Concepts

Befriending Wakefulness

Allowing yourself to be awake at night and not trying to chase sleep

Facing the fear of wakefulness. Instead of “trying” to sleep (escape wakefulness), you just allow yourself to be awake at night, so you face the perceived fear of wakefulness, this is how your mind can learn there is nothing to fear at night.

Perceived Threat

Your brain has perceived wakefulness as a threat

Insomnia is fuelled by the fear of not sleeping at night, in other words the fear of being awake. Remember, there are 2 states a human can be in, awake and asleep, therefore if you fear not sleeping you fear being awake. This fear is caused by the perceived threat of being awake, this causes the well-known fight or flight response to activate in your body which increases chemicals such as adrenaline and cortisol which prevents you from sleeping.

Speed bumps

Times that your sleep looks to have regressed again

You may find yourself improving or even getting to a period of sleeping like you used to, then all a sudden your sleep has gone down the drain again. This doesn’t mean you’ve “regressed”; It just means the brain is back to a hyper aroused state which can be triggered by a million different factors. This would be a time when people with insomnia would be looking for the next “fix”, but with the education on this site, you learn you don’t need to change anything, and in time this speed bump will end sooner or later.

Sleep Drive and Sleep Opportunity

The pressure to sleep and amount of time you allocate for sleep

The sleep drive is the very thing that makes you sleep, not medication, meditation, kiwi or hot baths, it is always the sleep drive. The sleep drives “fuel” is wakefulness, the more you are awake, the more fuel you are adding to the sleep drive.

Fear of Fear

Fearing the thoughts or feelings of fear

When you try to escape this feelings or thoughts of anxiety, you’re telling the brain it is something to fear which creates a fear response, this fear response is more anxiety, so the more you fear anxiety the more anxiety you will get. It’s a fear loop aka a fear of fear.

Self-kindness

Self-Kindness is simply being kind to yourself in hard times

Be kind to yourself when going through a difficult time, talk to yourself like you would to a family member if they were going through Insomnia, don’t be hard on yourself when you don’t understand something or don’t seem to be recovering, comfort yourself and tell yourself you will get through this and the process will take as long as it needs, with experience and learning you will understand everything eventually.

Emotional Fatigue

The fatigue you feel emotionally, e.g depression making you feel drained

This can be one of the most powerful concepts to understand when it comes to how you feel. When I was going through the thick of my insomnia, I had a little aha moment, I found I was making myself feel worse than I truly felt, this can be known as emotional fatigue. I was always monitoring how I felt, how much sleep I was getting and making beliefs that I “couldn’t do this” or “couldn’t do that”. Once I recognised, I was doing this, I started to feel much better when I stopped participating in these negative behaviours. Once you stop beating yourself up and stop heavily monitoring your sleep, you will feel so much better, even on little sleep. Now this obviously won’t make you feel “great”, but it will remove the heavy weight you’re putting on yourself and can make the path to recovery easier and more hopeful.