got worse. And the harder I tried, the worse I got. It seems like once it started going down that path, just like it’s a snowball effect or something, it just gets worse the harder you try.

Martin Reed:
Yeah. So do you feel it was all that kind of stress, worry, anxiety related to the pandemic that triggered that initial sleep disruption?

Eric Myers:
Yeah. I mean, something like that. I mean, I remember someone that I knew had recently passed away suddenly and I think I had that on my mind too. But I think that was more or less how it got started.

Martin Reed:
And so, what was that sleep disruption for you? Was it just at a basic level? Was it difficulty falling asleep or was it kind of staying asleep once you first fell asleep? Or maybe it was a bit of both of those things?

Eric Myers:
I think I was okay with falling asleep, but I would always wake up in the middle of the night and then that’s when it would start to get weird. I think later on, maybe it was a little of both, but initially it was more an issue with sleep maintenance.

Martin Reed:
So when you fell asleep and you woke up and then you found it hard to fall back to sleep, why do you think that that was the case, was there loads of stuff just racing through your mind or did it just seem to be like no obvious course what was going on?

Eric Myers:
Yeah, I remember just a lot of stuff in my mind and just remember feeling weird because, like I said, it was kind of a hypochondriac. And so anything, if I just felt sick at all, I would just start imagining things and I’m like, I don’t know, what’s wrong with me? And then I remember getting the chills for some reason and then just having this weird breathing issue or something, just weird stuff like that. But I think I was just having anxiety like anxiety attack, and then that’s when I would just be up for sometimes hours just trying to relax.

Martin Reed:
And so, what about your days, were you finding that there was any kind of knock on effect on your days related to all this struggle with sleep and all that wakefulness during the night?

Eric Myers:
Yeah, once it became an ongoing issue, I mean, in some ways, it seems like the days were worse than the nights because I’d just be thinking about it all the time, I became obsessed with it, which I think it happens to people with chronic, and some, you become kind of OCD about all this stuff. This is something that you talk about a lot is the way you react to insomnia really has a big effect on whether or not it becomes a chronic problem, and I definitely didn’t respond well to it.

Martin Reed:
Yeah. So I’m guessing that every other human being on the planet, you’ve experienced some difficult nights from time to time before this longer term struggle with sleep. When you were going through this, when you first experienced that sleep disruption, I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, but my guess is at first you’re just like, “Well, this probably the reason why I’m struggling is because everything is going on right now, normal, this has happened before.” But when did you get to that point where you started to think, why is this sticking around? This is different this time around, there’s something unique or there’s something this feels different. Why is this sleep issue sticking around?” When did that happen and why do you think that was?

Eric Myers:
Yeah. For some reason I just became really focused on it and it seemed like the more attention that I gave to it then the worse it got. If I would’ve just blown it off and didn’t worry about it, I probably would’ve been fine. I really became determined to overcome this, and then the harder I tried, the worst it got.

Martin Reed:
Yeah. Was it just after those first couple of nights that you started to really get more concerned and look for solutions? I’m just curious how long this sleep disruption was going on for before you figured out, “Well, there’s something a little bit different going on this time around,” and that’s when all that extra attention, all that extra focus happened.

Eric Myers:
Maybe a couple weeks, something like that. I don’t know. Because at that time, I really didn’t know much about sleep, so I remember thinking like what happens, can this just keep going on until I just collapse or something, and I didn’t know what to expect. So I don’t know, I just worried about it a lot, which just made it worse, of course.

Martin Reed:
I’m curious to hear what kind of things you’d tried in response. So you know the sleep issue stuck around for a couple of weeks and that’s when we start to think, “Okay, we got to fix this problem now.” So we are completely understandably going to put more attention on our sleep. Those of us who have made this journey and have put the insomnia behind us can recognize that it is a lot of that attention that we gives insomnia is often what feeds it, what gives it that oxygen that it needs to survive. But when we’re caught up in a struggle, when we’re struggling with something, it’s understandable, we want to fix it. And then part of that fixing process is usually attention and effort, but unfortunately sleep just doesn’t tend to respond well to those things. So I’m just curious to hear what kind of things you tried initially after those couple of weeks. What kind of techniques or things did you try to improve your situation?

Eric Myers:
Yeah. I think I tried the same stuff that everybody probably tries, tea, like the Sleepytime tea and melatonin. Because people like friends, family, coworkers, everybody is trying to give me advice and help, but they don’t really know what to do. So I’m just trying everything that everybody’s like, “Oh well, yeah, melatonin, that worked for me,” or something. Or essential oils, that was another thing that I tried that like you put on your skin or something, it was supposed to relax you. They got something for everything. And I started seeing a therapist too at one point just for treating anxiety, but just wasn’t what I needed, I guess.

Martin Reed:
I’m curious to hear if you found when you tried all these things when people are telling you, “Oh, this worked for me, try this,” or maybe you’re looking on Dr. Google and Google is suggesting that, “Oh, try this.” And then when those things don’t work, a lot of the time they can feed that worry and that anxiety and that fear, then you start to perhaps think that there is something really uniquely wrong with your sleep. Because after all, if all these things are working for other people, why aren’t they working for me? Is that something you experience?

Eric Myers:
Oh yeah. The level of worry and anxiety about this was just unbelievable. I was just imagining what’s going to happen to me and be so sleep deprived that I won’t even be able to function. I don’t know. I just really was starting to go off the deep end, all that.

Martin Reed:
I believe that before we started working together, did end up getting prescribed some sleeping pills or sleep supplements, something like that? What was that experience? Did you find that helpful even if only in the short term?

Eric Myers:
Yeah. Okay. So my doctor gave me a prescription for Trazodone, which is a really popular medication for sleep. I remember, at first, I was trying to avoid drugs because I didn’t want to go down that road. But eventually, I mean, I just got so desperate. I started with the over the counter stuff like Zzzquil and stuff, which actually helped for a little while. But once I started having issues again, then like, “Well, now what do I do?” So then I broke down and started taking the Trazodone, but even that would only helped temporarily.

Martin Reed:
I think you mentioned one of the pitfalls that we can experience when we take medication or supplements or rely on anything external to our own sleep mechanisms, so to speak, is that we can experience that kind of short-term relief, which is great, and for many people, it can be really helpful. But then if we ever experience a difficult night when we are using that thing, that external thing, then it can generate this kind of return, that flood of all that worry and stress and anxiety that, “Oh, I took that thing that was helping and now that’s not even working.” And it can just create its own fresh set of problems, which can be a huge part of the frustration.

Eric Myers:
Exactly. Yeah, exactly. I mean, you get to a point where, “Well, I’ve tried everything, I don’t know what to do now.” And that’s not a good feeling.

Martin Reed:
So let’s move forward a little bit. When we started to work together, one of the first changes that you made was… A lot of the stuff that we do when we’re working together is behavioral in nature because a lot of all the things that we do to try and improve our sleep, try and get rid of that wakefulness is it’s completely well intentioned and it even sounds logical a lot of the time, but much of the time it can end up actually perpetuate that sleep disruption. And one of the common things that we do when we are really trying to chase sleep is we spend more time in bed. We might go to bed earlier or we might stay in bed later, we might try napping during the day. And I think when we started working together, you were averaging less than five hours of sleep but spending about seven hours in bed. So you started to rein that in a little bit and a little bit less time for sleep. Can you tell us a little bit more about that change that you made?

Eric Myers:
Yeah, I think that was really helpful actually. That might have been one of the most helpful things now that I think about it. I forget what my sleep window was when we started working together. Because I started noticing an improvement very quickly, I remember that. That second week when I started implementing the sleep restriction or bedtime restriction, I think I started noticing an improvement just that week and just it got better from there.

Martin Reed:
First and foremost, I think it’s great that you experience that change so quickly. I think of all the clients I’ve worked with, you are probably one of the quickest to notice a change just from implementing that sleep window, just allotting an amount of time for sleep that’s a bit closer to the current reality of the sleep that you were getting at that time. Why do you feel that that was so helpful and so quickly? Was it just because you noticed a return of a strong sense of sleepiness rather than it just being exclusively fatigue and grogginess at night? I’m just curious to hear why you feel that you got those results, and what changed when you just started to go to bed later?

Eric Myers:
Okay, let’s see. I mean, I remember I guess just being genuinely sleepy instead of trying to… Well, because at that point I was still taking the medication, so I remember starting to noticing the difference between the feeling you get when you take drugs like that as opposed to natural sleep, and I remember noticing that pretty early on and that maybe helped my anxiety or sleep worry a little bit there.

Martin Reed:
Another change that you made a little bit later on whilst we were still working together was just a change in how you would respond to nighttime wakefulness, whether it was you’d go to bed and was taking you a long time to fall asleep or if you’d wake during the night and find it really hard to fall asleep instead of forcing yourself to stay in bed, tossing and turning, not feeling good, feeling frustrated, worried, anxious, trying to make sleep happen, instead you just thought to yourself, “All right, well, I’m awake anyway, let’s just do something to being awake a bit more pleasant.” Can you tell us a little bit more about that process and that change that you made?

Eric Myers:
Yeah, that was another thing that was really helpful because that’s one of the issues that I think I’m pretty sure I had was what you call a conditioned arousal where I had spent so much time lying in bed tossing and turning that I had trained my brain to associate the bed with anxiety and frustration instead of sleep. One of the things that was a key for me was coming up with an out of bed activity, which is ideally something quiet and relaxing. And the first thing I thought of was drawing because that’s something I do. So I started doing that and I guess the thing that was really great about that is not only was it something I enjoyed doing, so I didn’t mind getting out of bed to do it.
And also, that’s another thing, I remember that, I can’t remember if it was from the course or was one of your videos, but you talked about quality of sleep. As you start to condense your sleep into a shorter sleep window, there’s a tendency for the quality to improve like you get more deep sleep and I started to experience that, and again, it happened really relatively quick for me. I mean, I didn’t have to even practice that technique very long before it, I just started sleeping, I mean, it just got better and better.

Martin Reed:
Yeah. I think the reason I like these two techniques and just allotting an appropriate amount of time for sleep and just making any unpleasant nighttime wakefulness more pleasant is because it really just gets to what insomnia is all about. And it is basically just this strong desire that we have completely understandable desire, but that strong desire to just avoid nighttime wakefulness. We don’t want to be awake, we want to be asleep. And the more we crave sleep, the more we want to really avoid being awake at night. The more the brain might think that our wakefulness must be a threat, it must be this physical danger or threat that’s going to harm us, so I’ve got to be alert to protect you from that. Because my number one job is your brain, is to protect you. So when we implement a sleep window, for example, we give ourselves an earliest possible bedtime, a consistent out of bedtime in the morning.

Martin Reed:
We are no longer chasing after sleep by going to bed a lot earlier than we might otherwise, or staying in bed later to try and grab a few more minutes of sleep or an extra hour or so of sleep with the idea of getting out of bed or just doing something else during the night. If the brain kind of learns that not all nighttime wakefulness has to be awfully unpleasant nighttime wakefulness, there are things we can do to make it a bit more pleasant, then that also chips away that brain’s belief that being awake at night is a threat, is a danger. So we are no longer chasing sleep. We are no longer enduring so much unpleasant nighttime wakefulness. It all kind of helps the brain learn that, “Oh okay, maybe this wakefulness, although it’s not what we really want, it’s not a danger.” So I don’t have to activate all that fight or flight mechanism to try and protect you from wakefulness, which we can recognize when the body is activating his fight or flight response, it’s probably not going to be good conditions for sleep at that time.

Eric Myers:
Yeah, absolutely.

Martin Reed:
Okay. So just before I move on, I’m curious to hear, when we were working together, if there were any other kind of techniques or ways of thinking that you picked on up on that you feel contributed to being able to move on from insomnia to put all that behind you.

Eric Myers:
Yeah. I mean, I think I have mentioned this earlier, but one of the things that really resonated with me was something that you talked about as far as the way that respond to sleep or insomnia. Because even though I sleep very well most of the time, I mean, occasionally there’s an off night, so that’s something I learned is just to not worry about it and it’s not a big deal and I just bounce right back and everything is fine. And I think that’s one of the things that maybe separates somebody who just has a bad night sleep and somebody who becomes a continual issue and becomes chronic.

Martin Reed:
Yeah. How do we get to that point though? I think many of us can realize that it is really that response that might be making things more difficult in our lives, the worry, the anxiety, the frustration, the stress, how we feel the next day, all of that stuff. And a lot of us can probably recognize that if we are able to let that go, not only will we probably feel better, but we’ll probably also sleep better. But how do we actually get to that point?

Eric Myers:
So for me, I think the first thing in the course was the sleep education, just learning how sleep works and just the basic stuff, sleep drive, circadian rhythm, was it arousal system, just understanding those things and how they all work and kind of work together. That helped me a lot, just knowing I don’t have to worry like this is going to go on forever. That right there helped relieve a lot of the worry and anxiety from me.

Martin Reed:
Yeah. I think education is really helpful because there are a lot of ideas that we might have about how sleep should be or how it should work that really can feed into all our worries and our anxieties about sleep when we are experiencing sleep disruption. I think most of all what it helps do is it just eliminates the mystery behind everything. Because when we’re struggling, we want to know why, and when we don’t know why, that’s when we end up down the rabbit hole of looking for solutions, doing all of that research and it can consume us when we lift that veil of mystery and we start to have answers for everything that’s going on and we realize that there’s no real mystery to it. These things are happening understandably, predictably, and they’re all normal. I think that can just be so helpful. And it sounds like that was what really helps contribute to that change in your own mindset.

Eric Myers:
Yeah, oh definitely. Yeah. It helped me just see the bigger picture and understand how it all fits together.

Martin Reed:
When you were caught up in that struggle, were you finding everything that comes with it, the difficult thoughts, the difficult feelings, the fatigue, all that stuff? Were you finding that it was influencing your daytime behaviors like the kind of activities you might engage in, the things you might plan for, the things you might do?

Eric Myers:
Oh yeah, absolutely. In fact, I actually had some vacation plans with a friend of mine that I canceled because I was like, “I got to deal with this and I didn’t feel up to it,” or whatever, which now I understand that was a complete wrong way to approach things. But at the time, I didn’t understand.

Martin Reed:
I think it’s important to recognize that it’s normal and natural that we are going to want to cancel plans or withdraw from things when we are dealing with struggle and we’re dealing with challenge and dealing with pain, that’s normal. I mean, sometimes it can be helpful. Sometimes we got to just look out for ourselves and do what’s right for us, and that might mean taking a rest day, taking some time off, just some self-care, self-compassion when we’re going through struggle. But what can sometimes happen is it just consumes us and we end up just really withdrawing and just moving away from doing all the things that help us live the kind of life we want to live. So something might be really important to us like socializing with friends that might be a really important value for us. And we start to cancel those plans or not meet up with friends and isolate ourselves.

Martin Reed:
And that doesn’t tend to make us sleep better, it usually doesn’t help us feel better either because we’re then living a life that’s not aligned with our values, we’re just not living the kind of life we want to live. So I think that trying to commit to some kind of behaviors that are aligned with our values, even when we are really caught up in a struggle, can be helpful. They don’t have to be huge things. Maybe we are not quite ready for that round the world cruise yet or something, or a one year backpacking trip around the world, but maybe we are not even ready to go out to restaurants or bars. But maybe instead if, for example, socializing is important for us, maybe we can just pick up the phone and just talk to some friends, just do some things, even if they’re just baby steps that are just aligned with our values so that we are maybe separating our actions a little bit from all the difficult stuff that’s going on inside of us.

Martin Reed:
And I think the more we can do that, the more we can separate the difficult thoughts, feelings, and emotions from our own actions can be really helpful because then all those thoughts, feelings and emotions, they’re still there, we can’t get rid of them, not over the long-term, they’re always going to be with us for as long as we’re human beings, but maybe they’ll have less of an influence over our lives that isn’t helpful, an influence that leads to behaviors that aren’t going to help us live the kind of life we want to live.

Martin Reed:
How did you approach that? I mean, I just find it interesting because I have some clients, they’re just like, “I’m just going to force myself to live the life as though I got the greatest night of sleep every single day.” And others are just like, “Got to take tiny, teeny baby steps.” I’m curious to hear where you are on that. How were you able to go from canceling plans, withdrawing from the kind of life you want to live to maybe just breaking that connection between sleep and what you do, what was your process there?

Eric Myers:
Oh yeah. I mean, before, I just didn’t realize that avoiding things and canceling things, I didn’t understand that that was not helpful and probably working against me in a way. So I guess it was more that learning process and starting to understand that doing things that I actually want to do is a good thing and would actually help me in a way that I didn’t realize before.

Martin Reed:
So was it just a case of, this is the stuff I used to do, I’m just going to start doing it again? Did you just slowly start integrating the good stuff back into your days or was it just a case of right from now on, I’m just not going to allow this to control my actions during the day?

Eric Myers:
Yeah, I think once I started to understand that I shouldn’t allow those things to derail my life, then I just went in the opposite direction.

Martin Reed:
Yeah. And did you find that was difficult at first? Maybe you were still struggling with sleep and you felt pretty fatigued during the day. Was it kind of difficult to motivate yourself to do that during the day, or was it just as soon as you started to do it you just immediately felt all the better for it?

Eric Myers:
No, I don’t think it was really difficult. I mean, my whole way of looking at things changed. I mean, it’s amazing like when you change your perspective on something, how different you can feel about everything, you have this really positive experience actually.

Martin Reed:
Wow, that’s great. So I think it was maybe a year and a half or so that we actually stopped working together. How have things been going in that year and a half, have you found that when we stopped working together maybe your sleep carried on improving or did it stay about the same? What have things been like for you over that time?

Eric Myers:
Oh yeah, over time sleep just got better and better. I mean, gradually but definitely just kept improving for quite a while it just gradually got better and better.

Martin Reed:
I’m always curious to hear just because some clients, they make progress really quickly. Just within the first couple of weeks, they notice really positive improvements. Some clients takes a little bit longer. Some clients, they don’t really notice much improvement at all in the eight weeks that we’re working together, but then they somehow get this light bulb moment or they make some kind of breakthrough after we are no longer working together because they’re carrying on practicing what they’ve been learning. And it is a process, and for some people, it takes us longer. Some people, the process isn’t quite as long. But the reason why I love all this stuff that we talk about on the podcast is that really it’s skills based, it’s about learning new ways of thinking about exploring our relationship with our thoughts and our emotions.

Martin Reed:
And it’s about implementing behaviors that are going to help set the stage for sleep and help us just move toward the kind of life you want to live independently of sleep. And these are all things that we can control, they’re all actions, they’re all skills. So they’re with us for life and I think they are really helpful over the long-term, not just at first, it’s not a quick fix, so it can take time for us to notice results, but those results set us up for the rest of our lives just because we are armed with that knowledge that you touched upon, we have that education, we know why things are happening, there’s no more mystery. And if we ever experience that sleep disruption again in the future, we now have experience, we know that we can get through it and we know all the stuff that is helpful and all the stuff that’s not helpful.

Martin Reed:
And so, I do often see clients that tell me that their biggest improvements occur once we stop working together and they’re just practicing this stuff by themselves and they notice that they continue to enjoy improvements. And then maybe there’s some sleep disruption, there’s ups and downs because we all have difficult nights from time to time, but we know exactly how to respond now. So the way we respond is completely different and our response is often a lot more constructive by this point. So like you touched upon earlier, those difficult nights don’t have to mean that this is going to stick around for weeks, months, years. Now we might be in a place where we recognize I had a difficult night, that doesn’t have to mean that insomnia is back and I’m going to be struggling again because I’m just in a whole different place now.

Eric Myers:
Oh yeah. Yeah, exactly. And one thing I was going to say that was pretty significant for me because when I was working with you, I was still taking the medication, and by the end of the course, I realized I didn’t need it anymore. So that was a big step for me because back then it was probably more of just a psychological dependency I had on, I was like, “I got to take something. I can’t just go to bed without taking anything.” So getting over that was a really big deal for me.

Martin Reed:
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. What was your process with that? Did you just get to a point where you thought, “I don’t think I need this anymore,” or was it a tapering off plan, or what did you do?

Eric Myers:
Yeah. I got a pill cutter and tapered off. I probably didn’t need to, but I don’t know, that’s what I did. I mean, once I decided to do that, I mean, I was off really quick. I mean, it probably was all in my head anyway. I probably never needed that stuff in the first place so I’m sure I could have stopped anytime, but I had that idea in my head that, “Oh, got to take something. I can’t just go to bed without taking something to try and knock myself out or something.” So that was really a big thing for me.

Martin Reed:
When did you engage in that process of just moving away from the medication, was it whilst we were still working together or was it when we were done working together and you just decided to make that change?

Eric Myers:
It was right at the end of the course.

Martin Reed:
Sometimes I have people that feel like they have to choose like, “Do I engage in behavior change and exploring all this relationship with everything that’s going on inside me, or do I do the medication? How do I choose which one?” But the truth is we don’t have to choose. We can do both at the same time if that’s what we feel comfortable with. I’ve had clients that like yourself, they’re on the medication whilst we’re working together and then they make a decision at some point to move away, and that’s fine. I have other clients that stop immediately. After talking to their doctor, they stop or they taper before or during when we’re working together. It really doesn’t make a difference, it’s not an either or choice we have to make, I think there’s value in learning these skills regardless of whether we’re taking medication or not. And then the medication is something that clients can explore themselves whenever they feel ready to do so, just like you did.

Eric Myers:
Yeah. Yeah. I remember before I started the course, I remember thinking, I was a little hesitant and I was like, “Well, I’m probably going to have to give up my sleep meds,” and I was feeling anxious about that, but then I remember you saying like, “Oh, if it’s something you take every night, then you can just keep doing that. It doesn’t matter.” But that was a big deal because I didn’t want to be on pills for the rest of my life.

Martin Reed:
Yeah. So in this year and a half that you’ve been on your own, so to speak, I’m guessing that you’ve had some difficult nights every now and then. What’s your reaction now to when you have a difficult night and how has that changed compared to the past?

Eric Myers:
Oh yeah, I just don’t worry about it. I mean, I understand it’s normal and it’s not a big deal, so I just go on with my day and don’t let it bother me. And then next night I bounce right back, it’s no problem.

Martin Reed:
The reason I like asking about that is because we have to be realistic that there are still going to be some difficult nights from time to time, because as human beings, we’re going to have difficult nights from time to time, there’s nothing we can do about that. No one has a great night of sleep every single night. But I think the change is, we become more resilient to it when it happens. And like you said, that response is different now, instead of it generating all these really difficult thoughts and feelings and emotions and maybe influencing our behaviors in a way that’s not going to help us live the kind of life we want to live, now we’re just more accepting. But we had a difficult night, we can’t control sleep. Maybe there is a return of some difficult thoughts, some difficult feelings, some difficult emotions there, but now we’ve got that resilience to more flexibly respond to them.

Martin Reed:
We realize that we’ve got options in how we respond to them and we can respond in ways that are helpful and we can respond in ways that are less helpful. And often the brain screams at us to do the less helpful stuff, but if we can just take a step back, pause for a second, we always get to decide how we respond and really, like you’ve been talking about, it’s our response that really determines how tangled up or not we might get in that struggle.

Eric Myers:
Yeah. Yeah. That’s funny because after I completed the course, I mean, I remember there was a lot of nights where I still had some of that worry, “Oh, wonder if I’m going to be able to sleep tonight or something.” But then I still slept even though I was had some of that worry. And then over time, it became less and less. But now it’s just don’t worry about it, it’s no big deal.

Martin Reed:
Yeah, I think that’s a great point that you made this, we can still feel that worry or anxiety or whatever, but we can still sleep, that doesn’t have to be a barrier to sleep. I think what the real barrier to sleep often is our natural human desire not to experience worry, anxiety and all those difficult emotions because they don’t feel good. So when we feel them, our natural inclination is to try and push them away, or before we feel them, we want to avoid them, so we are just doing all we can to try and get rid of it. And I think that’s what the real struggle is when we get engaged in that battle. That’s what really can make sleep more difficult. It’s not necessarily their presence, but it’s our struggle with them.

Martin Reed:
All right, Eric, I’m really grateful for the time you’ve taken out your day to come onto the podcast, but I do have one last question for you. And it’s this, if someone with chronic insomnia is listening and they feel as though they’ve tried everything, that they’re beyond help, that they just can’t do anything to improve their sleep, what would you tell them?

Eric Myers:
Here’s the thing, I feel like I had it as bad as anybody could possibly have it. I mean, my level of sleep related worry and anxiety and everything, I mean, it was just ridiculous. So if somebody who was as screwed up as I was can, I mean, really recover, then it seems like there’s got to be hope for anybody. I mean, if I can do it, I think anybody can do it.

Martin Reed:
That’s great. All right. Well, Eric, again, thanks again for taking the time out for your date to come onto the podcast. Really appreciate it.

Eric Myers:
Yeah. And thanks for all your help.
Really means a lot to me.

Martin Reed:
Thank you.

Martin Reed:
Or, you can choose to add one-on-one email coaching and work through the course with me by your side. With the one-on-one coaching option, you get unlimited email access to me for eight weeks, starting from the day you enroll. Any time you have a question or concern, any time you are unsure about anything, any time you want to focus on the challenges you face or any difficulties that show up, you can email me and I will be there to coach and support you. With either option, there is a 30-day money back guarantee. If you don’t find the course helpful within 30 days of starting, just let me know and you’ll get your money back. You can get the course and start right now at insomniacoach.com.

Martin Reed:
I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Insomnia Coach Podcast. I’m Martin Reed, and as always, I’d like to leave you with this important reminder — you can sleep.

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Vicky dealt with her insomnia by taking sleeping pills and this seemed to work well until one night, after 20 years of regular use, the medication didn't help her sleep. This led Vicky to think that something was wrong with her. She felt alone. She started to experience a lot of anxiety and would wake up in the middle of the night and have panic attacks.

This all led Vicky to explore a new approach to insomnia that involved letting go of the struggle. She began to recognize that difficult thoughts and feelings, although very unpleasant, didn't need to prevent her from doing things that mattered — so she didn't need to engage in a battle with them. She committed to doing things that were important and meaningful even after difficult nights and even in the presence of uncomfortable thoughts and feelings.

Today, Vicky still experiences some difficult nights from time to time but she is no longer engaged in an exhausting and distracting battle with her mind throughout the day and throughout the night. She is living the kind of life she wants to live even when difficult nights happen and even when uncomfortable thoughts and feelings show up. In fact, Vicky now thinks of her insomnia as a gift — as something that has helped her become more resilient and better able to react in a more workable way to the difficulties we all experience as human beings.

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Jim struggled with insomnia for over 10 years. At first, he thought it was a symptom of heavy drinking, a poor diet, working late, and experiencing a lot of stress. However, the insomnia stuck around even after Jim addressed these issues. This led to many years of ongoing sleep disruption, fear, frustration, and anxiety.

In this episode, Jim shares the changes he made that helped him put his insomnia behind him. Ultimately, Jim stopped trying to fight or avoid nighttime wakefulness. He stopped trying to fight or avoid the difficult thoughts and feelings that often come with nighttime wakefulness.

Today, Jim knows that he can still enjoy really good nights of sleep — even after the most stressful days — because he is no longer engaged in a competition with sleep.

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Nick's insomnia journey began in 2000 when he relocated and started a new job. Stress, uncertainty, and anxiety took over his life as he found that the more he tried to fight or avoid his thoughts the more powerful they became.

Nick felt helpless. He didn't know how to deal with the difficult thoughts and feelings he was experiencing and he didn't know how to improve his sleep. The more he tried, the more he struggled.

In this episode, Nick shares how he adopted a new approach to dealing with difficult thoughts and feelings. Instead of trying to control them, he began to acknowledge them and make space for them. Instead of fighting with them and getting distracted by them, he validated them and then redirected his attention on actions that would help him move toward the life he wanted to live.

Nick practiced kindly bringing his mind back to the present whenever it started to time travel. He began to notice and savor all the things he was missing out on when he found himself running on autopilot. He started to focus on living a life aligned with his values — doing things that were important to him — even after difficult nights and even in the presence of uncomfortable thoughts and feelings.

Today, Nick has a different and more workable relationship with sleep and the full range of thoughts and feelings he experiences as a human being. He is no longer haunted by sleep. He sees sleep as part of his life but not his entire life.

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Adam's insomnia began the night before an important work presentation. After a really difficult night, Adam ended up calling in sick — and this planted a seed in his mind that told him that difficult nights would mean he couldn't go through with important plans.

In this episode, Adam shares how he learned to let go of his anxiety, his anger, his fear, and his intense desire to avoid nighttime wakefulness. He also talks about the benefits of self-kindness and how he managed to separate how he slept at night from his ability to engage in things that would help him live the kind of life he wanted to live and be the kind of person he wanted to be.

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As Juergen got older, his sleep began to change. Although this is normal, Juergen didn't know that at the time! And, just as he began to pay more attention to sleep, COVID hit, work stress increased, and all the places he used to enjoy going to got shut down.

Juergen felt as though insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it were starting to control his life. He felt as though he was losing himself and getting pulled away from the kind of life he wanted to live. This was when we started working together.

Ultimately, Juergen became more willing to experience nighttime wakefulness. He became more accepting of the difficult thoughts and feelings that would show up. Juergen discovered that as long as he didn't try to battle with all the stuff that was out of his control he could free up all that energy to do things that would help him live the kind of life he wanted to live instead. The skills Juergen learned and repeatedly practiced also helped when tinnitus returned after a long absence.

As a result, all the difficult stuff that is out of his control now has far less of an influence over his life — and he is also sleeping a lot better!

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Kristina had a very stressful job. One night, her husband woke her suddenly after experiencing a really bad nightmare. This event seemed to trigger the release of a lot of anxiety that had been building for some time and Kristina was unable to fall back to sleep. Unfortunately, sleep proved to be difficult on subsequent nights, too — and this created even more worry and anxiety.

At first, Kristina found that she could fall asleep but would wake in the middle of the night with a racing mind and find it hard to fall back to sleep. This then shifted into difficulty falling asleep — and this change created even more anxiety and sleep disruption.

After trying lots of things that didn't seem to help, Kristina started to do things that are known to starve insomnia of the oxygen it needs to survive. Instead of chasing sleep by going to bed earlier and staying in bed later, she started going to bed later at night — when she felt truly sleepy enough for sleep, rather than fatigued. She got out of bed by the same time each morning — no matter what. Whenever being awake at night didn't feel good, she did something more enjoyable instead.

Perhaps most importantly, though, Kristina decided to work on shifting her focus back to the present moment and what was in her control. She engaged in things each day that helped her continue to move toward the kind of life she wanted to live, independently of sleep and even in the presence of difficult thoughts and feelings.

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Deeandra always slept well but a stressful period in her life led to 48 hours of no sleep whatsoever and this generated a lot of anxiety. Deeandra started to panic and thought that she had lost the ability to sleep. Doctors gave her different medications that didn't always seem to be helpful and came with their own set of side effects. For three years, Deeandra put her life on hold while she engaged in a long list of rituals and experiments in an attempt to improve her sleep.

Gradually, Deeandra moved away from trying to control sleep and avoid nighttime wakefulness. She started to go to bed only when sleepy enough for sleep. She decided to live her life regardless of how she slept at night. She started to do things she'd withdrawn from — she no longer canceled plans, she started to exercise again. Little by little she reclaimed her life from insomnia — and her sleep began to improve.

Today, Deeandra averages around six to seven hours of sleep. She still has difficult nights from time to time but they no longer have such an effect on her life. In Deeandra's own words, "life is about the time we spend awake, not the time that we sleep".

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Wayne's experience with insomnia began when he was preparing for his board exams. Because he needed to get up earlier than usual, he started going to bed earlier than usual. Unfortunately, this made it harder for Wayne to fall asleep — and, as a result, nights started to become stressful and he began to experience a lot of sleep-related anxiety.

Ultimately, Wayne got his sleep back on track by recognizing that sleep is a natural process that doesn't require or respond well to effort. He started to go to bed later at night. He started to make some space for difficult thoughts, feelings, and emotions rather than trying to fight them, and he reminded himself that sleep always happens in the end.

This process took time but today, Wayne thinks of sleep as a friend — not as an enemy or something to be feared. He no longer puts pressure on himself to sleep and he no longer puts any effort into sleep. As a result, he sleeps well and is living the kind of life he wants to live.

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Felicity had struggled with sleep, on and off, for her entire life. Usually, her sleep would get back on track after a few months of sleep disruption — however, when sleep issues returned due to some big life changes, Felicity's sleep didn't recover.

Fortunately, Felicity was able to get her sleep back on track and change her mindset about sleep by implementing behaviors that created better conditions for sleep. She practiced self-care and did things that helped her continue to move toward the kind of life she wanted to live, independently of sleep.

Sleep is no longer something that gets in the way of Felicity's life — she lives her life independently of sleep and, as a result, she is sleeping well and living well.

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Night after night of wakefulness led Amy to a dark place where she saw no way out. She felt helpless and doomed to a life of insomnia.

Ironically, Amy became friends with someone else who was struggling with insomnia. This friend ended up enrolling as a client of mine and started to experience improvements in their sleep. Amy learned more about the behavioral changes he was making, and — even though she assumed these wouldn't work for her — she figured she was already suffering so much, nothing she could do could make her situation worse.

So, Amy started to spend less time in bed, she abandoned her sleep rituals, and she shifted away from trying to control sleep and all the thoughts and worries her mind would generate. After weeks of ups and downs, Amy started to get more sleep, more consistently. Now, she averages around seven or more hours of sleep each night and considers her transformation nothing short of a miracle.

Amy's story shows that no matter how desperate things feel, no matter how severe your insomnia may be, there is always hope. If you are willing and able to make some changes to your current sleep habits and your current relationship with the difficult thoughts and emotions that like to accompany insomnia, you can get to a place where you will realize that you CAN sleep!

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Jennifer's issues with sleep began 18 years ago when she started to wean her firstborn from breastfeeding. When Jennifer fell pregnant again, things got better — until it was time to wean her second child. As the mother of five children, Jennifer went through this cycle for a long time — and when she decided that she was done having children, she started to get really nervous about sleep.

After listening to a few episodes of the Insomnia Coach podcast, Jennifer felt that it was her belief system that was the real reason why she was enduring an endless struggle with sleep. At this point, she felt ready to implement some changes that would lead to new habits and a new relationship with her thoughts and beliefs that would help create better conditions for sleep.

Ultimately, Jennifer regained confidence in her natural ability to sleep after learning that she wasn't alone and that other people were experiencing insomnia in a similar way to her, and by making changes to her behaviors and the relationship she had with her thoughts. It was these changes that helped create better conditions for sleep and helped Jennifer put chronic insomnia behind her.

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In 2019, Jovana experienced a night of no sleep whatsoever but she was confident that she would get some sleep the following night. However, the next night was just the same — Jovana didn't get one minute of sleep.

At this point, she started to panic, and her anxiety was further compounded by the fact she was a new mom. Jovana started to dread going to bed. She felt frustrated. She felt lonely. Fortunately, she found the Insomnia Coach YouTube channel and the Insomnia Coach podcast and started to realize that she was not alone and that her insomnia was not unusual or unique.

Ultimately, Jovana stopped the endless sleep-related research and ongoing detective work. She stopped experimenting with medication and supplements. She started to remove herself from the process of sleep and began to accept that sleep cannot be controlled. At the same time, she committed to actions that helped her move toward the kind of life she wanted to live, even after difficult nights and even in the presence of difficult thoughts, feelings, and emotions.

As a result, Jovana regained confidence in her natural ability to sleep and is once again living the kind of life she wants to live.

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Cindy developed postpartum depression shortly after her daughter was born and was prescribed medication to help her sleep. The medication seemed to work at first but Cindy soon found that it wasn't helping and this led to more anxiety and more sleep difficulties.

Ultimately, Cindy stopped putting pressure on herself to sleep. She stopped striving for sleep, she stopped putting effort into sleep, she stopped trying to fight or avoid sleep-related anxiety, and she started to recognize that all the anxious thoughts produced by her brain were just that — thoughts. Nothing more and nothing less.

Today, Cindy doesn't take any sleep medication and she is sleeping well. Perhaps one of the biggest insights she shared is that she no longer uses sleep itself as a measure of her success. In Cindy's words, it's our relationship with sleep that is the true measure of success.

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Jake's sleep was severely disrupted when the COVID pandemic forced him to work from home. He soon found himself working at all hours and during weekends. When he took a vacation he found it really hard to get any sleep at all and this led to a lot of sleep-related research, a lot of anxiety, and a lot of worry.

As Jake learned more about sleep and insomnia he started to implement evidence-based techniques to help build sleep drive, strengthen his body clock, and weaken arousal. He started to spend less time in bed, he got out of bed during the night if being in bed didn't feel good, and — perhaps most importantly of all — he tried to live the kind of life he wanted to live during the day, independently of how he slept.

Now, Jake's life doesn't revolve around sleep and he no longer tries to control sleep or put effort into sleep. As a result, he is sleeping a lot better and has regained confidence in his natural ability to sleep.

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From a very young age, Celia would often try to control her sleep and often used medication to get her through her frequent bouts of insomnia. After the birth of her son and the emergence of the COVID pandemic, Celia became even more fixated on sleep. All of her old sleep crutches seemed to stop working and she didn't know what to do.

Celia recognized that it was her desire to control sleep and her sleep-related thoughts that was a big part of the problem. When she was able to accept that she couldn't directly control sleep or her thoughts and committed to implementing behaviors that would create better conditions for sleep and help her live life according to her values, she was able to starve her insomnia of the oxygen it craved and enjoy the life (and sleep) that she wanted.

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Chad experienced some sleepless nights during a stressful period at work but his sleep started to get back on track — until one completely sleepless night created an avalanche of anxiety and insomnia. Fortunately, Chad discovered that it was his obsession with sleep and the changes he had made in response to difficult nights that were giving insomnia the oxygen it needed to survive.

So, he started to undo all those changes. By abandoning all efforts to create or control sleep and by living his life according to his values, regardless of how he slept, Chad was able to shift attention away from sleep, create better conditions for sleep to happen, and put his insomnia behind him.

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Pat decided to approach each day pretending that she'd had a good night of sleep. She went about her days as normal and pursued enjoyable and enriching daytime activities, independently of how she slept. She also stopped talking about insomnia.

Pat shifted her attention away from sleep and refused to allow sleep to control her life. She also stopped all attempts to control anxious thoughts and instead, chose to acknowledge and accept them. The final piece of the puzzle came when Pat was able to abandon all attempts to control her progress and was able to accept that sleep is something that cannot be controlled.

As Pat discovered, if we can place less importance on sleep and refuse to allow sleep to control our lives, sleep often becomes a whole lot easier!

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Like many of us, Hannah began experiencing sleep disruption during the COVID pandemic. When it became clear that lockdowns were likely to be extended, Hannah started to find it harder to fall asleep. Before long, she also found it hard to stay asleep, too.

In this episode, Hannah talks about the new sleep habits she developed and how she changed her relationship with sleep-related thoughts, and tested the sleep-related beliefs that made sleep more difficult.

Ultimately, Hannah found that abandoning all attempts to control sleep, accepting difficult nights of sleep and sleep-related worry, committing to new sleep habits, and going about her days as normally as possible really helped her get her sleep back on track.

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Susie never had a great relationship with sleep — but dealing with her insomnia wasn't something that was high on her list of priorities. That all changed, however, when Susie went overseas and her sleeping pills seemed to suddenly stop working. Quite understandably, Susie's anxiety skyrocketed and she ended up cutting her vacation short and returning home.

In this episode, Susie talks about the changes she made to create significantly better conditions for sleep. She also discusses the challenges she faced as she implemented these changes, and describes the ups and downs she experienced along the way. Today, Susie loves her bedroom, loves sleep, and is confident in her natural ability to sleep.

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Michelle spent 15 years researching sleep and trying lots of different things to get rid of her insomnia. She did all she could to control her sleep but all that happened was sleep (or a lack of it) ended up controlling her as it slowly became an obsession and took a hugely influential role in her life.

In this episode, Michelle shares the techniques she found most helpful, talks about the short-term difficulties she experienced when changing her sleep habits, and shares how she ended up modifying two core behavioral techniques — sleep restriction and stimulus control — to better suit her while also abandoning all efforts to control sleep.

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Jennifer's insomnia was deeply entrenched. After working with me for four weeks, she felt as though it was becoming more difficult to get through the day, her sleep had not improved, and she was understandably feeling discouraged. However, Jennifer kept going and four weeks later she was happier with her progress. She was experiencing less daytime fatigue and getting more sleep but she was still finding it hard to fall back to sleep when she woke during the night.

In this episode, Jennifer shares how she coped with setbacks by focussing on the process rather than progress and tells us about the moment she realized that she knew exactly how to respond to sleep disruption and understood that she was now armed with life-long skills that would enable her to enjoy better sleep for the rest of her life.

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When Jessica moved back to her hometown with her husband and two children she began to struggle with sleep. When nothing she tried seemed to work, she started to believe that she'd lost the ability to sleep and was losing hope — until she learned more about how insomnia develops and realized that her insomnia wasn't unique or unusual.

When Jessica recognized many of the common thoughts and behaviors that perpetuate sleep disruption in her own experience with insomnia, she started to feel a sense of hope. This allowed her to start exploring and challenging her beliefs about sleep while implementing behaviors that build sleep drive, strengthen the body clock, and reduce sleep-related worry and anxiety. Today, Jessica rarely thinks about sleep and it no longer controls her life.

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Anafer believed that she was born with insomnia. Sleep was a problem for her for as long as she could remember. After years of doing her own research, speaking with health professionals, and taking various supplements and prescription pills, Anafer's insomnia was becoming unbearable.

After graduating from college, Anafer decided she needed to address her sleep issues before starting her career in dietetics. Two years ago, she came across my online coaching course and is now here to share her transformation and the ups and downs she experienced on her journey to better sleep and restored sleep confidence.

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Dr. Mendelson is a psychiatrist, sleep doctor, and author who works primarily in the field of sleep research and sleep medicine. He is perhaps best known for his research related to the properties of sleeping pills and the effect of medication on sleep.

In this episode, Dr. Mendelson describes the evolution of sleeping pills, explains how they work, and shares information on their potential side-effects. We also talk about over-the-counter pills and supplements, and the evidence-based alternative to sleeping pills and recommended first-line treatment for chronic insomnia — cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I).

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Sally had been living with insomnia for 60 years and had been taking sleeping pills for 10 years. She believed that she would never be able to sleep properly — but this all changed when she started to change the way she thought about sleep and began to implement new sleep-related behaviors that made it easier for her body to generate and sustain sleep.

Sally used to average around three hours of sleep each night. She now averages around seven hours of sleep each night and barely thinks about sleep. In this episode, Sally shares what she did to improve her sleep after living with insomnia for 60 years. If Sally was able to improve her sleep, you can too!

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Rick's insomnia started in 2017 shortly after retirement. He started to wake during the night and would find it hard to fall back to sleep. Before long, he started to feel very anxious every time he woke and began to worry about what the day would be like after each difficult night of sleep.

Fortunately, Rick discovered evidence-based cognitive and behavioral techniques that changed the way he thought about sleep and helped him implement behaviors that would improve his sleep for the long-term. Today, Rick averages somewhere between seven and seven-and-a-half hours of sleep each night. In this episode, Rick shares all the techniques he implemented to transform his relationship with sleep. Just as Rick was able to improve his sleep, you can too!

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For five years, Anna experienced short episodes of insomnia that would last for a week or two before disappearing. However, when her mother fell ill and required surgery, Anna found it very difficult to fall asleep and this time, even though her mother recovered, Anna's sleep did not. Anna got to the point where she just didn't feel sleepy when she went to bed and this made her think that her sleep system was broken.

Today, Anna doesn't really think about sleep and she gets somewhere around seven-and-a-half to eight hours of sleep each night. In this episode, Anna shares everything she did to improve her sleep and also reveals how she coped with the typical setbacks most of us experience on the road to recovery.

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Gretchen is a pediatrician and the mother of three children. Her sleep was regularly disrupted as she worked shifts during college and was on call during her pediatric residency. After having children and then entering early menopause, Gretchen started to spend hours awake during the night. This led to sleep-related worry and anxiety that combined with work stress to make sleep more frustrating and more difficult.

In this episode, Gretchen talks about how changing the way she thinks about sleep and implementing constructive sleep-related behaviors helped her improve her sleep significantly — and how setbacks along the way didn't lead to insomnia working its way back into her life. Gretchen went from believing she was the world's worst sleeper to looking forward to going to bed at night! Gretchen did it — and you can, too!

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Dave often experienced difficulties falling asleep and staying asleep and this became more of a problem once he became a father. After an overseas trip, Dave's sleep really took a turn for the worse — not only did he find it hard to fall asleep, he would also wake around 3:00 AM and find it very difficult (if not impossible) to fall back to sleep.

Fortunately, Dave found out about sleep restriction — a core component of cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I). In this episode, Dave shares his transformation and explains how sleep restriction improved his sleep and why consistency and persistence are so important if you want to enjoy better sleep for the long term.

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In August 2018, Bill was admitted to hospital with a suspected heart attack and this triggered an intense period of insomnia that led to progressively worse sleep. Bill soon found himself following a long list of pre-sleep rituals that did not improve his sleep but did lead to more sleep-related worry. Fortunately, Bill was told about cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) and was able to get his sleep back on track. In this episode, Bill tells us how his insomnia developed, all the ways he tried unsuccessfully to improve his sleep, and he shares the specific techniques that he found to be most helpful for improving his sleep.

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Dr. Jade Wu is a clinical psychologist and behavioral sleep medicine specialist at Duke University School of Medicine. In this episode, Jade and I discuss a number of concerns that are common among people with chronic insomnia — we talk about how much sleep we need, whether we can lose our ability to sleep, whether insomnia is caused by a chemical imbalance in the body, whether chronic insomnia causes any serious health problems, and whether we have any control over the negative impact insomnia can have on our lives. My aim with this episode is to help change the way you think about sleep and insomnia. I hope this will help reduce the intensity of any worry or anxiety that might be making it more difficult for you to improve your sleep and encourage you to pursue CBT-I so you can enjoy better sleep for the rest of your life.

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After trying to implement cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) techniques with the help of a book, Jeff continued to struggle — until he started implementing CBT-I techniques with the ongoing support and guidance of a sleep coach (me!). In this episode, Jeff shares the specific CBT-I techniques he found most helpful and why working with a coach proved to be the most effective way to recover sleep confidence, get rid of sleep-related worry and anxiety, and enjoy better sleep.

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Eileen is a registered nurse of almost 30 years. She was always a light sleeper who felt that she needed perfect conditions for sleep to happen. After becoming a parent she started to get less sleep and this triggered more sleep-related stress and worry that made sleep even more difficult. Before long, Eileen became totally focussed on sleep and soon developed the mistaken belief that she just couldn't sleep. After seeking help from her physician, Eileen ended up on Ambien — a drug she took almost every day for 15 years. In this episode, Eileen describes how insomnia became part of her identity and how she went from constantly worrying about sleep and struggling with sleep to someone who now sleeps very well without sleeping pills.

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Dr. Steve Orma is a clinical psychologist and specialist in the treatment of insomnia and anxiety. He is the author of the book Stop Worrying and Go To Sleep: How to Put Insomnia to Bed for Good, and he provides online treatment for insomnia and anxiety. In this episode, we talk about how Steve got through his own insomnia using cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) techniques and the common challenges people face when implementing CBT-I techniques. The fact of the matter is that, in the short term, CBT-I techniques can be hard to implement — but if you are committed and consistent, your sleep will improve.

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Sara lived with insomnia for a year and resorted to sleeping pills because she didn’t know how to improve her sleep. Luckily, Sara did discover cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia — and after just eight weeks of implementing CBT-I techniques, she went from averaging four hours of sleep each night to six hours of sleep each night. One year later, Sara now averages seven hours of sleep and no longer takes sleeping pills. In this episode, we’ll learn more about how Sara got her sleep back on track and how she regained confidence in her ability to sleep.

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Like many people, David struggled with the odd night of poor sleep every now and again — but three years ago a night of absolutely no sleep led to sleep-related worry and the fear that he had lost the ability to sleep. This led to more nights of bad sleep (and many nights of no sleep whatsoever) and this compounded the problem. Eventually, David discovered that it was his worry and obsession with sleep that was perpetuating his insomnia. His recognition of this, along with the implementation of cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I), acceptance, and mindfulness techniques helped him get his sleep back on track.

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Nick Wignall is a clinical psychologist who specializes in cognitive behavioral therapy for anxiety disorders and insomnia. He’s also a writer interested in how we can use the tools and insights of behavioral science to better achieve our personal growth and development goals. In this episode, we talk about insomnia as an anxiety disorder rather than as a sleep disorder, the pros and cons of acceptance and commitment therapy for insomnia, why sleep hygiene is rarely helpful, and why CBT-I is typically the best option for people with chronic insomnia.

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Rose started struggling with sleep at the age of just 12 years old. One bad night of sleep triggered a vicious cycle of ever-increasing sleep-related worry and anxiety, and ever-worsening sleep. At the age of 18, the added stress of exams led to panic attacks and as little as two to three hours of fragmented sleep each night. In this episode, Rose shares how she addressed her sleep issues so that she now feels far more energetic during the day, sees sleep in a far more positive light, and actually looks forward to sleep at night.

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Daniel Erichsen is a sleep physician of eight years and is currently practicing in Eugene, Oregon. He is also the man behind BedTyme, a CBT-I based iPhone app, host of the Insomnia Insight YouTube channel and podcast, and author of two books; Sleep 101 and Why We Don’t Sleep. In this episode, Daniel explains why he is such a believer in CBT-I and why eight hours of sleep is not an appropriate goal to aim for. We also discuss the barriers that make it harder for people with insomnia to improve their sleep, how to cope with setbacks when implementing CBT-I techniques, and the problem with melatonin and other supplements for insomnia.

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Scott slept well his entire life until he listened to a podcast that led him to worry about how much sleep he was getting and the health consequences of insufficient sleep. That night, Scott had a terrible night of sleep and this triggered a vicious cycle of ever-increasing worry about sleep and increasingly worse sleep that lasted for ten months. In this episode, we'll discover how Scott managed to get his sleep back on track, how well he sleeps now, and what life is like now he no longer worries about sleep.

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Michael Schwartz is the founder of MicroSleep, LLC, and the program director for the Clinical Sleep Health Program at the Oregon Institute of Technology. Michael has over 30 years of experience in sleep. He’s a registered and licensed sleep technologist, and he’s certified in clinical sleep health. Michael can be found at SleeponQ.com and on Twitter. His Sleep on Cue app is available for iOS devices and Android devices. In this episode, I talk to Michael about cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) and intensive sleep retraining.

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Ann is a college professor from New York City who had been struggling with sleep for over 30 years and got great results using the cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) techniques I use in my online coaching course. In this episode, Ann describes how her sleep issues began, all the ways she tried to improve her sleep without success, and how she finally managed to get her sleep back on track. I think many people with chronic insomnia will recognize Ann’s struggles with sleep — and the good news is, of course, that since CBT-I techniques worked for Ann, it’s very likely they’ll work for you, too.

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I talk a lot about cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) in this podcast. This episode will explain exactly what CBT-I is and how it helps improve sleep.

Insomnia Coach® Podcast: Recent Episodes

Martin Reed, MEd, CHES®, CCSH