01 - The Start
This is where your journey out of insomnia begins. On this page I have laid out some basic understandings and behavioural changes that can be implemented right now. Even after looking at this whole page, you may still be rather in the dark for understanding what insomnia really is and what the journey out will consist of, but starting with the behavioural changes I have laid out on this page for the first 3 to 4 weeks will most certainly have you see changes already happen and the doorway to understanding the deeper teachings will open. The whole journey will be a conjunction of behavioural changes and education, but unlike most aspects of life, practice will be prioritised before theory.
Insomnia is mostly overcome during the day
With Insomnia, you may find yourself holding back from doing stuff you like doing. Maybe a friend has invited you to a late-night party, maybe you want to go abroad but you’re worried the hotel won’t have the “right conditions for sleep”, or you hardly leave the house anymore as you feel safer at home. Whatever it is, you most likely have found yourself holding back from life and your everyday tasks now revolve around sleep. This is what feeds the Insomnia, the constant worry and hyper fixation on your sleep, the need to control your sleep. Focus on what you can control, which is what you do during your time awake. The more you allow yourself to do the things you love, the more your brain will learn that being awake is no threat. Little by little, new deep learnings at both a conscious and sub conscious level will be created.
Your Insomnia isn’t special
One of the most important things to learn early on is that your insomnia is not special, your recovery may look a little different, but the root cause for everyone with insomnia is the fear of not sleeping/wakefulness. I did doubt I would recover, having a condition that you can’t directly treat with effort makes you think you will have this condition for life, but I along with thousands of others are proof that even with these doubts in place, you can still recover. The day I am writing this, it has been a year since these doubts were at their greatest, I truly thought my life was pretty much over, and now here I am living a life closer to what I truly want, and this includes helping people like you, people like myself a year ago. No matter how much doubt gets in your way, trust the process and you will recover in time.
Still have other avenues to explore?
If you still have beliefs that something else may be causing your insomnia, feel free to look down these avenues as the question(s) will sit in your mind until have an answer. If you believe your insomnia may be caused by something medical, have this checked out. For me I thought it may be sleep apnoea, I did a sleep apnoea test, and it came back negative. I thought it may be something else medical, so I bought a few home tests, they came back fine. This is how I was able to move on from these questions as to what the root cause of my Insomnia was and accepted it was a fear of not sleeping/wakefulness. This is how I was able to go 100% with the same recovery process I have written out on this site.
Behaviour Changes
The gentle sleep window
Every person is different when it comes to the amount of sleep we need, some people need 7 hours and some need as little as 5, this is why the 8-hour recommendation is now being seen as more of a myth. Let’s compare the 8-hour myth to shoe size, let’s say you’re a size 8 but someone came along and told you that you need a size 9, well you would know this isn’t true as you can measure exactly what shoe size you require, the same can be done with sleep, albeit being a little more tricky to measure as you can only really go off historical rough guesses of how much sleep you require.
Let’s say you got around 7 hours of sleep a night before your insomnia, well we can now use this a basis for your sleep window. Set a time that the window starts, let’s say 12 midnight, so this is the time you only allow yourself to go to bed at a minimum, you would then set your alarm time for 7am, you now have a 7-hour sleep window in place. Think of this almost like a bed time and wake up time, a very normal thing in society, but don't be militant about the "bed time", only be militant about the wake time by setting an alarm and only put your head down/go to bed when you feel sleepy. The goal here is to only allocate a set period you can go to/be in bed, this will allow your sleep drive to gain more pressure throughout the day as the sleep drive is what makes you sleep and the more pressure it has, the more likely you will fall asleep and longer you will sleep.
What to expect from the sleep window
When you implement the sleep window, expect your sleep to become incredibly bumpy, some nights you may get a good night’s sleep, but other nights expect to be sleeping worse than when you started this journey.
The reasons for your sleep being better some nights can have several explanations, but the most common reason can be the fact you’re taking advantage of your sleep drive since you are only allocating a set part of the day to sleep.
There can also be many reasons why your sleep can be even worse some nights than before you implemented the sleep window, the biggest reason can be explained as the fact you are now finding the courage to go face to face with the perceived threat of wakefulness, so as you are going face to face with the fear, your brain may feel even more threatened.
The good news is, just like insomnia, this period will end. I will not give an estimated time for how long this period usually lasts as to remove any pressure to your recovery, but it is usually the shortest period of the recovery.
Reduce or eliminate napping
Napping reinforces negative behaviours that will feed into your insomnia and enables an unhelpful pattern of sleep. Making napping a habit can reduce the pressure on your sleep drive which can cause fragmented and unrefreshing sleep. I would only advise having a nap if you really need to but do it as minimal as possible and limit a nap to 20-30 minutes. This type of advice is even given to “normal” sleepers, nevermind someone with insomnia.
The less you nap and the more you stick to your sleep window, the more your brain will learn that it only has sleep opportunity between the start and end of your sleep window, so it will give you the most amount and most high-quality sleep currently possible between those times. The brain loves working on a schedule.
Stop Looking at the Clock
People with insomnia usually have a habit of looking at the clock through the night to see how much sleep opportunity they have left. This, of course, is incredibly unhelpful. Each time you look at the clock in the night, you are further reinforcing an unhelpful pattern of sleep, this can be caused by your anxiety rising up each time you look at the clock, so this creates a scheduled response in the brain to wake you up at these times as the brain is detecting a threat at those times. This explains why the 3AM phenomenon exists. I reccomend you set an alarm for when your sleep window start and once for when it ends, this way you can remove analysing the clock all together. This is something I still do myself as I find looking at the clock in the night isn’t helpful at all, I see it as a negative behaviour or at best neutral.
Sleep Drive
The sleep drive is what makes a person sleep. The “fuel” of the sleep drive is wakefulness, so let’s say someone gets/needs around 6 hours of sleep, this means they need around 18 hours of wakefulness to fully fuel their sleep drive. Now let’s say this same person gives themselves 7 hours of sleep opportunity, well their sleep may become fragmented and lower in quality as the sleep drive will be weakened. In this situation, I would recommend this person give themselves around 6.5 hours of sleep opportunity a night to get the best quality sleep but also not to add pressure to get the “right” amount of sleep, if I were to give this person a 6 hour window, then they may feel pressured to fall asleep quickly of wake up the least possible in the night and this just goes against what the recovery is all about.
Befriending(allowing) Wakefulness
People with insomnia are in a constant state of chasing sleep and this is exactly what tells our brain that wakefulness is a threat. When you find yourself awake at night, follow the advice of either counter control and/or stimulus control as outlined below:
Stimulus control:
Stimulus control is when you get out of bed and do something to pass the time and when/if you start to feel sleepy again you return to bed and allow the chance of sleep to come. This version of befriending wakefulness is advised for when you feel anxious and/or find yourself fighting to get to sleep in bed so you can remove the association of wakefulness and fear with the bed.
Counter control:
Counter control is when you find yourself awake in bed but you’re feeling calm and relaxed, you find no need to get out of bed. You can pass the time by maybe watching tv, reading a book, listening to music or simply lying down with your eyes closed allowing the best chance of sleep to come.
Now you don’t need to do one OR the other, both can be used, it just all depends on how you’re feeling while in bed. Feeling anxious and fighting for sleep? Stimulus control. Feeling calm and relaxed in bed? Counter control.
Allowing yourself to just be awake at night allows you to face the perceived threat of wakefulness aka not sleeping, and as with anything you fear and isn’t inherently harmful, the more you face it the more your brain will learn it isn’t a true threat. THIS is how the MAIN root cause of insomnia is overcome. At first these behaviours will feel incredibly foreign as they are going against what your brain wants you to do to escape wakefulness, paradoxically what your brain wants you to do while going through insomnia is actually what keeps you in the loop of insomnia, also over time you will find that these behaviours have become second nature to you and this is exactly what recovery is all about, it’s an organic transformation of the mind and once you’ve overcome insomnia you really become immune to it.
Further Understanding
Type of Insomnia
Onset
Onset Insomnia is when it can take a very long time to get to sleep or not sleep at all.
Maintenance
Maintenance Insomnia is when a person can fall asleep just fine initially but can wake up multiple times throughout the night. Sometimes it can also take a while for this person to fall asleep again. 3AM awakenings are a well-known version of this.
Early awakenings
This is when someone will wake up far earlier than their alarm clock and can’t get back to sleep.
Sleep efforts
Sleep efforts are as they sound, efforts you put in place to “make sleep happen”. As sleep is a passive process, just like digestion, no effort is needed and paradoxically the more effort you put into making sleep happen, the less likely it is to happen. Examples of sleep efforts can be warm baths/showers, supplements such as magnesium or melatonin, cherry juice, meditation and breathing techniques. Really anything can be a sleep effort, as what makes something a sleep effort is doing the thing purely to make sleep happen, so to combat these efforts you need to ask what your intent is, is your intent with something you’re doing to make sleep happen? If so, change your intent or remove it all together. Meditate before bed but you enjoy it? Change the intent from sleep to enjoyment. Drink cherry juice before bed but hate the taste? Remove it. The sleep efforts themselves aren’t an issue as it’s not meditation or a warm bath that is stopping you from sleeping, it’s about the intent of trying to make sleep happen that is the issue as this is telling the brain you’re trying to escape being awake.
Supplements
One of the most common sleep efforts are supplements as they are cheap and easy to take, there's also a lot of marketing around many supplements such as magnesium where companies will talk about how they will improve your sleep or will say something as bad as “Got insomnia? try magnesium glycinate”, so it would seem obvious that someone with sleeping issues would try this type of sleep effort. The good news for your wallet is that you do not need supplements for sleep, they can however improve sleep quality, so if you wish to continue to take supplements, be sure the intent has nothing to do with making sleep happen but is for health first and even perhaps sleep quality.
Looking for the next “fix”
During Insomnia you may be on an infinite adventure to find the “fix” for your sleep. You see that you’ve tried A, B and C and now we need to find D as this may be the thing that “fixes” your sleep, D could be something as simple as a sleep supplement or something as insane as patting your head and doing exactly 7.62 spins before bed. The best thing here is to remember that sleep requires literally 0 effort and the more effort we apply the worse we sleep, sleep is a 100% passive process. The next time you find yourself looking for your next “fix”, please tell yourself that what you’re buying or applying will do nothing or even the opposite of what you want.
Counter sleep efforts
Counter sleep efforts can be a tricky concept, you find all the sleep efforts you have in place, and you may automatically think the opposite is what you “need to do”. Let’s say you have a warm bath before bed to calm yourself down and your intention here is to make sleep happen, well now that you see that you have this sleep effort in place, you think you need to stop having the warm baths. But this is not how it works, recognising something is a sleep effort is just recognising you’re doing something to make sleep happen, as said previously you can simply change the intention of the action(s) or drop it all together, this is easy once you recognise something is a sleep effort and you accept it will not make you sleep, thinking that doing the opposite thing will make you sleep is a counter sleep effort. All you need to do to have neither sleep efforts nor counter sleep efforts in place is question why you have an action in place. Again, if you enjoy it and accept it will not make you sleep, keep it. If you hate it and now accept it will not make you sleep, drop it. Sleep efforts and counter sleep efforts are all about intention.