The stages of recovery

0 - No understanding:

At this stage you have basically no understanding of what’s going on, you have no idea as to why you can’t sleep like normal anymore. You see yourself participating in sleep efforts to make you sleep. You’re going to doctors’ appointments as you think you have something medically wrong. You are rapidly reducing your quality of life as you hold yourself back from participating in plans with friends, you are scared to book that long awaited holiday as you “need to fix your sleep first”, you are in a constant state of fear and always trying figure out what the hell is going on.

Below are the main stages to recovery, I would recommend you stick with stage 1 for the first 2-4 weeks and then look at stages 2 and 3, don’t worry if you don’t fully understand stages 2 and 3, the knowledge in these stages becomes more understandable and evident the further into recovery you are.

1 -Simple understanding and behavioural changes (Weeks 2 - 4):

Stage 1 is where you will gain the basic understandings of insomnia along with the behavioural changes to put in place, this is of course the stage your recovery truly starts, and everything can be implemented on day 1. You see change happening and new experiences take place, with these experiences more questions can arise and this is where we go onto stage 2.

2 -More in depth understanding of the recovery process (Weeks 2- 4 +:

With the behavioural changes and basic understandings in place, new experiences can arise, one key experience I want you to understand are speedbumps, this is where your sleep quality/quantity can decrease at times and stage 2 explains these events in detail. All other likely events during your recovery journey are also explained in detail.

3 -Recovered:

At this stage you understand what recovery is, you learn that sleep is not the only metric for being recovered, you understand that your relationship with sleep and the fear that comes with insomnia are 2 other main metrics to recovery. You learn acceptance is the end goal.

Extra - Concepts

As an extra, I have made the concepts page for when you need just a little reminder as to what the concepts of insomnia are. I have written basic definitions of each concept, this way you don’t need to read multiple paragraphs in stage 2 just for a reminder.