Insomnia Coach® Podcast

A couple of years ago, Maria experienced anxiety and panic attacks. When she didn’t sleep for over 72 hours, she felt that something was wrong with her. She feared that the chemistry of her brain had changed and her days became dominated by sleep-related thoughts and worries. Medication didn’t seem to help. Maria felt lonely, confused, and afraid. She felt that she couldn’t even leave the house because things were so difficult. She withdrew from doing things that she enjoyed. She found it hard to focus on anything other than sleep. Feeling completely stuck, Maria committed to a new approach. She started to leave the house and went for short walks — even when her mind told her that wasn’t possible. Taking baby steps, she started to do more of the things that mattered to her. Perhaps the most helpful change Maria made was facing the fear of insomnia. Instead of trying to fight or avoid insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings associated with it, Maria started to allow it to exist. She would even start to welcome it, whenever it chose to show up — and, by doing this, Maria found that insomnia started to lose its power and influence. She soon discovered that she didn’t need medication to generate sleep. That she didn’t need to do anything to make sleep happen. And, that trying to fight or avoid insomnia and the difficult thoughts and feelings that often come with it only set her up for an ongoing struggle that made everything more difficult. Maria realized that insomnia’s survival depends on how we respond to it. And, she is 100% sure that with the right approach, no matter how bad your situation might be right now, you can recover. Click here for a full transcript of this episode. Transcript 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, Maria, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to come onto the podcast. Maria Koziol: Absolutely, no problem. My pleasure. Martin Reed: I’m really excited to have you on. Let’s just start right at the beginning. When did your sleep problems begin and what do you think caused those initial issues with sleep? Maria Koziol: If we’re talking about the trigger, I think it was a very complex case. There was not a singular cause or trigger that I could point out. I think I haven’t even been able to recognize it yet, like 100%, what was that? I just think it all started at the point when I actually started to have different mental health problems. That was at the beginning of 2021 when all of a sudden, I started to have panic attacks and anxiety attacks, when I had never ever experienced such things before. I was trying to figure out why at that time, why the beginning of 2021? I hadn’t had any major tragic events at that time, so this is still kind of a mystery to me. But I talked about it with my psychotherapist and we’ve come to the conclusion that it must have been for the reason that I’ve had a lot of personal issues that were like, I didn’t really have a chance to talk about them so they accumulated over time. And then on top of that, we had COVID, the outbreak of COVID. I had to experience loneliness and detachment from environment at that time. Also, problems with work as well because I wasn’t sure if I’m going to be able to keep my position at work, because of COVID. So I think there was a lot of different things that started all of my problems, and insomnia came along with it. Insomnia came around beginning of 2021. That’s how I would describe the beginnings, how I would describe the trigger. I know it doesn’t really point out any specific trigger, but it’s kind of hard for me to say, to be honest. Martin Reed: I think everyone’s experience is a little bit different there. Some people have this really clear and obvious pinpoint and they know exactly when it began, what caused it. For other people, it can be a bit mysterious. The trigger itself is usually less of an issue. It’s more to do with how we’re responding to that sleep disruption when it turns up. So when all this difficulty arrived, what was sleep like for you? What was a typical night like if there was such a thing? Maria Koziol: I would have long streaks of not sleeping, and the longest I had was I think more than 72 hours when I didn’t sleep for the whole three or four days. At this point, I was absolutely anxious and freaked out. I hadn’t really slept. That was the longest streak of not sleeping for me in my whole life, so at that very point, I thought that something must be wrong with me. And I’ve heard a lot of people on your podcast saying the same, so I also could identify with them because when insomnia comes to your life, you feel as though something must be wrong with you. How can you not sleep? All of the other people are sleeping. How can you just lose your ability to sleep? I just felt as though something in my brain, like chemistry of my brain, has changed permanently, and I was super anxious about that. So, how would my sleep look like? I had the long streaks of not sleeping and then following that, I would have maybe a microdose of sleep the next night, like two hours, and then another streak of not sleeping like two days, and then maybe again two hours of sleep. Sometimes I had five, six hours of sleep during this period, but then it would usually be followed by, again, not sleeping or sleeping in micro doses. So that was a nightmare, I remember that so well. I could lay for hours in bed and just focus so much on trying to get asleep that it never happened. The more I focus on trying to fall asleep, it never ever happened. I would usually spend hours and hours tossing around, tossing over in bed. Martin Reed: What about your days? Were you finding this difficulty, the struggle with sleep was affecting your days as well? Maria Koziol: Yeah, of course. At the beginning when this was all new to me, the insomnia thing happened so suddenly and I was so disorientated, I didn’t know how to deal with it. I was so confused about all of this especially since before, I had never struggled with sleep, ever. I would fall asleep very easily anywhere, so that was all the more strange. About my days, I would be all shook up and I could cry over simple things, like a glass would break and I would burst out in tears. I was even shouting at my family members for no reason. I was crying. I was super emotional. Physically-wise, I was able to function normally. I could even go work out, to be honest, but the only thing stopping me from that was that my mind wouldn’t stop running around the thought if I will be able to sleep that night or not, or how I didn’t sleep the last night. My whole day was dominated by the sleep thing because I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Regardlessly of what was going on in my life, even if maybe I won lottery, I couldn’t probably be even enjoying that because I would be still thinking about how I am not able to sleep that night. That was manipulating my whole way of thinking. I felt like I couldn’t be really enjoying the activities I used to enjoy as well anymore. And to be honest, I think the worst part of it was the loneliness that came along with it. The feeling of being alone and the feeling of your family members and friends not having a smallest clue about what you’re going through because they have never experienced insomnia. I know they have been trying to help me and comfort me, but they had no idea about what I was going through. My mom would usually tell me, “Okay, don’t worry. If you didn’t go sleep that night, you would probably go sleep the next night.” And I’m like, “But you don’t get it. I wasn’t sleeping for three days, what if I die?” No one could actually understand me. No one could relate to it, because none of my friends ever experienced insomnia, none of my family members ever experienced insomnia, so the feeling of loneliness that no one actually understands you, that was also a very big part of how I felt during the day, if that makes sense? Martin Reed: Yeah, it makes complete sense, and I’m sure it’s going to make complete sense everyone listening to this as well. You mentioned that physically, you felt like I could probably still work out or still do activities that I had planned or that are important to me, but at the same time, your mind is like, well, can you still do that? Do you have energy to do it? Are you going to enjoy it? Are you going to be able to focus on it? How did you actually end up responding? Did you still do things that you had planned or did you start to withdraw from those kind of activities because of all this mental chatter that was going on? Maria Koziol: Yeah. Of course, before I met you and your content, I would definitely withdraw from everything. I would stop doing what I liked. I would stop even leaving house because I felt like absolute waste, and I just refrain to do anything. I just did the bare minimum all day. And by the way, I couldn’t really focus on anything else other than thinking if I will sleep today. At the same time, because I was so obsessed about the sleep thing, and I’m very emotional and expressive person so I would usually say to people very sincerely what is in my mind instead of actually keeping that inside me. So I would tell all my family and friends about how I feel and about what I’m going through, and then I noticed people started to withdraw from me as well because I couldn’t stop talking about just one thing and they were fed up with this, which I do understand right now. But at that time, it was also very disappointing for me because I felt like they didn’t want to hang out with me anymore because all I could talk about was sleep, and the lack of sleep. I started to lose friends at this point. Of course, not family, but my family would also be kind of… I felt as though I shouldn’t really talk to them about this anymore because they didn’t express this explicitly, but I felt like they’re also fed up and helpless because I would usually talk, call my mom and cry over the phone how I can’t sleep, but she couldn’t do anything. She was just like, “I’m sorry, I can’t help you. I don’t know how to help you.” So, that was quite serious at that time. Before I actually met you and your content, I was completely lost with this. Martin Reed: Did you find that by taking that approach you did actually start to feel better? Or did you feel about the same? Or did it tend to make things more difficult? What was your actual experience like? What were the results of withdrawing and doing less? Maria Koziol: The results of actually withdrawing and doing less, I would just be stuck in the bubble of thinking about sleep. I would spend all my day in bed and freak out at the thought of the moment when I will have to go to bed. And I remember, whenever it was becoming darker outside, I would freak out completely because that means it’s the nighttime, so this is my nightmare time. This is where I will be suffering for the next seven, eight hours while everybody else will be asleep. Basically all my days would be staying in bed, working from bed as well on my laptop because I do have this possibility to work remotely. However, I wouldn’t even go for a walk. I wouldn’t do anything. It almost felt like I was stuck in a bubble and not do anything, and just await this nightmare coming in the evening. Martin Reed: When you picked up on this idea that we talk about a lot on these podcast episodes of trying to still do some of the stuff that matters, what were your thoughts on that? Were you thinking, no, that just sounds impossible? Or were you thinking, I’m going to give it a try? What was your response to that idea and how did you go about changing to start reintroducing daily activities back into your life? Maria Koziol: I think if I had heard it from a very random person, like my friend, like, “Hey, go enjoy your activities and still try to enjoy your life anyway,” I would think this person has no idea what they’re talking about. This is absolutely stupid and I’m not going to do it. They don’t know what risk is involved. But when I heard it from you, of course I studied your content before and you were a very reassuring and convincing person for me, also with a very, very huge knowledge about the topic and certified as well, so you were very convincing for me. So when I heard it from you, I thought, if he’s saying that, I need to try it, because it did sound a little bit, hmm, I’m not sure if it’ll work for me, but I still wanted to give it a try. That was my approach when I heard it from you. Probably might have been different if I heard it from someone super random, like my friend or someone who I met on the street. Martin Reed: And what was that process like for you? Did you take little baby steps, maybe start by getting outside each day, or did you just dive right in and try to do everything as though insomnia didn’t exist? I’m curious to what your approach was. Maria Koziol: As far as I recall, I think that was more like baby steps. I started with going out for a walk, going to the shop instead of ordering a delivery, just walking a dog out. And then it came to the point when after two weeks, I was actually meeting my friends out in the restaurant, which was inconceivable for me at the very beginning because after the night of not sleeping, I was like, that’s not possible. That’s not possible to meet anyone. That’s absolutely not happening. And then I actually saw that it is possible. Okay, you won’t be your best form, you won’t be all shiny and glamorous, but friends wouldn’t even notice. To be honest, when I showed up without the night of sleep, no one would even notice that I wasn’t sleeping. No one even said anything. I looked normal and I kind of behaved normal as well. At this point I started to realize that if they didn’t notice that, I think it’s actually worth going out. No one will notice that anyway, so let’s just continue doing that. That’s basically how it went, I think from the baby steps up until the huge steps. Martin Reed: Did you find that it was really hard at first to get yourself outside, going for walks, being in social situations again? Or did you find that straight from day one, for example, as soon as you started to do stuff like that, you noticed that this was kind of an approach that was maybe more helpful, compared to doing less stuff? Maria Koziol: The very beginnings, it felt awkward, but I knew I was doing this to improve my situation so I did really have a lot of hope related to it. It did feel a bit awkward and difficult at the very beginning, but it got easier and easier over time. Logically if you see something is working, you trust it even more and you go into it deeper, so that was how it looked like for me, if that makes sense? Martin Reed: Absolutely. Were you finding that your brain was generating all different stories about this or thoughts that maybe weren’t very helpful? Maybe it was telling you things like, so you went for a walk today, that might have felt good today, but are you going to be able to do it tomorrow? Is this going to work? You can’t do this. Maybe let’s stay at home. Did you find lots of thoughts and stories like that turning up? Maria Koziol: Definitely. Yeah, exactly. I’m even surprised you’re saying this as though you were reading my mind at the time. I would always question myself after… There would be positive thoughts and two seconds after, these little demonic thoughts that are like, fine, you can do it today, what about tomorrow? You shouldn’t be doing this. It’s not good for your health. So definitely, I did have a lot of these thoughts. It was super, super difficult to overcome them. It was a constant battle in my head. It was about questioning my actions all the time in my head. Yeah, definitely. Martin Reed: I think it’s interesting that you feel like I just accessed your brain there and pulled out those stories, even though we haven’t talked about this before this episode, and just because that’s how the human brain is wired. It generates thoughts like that, stories like that. Ironically, as it’s doing its job of trying to look out for us, it’s trying so hard, it’s being a little bit unhelpful and getting in the way. And it can be a little bit like these maybe two little mini brains, one on each shoulder. One is kind of reassuring, and yes, you can do this, and the other one’s like, are you sure you can do this? Maybe you can do it now, but what about tomorrow? And so we are kind of caught in the middle of that. But I think where it can be so helpful, the process you described, even if it is baby steps, just kind of reintroducing stuff, doing stuff again, especially things that are important to us and meaningful to us, is we can prove to ourselves that even when our brain is doing whatever it wants to do, helpful thoughts, unhelpful thoughts, true thoughts, false thoughts, whatever it’s doing, whatever it’s churning out, we can still control the body. We can still choose how we respond to those thoughts. So even if the brain says, you cannot go for a walk today, you’re too tired. Physically, we can still stand up, put our shoes on and go out of the door. That’s another reason why I think it’s helpful to start getting active again, is because we recognize and reinforce this idea that no matter what our brain is telling us, we still get to choose to respond. And every time we respond in a way that’s helpful or workable, we’re reminding ourselves of that. And maybe we are less likely to get tangled up in trying to battle with our mind because after all, do we need to battle with our mind when we are constantly reminding ourselves that we can respond however we like, regardless of what the mind is doing? Maria Koziol: Yeah, absolutely. Martin Reed: Just rewinding a little bit, you talked about when the sleep disruption first turned up, one way you tried to deal with it, which is completely understandable, is to do less because you just feel, this is overtaking my life, I don’t have the energy to do anything. I don’t look right, I’m going to make mistakes, all of that difficult stuff. What other things had you tried in an attempt to improve your sleep to get things back on track, that now you’re able to look back, maybe weren’t effective or weren’t quite so helpful? Maria Koziol: The first thing I can list were medications. There was a lot of medications that only worsened my state at the very end. I was taking Zolpidem at some point, even SSRI. Then once sleeping pills stopped working because I was very quickly addicted to them… When I think about it back two years ago, it’s just so dreadful to think when I saw this pack of pills, I was running to them just to take it, like I couldn’t wait for the moment to take these pills. And never in my life I thought I could be addicted to something, and then it turns out I’m so easily addicted to these pills. So I got freaked out and I called my psychiatrist and I told them, “Hey, can we get off these pills? I’m just frightened about how it might end up because I feel like I’m super addicted. And by the way, they’re not working anymore because my tolerance went up. I started off with half of the pill and now I need to take two, which is not even an allowed dose, I think.” My psychiatrist, they started to prescribe me even weirder things like antipsychotic medication that was used for treatment of schizophrenia, for example. I think it was called quetiapine, something like that. It was an absolute disaster. I was going for holidays and then my whole suitcase will be filled up with different types of antipsychotic medication, sleeping pills. I felt as though I just walked out of a psychiatric ward. It was a absolutely terrible experience and it lasted for a couple months that I was taking the pills. None of these pills actually worked. With the sleeping pills, they helped me fall asleep initially, of course, but afterwards, I would just need more and more to fall asleep. If I stopped taking them, I was in an even worse place that I was before starting to take them. That was not a solution to the problem, not at all, and I kind of blamed the psychiatrist for that as well because they knew that they shouldn’t have been prescribing me this as a long-term solution. And even though they knew it perfectly because it’s an obvious fact, it’s a short-term solution for insomnia, not a long-term, they kept prescribing me this all the time. Whenever I asked, no questions, just give her the pills, get her off my phone and give her the pills. So it wasn’t working anymore, and not to mention that I started to feel super, super depressed the day after. And then I started reading articles about how Zolpidem is linked to creating depression. There were even cases studied of people that committed suicide and didn’t struggle with any mental health issues before taking Zolpidem. I think it’s very important to mention that because it’s never going to do any good. Pills are never the solution for insomnia. I think it would never do any good, long-term. Short-term, yes, they’re working, but it’s just for a limited period of time and then you would need more. You would get addicted. You would develop other things like depression maybe as a side effect, which I started to develop, because I was also scared that they might have influenced my brain chemistry long-term somehow. Some medication, psychiatrist, I would usually call different psychiatrists like three times a week. It was a very helpless cry for help, and I never felt as though they would really listen to me. I just felt as though they take notes, prescribe something, and you would never hear from them again. When I tried to outreach to them, I remember they prescribed me this SSRI, I’m not sure what was that exactly? I can’t recall now. But they prescribed me the SSRI and then I took it, and it was like five milligrams. How I felt, I can’t even describe it. I was super scared about how I’m feeling so I immediately called the doctor and I was trying to get in touch with him like, “Hey, please help me. I’m scared. I don’t know what’s going on with my body. I feel as though my receptors are not working.” I couldn’t even read an email. I was taking my pen and going with my pen to my fridge. It felt absolutely odd, so I tried to call them. They didn’t pick up, or they said to me, “Okay, you can schedule an appointment in a week. I can’t give you anything right now.” So there was no support from them. I felt as though they would just prescribe me pills and didn’t care what happened to me afterwards. So, that were the things that I’ve tried and they only had a detrimental impact on my mental health. Martin Reed: I’m curious to know, all the doctors that you spoke to, did anyone suggest alternatives to medication or offer you any advice as to how you might be able to deal with this without taking medication, or even make some changes while taking medication that might also prove to be helpful? Or were you just only offered medication as the only option that was available to you? Maria Koziol: Yeah. Most of them would actually only prescribe me pills without mentioning any other recourse. Some of them were pointing out at the CBT-I therapy. Some of them were like, “Here are the pills, but make sure you actually sign up for the therapy because this is a long-term solution.” So yeah, some of them did, but I feel like most of them were just prescribing pills without mentioning anything else. Martin Reed: When you heard about CBT-I, cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, was that something that you’d heard of before? Is it something you explored or looked into? Were you able to research anything about that? Maria Koziol: Not specifically for insomnia. I knew that kind of therapy existed. However, I would more link that to depression, for example, and not really to insomnia. I’ve never heard of treating insomnia with that before, to be honest, so that was new to me. But at the time, I already actually met you and your content. I had you, so I didn’t really have to have any other help because it was helping to have your content to read and listen to you every day. Martin Reed: Let’s talk a little bit now about what happened next on your journey, the new approach that you explored. What were some changes that you made that you are now able to look back on and think that this was really what helped me start moving away from struggling with insomnia and started to create better conditions for sleep, reduce the influence it had over my life? Where did that start? You’ve already mentioned starting to do more things, be more active during the day. What other behavioral changes, new habits or old habits did you bring back that you’ve found to be particularly helpful? Maria Koziol: I remember after I’ve seen your video where you were talking about how we are never going to lose the ability to sleep, that was a milestone in my process because for some reason, that was so simple but it sounded so reassuring for me and convincing that I just trusted you 100%. And from the day I saw that video, I would usually also replay it in the next days as well. But from this moment, I just thought, he’s right, it’s true. I shouldn’t be freaking out about this, and you also provided some kind of evidence or lack of evidence that chronic insomnia can cause any health problems. There was no evidence of that as well. I feel like from this point, it all started to change. First of all, I stopped obsessing about whether I’m going to go to sleep tonight or not. The method I have used, I would describe it as facing the fear or facing the pain. Previously, before I heard your video about what I just said, I would usually freak out when the night was coming, the bedtime was coming. I would run away from the fear. And the thing with fear is that when you run away from it, it gets bigger and bigger and holds you like a monster, but when you face it, it shrinks. So I know it may sound very odd to someone who didn’t apply this, but I applied this method in my life when it comes to insomnia and panic attacks, and it really works. It really works. When you face the fear, it just shrinks, and over time, it actually disappears. And the same applies to insomnia. There’s something I read recently in a book, and it said, it stuck in my head, it said that pain and fear is not absolute, and your experience of fear and pain changes relative to how you react to it. And I think it’s perfect to describe the attitude we should have to insomnia. That is a great things to say, I’m not sure if you will agree with me, but this simple method I think has actually cured me. Your reaction to insomnia is something that essentially is the most important thing. It is all about how you react to this. And then once I understood it, of course, it wasn’t like, oh, I just started applying this method that I was cured the other day. No, of course not. It took time. It took quite a lot of time to apply it 100%. But over time, I really stopped fearing the lack of sleep, stopped fearing the nighttime. Even though I wasn’t sure if I’m going to fall asleep, I would remind myself of the video you posted and I was like, okay, cool. Well, I won’t die anyway. I won’t sleep, but that’s it. I won’t die. Nothing bad will happen. I will live. Nothing bad will happen. And then I was able to change my thoughts over this. Of course, the bad thoughts would always pop up again. They would always try to devaluate what I was just saying to me. It takes time, of course. It’s not going to be overnight change, but it really works. It really works. When you maybe stop fearing insomnia, it’ll eventually vanish, evaporate because it will have no force over you. It will just lose its forces. About the behavioral changes, what I mentioned so far, I started going out more, doing more activities, but I really started to not care anymore about sleep. I was like, well, I might not fall asleep this day, but it will not kill me. I will live, I not die, and there’s no proof someone ever died from lack of sleep. That was the same with my panic attacks. That was the same treatment that I used, and I was able to overcome them as well. I was like, okay, cool. I’ll have a panic attack, but there’s just a sensation. Nothing is actually physically happening in my body. It’s just a sensation of your thoughts and what’s going on in your head. There’s not nothing endangering your life at this point. So I think that was super relieving, this knowledge that the less you care, that the less powerful insomnia will become. I would say that was maybe my behavioral approach. Martin Reed: Do you remember the title of the book that you just shared that quote from? Just think people might be interested. Maria Koziol: Yeah, of course. That book wasn’t about insomnia, by the way, but I feel like it’s kind of connected to the way of how you might treat insomnia and anxiety and panic attacks, so it’s great. It’s called The Tools and the author is Phil Stutz. I’m not sure if I’m pronouncing his surname in a correct way, but the book is called The Tools. You can buy it on Amazon. Martin Reed: Going back to this idea of facing the fear, if someone’s listening to this and they think, I think this is something that I want to try. I want to face this fear. I want to face this fear of insomnia. I want to face the fear of what tonight might bring. How do we actually go about facing that fear? If you were to give someone a list of actions to take that might help them face the fear, what might that look like? How do we implement that in practice, do you think? Maria Koziol: I know it’s super difficult. It’s very, very difficult even describe or maybe implement at the very beginning, but I promise you it’s doable. What I would usually do is… Let’s try to imagine that you won’t fall asleep again tonight. Try to imagine that you’re laying in bed for four or five hours, everyone else is asleep, but you’re struggling and the next day is just waiting in a few hours. You’ll need to live through the next day, but you didn’t have any sleep. Imagine you’re in that situation and let this thought be in your body, flow through your body and just say to yourself, bring it on, I want to experience this. I want to experience the worst that can happen. Bring it on. I’m ready. And you know what? When I said it to myself, I would feel like I actually get less anxious, and then I felt like a bit more powerful. I would stop thinking about it. I’m like, I’m going to continue right now with my day. I’m going to go relax, watch TV. Then if I’m going to go to bed and the sleep doesn’t happen, I’m ready for it. I’m 100% ready for it, and I’m not going to be freaked out. I know it’s super difficult for people that are suffering with insomnia because they feel as though they’re dying, that they’re so desperate. I know where you are. I promise you, I’ve been there. It’s absolutely dreadful, but there’s hope. There’s always a way out, and you can do that. You can’t die from it, I promise you. There’s no way you can die from it. Nothing can happen to you. I’m sorry, I don’t really have instruction on how to actually apply this. It’s so difficult. I think it’s the battle that you need to have with your thoughts. Martin Reed: I think really what you described is moving away from the struggle, so moving away from trying to make sleep happen, trying to remove certain thoughts and feelings from your brain, but taking an approach where you’re acknowledging everything that you are thinking, everything that you are feeling, and you’re becoming maybe more of an observer instead of someone that’s trying to fight it. Or at the very least, you’re kind of removing the dam that you might be trying to build to stop all of that stuff arriving. But what happens when we build a dam? It all accumulates behind that brick wall and eventually it all comes overflowing anyway. I think what you’ve described is moving away from that struggle, just allowing this difficult stuff to exist, especially if your experience anyway tells you that you can’t really get rid of it, and just allowing it to flow through you, as difficult as that might be. Maria Koziol: I know, exactly, but it’s actually really working. It was the same for my panic attacks. When I first heard this method, I was like, I’m not sure if it’s going to work but let’s try it. When I had a panic attack and when I would try to calm down, it would only get worse, always. And then once I remember, I was on the airplane and that was a very long flight, like 11 hours, 12 hours, I had a huge panic attack on the plane. That was so frightening to the point that I was actually about to exit the plane, like at the boarding, I was about to actually tell the flight attendant, “Sorry, I think I’m not going because I can’t… I have a panic attack.” But I said to myself, you’re going to get through this. It happened to you a lot of times. It’s not going to kill you, it never killed you. And then the panic attack came, and instead of trying to calm down as I would usually do, like oh my God, I need to calm down. Everybody will notice. Oh my God, nobody can notice that. I just felt as though this is normal. You’re just having a panic attack. Feel it, bring it on. I want to feel it even more. Just try to feel it with all of your body. Let it let this feeling flow through you and it will actually calm down after a while, after three, two minutes. And the same was with my insomnia. Let’s say that it was bedtime and it was like midnight, then 2:00 AM, 3:00 AM, I’m still not sleeping. Normally, at the very beginning, I would freak out. I would be watching my clock all the time and just getting crazy, whereas after applying this method of not avoiding the fear and just facing it, I was rather laying in bed and thinking, well, that’s okay. Eventually I’m probably going to fall asleep, even if it’s microdose. I’m just going to watch a movie right now. There’s nothing bad happening. I’m just going to watch a movie and let the bad feeling flow through my body. I’m not sleeping well. Okay, what can I do about this? Nothing. This is how I try to explain this to myself. And you need to remember, the bad thoughts will always pop up. Even sometimes they will try to devaluate what you are thinking, and they will try to push you away from your path, but those are just thoughts. Those are just thoughts. They will always pop up. It’s just thoughts. I think that would be my advice. Martin Reed: There’s just so much great stuff there. I’m curious to hear, I think you already mentioned this, but even taking this approach of facing the fear, allowing the difficult thoughts and feelings to show up, allowing the possibility of insomnia to show up, it’s not like, I’m going to do this and then all of a sudden all these difficult thoughts permanently disappear, and all of a sudden you’re having great nights of sleep again. I’m curious to know what the process or the timeline was like for you? Was this something that you found that you had to practice for days, weeks, or even months in order to notice that it was helping? I’m just curious to hear what timeline from your own experience? Maria Koziol: To be honest, that was when I started using this method. The behavioral change, that was quick. That was like a few days and I was back on track with my sleeping. I was like, wow, I slept seven hours. Wow, it really worked. But then when I had a bad night after a few days, I would have a rebound of anxiety like, ah, you see, it’s actually not working. So my bad thoughts would tell me, ha ha, you are so confident, but you’re never out of this. You’ll be stuck with insomnia for the rest of your life, and there’s no cure for you. I would have a rebound sometimes, but then I would again apply the method of what we were talking about just now, and then it would again improve for a few days, where I would have a rebound as well and then I would apply this and that would improve as well. So I would say that it took me… To fully recover from insomnia, is that what you’re asking for? Or just right after applying the method? Martin Reed: I would say, maybe where you got to a point where you felt, I’m free of it, I’m independent. I can live my life independently of how I sleep. I’m not so much tangled up in the struggle. It’s not something that has a big influence over my life anymore. Maria Koziol: I feel like that would be maybe a month or so when I got this confidence about, I’m actually able to recover from insomnia. But at this point, I was sure that it would at some point come back, but then I had the tools to defend myself and to approach it in a right way. I think the very, very big lesson for me was something that you’ve been talking about a lot in your podcast and in your content on YouTube, that the most important thing is actually your approach to the sleep and your approach to insomnia, and how you react to it will essentially influence how it will develop. So, that was something that was super big lesson for me, the attitude. When I started having insomnia, when it happened in my life, my attitude was anxious fighting. I was super confused. I was freaked out. I was battling the thoughts all the time. I was trying to fight the fact that I’m not sleeping, forcing myself to fall asleep, which is impossible to do it. With pills, it’s possible, but there’s no way you can force yourself to sleep. So my initial approach to that, my reaction to insomnia was completely fighting with that. And then when I changed to accepting it and just acknowledging it, it was shrinking more and more, and eventually it disappeared. Martin Reed: I like that way you said that it felt like it was shrinking and shrinking, because one of my favorite analogies about the insomnia struggle is we have this big scary thing called insomnia, and we want to fix it, we want to get rid of it, so we want to study it to figure it out so we can get rid of it. So we might pick up a magnifying glass, and we’ve got the insomnia here, and we are just staring at the insomnia through this magnifying glass. And of course, when we look through a magnifying glass, that thing is really big. And when we are focused just on looking through the magnifying glass, we don’t see anything else around us. All we see is that thing that we’re staring at. I think when we start to move away from the struggle, it’s like instead of prodding and poking at this thing under the magnifying glass, what we’re actually doing is putting the magnifying glass down. So the insomnia might still be there, but now because we put the magnifying glass down, our field of view is so much bigger. We can now see the world around us. We might be better able to engage in the world around us, and we free up our attention to do more of the things that matter rather than everything being consumed by what we see through that magnifying glass. I just think that aligned with what you were saying, where it kind of shrunk. That’s just what reminded me of that. When we’re able to recognize that this thing is here, maybe I can’t directly get rid of it, but what I can do is dilute it by adding other things to my life, doing good stuff. It starts to lose its influence, so it feels like it gets smaller. And even when it’s present, if something loses its influence over us, maybe then it becomes less of a problem that we feel we need to address. And when it comes to sleep and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that can come with it, the less engaged we are with trying to control that stuff, the more it’s able to take care of itself and get back on track by itself. Maria Koziol: Definitely. It’s so true because I felt like I just disempowered insomnia by taking away the importance of it. At some point, I just started to ignore it, like the screaming of insomnia, just ignored it and I felt like it devaluated the whole thing and then it becomes smaller and smaller and smaller, and eventually actually disappeared. Martin Reed: One thing you touched upon was that you’re not using sleeping pills anymore. I’m curious to hear what your process was to moving away from them, because sometimes it feels like they’re the only thing that we have available to us, that maybe we need them, otherwise no sleep is going to happen. Or we need to always have them as an option, just in case. What was that process like for you in terms of moving away from them and not even having them available anymore? Maria Koziol: I feel like it lasted very long until I actually was able to stop taking them. That lasted for months, maybe half a year. By that time, I already developed addiction to the sleeping pills. The moment I threw them all away, I remember even flushing them off in the toilet because what happened is that I really started to… I’m very sensitive person in terms of emotional intelligence, so I can very easily recognize when what I’m feeling is being influenced by external object or is it my own feeling. And then after taking those pills the next day, I would feel as though I was on drugs, I was depressed, the feeling of depression. I can’t recognize… I used to have my sad moments. Of course, everybody has them. Some maybe depressive thoughts a little bit, but those thoughts were different. This was feeling as though I started to have depression. It was like everything was so vain. I felt like I would like to start crying, and it was so strange for me. I never felt that way before, so I immediately linked this to the sleeping pills because I knew this wasn’t mine. I never had this feeling before. At this point, I was so scared. I was super scared about my mental health at this point and I said to myself, okay, this is the point where I need to say goodbye to the sleeping pills. However difficult this is going to be, I can’t do this anymore because it started to have a super detrimental impact on my mind and I couldn’t allow it anymore. I just felt like, no, it can’t happen. I can’t deal with depression on top of that, it can’t happen. So, that was my trigger, the point where I decided goodbye, sleeping pills. I can’t. Martin Reed: Maria, I’m really grateful for you coming on and giving up your time to share your experience. I know that a lot of people are going to find your experience really helpful, hopefully as well, hopeful, and just giving people the possibility and the reassurance that we can get out of this struggle no matter how difficult things feel. But I do have one last question for you, which is one that I ask everyone that comes 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, that they’ll never be able to stop struggling with insomnia, what would you say to them? Maria Koziol: I came from the point where once I even almost overdosed on sleeping pills and I drank alcohol as well. That was when I was on holidays. I think I was just so hopeless and so desperate and all the things you can imagine how I felt.It wasn’t just for clarity, it wasn’t like it was a suicidal thing. I didn’t want to do it. It’s just that I would do anything to fall asleep, so I just had a bunch of pills and I took like five or six pills at once and I drank a bottle of wine before, anything to fall asleep. I just wanted to fall asleep. I’m very lucky and grateful that I’m still here today, but you see at what point in my life I came from, what point I was in. That was absolutely a nightmare and I almost killed myself. Where I am now, I don’t have insomnia anymore. I can sleep without any pills, without nothing. So, just wanted to say it as a word of hope for anybody that could be listening to that because it doesn’t matter what state you are in right now, maybe you’re taking a lot of pills daily as well, you are able to get out of it. There’s always hope. You can always do it. And definitely, you’re going to recover from insomnia. Remember that you are not alone and there’s millions of people experiencing the same thing, even though you don’t see them around you, but they are there. There’s a lot of people suffering from the same thing you are suffering right now. And as difficult as it might seem right now, I promise you, you will recover. And you need to change your approach to insomnia and try to disempower insomnia. I know how confusing it sounds, but I promise you will be fine and there’s a way out, and you will 100% recover. I’m 100% sure about that, because I was at the same point as you and maybe even worse, so there’s hope. Martin Reed: All right. Well, that’s great. Thanks again, Maria, for coming on. I really appreciate it. Maria Koziol: Yeah, no worries. Thank you so much, Martin, as well. 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. Mentioned in this episode: The Tools by Phil Stutz and Barry Michels 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 at insomniacoach.com. Share this page

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. Click here for a full transcript of this episode. Transcript 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: 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. 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 at insomniacoach.com. Share this page

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. Transcript 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 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: 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. 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 at insomniacoach.com. Share this page

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. Transcript 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, 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: 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. 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 at insomniacoach.com. Share this page

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. Transcript 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. 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: 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. Mentioned in this episode: Podcast episode with Michelle talking about things going on “behind the scenes” 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 at insomniacoach.com. Share this page

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. Transcript 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: 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: 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. 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 at insomniacoach.com. Share this page

Listen to the podcast episode (audio only) 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 felt that without getting the amount of sleep she wanted to get, she would be unable to take care of her children and she wouldn’t be able to be the person she wanted to be or live the life she wanted to live. 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. Vicky started to allow her mind to think what it wanted to think and to generate the full range of human feelings and emotions. She started to acknowledge and make space for thoughts and feelings — even though she often wished they weren’t showing up — instead of going to war 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. Click here for a full transcript of this episode. Transcript 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 Vicky, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to come onto the podcast. Vicky Chiu: Yeah, absolutely. I’m really grateful to be here. Thank you. Martin Reed: I’m really looking forward to everything that we are hoping to cover today, so let’s just dive right in. Let’s start, if you could just tell us when your sleep problems first began and what you think caused those initial issues with sleep. Vicky Chiu: I’ll start right from the very beginning where it all started in my teens and I think it’s about when I was 17. I got my very first early morning job, and of course, that got my nerves going before when I go to bed, and actually I didn’t sleep well. But then going on forward with that job, I had hung on to that problem and stress, but not being able to sleep. I also have a background where my father has insomnia too, so being around a house of not good sleep was normal. And I went to him because he had the same kind of problems so obviously he was probably a good person to go to at that time. And so he’s commonly on Zopiclone, the blue pill is what people commonly know it as. But yeah, he gave me one of those and it worked fine and from then I just started taking a little bit of it, maybe a quarter, not even the full thing, but that just began the habit of relying on sleeping pills whenever I had an early morning. So then fast forward into my twenties, it would be every day before I go to bed for work, very manageable. And then on the weekends I would be totally off of it. So really it was psychological if you think about it. And then fast forward again until my late thirties now, I have three kids and the first two were fine with sleep and everything. The third one, I’m not sure what changed, but I think it was because of my third. It was all these little pieces of puzzles that came into place then it fit really well to create this big monster of insomnia, anxiety and stress. It was my third one and it was going to be our last one, so I was very cherishing that moment. And then when the infant stage moved on, I was grieving that stage and she just grew up so fast and I think I was sad that way. And then at the same time I just cut off nursing, right off, and that was hard too. And I think because of that there was also a lot of hormones related to not breastfeeding anymore, and so I had a very hard time letting go of that. Plus then going to sleep, I was thinking about that and there was one night that just triggered everything where I couldn’t sleep so I was like, oh, I’m just going to take this sleeping pill. I took half, didn’t work, I took another half and it didn’t work. And I was like, okay, I don’t want to overdose on this so I’m like, the sleeping pills not working, so this is a problem. And then that ignited a lot of stuff like anxiety and then panic attacks in the middle of the night. I would wake up in the middle of the night and have a panic attack and then not be able to fall asleep. So it really spiraled downwards in 2021 of September. Martin Reed: Yeah. I hear that quite a lot. I’m thinking just to myself that I think a lot of people are going to identify with that process where you have the sleeping pill or the supplement or whatever that external thing is that we rely on as a crutch to get us through difficult nights. And those things tend to be fine for as long as they have an effect. But then the downside is that when that experience happens where we use that crutch and it doesn’t seem to have an effect, then we can just become so much more worried than perhaps we would’ve done if that crutch wasn’t even available to us. Because now we’re taking that thing that we’ve always believed will generate sleep for us and even that’s not working now and that can really be quite scary. Was that the case for you when you found that wasn’t helping anymore? Vicky Chiu: Yes. So once the sleeping pill didn’t work, it was very scary because it’s worked for me for the last 20 years, and I’m taking one and a half of the amount that I used to take at least. And so I’m like, yeah, there’s something wrong with me. The feelings of, there’s something wrong and I’m the only one because sleeping pills should be working for everyone, especially the prescription ones. So yeah, it caused a lot of anxiety and stress. Yeah. Martin Reed: Yeah, it’s really interesting. This whole relationship we can have with just sleeping pills, it really doesn’t matter, it’s just whatever that external thing is that we rely on or we see is a safety net. I think what happens is, it’s a comfort. So we take that pill, we’ve known from experience that now sleep is going to happen. So all that worry, that pressure we might be putting on ourselves to sleep, that effort we might be putting into sleep, we just drop all that struggle. And I think that might be one of the real mechanisms behind how they actually work. It’s less to do with whatever’s in what we are taking and more to do with just, I’ve taken that thing, now I can relax, I don’t have to worry, I don’t have to fight with my mind, I don’t have to try anymore. And it’s that abandonment of the trying that tends to generate that good sleep. And so then going back to your experience, okay I’ve taken this pill, but if there’s still that big underlying anxiety or worry or stress going on, the mind is still going to be churning over that. So then we find, oh, now this pill isn’t working. And I hate using the air quotes, but it’s not working, it’s not getting the desired result. And just like you said, then you just start to get really worried because now it’s like, well this isn’t even working now. What’s going on? I must be unique, but it’s not. It’s just down to the fact that at the end of the day we haven’t got to the root cause, that root problem of what’s creating this long term sleep disruption. And I’m sure we’ll get to talk some more about that. But really it just comes down to our relationship with all those thoughts and feelings that are going on in our mind and often a change in our behaviors as we try to protect our sleep, try and make more sleep happen and just fix the problem that we’re dealing with, right? Vicky Chiu: And actually that’s how I found out about your podcast actually was, I felt alone, but I was like, realistically I can’t be alone. So I just searched up insomnia and just anything to help me during the day to listen to other people’s stories. And I did listen to one of your podcasts with a lady, I think she was a mother too, and somehow she went on the sleeping pill and it didn’t work for her. It didn’t solve my problem, but it was very comforting to know that and hear a real true story that it wasn’t working for someone else. And so that’s when I really started to do my research and start doing more digging. Martin Reed: Yeah. And this is exactly why I’m so grateful for guests like yourself coming on and just talking about this because it can be so helpful, so comforting, just to know that you’re not alone, that what you’re going through isn’t unique or unusual. That in itself can just be so reassuring. And like you said, it’s not going to necessarily fix everything, just knowing that isn’t going to fix everything. But it’s just so reassuring. So yeah, I’m really grateful for you coming on just to talk about this in your own words because it is really helpful for so many people. So let’s just rewind a little bit. So you had that really difficult night when the medication just didn’t seem to work. How do you think that then progressed onto subsequent nights of sleep disruption? Because you’ve got this long history of sleep disruption before ups and downs. What was it, do you think this time around after that really difficult night when the medication didn’t seem to work that… why do you feel like things didn’t bounce back and recover? Why did things progress and stick around do you think? Vicky Chiu: I think just because the realization that the sleeping pill can not work was a big one and I didn’t have that crutch anymore. And then it just, I didn’t even think that the sleeping pill wouldn’t work. I never had that thought before. So then since then that it didn’t work, it was in my head, then your brain’s like, it’s not going to work. It’s not going to work. What if it doesn’t work? You’re going to be up all night and then your entire day, the next day’s going to be screwed and you’re not going to be able to take care of your children properly. You’re going to be short tempered, impatient, you’re going to be a bad mother. All those stuff start to creep in and yeah, that’s just very stressful and lots of anxiety around that. Especially when you’re alone at night, it gets really lonely because there’s really no one to talk to at that point. And when you’re feeling like that, you really want someone to be with you. I think like that for me at least. And so it’s a very stressful and also very scary time because the night can be so long if you’re not sleeping and then at that time you’re just all by yourself too. And you’re like, what do I do? I tried all sorts of stuff and it just didn’t work. Martin Reed: Yeah. What were the nights like at that time? Was it just really, you were just finding it hard to first fall asleep at the start of the night or was it to do with waking and finding it hard to fall back to sleep? Or was it just all of the above? Vicky Chiu: Yeah. My whole entire insomnia experience always started with just falling asleep, and then after that it’d be fine. I could wake up, go to the washroom, whatever, it’s fine, I could go back to sleep. But after that big night of the sleepy pill not working, then even when I fall asleep I would be woken up by, I don’t know, I have children, they would wake us up sometimes or my partner snoring, that would wake me up. And that would be like, oh my God, now what if I can’t fall asleep? So I’ll hold onto that, which obviously is not the way to fall back asleep, but a lot of people out there they probably don’t know the best is just to let go, which is also the hardest thing to do. Martin Reed: Yeah, right. Yeah. It’s so easy to say that, isn’t it? Oh just let go. Just don’t think of anything, think positive. But yeah, actually doing it is very difficult. So you touched on this before that when we have a problem we try and fix it. So you obviously tried some different things before finding this collection of tools, which we’ll definitely discuss that you did find helpful. But before you got to that point where you were actually doing stuff that looking back, this was what was really truly the good stuff, the goal that was really helpful. What kind of things had you tried to try and turn things around that on reflection perhaps one that helpful, maybe even ended up being a bit of a distraction? Vicky Chiu: Ooh, there’s probably many. I would say it was just more a stress around preparing for sleep. So I would do a lot of yin yoga or yoga nidra, but it was a way to relax, but then I got stressed out like, oh, I need to set aside at least half an hour before going to sleep so I can do my yoga and stretches or meditation. And I think that was a bit of a distraction because I’m already creating that worry pre-bedtime. And then if let’s say I can’t get that in because the night was just so crazy, then the level of stress would be kicked up a notch, right? So, those things are good, but then I don’t know, for someone who has trouble sleeping might not be. At least for me, it was more of a distraction, like you said. Yeah. Martin Reed: Yeah, yeah. I think it just comes down to intent, right? Because like you said, all these things, they’re not necessarily harmful, but anything that we do with the goal of generating sleep, we are just putting more pressure on ourselves and it takes away the whole purpose of whatever we’re doing. So many of my clients, they talk about meditation, relaxation techniques and stuff like that. And certainly I’m never going to say, don’t do that. It’s a bad thing. How can that be a bad thing? But if we are doing it, we’ve got this really set rituals, like half an hour before bed, I have to do this meditation routine or this breathing exercise, we’ve got to do it in order to make sleep happen or to help me feel more relaxed for sleep to happen. We just immediately making ourselves less relaxed because we’re putting all this pressure on ourselves to first of all do this routine or ritual. If we don’t, like you said, then we become really worried. Now I missed that opportunity. And second of all, the whole time we are doing it that we’re trying to let go, we’re trying to relax, we’re trying to be more present, we’re doing it with the goal of influencing something that’s going to happen in the future that we have no control over. So it really becomes self-defeating. And I think that’s where we can really get tripped up with all this sleep hygiene stuff that is so prevalent out there. I think it can be helpful as a preventative thing, maybe if we’re burning the candle at both ends, but other than that we sleep great then yeah, sure, let’s do an unwinding time. Let’s just make sure the temperature of our bedroom is optimal, for example. But if we are dealing with chronic insomnia, no amount of sleep hygiene is going to help. And it can actually be more of a hindrance because we end up just adding more of these rituals and more of these sleep efforts to our lives and when they don’t work, which is actually to be expected, then we can more worries. It’s like when that pill doesn’t work, right? Oh, this sleep hygiene everyone’s telling me about, even that’s not working. I must be truly unique and truly broken. But it’s normal and it’s to be expected. We just want to get to that point where we are not engaged in all those efforts or we just drop that struggle. Vicky Chiu: Yeah. Honestly, I’ve used everything and all of the tools around better sleep, relaxing, just does not work for me, at least within insomnia. The blue light cancellation glasses, all the different supplements you can think of. Vitamins, magnesium, melatonin. Yeah, there’s lots of supplements. And that was in itself stressful. Like, oh, I’ve got to take this 30 minutes before bedtime and sometimes I would forget. I’m like, oh no, then get out of bed and go get those supplements and eat that and then it doesn’t work. And so it creates a whole level of anxiety again, which it’s just the effort that you put into it that you’re not supposed to. But yeah, you just don’t realize that you’re doing all of that stuff. Martin Reed: Yeah, and it’s understandable why we would do that, right? Because when we have a problem, we want to put effort into the solution. But unfortunately sleep is this unique thing where it doesn’t respond well to effort. So the more we try, the more we struggle. That’s really what it comes down to. So when we think about it, what’s our brain’s number one job? It’s to look out for us, it’s to protect us. So it’s going to generate all these difficult thoughts, these difficult feelings and emotions, not to make us feel bad, but to actually look out for us to try to help us, to help us look for a solution, to help us live the life we want to live, to be aware of threats and risks. None of us would be alive today if our brain didn’t do that. But when we’re really struggling, the brain goes into overdrive. It tries so hard to help us that it actually ends up getting in the way. And I think the more we engage in those efforts to change how we feel, sometimes then the brain thinks, you’re not listening to me. Why are you not listening to me? This is serious. And so it screams even louder at us. It generates even more intense and difficult thoughts and feelings. And the more we try to make sleep happen, the more we reinforce to the brain that, wow, this wakefulness is serious. It’s a real threat. Maybe it’s a danger. You’ve got to be alert during the night to protect me from being awake. And then as soon as we’re telling the brain to be alert for wakefulness, it’s going to make it difficult because we all recognize that an alert brain probably isn’t going to be helpful if our goal is to sleep. Vicky Chiu: Yeah. So true. Yeah. Then your bed and your pillow turns into something that’s an alert for your brain instead of, it’s time to relax. Yeah. Martin Reed: Yeah, exactly. As far as your brain’s concerned, there’s this imaginary 600 pound gorilla just sitting on your bed waiting to maul you, as soon as you climb in. The brain just can’t tell the difference between a real physical threat like that gorilla on the bed and this perceived threat, which is wakefulness. Vicky Chiu: Yeah. It’s funny because I had no problem if we’re on the couch watching a movie and I’d doze off, that’d be okay. Or sometimes when I meditate I can easily fall asleep. But when it comes to real bedtime and then putting your head on that pillow, it’s like your heart starts to pump and then your brain just starts going. So that’s so true. It’s interesting how that all works. But yeah. Martin Reed: It really is interesting. I agree with you. And again, it just comes down to that, the brain looking out for us really. So before, to use your example, let’s say you’re watching TV earlier in the evening, you know it’s not time to go to bed. So you’re not trying to make sleep happen. You’re not trying to avoid being awake at night. There’s no effort, there’s no pressure. So you really feel that sense of sleepiness when it’s time to go to bed. It’s okay, you flipped that switch. Now you’re donning that suit of armor. It’s battle time. I’ve got to avoid being awake. I’ve got to make sure I fall asleep in a certain amount of time. I’ve got to make sure I don’t wake up. All this pressure that we are putting on ourselves and the brain’s trying its hardest to protect us. We’re probably not going to feel sleepy. It’s like anytime we’re going into battle, we’re not going to feel sleepy. It’s really, we want to get to a point where we’re just dropping that battle, which is hard to do. Because all of our instincts are telling us, avoid this wakefulness, we need sleep to happen. It feels so good to get that sleep. It feels so good to have those thoughts that you can sleep and not to deal with all these thoughts that it’s going to be another one of those nights. But the more we struggle with sleep and those thoughts and feelings, unfortunately the more we get tangled up in that struggle and that battle. Vicky Chiu: Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Martin Reed: So let’s talk about some of the stuff that you did and was the reason why we’re talking today. I don’t have a set list or anything. I’d love to just hear your thoughts on things that you did find helpful, that helped you over the longer term. Maybe were really difficult in the short term, but actually proved to be helpful over the longer term. Vicky Chiu: Yeah, like I said before, I found your podcast and started listening to that one lady and then that led me to listening to the other ones too. And in general I found a common pattern and it’s like I wasn’t the only one and it’s everyone out there and most of these people are chronic insomniacs, right? So then I went into more research around your podcast and the stuff that you do, the work that you did. And then I signed up for your emails, which then you started sending me the day one to day seven daily emails, which were really good, helpful tips. So that combined with the podcast, I started to realize some more things and then I had a really good psychologist that I go to. So I started talking to her. And then she also had some live, in-person workshops, not around insomnia but just around anxiety and worry, which is closely related. And just really getting out there to talk to someone really helped. And a group of people too that she hosted was really helpful. Just to have people that are in the same path and in the same boat really helps just to even talk about it. And then you also mentioned a lot about CBT-I, which is the Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. And I got help with that too. But yeah, just really at the end of the day, you can get all these tools, but you just have to work on it yourself too. When it comes to nighttime, that’s the hardest part. It was difficult, not going to lie, but it’s short-term pain, long-term gain. The idea of, or the thought of not being able to sleep still, I still think about it every night just because it’s just been this ingrained neural path in my brain that’s stayed with me or been with me for maybe 25 years now. But the key is you just relearn that if I actually let go, I can fall asleep. And if I don’t, I’m still going to function and I’m still going to be that mother that can take care of my kids. It’s not going to be the end of the world. I’m not going to accidentally kill them. Your brain is really good at thinking catastrophically. You just make it so bad or seem like it’s going to be so bad. But really when you’re actually doing it the next day, it’s like, yeah, you’re going to feel drowsy and maybe not at your best, but you’re not just going to be at your worst. So those tips really helped a lot. Martin Reed: Yeah. And that catastrophizing, what’s the brain doing there is just trying to look out for you, always wants to present the worst case scenario just to make sure that you listen and that we take steps to avoid that from happening. And sometimes, well probably most of the time, that’s really helpful. We’re going to cross the street, make sure you look both ways. What if you get mowed down, your family’s all going to starve, then you’re not going to be there for them, et cetera, et cetera. And it makes us look both ways. Great. Thanks brain. But when it comes to stuff like sleep that we have no control over, those thoughts can be really difficult and we can easily get really tangled up in them and believe that they’re 100% true. Think of them as facts, think of them as a reflection of who we are. Think of them as an obstacle to the kind of person we want to be. But the truth is, it’s just the brain looking out for us. And sometimes just acknowledging that, sometimes just really simply just being like, okay, thanks brain. Thanks for looking out for me. And just letting that sit, not trying to push it away, not trying to tell the brain, don’t try and protect me, don’t try and look out for me, but just let that thought just sit next to you. Just redirect your focus and your attention elsewhere. And you said letting go, just to clarify, by letting go, do you just mean dropping that struggle, trying to push or avoid certain thoughts or feelings or? I’d just like to hear your thoughts more on what you mean by that, and if someone’s listening that’s like, yeah, I’d love to let go. How do I do that? Vicky Chiu: Yeah, no, that’s a great question actually. For me, when I start to feel that anxiety, which I still do on some days, there’s just one of those days, maybe once a week I’ll get that, I can’t sleep, I have a big day tomorrow. So when I start to feel that during bedtime, I would just let it in. I would try to feel it. Be like, okay, like talking to your brain, but okay, anxiety, thank you for warning me, thank you for coming in and dropping in. And before when I felt so anxious, it was that right away feeling like, oh my God, I need this to go, right? But now it’s like, you still want to do that, but instead you just invite it and just be like, okay, let me feel all the anxiety right now, just to accept it. And then when you do, it feels heard or seen or something. And then it’s like, oh, okay, well she’s listening to me and now I can let go. So for me, that’s how the process works, is just to feel it and stop pushing it away because the more you resist, the harder it comes through. So yeah, just to accept it and then it just eases out and that’s when you can let it go. Martin Reed: Yeah. So, let me ask this. Do you find that when you’re really caught up in really anxious thoughts and feelings, you mentioned that in the past you even experienced panic attacks. Do you find that when we’re really experiencing a lot of anxiety, it feels like it’s just going to get more and more intense, right? It’s just going to keep ratcheting up and getting worse and worse and worse until something awful happens. But in reality, and sometimes it can be helpful to just recognize this, that it does eventually reach a plateau. It’s like a wave in the ocean. That wave can grow and grow and grow and it looks like it’s just going to wash over you and take you down. But eventually it does recede a little bit. This wave can’t grow indefinitely. It does get really high and then fall again. And then sure it might come back and get a little bit higher or get almost as high, but then it goes down again. But do you think it’s helpful just recognizing and acknowledging that this is starting to feel really unpleasant, but maybe I can just ride it out. As long as I can try and let go and just drop that struggle, sooner or later that wave is going to reach its maximum height and it will start to fall back down again? Vicky Chiu: Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s exactly what I do by accepting it and riding the wave. It’s just the more you just let it do its thing, it will come down eventually. And for me, it’s always came down. It’s like this too shall pass like everyone says. So yeah, and I do now for sure get out of bed when I do feel anxious. So my brain does not relate my bed as a place of anxiety. So I’ll just get out of bed and go to my little meditation place and just sit there for a little bit and just ride that out. But once I’m out of that bed and I let myself feel all the emotions or anxiety, things tend to calm down and sometimes it may not. I’ll try that whole cycle maybe 2, 3, 4 or five times a night. But I’ll just repeat that whole cycle again and again and just get out of bed, ride it out, get out of bed, ride it out, go back to bed kind of thing. So that’s the technique now. Martin Reed: Yeah. And I think if nothing else, the reason why I like this idea of just getting out of bed when it doesn’t feel good to be in bed is it just gives us the opportunity to make being awake, we’re awake anyway, it just gives you that opportunity to make being awake a bit more pleasant. So instead of just being engaged in that battle of trying to make sleep happen, tossing and turning all that unpleasantness, how about we just do something that makes being awake more pleasant. That not only makes being awake a little bit more tolerable, but again, it comes back to training the brain that, oh, maybe being awake isn’t a danger. Maybe it’s not this physical threat that it might be because you’re actually enjoying this wakefulness. So maybe I don’t have to be quite so alert to protect you from being awake at night. And that in turn, obviously creates better conditions for sleep to happen. Vicky Chiu: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Martin Reed: Yeah. So I love that we’ve talked a lot about this letting go and dealing with that anxiety. Again, I think people listening to this are going to be, yeah that makes total sense. Maybe they’ve tried this, I’ve tried allowing this worry, this anxiety to happen, but still struggling with it, still finding sleep difficult. I think it’s helpful to emphasize that this is a whole new way of developing a relationship with our thoughts and our feelings and our emotions. And so I think it takes time. It’s not just going to be, all right, I’m really struggling tonight. Okay, I’m going to allow these thoughts, these feelings, and then suddenly we feel better or suddenly we fall asleep. I’d just like to hear your experience a little bit more on that process. Was there a lot of practice? Was it really challenging? How long was it taking you to notice a change in the effect of difficult thoughts on how you felt and how you slept? Vicky Chiu: Yeah. On my end with my experience, it took a longer time just because I had also goals of tapering off the pill. And so it started in September. I went to seek help around November and then I didn’t actually get medical help until December-ish, and it was just the slow process of trying to accept each idea one at a time. So it would be like letting go would be a big one. But then that aside, I was always taking the pill too just to… So the sleep doctor that I was talking to was like, don’t try to just do everything all at once because that might be a huge stress on you just to sleep and that’s not what we want. So we did little baby steps at a time and the longest one was just trying to taper off the sleeping pill, which it was a good technique but it took long. It would be like, find one night in this whole week that you think or you just try without the sleeping pill. So it’d be maybe more a weekend where I can have a really bad night of sleep or no sleep at all, and then I’ll be okay because I’ve got my partner around to take care of the kids or whatever. And then if I’m confident for one night a week, then I would move on to the next week, which would be two nights in the week where I’m going to try no sleeping pill. But it’s not every week I would jump or go to three and four or five nights. If I’m only confident at two, I would stick to two nights every week until I built that confidence and then I’ll go to three nights. So that dragged for a long time until, I don’t know, it suddenly happened that there was one night I forgot even to take it when I was supposed to because they make you track stuff on a worksheet and I didn’t really track it anymore and then I forgot about it and then I woke up the next morning, I was very happy that I was able to just even forget. And now I’ve developed this thought that, or realization maybe, we should call that, is when I do take the pill it will take the worries in whatever away and the trying and the anxiety. But when I wake up in the morning, I feel just as crappy as maybe having no sleep. I was like, it’s not worth it. It’s kind of the same, if I’m not going to sleep good tonight or take it, I’m going to feel the same the next day. So I just decided not to. Sometimes you even feel better if you have a poor nights sleep without the pill I realized. Martin Reed: I love how we’ve talked about all these thought processes and that it’s difficult and that it takes time and that we’ve talked about when you come from a place where you’ve been taking medication for a long time, that there’s also another journey. It’s another challenge to move away from that. You touched upon the behavioral side of things in terms of getting out of bed to do something more appealing if being in bed doesn’t feel good. Something that a lot of people with chronic insomnia can do in a bid to chase sleep or make sleep happen is just spending a lot more time in bed than maybe they ever did in the past. So we might go to bed earlier because we just feel really fatigued and we want more sleep to happen. So we might go to bed earlier or stay in bed later in the morning and often that’s one of these things that can actually perpetuate the sleep disruption because we end up going to bed before we’re sleepy enough for sleep. We can stay in bed in the morning all different times, which can be disruptive to our body clock. And if we get out late in the morning, get out of bed late in the morning, we’re going to be awake for less time during the day to build up that sleep drive to help us sleep the following night. So we see often it’s suggested to a lot, a little bit less time for sleep, spend an amount of time in bed that’s a bit closer to what your current circumstances are, the amount of sleep you’re currently averaging. Was this something that was relevant to you in your experience or was it a change that you made? I’m curious to hear your thoughts and experience with that. Vicky Chiu: Yeah, it was very relevant. I was told the same thing is to sleep around the time you are sleepy, because everyone has their natural biological clock for sleeping and waking up. And we had to figure out when my sleep time was and when my awake time was. And it was a bit more of a strict plan at first because it’s trying to train the brain, do some new things and to adapt. So it was for me, sleep around 11 and then would wake up at around 6:30. And I say strict because I would do that on the weekends as well for a little bit, I don’t know, until I was just used to it. But yeah, the sleep doctors also told me, you still have to live your life and you’re going to have those weekends where people are coming over or you’re going over to a friend’s house or we have parties and weddings and all that stuff. So those things need to be okay too in your life. Because if you stick with this strict plan, then that’s going to start to stress you out if you have other things in life that come in. And that is exactly what I was thinking and I had that question on my mind too. Like, well if this is my life, then it would suck, right? I’m going to be missing out on stuff. But at first it’ll be a little bit strict or at least it was for me. And then after it’s like, once that confidence came in and the routine was like, I can actually do this then it really worked. Martin Reed: What you said there is really helpful because it can be helpful or useful at first to have a more strict routine. I’m not going to allow myself to go to bed for example before 11 o’clock. So I want to make sure that I’m really sufficiently sleepy enough for sleep to happen and I want to try and make sure that I’m always out of bed around the same time every day in the morning to help anchor my biological body clock and to make sure that I’m giving my body enough time awake during the day to help build that sleepiness for the next night. But at the same time, we don’t want it to interfere with our life because ultimately what we do with our life, our actions are way more influential over the kind of life we live than how we sleep. It’s really what we do. So we don’t want to be like, oh I can’t go out with friends tonight because I’m not going to be able to go to bed at a certain time. I’m not going to be able to do all this stuff that makes my life meaningful and rich because it might interfere with the plan or with the schedule. So I think it can be helpful in the short term, maybe be a little bit stricter just to get those early results, to start feeling that really strong sense of sleepiness, which can actually be really reassuring when that returns because we can just be so used to that feeling of fatigue, just grogginess and feeling worn down, which isn’t the same as sleepiness. When that sense of sleepiness comes back, it can be really reassuring. And when we notice all the improvements, then we can be a little bit less strict with ourselves and just be like, I’ll aim to make sure I’m not going to bed before a certain time, but if I feel really sleepy before then, I’ll allow myself to go to bed then. If it’s the weekend, maybe I’ll allow myself to sleep in for half an hour or an hour. I think that’s a good process to follow. And it sounds like that’s what you found to be helpful for yourself. Vicky Chiu: Yeah, I’ve just been a lot more lenient in, especially weekends, be like I can sleep in a bit more. It would be the one hour sleep in more. And again, it’s that confidence. I can sleep tonight and if I don’t, everyone has a bad night of sleep. Even the sleepers or people that are good sleepers, everyone has bad… That’s just natural. There’s nothing wrong with that and you just have to learn to accept that. And if you do have a bad night of sleep, you’re not going to not function. You can still function. So yeah, that’s reassuring. Martin Reed: Yeah. Even when it feels like we just can’t function, even the most basic level, we can still breathe, we can still drink water, we can still eat. So it just comes down to, it’s that brain again, right? It’s just trying so hard to look out for us. It’s like, look, you got to make this, this has got to be fixed. We’re not going to be able to do anything. But the truth of the matter is, the brain tells us one thing, but we can still do other things. Our brain could tell us, don’t lift up your right hand, but we can still lift up our right hand. We still get to choose how we respond to all that stuff the brain is generating, but it takes practice. It’s really hard to separate ourselves from those thought processes because they can feel they are just so intense and they just feel so genuine and it’s so easy to just have that wave crash over us and just sweep us away. It really does take a lot of practice to change that relationship I think. Vicky Chiu: Yeah, absolutely. It’s not an easy fix, but it is fixable. Martin Reed: Are you telling me that you never have any difficult nights anymore? Vicky Chiu: No, I’m not saying that. For sure not. Even just last night it was difficult. I think at least there’s still one night out of the week where it’s not very bad, but I won’t get the ideal amount of sleep that I wanted, and it happens. Martin Reed: Yeah, I think it’s so important to just recognize that we all have difficult nights from time to time. So it’s a loaded question because I was secretly hoping that you were going to be honest and say that, yeah, I do still difficult nights from time to time because everyone does. I think what the change is, what the difference is, is your reaction to it. So instead of it being the default reaction, which is trying to battle with all those stressful thoughts and the anxiety that the brain is generating to try and help you out, changing our behaviors during the day, maybe canceling plans as a result and really getting caught up, tangled up in the struggle, what’s tonight going to bring? All that stuff. The transformation happens when you realize that okay, I’ve had this difficult night or I’m having this difficult night. There are things I can do in response. So during the night I can do something a bit more appealing. If it doesn’t feel good to be in bed during the day, I don’t have to use all of my energy trying to push all these thoughts and emotions away. I can just let them sit and hang out for as long as they want whilst I still engage in doing stuff that helps me just live the kind of life I want to live. I think when we get to that point, that’s when we’ve truly put everything behind us and are whole. I just don’t think chronic insomnia can just no longer exist once we get to that point. Vicky Chiu: Yeah. And that’s a good point too about the schedule and stuff the next day. Something that was very important to me was not to do that, like not to cancel anything. If you had no sleep at all, say the night before and you had a whole calendar of stuff to do, just don’t cancel it. It’s still going to happen. I can still push through this. Makes a huge difference, because if you start canceling stuff, then that creates another load of anxiety at nighttime, then your brain associates, oh I have a big thing tomorrow, I must sleep. But then you’re not going to because you have a big thing tomorrow. So it’s like that spiral again. So I’ve learned to like, okay, I’m just going to deal with whatever I need to do the next day and it’s going to be hard, but whatever. And so now it’s all good again. Martin Reed: That’s one of those big changes that we can get to is just recognizing that, this week I would much rather be asleep. Nobody wants to be awake during the night. But just recognizing that that is out of our control. What do we still have control over? We still have control over our actions. So we can still do that stuff during the day. No doubt it’s probably going to be more difficult, it’s going to require more energy, but we can still do those things. When we’re faced with a struggle, we really only have two choices that we can make. We can give up, withdraw from life, move away from the kind of life we want to live, or we can recognize what we don’t have control over, focus on what we do have control over and still commit. I think it does take a commitment to doing those things that are important to us, that help us move toward the kind of life we want to live. They might not feel as good. They might be more difficult because we’re not feeling as good as we otherwise might. But the most important thing is just that we are doing them. And I think that really is just so important. Vicky Chiu: Yeah, absolutely. And just a little side note that I’ve… from this whole insomnia experience and being alone by myself at night really brought me to my spiritual side. So now I’m more like, well what is this? Why is this problem laid on me? What am I learning from this? And instead of why is this happening to me, it’s not fair being the victim, it’s like, well what is the gift on the other side? And I truly think a gift is just to share it and have someone listen to my story and be able to relate to it. So yeah, that was another big, aha moment I had at nighttime. Martin Reed: I’ve heard similar things like that before where people just feel once they’ve made this transformation that we’ve been talking about, where they actually can reflect back and think, I don’t necessarily think this had a 100% negative impact on my life. I think there might have actually been some good to it. This is probably sounding crazy to many people listening, how can any of this be good or have a positive side? But once we get to that point, we’re able to reflect back. I think the experience can change us perhaps in a way that can be really life enhancing for the future. Vicky Chiu: Yeah. For me at least, it definitely made me stronger mentally and definitely made me see the gift that was hidden. It was hard. I was the victim. I had all of that and I was depressed and it was hard, but at the end, I truly received it as a gift. Martin Reed: All right. Well Vicky, I’m really grateful for the time that you’ve spent with us today. I know that lots of people are going to find this discussion really helpful, but I do have one last question for you. It’s the same question I ask everyone at the end of these discussions, 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? Vicky Chiu: I would have to say that I’ve definitely been there and I thought that there was no help for me and I felt lonely. But I would say and tell them that they’re definitely not alone because the theory that was taught by you, Martin, the Insomnia Coach, is something that really works. The cognitive and the brain and all of that stuff is that’s the key. And there’s plenty of help out there. And talk about it. Talk about your problems. Sometimes, like for me, I felt shameful at times, or everyone has good sleep. I’m the only one out there, so I shouldn’t really burden them with my problems. So the key is to seek help, I think. And I took from this experience as a lesson, again, I was destined to learn something about me. And yeah, there is a light at the end of this tunnel. Martin Reed: That’s great. I think that’s a positive note to end on. So thanks again for taking the time out your day to come onto the podcast, Vicky. Vicky Chiu: Thanks, and you’re doing wonderful work. You’re sharing other people’s story, which is amazing and I’m very grateful for you for that. Martin Reed: Thank you so much. Vicky Chiu: Thanks Martin. 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. 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 at insomniacoach.com. Share this page

Listen to the podcast episode (audio only) 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. Instead of chasing after sleep, he began to spend less time in bed and always got out of bed at the same time every day. He started to get out of bed at night instead of staring at the ceiling for hours. Instead of spending time before bed doing things in an attempt to make sleep happen, he simply set aside some time to unwind and do things that were relaxing and enjoyable. 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. Click here for a full transcript of this episode. Transcript 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: Hi, Jim. Thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to come onto the podcast. Jim Evans: Hey Martin, thanks for having me. Really appreciate the opportunity. Martin Reed: Well, let’s start right at the beginning. If you can just tell us a little bit more about when your sleep problems first began, and what you think caused those initial issues with sleep. Jim Evans: Yeah, so I’ve had sleep problems for probably the last decade. It really was alcohol. I was a heavy drinker. In fact, you could say I was a high functioning alcoholic. Caffeine. When I wasn’t drinking alcohol, I was drinking caffeinated beverages. I drank coffee for a number of years. And then when I quit coffee, I went over to some black tea and green tea, and even when I was drinking tea, I was really drinking too much of it. The other contributing factor was diet. I was eating standard American diet, was snacking all the time, and was even eating before I would go to bed. I would have a late night snack before I would go to bed, and I didn’t really even realize what impact that was having on my sleep. I was working a lot of late hours, had a lot of stress in my life. Still do occasionally have stress in my life, but it’s not as bad now. And then, a lot of bad sleep habits that I acquired over the years. I found myself trying to jump into bed early and stay into bed late, trying to grab naps. The sleep wasn’t really bad right away. It probably took me about a decade for my sleep to become completely dysfunctional, and at the worst, I was taking sleeping pills with alcohol. I think that was probably the lowest point of my life, in terms of trying to get a good night’s rest. Martin Reed: And so, what was sleep like for you during this period? Was it difficulty falling asleep, difficulty staying asleep? A bit of both? Was there ever an average kind of night? Jim Evans: Yeah, I guess I would say I sucked at all aspects of sleep. I would lay in bed, staring at the ceiling. I would tell people that was a hobby of mine, as I would be laying in bed, staring at the ceiling, trying to fall asleep. When I did get to sleep, I would often wake up. I remember the 2:00 hour, for some reason, I would wake up at 2:00 every night. And I knew when I would wake up that the chances of me falling back asleep were pretty rare. And then, I would wake up earlier than when I wanted, before the alarm went off. And I just, I felt like the only thing I was really getting was just light sleep. I was spending 10 hours in bed, approximately 10 hours in bed, but I was probably sleeping five or six of those hours at best. And eventually, I got to the point where I was having great anxiety about sleep, which created more sleep issues. There were times that I was afraid to jump in bed because I knew it was just going to be a frustrating night of me trying to compete against sleep, and I would wake up frustrated, and I didn’t know what to do about it. And this went on for many, many, many years. Martin Reed: Yeah. You kind of touched upon it a little bit, in terms of the anxiety there, but were you also finding that this sleep disruption was also having an effect on your days, like in your daily life? And if so, what kind of influence was that having for you? Jim Evans: Yeah. I was experiencing things like short term memory loss, lack of ability to focus, fatigue and tiredness in the afternoon. I’m a part-time athlete, so I’m an endurance athlete, and so I spend a lot of time road biking and swimming and doing things like in strength training. And I just found I wasn’t recovering from those activities, and I just didn’t feel myself. And I knew sleep was the cause, because occasionally I would’ve a good night’s sleep. What would happen is, I would’ve three or four nights of really horrible sleep, and that would build up, and then I would just basically pass out one evening and get maybe a good, solid six or seven hours. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen often enough. But then, on those days when I got a good quality sleep, I felt really good. So, I knew sleep was kind of the cause of all of the daytime disorders that I was experiencing. Martin Reed: Yeah. So, before you found Insomnia Coach, what kind of things had you tried in a bid to just improve your sleep, improve your situation and struggle? Jim Evans: Yeah, so, obviously I tried a lot of Google therapy. Martin Reed: Yeah. Jim Evans: And I would just try the little things that I thought were the cause. I would try to resolve those issues. I went to a couple sleep doctors. The first sleep doc doctor I went to prescribed me Ambien. I can’t even remember the dosage of it. But I took that for a number of years, but to be honest with you, I never liked the effects of it. But it worked, partially. It partially worked. So I would take Ambien, and then the next day I felt sluggish almost the entire day. And I think, I don’t know why I continued to take it. I guess I really didn’t have another solution, and so I was able to sleep pretty okay. Not great, but pretty okay. Take an Ambien. Over the years, I had gone to probably three different sleep doctors. I also had a sleep study that was done. They brought me into a hotel room, hooked me up to a monitor. They actually hook you with diodes all over your body, and then they’re like, “Okay, we want you to go to sleep now.” And you’re like, “How am I supposed to sleep with all this equipment, with like, two or three video cameras looking out over me to watch me?” And of course I didn’t sleep, you know? And so, it kind of ruined the whole point of the exercise. But I think I did sleep like an hour and a half, and afterwards they gave me a diagnosis of… What was it? I’ve got this written down here. I can’t remember. Yeah. I don’t remember what the diagnosis was, but basically it was like a psychological sleep disorder that indicated that I really was asleep when I thought I was awake, which basically to me meant that I slept really lightly. They didn’t find any breathing disorders or any other type of sleep dysfunctions. Oh, I just remembered. Yeah, the sleep study was paradoxical insomnia, is what they prescribed me with. I had to Google it to find out what that meant. Yeah. And when the sleep study was over, they actually indicated I was sleeping parts of it, but I remember, I remember distinctly some of the thoughts that I had while I was supposedly asleep, and I told them, I said, “I was just meditating.” They said, “No, your heart rate was really low.” And I said, “Well, my normal resting heart rate is between 35 and 40.” I said, “So if you’re going to go by that, then I guess I’m asleep right now talking to you.” So, I went from sleep doctor to sleep doctor. Really didn’t find any solutions. And then, I finally came upon another sleep doctor that basically said, “You should give cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia a try,” and that’s kind of how I wound up finding you. Martin Reed: Yeah. And it’s interesting just hearing you talk about all these things you tried and the experience that you went through, because I think a lot of people are going to really resonate with what you’re saying, because when we’re struggling, we want to look for a solution to the problem, right? And when it comes to sleep, we often, from person to person, we all do very similar things, and a lot of it is grounded in medication or supplements, the kind of sleep hygiene, like changing our bedtime rituals or developing new rituals. And all these things really, over the long term at least, aren’t usually that helpful, just because they don’t really get to the root cause of what is feeding the insomnia, what’s keeping that insomnia alive. And often, it is related to our behaviors and our thought processes, our relationship with our thoughts. I don’t think it’s our thoughts themselves, because we all experience thoughts. Some are pleasant, some are unpleasant, but often it’s our reaction to those thoughts, that temptation to try and fight or avoid the really difficult and uncomfortable ones, that then just kind of serve to make them push back harder, lead to more arousal and create more difficult conditions for sleep to happen. I’m curious, just after I gave that little spiel, if any of that, looking back in your experience, if that sounds as though it’s something you identify with. Jim Evans: Yeah. I mean, I tried all those things that you talked about, and you’re right. Identifying the root cause is totally essential. I mean, I think, unfortunately, with sleep it’s complex, and sometimes people have multiple root causes. I mean, I look back over the years, and based on what I was just telling your listeners and viewers and you is that I had many root causes. I mean, I had alcohol abuse, caffeine, diet, poor sleep habits, just poor eating, and even eating before bedtime. I had to resolve all of those. But I guess, once I fixed all of those, though, I figured that my sleep would also improve, and unfortunately the root cause of that was really that I needed to retrain my brain, is that my sleep habits had gotten so sloppy that I needed to really retrain myself on how to sleep, because I was laying in bed and I wasn’t sleeping efficiently, and I wasn’t following a good structured sleep habit. So even though I cleaned up all other aspects of my life that would normally contribute to good sleep, until I fixed that single root cause, I wasn’t going to be able to address the issue. Martin Reed: Yeah. And that is basically insomnia, chronic insomnia at least, in a nutshell, because we have these triggers for sleep disruption. We can never eliminate them all. Some we might be able to, but never all of them. There’s probably billions of them, that can all just temporarily disrupt our sleep for as long as they’re relevant, or as long as they’re an issue. But once they’re no longer an issue, whether that’s because we were able to eliminate those triggers, or if we’ve just kind of adapted to them, if the sleep issues stick around, it’s always because of these perpetuating factors, these things like our behaviors, our relationship with our thoughts. And so, that can also sometimes be this area of mystery or additional concern, because we can think, well, look, I’ve got rid of this. Let’s say I had a really stressful job, and I think that’s why I’m struggling to sleep. I’ve left that job now. I’ve got a really good job. I’m really happy. I love it. I’m chilled out, relaxed. I love going in, but my sleep issues have stuck around. Now I’m really concerned, because does this mean something’s wrong? Something’s broken with me, because my sleep issues are still here, yet what was causing the sleep issues has gone? But that’s normal, and it is down to these perpetuating factors behind insomnia. I like to say they give insomnia the oxygen it needs to survive, even when that trigger is no longer around anymore. And it’s down to those behaviors that we completely understandably implement in a bid to improve sleep. Like you touched upon, we might start chasing sleep, going to bed earlier, staying in bed later, just spending a lot more time for sleep. We might be changing our days and our routines around to try and protect our sleep, or to conserve energy, to protect us from that sense of fatigue. And we really can be tempted to get involved in that endless and exhausting battle with all the thoughts, feelings, and emotions that are being generated by our brain in a bid to protect us. It’s looking out for us, but it’s just trying so hard that it’s kind of getting in the way. And these are all the things that keep that insomnia going long after whatever initially triggered it is no longer around. Jim Evans: Yeah, and you begin to feel helpless, because you’re chasing all these things, but you don’t really know which one of it is that’s contributing to sleep. I mean, for the longest time I thought stress was a big factor in whether I was going to sleep or not. And stress used to be one of the triggers. If I had a stressful day, it was very difficult for me to sleep. But when I started to go through your program, I would notice that I could have a horrendously stressful day and still sleep pretty decently, so I started to realize, while stress is a contributing factor, it’s not really the underlying cause of why I’m not sleeping. And then, you’ve got to figure out, you got to really address those structural sleep issues that you’re dealing with, and that’s what I found to be successful. Martin Reed: Yeah. So, let’s talk about that a little bit more. When we were working together, what changes did you make, that on reflection now, you’re like, yeah, they were really helpful? Jim Evans: Well, the sleep restriction was honestly the most helpful thing. I could not have solved my sleep problem without going through sleep restriction. And I don’t think of it as sleep restriction. I think more of it as a gaining efficiency with sleep, or restructuring sleep. Sleep restriction is, the term almost doesn’t describe truly what it’s doing for you. And over time, well, you saw the results. Every day that I did this, I got better and better at sleep, and toward the end of the eight week program, I was sleeping pretty efficiently. So, that was one of the things that was super helpful. The other was a sleep buffer, the idea of having to 30-minute to a one-hour period of time to unwind, and I find that time to be extremely important. I’ve experimented with different things during that sleep buffer, some that I found successful and some not so successful. Like I think I told you, when I was going through your program at first, I was meditating during my sleep buffer, and I’ve stopped doing that. The reason why is because what happened was, my brain would start to associate meditation with sleep, and so then I would try to meditate at work and I’d fall asleep. And so, that wasn’t a good thing. I didn’t want my brain to associate meditation with sleep, and so I discontinued that. I find reading to be really peaceful and relaxing, and so, lower the lights a little bit, grab a good book and just read. Or sometimes I’ll just sit in a darkened room and just kind of relax, and I find that to be helpful as well. But to be honest with you, I’ve had nights where I’ve watched TV up until the moment I go to bed, and I’ve slept perfectly well. And so, I think sleep buffer helps. I notice I do sleep better with sleep buffer, but I go back to sleep restriction, and talking about sleep restriction, the important thing there is going to bed at the same time every single night, waking up at the same time in the next morning. And I think the more important of the two is waking up at the same time every morning. So in other words, there will be times when I go to bed at, for whatever reason, if I get together with friends or something, I may go to bed at midnight, and that’s okay if I do that occasionally, but I still have to get up at 5:30 in the morning, which is my wake up time. And so, no matter what, if I go to a rock concert, or I get together with friends, or have insomnia for some reason, you never extend that wake up time beyond 5:30 in the morning. The other thing I found to be hugely important was looking at the bed in a very different light. I had anxiety before when I would look at the bed, because I had this very dysfunctional view of it and sleep in general. And so, now the bed is only for sleeping, and so I don’t… I used to lay in bed. I used to eat in bed. I used to read in bed, and I don’t do any of those things anymore. I don’t even sit on the bed anymore. So, if I’m in the bedroom and want to sit somewhere, I’ll sit beside the bed. I won’t sit on it, because I just want my mind to associate that bed with the place where I sleep. The other thing that’s kind of helpful too is, if I know I’m going to have insomnia for some reason is just, if lay in bed for like a half hour, 45 minutes, and I know I’m not getting to sleep, I get out of bed, and then I’ll go read, or I’ll go sit in the living room. Sometimes I’ll even watch TV. And then when I feel tired again, I’ll go jump back in bed. So, those are the techniques that you taught me, and honestly all of them have been hugely successful, because I’ve been insomnia-free for like a year now, and I think I’ve only, within that whole year, I’m still surprised to say this, but within that year, I think there’s, probably can count on one hand the number of times that I’ve had insomnia. And I don’t even remember when they were. There’s times of maybe sleepless nights, and maybe that’s not insomnia, where I don’t sleep as well, but then the next evening, I’m able to sleep again. So, those are the things that have really helped. I think the sleep restriction though, if I wouldn’t have done the sleep restriction and really restructured the sleep, I probably would not have been as successful. Martin Reed: Yeah. There’s so much great stuff there, and I think that last point you made, yeah, still, I can remember that I’ve had a few difficult nights over the past year. I can’t really remember when they happened though, or anything else about them. I think that’s important, because it’s normal and natural to have some difficult nights from time to time. That’s just part of being a human being. But what changes is our relationship with them, our reaction to them. Now they’re not this huge, difficult, challenging, painful influence on our life anymore. They’re just, oh, I’ve had a difficult night. That’s in the past. Just our relationship with those difficult nights when they happen just completely changes. We can never eliminate difficult nights from time to time. There’s always going to be some difficult nights, just as there’s always going to be some difficult days, but it’s just our relationship just completely changes. When we’ve put insomnia behind us, it just has far less of an effect on our life, and that’s really what our ultimate goal is, I think. That’s where the transformation happens, when we’re kind of okay with those difficult nights happening, then they tend to happen really infrequently compared to when we’re really determined and really desperate, almost, to avoid them. That’s when they’re more likely to happen. Jim Evans: Yeah. I don’t get anxiety anymore. If I have a sleepless night, it doesn’t bother me, because I just have confidence now that my brain knows how to sleep, and I know that, okay, so I didn’t get a good night’s sleep. I only slept four hours last night. I know I’ll sleep good the next night. And that’s huge, having that confidence. Martin Reed: I read something recently that says, about sleep confidence, and it was like, we don’t need to have confidence in our ability to sleep. If you ask someone who sleeps well, how confident are you about sleep? They’ll probably give you this kind of blank, confused stare. We don’t need to be confident to sleep. We just need to be awake for long enough and sleep will always happen. And the more we try to either feel confident, or the more we try to make sleep happen, or the more we try to feel a certain way or think certain thoughts, that’s when we tend to get trapped, tangled up in that struggle, you know? Jim Evans: Yeah. No, that makes sense. But I think, when you’re an insomniac and you haven’t and you haven’t slept well in like half a decade or a decade, you need to build some of that confidence and some successes before you can get to that point where you can sleep successfully again, because sleep is, you associate sleep with this negative event, and it’s not a good thing. You get into that bad mindset associated with sleep. Martin Reed: Yeah. And I think you made a great point as well, when you talked about sleep restriction, about it’s awful terminology, and I completely agree with you, because it sounds like we are restricting sleep, like we’re taking sleep away from you. But really, what we’re doing is, we are trying to take long periods of wakefulness away from you, just because so many of us, when we are struggling with chronic insomnia, we are spending more time in bed, and there’s a big gap between the amount of sleep we’re generally getting and the amount of time we’re allotting for sleep. So we are kind of, almost in a way, setting ourselves up for long periods of wakefulness. So, with sleep restriction, all we’re doing is just trying to more closely match the amount of time we spend in bed, or the amount of time we set aside for sleep to happen, so that’s more closely aligned with how much sleep we’re getting at the current time, in our current reality, but with a little bit of time added on, just because we all spend a little bit of time awake. No one generally falls asleep as soon as their head hits the pillow, and we all spend a little bit of time awake during the night. So, sleep restriction can sound really scary, because it sounds like we’re taking even more sleep away, but really what we’re doing is we’re just creating conditions to help take some of that wakefulness away, whilst also just building up more of that natural biological sleep drive, which occurs the longer that we are awake, the stronger that drive, the stronger that pressure for sleep to happen. And what’s also helpful with that sleep restriction is it kind of gives us an earliest possible bedtime and a final out of bedtime in the morning. And like you said, that final out of bed time is probably way more important than the front end, than the bedtime. That’s why I like to think of the start of our sleep window just as an earliest possible bedtime. So, we don’t go to bed before then, but we might not even go to bed at the start of the sleep window if we don’t feel sleepy enough for sleep, because a clock doesn’t know when we’re sleepy enough for sleep. We might want to be living our lives. We might be out socializing with friends, as you touched upon. But if we can try and stick close to that out of bed time in the morning, that can just be good as a kind of anchor, as a reference point for our body clock, that consistent out of bed time in the morning. It stops us from that temptation to chase after sleep, and if we’re always getting out of bed around the same time in the morning, it ensures that we’re giving ourselves lots of time during the day, lots of wakefulness to build up that sleep drive to help with sleep the following night. So, that’s where that sleep restriction can be helpful, but totally agree with you that the terminology is terrible. Jim Evans: Yeah. And I was just thinking, in terms of the wake time, it helps set that biological clock, because what I’ve noticed over time is that now I wake up one or two minutes now before my alarm goes off, and I feel like I’ve got enough energy to go through the day. Whereas before, when the alarm clock went off, I would hit the snooze button multiple times, and my body didn’t associate that alarm going off, or my wake time is the time that I needed to be up and active. And so, having the same wake up time every day has just been huge, because my body knows, look, it’s 5:30. It’s time for you to get up. It’s time for you to begin your day. And I don’t even need to set an alarm. I do, but I don’t recall the last time I actually got up to the alarm. I always get up a few minutes in advance of it. And even if I’m only getting four hours of sleep a night, because I stayed up late or something, still, my body wakes up at 5:30 now. Martin Reed: Yeah. It’s pretty amazing. I like how you touched upon something as well with that kind of wind down time that you give yourself in the evening, how really, listening to you talk about that, what struck me was the fact that you got to this place where maybe at first you were kind of doing things in an effort to try and make sleep happen or to make sleep more likely, to make yourself feel relaxed and sleepy. But you got to a point where it was just time for you. Time for you to just do stuff that you found relaxing and enjoyable, whether that’s reading or whether it’s watching TV. And I think that’s important to emphasize, because when we talk about taking time to wind down, it can push us into this area of rituals and sleep efforts, where we are engaged in all this stuff to try and make sleep happen. And anytime we do that, anytime we engage in effort around sleep, we make conditions for sleep less favorable. Really, our only goal is to just give ourselves some me time before we go to bed, just some time to unwind and just do stuff that we find relaxing and enjoyable. It’s not something that’s going to make sleep happen. It’s just some pleasant time for ourselves to unwind at the end of the day, before going to bed, just to help make that transition from wakefulness to going to bed more pleasant, more relaxing, more enjoyable, just so it feels good. Jim Evans: Yeah, and it’s a transition from the work day to to the bedtime, because honestly, without that, some people, and I used to have the habit of feeling like I could work up until the point when I went to bed. And now, you’re right, it’s having a little bit of that me time, so you can let those workday thoughts leave the brain, and you can do something relaxing. But I fell into that trap that you described. I was trying to use the sleep buffer as the time where I was just chasing after sleep, and that’s why I was meditating during that time, and I was doing anything possible to try to set myself up for success. I’m a lot more casual about it now. I do find that there’s certain activities that I really cannot do during my sleep buffer, though. One of them is, I can’t do gaming. I’m a PC gamer, a console gamer, and I simply can’t do that because my adrenaline gets brought up. If I’m playing a first person shooter, an RPG, and then if I were to do that and then try to jump in bed, I’m not going to be able to get to sleep. So, that’s one thing I do notice. I think people have to find whatever activities are good for them, whether it’s knitting, reading, whatever it is, but it’s probably going to need to be something relaxing, both mentally and physically, versus something that stimulates the brain or stimulates the body. That’s kind of what I’ve found. Martin Reed: Yeah. That’s a great point, and I think it’s not something we need to get really wrapped up in trials and experiments. A lot of it does just come down to either our own experience or just a little bit of common sense. If we do something that’s really going to release a lot of adrenaline in our body, then maybe that’s not the best thing to be engaged in. But other people, they love it. I have clients that tell me, “I love playing Call of Duty at night before bed. I find it really relaxes me.” And personally, I think that’s crazy, but you know, we’re all different. We all know what makes us feel good, so it really doesn’t matter. There shouldn’t be any rules, regulations around this. It’s just stuff that you find relaxing and enjoyable before going to bed can be really helpful. And similarly, that’s a good little transition into our reaction to wakefulness during the night. When we wake during the night, again, there’s nothing we can do to make ourselves fall back to sleep, and the more we try, the more difficult it’s going to be. So again, you touched upon getting out of bed and doing something else. So again, all we are doing here is, if it doesn’t feel good to be awake at night, let’s just give ourselves the opportunity to make being awake more pleasant. Because we can’t control sleep and wakefulness, but we can control what we do. So if it feels really uncomfortable to be awake in bed, we’re tossing and turning, frustrated, angry, depressed, not feeling good, battling with sleep and wakefulness, let’s just get out of bed and just do something more appealing instead. And if we do feel sleepy again, then we might return to bed and allow ourselves to be in bed for as long as it feels good to be in bed until our alarm goes off in the morning. We might fall back to sleep. We might not. We can’t control that stuff. All we can control are our actions. So, we always have that option, if being awake at night doesn’t feel good we can do something else that might make being awake a little bit more pleasant. Jim Evans: Yep. Yeah, I find if I can’t sleep, I’ll just get up and I’ll just, I don’t turn the TV on, but I’ll just sit in the living room, and I’ll just relax. And sometimes I’ll read, but sometimes just sitting on the couch for a little while and just relaxing, and then after 15, 20 minutes, my body’s like, okay, let’s go back to bed, and then I’ll go back to bed and I’ll successfully fall asleep. Doesn’t happen that often, but maybe once or twice a month at most. But I don’t fight it anymore. Whereas I used to lay in bed and agonize. Used to play the game, looking at the alarm clock and saying, okay, I have four hours now before I have to get up. Okay, I have three hours, I have to get up. Some strategizing. Okay, if I just fall asleep now, I should be able to get enough sleep to be able to be energetic for tomorrow. And those kind of thoughts are very destructive, and they don’t help you get to sleep. Martin Reed: Yeah. It’s so tempting to just be staring at that clock during all that wakefulness, right?And it’s always one of the first things when I’m talking to clients is, hey, you want to try something different? How about we don’t check the clock? From the moment you go to bed to when you get up in the morning, let’s just try not checking the clock and just see if you find that helpful. And everyone’s different. We never know how each individual is going to react, but I would say the vast majority of clients find that really helpful. It’s such a small change to make, but it can just be so helpful. It just eliminates such a big source of pressure and worry and anxiety, just not checking that time. Jim Evans: Yeah. I used to do that too. I used to turn the alarm clock around and not look at it. But I find, now I don’t have any anxiety around the time, so I just leave it there. So if I wake up and it’s 3:00, and I’m like, no big deal. But before, it gave me significant anxiety to be constantly checking the alarm clock, and I had to turn it around and not look at it, because it was just a constant source of worry about how much time I’ve been laying in bed and how much time I have left before I have to get up. Martin Reed: Yeah. Well, one thing I did just want to cover, if you feel okay talking about it was, I remember when we first started working together, you were taking, I can’t remember exactly what it was, but it was some kind of over the counter sleep supplement, and one of your goals was to kind of move away from that. And so, when you felt ready to do so, you were like, all right, I’m going to start by cutting this in half, and that first night you took half that dose. You found it did take longer to fall asleep, and I remember you sharing that with me. Can you tell us a little bit more about that process, how you started to taper off that supplement and move away from it? Jim Evans: Yeah. At one point I was taking 10 milligrams of melatonin, which is way too much. I don’t recommend anybody take that amount of melatonin. But then I was taking, I think when I was seeing you, I was taking six milligrams of melatonin. I cut it down to three, and then I cut it down to zero. But what I found with melatonin is that the substance works for a little while, but then over time, your body just gets used to it and you need more and more of it for it to work and I don’t notice the difference in my sleep quality between when I take melatonin and when I don’t. The problem is, it’s unregulated, and I don’t think we know what the upper limit is, and I don’t think we know what the long term ramifications on people’s health is. My naturopath was okay with it in low doses, but even she said I shouldn’t be taking it for the rest of my life. So, it was a temporary solution at best, and then I found over time, the efficacy of the melatonin was just, it was degrading. And so, yeah, I went from six milligrams down to three milligrams, and then after, I think, a week or two weeks, tapered it down to one or two milligrams. And I know some people that take one or two milligrams at night and they find that successful, but I think it’s more of a mental crutch than anything. I think that’s what it was for me. And once I discovered that it was a mental crutch, that it was just something that I felt like was helping me, I was able to get rid of it then, and my sleep was just fine. Martin Reed: Yeah. We were touching earlier upon this, one of the, I’m going to use that horrible phrase again, the sleep restriction. I prefer sleep window. Let’s say sleep window, with that earliest possible bedtime, really consistent out of bed time in the morning. One of the real benefits is it stops us from chasing sleep. I remember when you started that process of tapering the supplement, you had some initial sleep disruption. If we didn’t have that sleep window, what our temptation is going to be, I’m going to sleep in for longer now to try and catch up on that lost sleep, or I’m going to go to bed earlier the next night. And really what that does is, it just kind of, that sleep disruption can then leak into following nights. But I remember with you, you were just really determined. I’m going to stick to that sleep window, even though I’m having these difficult nights, even though I’m tapering off this sleep supplement. And then, as a result, you kind of kept things, you kept your routine consistent, and so once the brain was doing a little bit less monitoring for the results of that change, that tapering process, you found that things stabilized again, and you got right back on track, and that is completely down to your own efforts to commit to behaviors that just create those good conditions for sleep, create and maintain those good conditions for sleep. One of which is not chasing after sleep, having that really consistent sleep schedule. Jim Evans: Yeah. I had no choice. I feel I had no choice but to really stick strictly to your sleep recommendations, because after more than a decade of insomnia and trying different things, and going to different sleep doctors, I was desperate. I found you on YouTube and you had this pleasant demeanor. You seem to… you obviously know a lot about sleep. But if this wasn’t going to be the cure, I didn’t know where I was going to go next, because sleeping pills didn’t work, melatonin supplements didn’t work, different sleep techniques that I tried didn’t work. And so, yeah, that’s the reason why I stuck to it as much as possible. I think I was more strict with me than you were through the program, Because you were like, “Well, if you need an extra 15 minutes in your sleep window, why don’t you add it?” And I said to you at one point, I’m like, “No, I’ll stay here for a little while. I want to make sure that I’ve gained as much efficiency as possible before I move on to the next 15 minute increment.” And then, after you and I had worked together, then I added 15 minute increments slowly over time, and got my body used to that new window, while keeping the efficiency, because that was important to me. What I didn’t want to do is go, okay, here’s my reduced sleep window, and then, okay, go back to eight or nine hour sleep window. I wouldn’t bring that efficiency along with me with those changes. So, just layering on a little bit more sleep to the beginning of my sleep schedule was kind of the way I got back to what I would consider a normal amount of sleep. Martin Reed: Yeah. I think it’s important to emphasize too that, like with any of these techniques that we are talking about, none of them can generate sleep. None of them make sleep happen. They just help set the stage for sleep, and they just help us avoid falling into that trap of implementing behaviors that just perpetuate sleep disruption, that give insomnia the oxygen it needs to keep going. And so, I just think that’s helpful just to just emphasize. That’s why, when clients say to me, “Oh, I really wish I could just go to bed earlier.” Well, how about you just allow yourself to go to bed a bit earlier? 15 minutes, half an hour, maybe even an hour earlier. If you’re feeling really sleepy you’re really struggling to stay awake, why not just go to bed and see what happens? You know, after all that, if it starts to feel unpleasant being in bed, you’ve always got that opportunity to just get back out of bed again and just do something more enjoyable. And if that sense of sleepiness comes back, then you can just return to bed. We just want to make the process of sleep more natural, and in the short term, this can involve changing our behaviors in a way that might not feel quite so natural, but as we kind of see some results, see that, ah, these are making some changes, these are influencing things in a positive way, then we can start loosening the reins, so to speak, and giving ourselves more opportunity for sleep, being little bit less rigid with ourselves and being a bit more flexible. Something that you touched upon earlier, like right near the start of this conversation, as you said that you found the really stressful days, they started to no longer have such an impact on your sleep as they used to in the past. I’m curious to hear more about that. Why do you think that these stressful days started to have less impact on your sleep, less influence than they did in the past? Jim Evans: Well, I think it was because I finally addressed the underlying cause of the sleep issue, which was creating a good sleep structure and a good sleep window. So my brain, whether I was stressed or not stressed, my body and brain kind of knew that, look, this is the time that you’re supposed to sleep, and now I associate that time with sleep. I do notice that after a stressful day, I don’t sleep as well than I would if I had a less stressful day. But I think the sleep buffer also was the other piece of it that contributed significantly, was having that space between the stress of the day and the time when you’re supposed to sleep. If you think about it, it’s like a demilitarized zone. It’s like this space where we’re going to keep the conflict away from. But so, having that space and that zone where you can just kind of relax, that free time, and then your brain can transition from one mode to the other mode, and then finally, by the time you go to bed, you can just, you get in bed and you can fall asleep with, with greater efficiency. So, I think it was a couple of things that contributed to that. But yeah, so stress nowadays, I mean, I have days that are tremendously stressful, and I can’t think of any of them that created insomnia. Which is kind of surprising to me, even a year later because, because I used to associate stress with the insomnia. Martin Reed: Yeah. I think something, a little hint there at the end was the fact that, because we feel stressed in a similar way, just because we feel anxious, just because we feel worried, that doesn’t mean that sleep can’t happen because we feel stressed, because we feel worried, because we feel anxious. Often, it’s our battle with that that makes sleep more difficult, because it doesn’t feel good to feel stressed. It doesn’t feel good to feel worried. It doesn’t feel good to feel anxious. So we try and push that away. We try and fight it, we try and avoid it. And then, when we get involved in that battle, I think that’s what truly makes sleep more difficult. It’s not necessarily the presence of these thoughts and feelings, it’s our reaction to them, and because they don’t feel good, we want to push them away. Then they push back harder. Then we try and push back harder. That’s what makes sleep more difficult. So I think, when we get to that point where we still have stress, we still have worry, we still have anxiety, because we’re human beings, we all experience those feelings, those emotions. If we can just get to a point where we just kind of acknowledge that I’m feeling stressed, I’m feeling anxious, and maybe even just make a little bit of space for that to hang out, and then just redirect our attention onto where we are, what we’re doing. And that’s where I think that wind down routine can be helpful, just giving ourselves some time to sit, let that stress just hang out on our shoulder whilst we read a book or watch TV or just do something pleasant, relaxing and enjoyable. Because it’s not that presence sitting on our shoulder that stops sleep. It’s us trying to keep brushing it off our shoulder, then it pops back, and then we try and brush it off again. I think that’s what truly makes sleep more difficult. Jim Evans: Yeah. It’s kind of the same concept with meditation. When you have the bad thoughts coming in, you’re not supposed to fight them off. You’re supposed to kind of just let them flow through you. I know I notice with stress, it will affect your sleep. It will affect the quality, and in terms of some of the dreams that you have, but it doesn’t necessarily need to take over your entire sleeping life. And that always surprised me, because I just always thought that there was just a strong correlation between stressful days and not sleeping. So, I’m glad I’m past that, because now I’ll have horribly stressful days. I’ll have some days where I’m working until 9:00 or 10:00 at night when I have a board meeting, and then I’ll go home and be wound up and still need an hour before I can hit the bed, and it could be midnight, but then have a really good night’s sleep and wake up the next day feeling refreshed. It’s a good feeling. Martin Reed: Yeah. So, here we are now. It’s been over a year since we stopped working together. What’s an average night like for you now, Jim? Is there an average night? I’d just love to hear your experience with what sleep is typically like for you nowadays. Jim Evans: So, I’m pretty pleased to tell you that after more than a year, I’m averaging seven hours of sleep a night. I wake up about three times each night, and that’s not because of insomnia it’s because I have an overactive bladder. So I’ll wake up, I’ll go hit the restroom, but then I come back to bed and I’ll fall back asleep within two or three minutes. And so, that’s an average night for me. Last night, I did really well. I don’t know why, but I went to bed maybe 10 minutes earlier than I normally would, but I got like seven and a half hours of sleep last night, which is unbelievable. And so, yeah, it’s been good. And I may experience insomnia maybe, at most, once a month. And this is coming from a guy that, when I came to you, again, I hadn’t slept well in probably a decade. And, and that decade was probably closer to maybe two decades. I don’t even know, but it was, it was a lot more than 10 years. And I just, I could count the number of times I slept well in a month on a single hand before, and now, and now it’s very unusual for me to have a poor night’s sleep now. Martin Reed: Wow. And how about the days? Do they tend to feel any different? Because I always like to think that people without insomnia, they always just think that insomnia is a nighttime problem, but I think that it can be a real daytime challenge as well, because all those, that fatigue, the thoughts, the feelings, all the stuff that comes along for the ride can really affect our days too. Are you finding any changing in your days now that your nights are a bit different? Jim Evans: Yeah. I have energy to make it through the entire day now, where I don’t start feeling tired until maybe an hour or two hours. Maybe an hour, half hour before sleep. So before, I used to get tired in the afternoon around 2:00, and I would feel like the rest of the day, I was extraordinarily tired. I’d like I had fatigue. I wouldn’t recover from physical activity. My mental acuity was way off, so I wouldn’t be able to focus on any one thing. So, so those are some of the things that I experienced before. But now, I feel sharp. I feel like I have enough energy to make it through the day, and I have focus. So, yeah, it’s been great. I feel for people that have insomnia. I occasionally go on your forum and see what the people are dealing with, and I’m very thankful that I’ve gone through your program and that I’m not at that space anymore. And hopefully this video will help your viewers, and more people will reach out to you and go through the program. I think for me, you have different programs that you offer, but for me, the eight-week program, really being able to rediscipline my sleep and learn all the techniques that you taught, I don’t think I could have solved it without going through that program. Martin Reed: Yeah. That’s great. I’m really grateful that you’ve come on and just shared your experience in your own words, just because I think it’s so helpful for people to listen to a transformation like yours. Because I think if anyone listening to this or watching this can identify with the kind of things that you are talking about, your experience with the sleep disruption, then they might recognize that their insomnia isn’t unique. That if you were able to put it behind you and get to a different place, then they can too. And it’s just so powerful to hear this from guests, from people that have been through it, so I’m really grateful that you’ve taken the time out for your day to come on and share this in your own words. But having said that, I’ve got one last question for you, Jim, and it’s a question that I ask everyone, so I don’t want to leave you out, and it’s this: If someone with chronic insomnia is listening and feels 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? Jim Evans: I guess the biggest thing, the key is, you said if they have insomnia for a long period of time, I think you really have to find a program like yours that can help retrain them on how to sleep, and build the sleep efficiency, create the sleep structure that’s needed. I think that was the only way, because again, I went to three different sleep doctors, had a sleep study, was on different types of over the counter sleep medicine, sleeping pills. Absolutely none of that stuff worked, for a decade. It wasn’t until I discovered your approach and met you that I was able to resolve this. So, my recommendation is try to deal with the underlying root cause, which is usually, which is poor sleep habits, and try to fix the sleep structure. And I think your program does that very well. Martin Reed: Great. Well, I really appreciate that, Jim, and I appreciate, again, you taking the time out of your day to come on to the podcast. Thank you so much. Jim Evans: Well, I appreciate you having me on, thank you. 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. 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 at insomniacoach.com. Share this page

Listen to the podcast episode (audio only) 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. Click here for a full transcript of this episode. Transcript 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: Hi, Nick. Thank you so much for coming onto the podcast today. Nick Hobbs: Hi, Martin. It’s really lovely to be here. Thank you for inviting me. Martin Reed: Absolutely. I can’t wait to get onto our discussion, so let’s just get started right away. When did your sleep problems first begin, and what do you think caused those initial issues with sleep? Nick Hobbs: It’s lovely when you got hindsight, isn’t it? I can look back and around about the year 2000, I moved states, and started to live in a new city, and a new situation. And at the time, I would’ve told you that I was anxious about starting a new job. And, but looking back, I can see that it wasn’t partly situational crisis of just uncertainty, unknowing. But actually when I look back, that was a big life change as well. That was a big shift in direction. And I guess how I would answer that question now would be that well, partly it’s to do with in daily stress reaching a certain level, where on which I wasn’t really dealing with. But the other side of that was a sense of not being sure whether I was heading in the right direction with the decision that I’d made about moving to another place. Nick Hobbs: So that’s a slightly bigger picture concern or uncertainty. And I think the other thing was that having done the course with you, looking back, it’s a really interesting question, because it shows me that I actually didn’t know a lot about what to do when my sleep was being disturbed by the things that happened to us in our life. Does that make sense? Martin Reed: Yeah. Nick Hobbs: So I can see now that I didn’t have a great ability to respond to the needs that I had at the time. Martin Reed: So talking about that response, because I think most of us can recognize, there are always going to be some times in our life when we have some difficult nights, especially if there’s a big life change going on, or if something unusual or stressful happens in our lives. And normally sleep will just get right back on track as soon as we’ve adapted, or as soon as that event is behind us. But often, as you’ve experienced yourself, those sleep problems can stick around. So looking back, what was it you think that kept those sleep issues around? Why didn’t they just sort themselves out after that life change that you just described had occurred? Nick Hobbs: Partly, I think they resolved in about 2007. So I’d say there was a bit of a seven year period there where the sleep was a really unknown prospect for me, where I just lost confidence. So it’s partly about losing confidence in my ability to do something, which had never really been a preoccupation of mine up until that time. And so the changes kept coming throughout that period. I relocated again several times in that period, so that constant trying to define… And this is a period of young adulthood. And so that in itself was maybe partly about a life cycle issue that it just took time to find my way, and my place in the world. But I think more than anything, because a lot of people have to find their way in the world. Nick Hobbs: Not everyone is having sleep issues. So to me, then I look back and I go, “Well, actually, lack of confidence was a huge one.” And just lack of insight about what it is that keeps things going. So I just developed really, probably quite, unhelpful ways of responding to the way my brain. We talk about in your course, you talk about operant conditioning, and you talk about the way that our brain is wired to foresee threats and dangers, and to highlight those, and bring those to your attention. So I really didn’t have a very good way of responding to that. I felt really trapped by those thoughts. When they appeared, they just took over. That was the agenda, and I didn’t have, really, any ways to unhook from that. Nick Hobbs: And then I thought I could control my thoughts and my feelings. I thought that was the way to go. Try and distract myself from the things that were going on inside of me. And so therefore, inevitably, of course, nothing seemed to get resolved. It seems pretty straightforward now, doesn’t it? When you say it like that, but at the time, I just remember being so confused by the whole process. And therefore, it just kept rolling and taking on its own life. And then anxiety becomes then anxiety about anxiety, and it’s the hall of mirrors, isn’t it? You get this bigger response. Oh my God, I got these feelings of anxiety. Nick Hobbs: I start to associate bedtime with this sense of uncertainty and lack of confidence. And then from there, it builds to a thought process that kicks in where you start to just become hyper alert, but not necessarily attentive to the thought processes that are keeping that going. You’re not able to going to necessarily notice what’s happening, just in it. It’s very confusing space to be. It’s a bit of a labyrinth, isn’t it? It’s probably a good word for it, really. Martin Reed: Yeah. I completely agree with you. But when you were trapped in that struggle, what were those nights like? Was there a typical night or would you have trouble just first falling asleep? Or was it staying asleep? Or it’s just every night different… But it’s always a struggle? Nick Hobbs: Yeah. Look, it was a war of attrition. I think you can keep going and going, and it’s amazing how far you can go without sleep really, how far you can push yourself. But of course, then you collapse into this sleep. It takes over eventually. But it’s a good word for it, struggle, because it was. It really felt like those nights just ended up being a struggle. First, it would start off with a benign acceptance that, maybe it’ll come, maybe it won’t. And then you hear a partner sleeping or you start to get envious. You kick off, your mind starts running along these paths. Well, why is it not me? And what is it about me? Nick Hobbs: You get a bit preoccupied, very much preoccupied and self-centric. I think that those interior thought processes, it would be very much about not getting to sleep, and then ramping up, and then not sleeping, and then becoming, “Oh, well, the time. The one thing I don’t want to hear is the birds before the sun rises. The one thing I don’t want to see is the sun.” And of course, that’s exactly what would happen. The birds would come and they would become, instead of sweet sounding harbingers of a beautiful new day, they became this awesome specter of the drudgery that I’d have to force myself through the next day. So I just became very cued to those things, and quite demoralized and dispirited. Nick Hobbs: So by dawn, I was exhausted. I had mentally fought my way and tried to control myself. I’d be angry, full of self pity, definitely confused. And a source of distress for people around me too. You could see me in obvious distress, and they really couldn’t do anything to help me. And I didn’t really know how to help myself either, really. I just felt very helpless in that. So those nights, and they would come, there would be a run of them. And then maybe it would settle down, and there would usually be some anticipatory trigger. If it wasn’t, “I’m not going to go to sleep,” it might be, “Oh, gee, I’ve got to get up early in the morning.” That’s a classic one, isn’t it? Nick Hobbs: I’ve got to get up early in the morning. Oh, I hope I get to sleep because I really wouldn’t like to not get to sleep, and on it goes. This kind of self-talk and self worry and, “Oh, shit. It didn’t happen before and maybe it’s going to happen again. Oh.” So yeah, that’s a typical pattern for me at the time. Right through, and then it would settle, and then maybe something, another change would come in life. And at 2007, another shift, and 2010 there were periods where it would lull for a little while. And then it’s like, “Oh my God, it’s come back. Oh, I thought I’d left these things behind, and here they are again coming to haunt me.” And it would get even worse then because like, “Oh my God. I’m never going to be free of this.” Martin Reed: Yeah. I think it’s interesting as well how, like I touched upon earlier, it tends to start with this trigger. So there’s this trigger of a life change. We’re relocating for example. And that becomes, all our concern around that, it manifests. The symptom becomes difficult nights of sleep. But then sometimes it can morph into then your concern isn’t about whatever that trigger was. So for example, you’re not really concerned about the relocation anymore, because either you’ve just adapted to it’s happening or it’s already happened. Martin Reed: Then the concern becomes, am I going to sleep tonight? Is this sleep problem going to go away? How long is it going to take me to fall asleep? Why am I not falling asleep yet? What’s going to happen if I don’t get any sleep? So it shifts. The concern was once on that trigger for insomnia but when that triggers disappeared, the concern is still there. But the concern now moves on solely to sleep. And I think that’s where we get caught up in that struggle. Nick Hobbs: No, I agree with you. I think it really takes on a life of its own, which is even scarier really, when you realize that. You go, “Oh my God.” You think it’s related to, if I just fix things in my life. And then you’re, “Well, but why is it still here?” Martin Reed: Yeah, exactly. Nick Hobbs: Our brains are really adaptable, aren’t they? They’re really absorbing and they take account of so many things. So yeah. I agree. I think you’ve described that very well, definitely. Martin Reed: Yeah. Well, what’s our brain’s number one job is to look out for us, so it’s always going to be monitoring for threats. And as soon as it detects a slight hint of a threat, it’s going to amplify it and amplify it and amplify it. And because, often, when the brain identifies a threat, we don’t feel good. Whether it’s that fight or flight response, some anxiety or stress, because it doesn’t feel good. Normally, we want to avoid it or push it away or suppress it. And then the brain’s like, “There’s this threat and now you’re ignoring me.” So what does the brain do? It’s got to yell louder and louder and louder. And that’s when we get really tangled up in that struggle, and through no fault of our own because it’s just our normal human response. Martin Reed: We don’t want to feel that way, but the brain thinks it’s being ignored. So it just yells harder and harder, and so then we try harder and harder to push it away as like a tug of war. The more we are trying, the more difficult it becomes. And the more fatigued we feel, all those symptoms that we associate with insomnia is often down to that struggle, that battle with sleep itself, wakefulness and how we’re feeling. Nick Hobbs: I think you captured that really well. Martin Reed: Oh, thank you. I think people that have never struggled with insomnia really also don’t recognize that it’s not just a nighttime issue. It’s something we carry during the day as well, whether it’s through how we feel, or through all the stuff that’s going through our head, or even how that influences the things we do. Our actions and our behaviors. How are you finding the sleep? Whether it was because you had difficult nights or just all that mental chatter about what if. How are you finding that was affecting your days? Nick Hobbs: It was having a very significant effect on my days because you know that you could be having a very different day if you’d slept. So this comparison point between the Nick that sleeps and the Nick that doesn’t sleep is just so present in every part of that day. And you just learn to find resources. So on the one side of it, you’ve got the handbrake on and you just can’t seem to figure out how to get the handbrake off. But you know you’ve got to push through. So some days, I would actually not turn up to work. I would just stay at home and just feel quite useless, and do very little, and just wait helplessly for the night to come, right? Nick Hobbs: And realizing that I’d really never got any solution. Other times, I’d just push through, go to work, get through the day, feel exhausted, feel numb. Your body just becomes so over driven and over aroused, and that your body system, you know that they’re in high alert. Your stomach’s not functioning well and your brain is just feeling so tired, and it’s just been going on and on and around and around and around. And you just have a sense that this is not the life that I know that I can live, but I don’t quite know how to get to the promised land. I don’t know really how to get out of this labyrinth that you’d described before. And the way my mind is just seems to be telling me about all these alarms and alerts. Nick Hobbs: And it seems to be going off and off and off. But I know logically, I know that I really didn’t need to not sleep that night. The things that I was worried about happening the next day, sometimes they didn’t even occur. Sometimes they happened, but they weren’t bad. So I know that I was talking myself into an unnecessary state of arousal. I know I was elevated in the night, and I would look back and go, “Why do I do that? What is the reason? What is the purpose? How can I be really that keyed up that I don’t sleep?” So I would come out of it with a self… there would be this self-criticism in the back of my mind during the day. Nick Hobbs: Why, Nick? What is wrong with you? Maybe there’s something wrong with you. Gee, Martin, why do we have a brain, really? I know you’ve explained it, but gee, it does play havoc in a world where you really feel like you’ve got to fit into a 9:00 to 5:00 structure. I love routines and I love structures now. And I don’t struggle with them half for so much as I did then. And it does make it very hard to fit into a routine life. But ironically, that’s a bit of a savior too. You just get up. Those days, you haven’t slept then well, I’m just going to follow the pattern. I’m just going to go and do what I have to do. Nick Hobbs: I may not be a hundred percent around it, but might be pretty average. But often, that’s probably an internal perception. Externally, people may not know. And that’s the other thing I didn’t know what to do about in the day when I was really deep in the sleep problems, is what to do about talking about it. I didn’t talk about it much. Maybe an admission of weakness or dysfunction, or maybe projected an image of myself that I didn’t like. So there was a sense of shame around it. So I didn’t talk about it openly, but when I did, you would find that lots of people get affected by sleep. And lots of people have sleep that is probably less than ideal to them. And I think a lot of those conversations weren’t very helpful to me either because they didn’t really know what the answers were either, right? Nick Hobbs: So talking about it wasn’t particularly helpful, and there were lots of well-meaning people that would give me lots of suggestions that didn’t seem to work. And in the end, I actually just didn’t talk about it really with anyone. And then it becomes very private and very internal, and in a way, it’s strangely isolating, and a bit of a lonely space. Yeah. And that’s why it’s been really nice about coming across this whole phenomenon of sleep coaching. And I don’t know if that’s more recent, but boy, it would’ve been very useful to get that much earlier on in my life for sure. It’s a very constructive way of talking about sleep, I think. Martin Reed: Yeah. I think also, you touched upon a really good point about how very few of us talk about our struggles. So just to use, for example, social networking as an example, everything we see on social media like on Facebook, on Instagram, everyone’s always really happy. They’re on vacation, they’re happy families, they’re doing things that look really exciting and enjoyable. We never see any of the struggle. It’s always filtered out. So whenever we are struggling, which is a normal part of being a human being, we feel there’s something wrong. Martin Reed: Whereas what would probably be more wrong would just be living a life where we’re happy and fulfilled 100% of the time, and never ever feeling any pain, or any struggle, or any anxiety, or stress, or worry. That’s all filtered away from us. So it can really turn ourselves inwards thinking there is something wrong. Why aren’t we feeling this way? Why aren’t we feeling as good as everyone else? Why are we struggling? And the truth is, everyone out there is struggling. It’s just we’re all hiding it from one another. Nick Hobbs: Yeah, we do. We have these things very privately but as well, in addition to that, I think you’re right. Addition to that is we don’t necessarily know how to respond to people’s problems either. And when I would open up, the most common response would be a problem solving response. And what I valued about coming in contact with your program and the way you run that program is what’s really evident in the way you talk about people’s experiences that you validate them. You validate what’s going on for them. Nick Hobbs: You don’t try and focus on the outcome and the guarantee, do this and you’ll have that. And it’s not a problem solving approach so much as it’s one about understanding. And it’s one about validating and understanding what’s actually happening for people. And then working from that spot, which takes a lot of that pressure off, because it’s the pressure that we build internally, in our minds, and the expectations that you’re right. We have these expectations about how we should look, behave, feel, be, and experience life that come to us from so many different places. Nick Hobbs: And we want that. They’re very inspiring images, and I think my expectations around wanting to be the perfect sleeper were very much a part of that too. I don’t think I was any different, but I did really respond to the validation that comes through the way you communicate with your audience. Martin Reed: Yeah. Well, I appreciate that. And the reason why that’s important to me is because all these things we’re feeling, all these struggles that we’re struggling with, all the challenges we face, they’re real. And so why would we try to deny that? Why encourage getting wrapped up in trying to fight that? It makes sense that we would want to fight it, but it would be a losing battle because we just can’t control what’s going on inside of us. And all of our thoughts and our feelings, we can’t control that. We can temporarily maybe feel better, temporarily. Some people might take a couple of drinks, temporarily feel better, for example. But over the long term, we just can’t control how we feel. It’s just one extra struggle that we are just going to be involving ourselves in, and we’re all human beings. Martin Reed: So we’re all going to feel an experience, the full range of human emotions throughout our life. Some of them are going to make us feel good. Some are not going to make us feel good. Sometimes, just acknowledging what we’re feeling can just be so helpful. Not trying to push it away, not trying to deny it, just acknowledging what we’re feeling is real because it is. But then maybe, just exploring our relationship with those thoughts and those feelings. So instead of just by default, which is human nature, trying to push them away when they don’t feel good, maybe just making a little bit of space for them. Martin Reed: Allowing them to come and go as they please. And even whilst they’re there, doing things that are important to us, and that truly are going to have a very real influence on the life we live. If we do things that are important to us, even when all that stuff is sitting inside of our brain. Because we always have control over our actions, but we never really have control over what’s going on inside our brains in terms of what it’s thinking, what it’s feeling. Nick Hobbs: Well said. I think that probably is the heart CBT-I. Martin Reed: I think the traditional cognitive side of the CBT model is all about how accurate are these thoughts that I’m having? Maybe there’s a more accurate way of thinking and maybe trying to change those thoughts from one type of thought that might not be very accurate, or helpful to a thought that is more accurate, and maybe more helpful. But I’m increasingly believing that we don’t even need to get tangled up there. We just need to acknowledge what those thoughts and feelings are that we’re having. Allow them to exist. Martin Reed: We don’t have to evaluate them. We don’t have to get caught up in them. We just need to acknowledge them, that they’re there. If we do have to take action, oh, the kitchen’s on fire. Well, yeah, we don’t just want that to sit in the back of our mind and let the kitchen burn down. There’s some stuff that we do have to take action on, but if it’s other things like, “I’m going to be exhausted tomorrow. I’m not going to be able to meet up with my friends tonight.” Maybe we just make some space for those thoughts to exist and then go about our actions anyway, regardless choosing to do things that are important to us, even in the presence of all that really difficult stuff going on inside our minds. Nick Hobbs: Yeah. I when you say that, I can definitely look back and I can go, “Wow, I wasn’t doing any of that.” I was just really focused on trying to push the feeling of anxiety away from myself. Trying to suppress it very effectively, but try and somehow distract myself from the thinking that was going along. So I would, at times, especially when I was doing your program, wake up in the night and I wasn’t even sure whether I’d been asleep or not. And so then I, “Oh, I probably didn’t even fall asleep. Oh, gee.” Really, it starts all kicking in again, right? Nick Hobbs: It’s programming. All this old programming is just ready and waiting to go, and now I can see that you’re right. If I make space for things. If I just allow and have a bit more of a self validating response, then I just acknowledge that, yep. I notice there’s that thought again, or there’s that narrative, or there’s that story, or there’s those feelings. There are those sensations. If I were to probably just make some space for them, that would’ve been heading in a better direction, in a more fruitful direction than panicking about them. Because I think that’s one of the things that I learned coming out of this program was that, you say about focus on behavior because that’s what you can control. Nick Hobbs: And when you’re in that labyrinth of that sleep confusion and that sleeplessness, and when it’s really seems to be dragging you along, a lot of what motivates your behavior is fear, anxiety, and you’re right. We’re focused on the outcome, not so much the process. The way that we get from A to B. It just becomes all about, well, what if I don’t get to B? And so there’s a real imbalance there, and what I find you have on the one side, those fears and anxieties, that motivate behavior. But on the other side, I guess what this program that you deliver, what I participated in, really got me to understand that there is another motivation for behavior, and that’s values. That’s the things that we stand for. Nick Hobbs: Those are the things that are important to us. And at the end of the day, yet we do have the option of sitting there and giving up. But if we’re not going to just sit there and give up, and we can’t just sit there, and give up forever. We’re going to have to stand for something. Looking back, anyone who goes and seeks out information to try, and resolve their situation, make improve their sleep better. Anyone who decides to sign up to a course and a program, and see it through is really standing for something. Really, aren’t they? They’re making a statement around their values and what’s important to them. That their health and that their wellbeing is important to them, or that the impact of what this is doing to other people is important to them, or the sense of what they want to have in their lives is important to them. Nick Hobbs: And so in the Sleep Diary so to speak, you really talk about what have you done in the day? What is it that you valued about doing in the day? What did you enjoy about the day? Rate your day, the quality of your day, and what gave it that quality? That is about connecting with what’s important to you, and that’s a different motivation for behavior. That is qualitatively very different from the fight flight stuff that you seem to be talking about with the brain, the way the brain’s looking more skewed for danger, and keeping us safe, and alerting us, and remembering things that maybe you felt unpleasant, or uncomfortable that we don’t want to have to go through again, which is really important. But it seems to just take over. It just seems to have the line share of head space. And then quietly, right in the corner, this little values voice that’s being drowned out all the time by these sirens, and fire, and running in, and the whole bit. Nick Hobbs: And that was a significant moment of awareness for me and a relief, to be honest with you, because it’s pretty stressful having a brain that’s just always geared, and chattering, and anxious. Like the overbearing anxious friend who really wants the best for you, but boy, how annoying. I was like, “You just want a bit of a break.” So the Sleep Diary was fascinating because I thought the Sleep Diary was going to be a trigger for me, and make things worse for my sleep. And it did. It did. My brain initially… I just focused on the steps and the numbers, and whether or not, and was it going to be another crap reporting day of no sleep? And it was. I felt like the training wheels came off and boom. Bike crashed, and I crashed. Nick Hobbs: First couple of weeks was worse on the program than before. Oh my God, catastrophizing again. But surely, doing the Sleep Diary when I actually started to understand about focusing on what I can control in my behavior, and focusing on behavior that is directed towards doing things in the day that mean something, that are important, making space for that, making time for that. I didn’t see the link initially. I thought, “Well, what’s the connection?” I’m trying to sleep here, Martin. I’m trying to sleep and you are getting me to focus on what I’ve done in the day that I enjoyed. Great. Yeah. That’s excellent. All right. Nick Hobbs: But really, when I see it, it’s creating space in my mind for it. It’s about shifting the balance, isn’t it? It seems to me, anyway, about really balancing the scales again, and getting back in touch with that sense of personal direction. About what’s important and about, well… Sleep will just look after itself. I just focus on doing something with my life so not sitting there, and doing nothing, because that wasn’t helping. Understandable. You can feel absolutely lost in it, and it’s really understandable to just give up for periods of time. But it’s just not a sustainable long term option. Nick Hobbs: So that was very, very helpful making that little connection that you’re talking about. Focus on your behaviors, make space for the feelings, and thoughts as they come, and go. Allow them to. Don’t try and control them but focus on something that’s that’s worth your time, worth your effort. And so I found the Sleep Diary structure really helpful for that. I’m not sure if that’s what the intention was with that Sleep Diary. Maybe it was also to help you get a sense of what was going on for me, but that was certainly one very beneficial strategy. Martin Reed: I love how you talk about values just because, really, they’re the key to the life we live. That we can still move towards our values even when we are really caught up in a lot of struggle. And the interesting thing or the important thing I think to emphasize with values is we never accomplish them. They’re just a journey that we always move towards. And on that journey, there are going to be ups and downs. Sometimes, we’ll move towards that value. Martin Reed: Sometimes, we might move away from that value. Sometimes, we might focus on a different value. We never accomplish our values. We can only ever just keep moving toward them. Sometimes it requires a lot of effort but as long as we do keep moving towards those values, we’re always going to be moving toward the life we want to live. And I think that’s really all that we can do as human beings. That’s the only thing we can control is our actions that move us toward. We can never get to that destination. We can only move toward it. Nick Hobbs: And listening to you say that reminds me that we don’t always spend a lot of time in our daily lives consciously reflecting on our values. And we, well, at times, especially, probably, I would say, times when my sleeps not so great, it would be more characterized by being really focused on tasks, or being overwhelmed by demand, or the struggles and the problems that go on in life, and even seeking pleasure, and enjoying things. And what you say makes complete sense, but not necessarily something that I would’ve carried around consciously prior. And I think that’s something that the Sleep Diary is helpful for because it’s a concrete thing. It’s there in front of you. It’s kind of evidence in a way, and that this is what’s actually happening for you, which is different for what your mind might be constantly telling you about your sleep. Amplifies it, and it really does tend to… Nick Hobbs: When I don’t sleep well, I tend to exaggerate a lot, and everything becomes really much more over the top. And I speak in much more categorical terms about how bad everything is, and it overshadows things. And so when you’ve got this structure there, when you’ve got this Sleep Diary there, it’s really just there quietly sitting there pointing things out to you. So there are potentials there for reflecting around values, because you’ve asked me to rate the quality of my day, and you’ve asked me to note down the things that I did that were important to me, or that felt good, or that were memorable in a positive way. That’s a point of reflection. Martin Reed: Yeah, and I think it also can… I like how you touched upon… This just shows you what the situation is and it might be difficult. You might have had some difficult nights and you’ve maybe written that down on your Sleep Diary. We’re not trying to get away from that. You’ve had some difficult nights. What we’re really trying to do is recognize that’s happening. Not trying to sugarcoat it. If you had a difficult night, you had a difficult night, but is it still possible to do things during the day that don’t have to be huge monumental things? But is it possible to just do some things that are aligned with your values that do help you live the life you want to live independently of how you slept, and independently of all the stuff that might be going on in your brain after those difficult nights too? Nick Hobbs: And that’s the thing, isn’t it? I guess there’s an encouragement implicit in the program that it is possible to do that. It is possible to actually not have slept, but still do things that you enjoy, or still at least savor one, or two of those moments in the day. Even if it is just when you’re doing your Sleep Diary and you’re going, “Oh yeah, well, I did that, and that was… Actually, didn’t mind riding my bike into work. That was the sun.” So there is a sense that you can savor something implicit in a way. Martin Reed: I love that word savor because so much of our lives, whether we’ve got insomnia or not. So much of our lives are on autopilot and we just miss so much of everything that’s going on around us. If we just can slow some of these things down a little bit and just, if we can notice when we are on autopilot, and just bring ourselves back a little bit more to the present moment, it’s amazing all the stuff we miss out on. And it sounds really minor, but even just something like making a cup of tea, or washing the dishes. It’s like, “Oh, I got to wash these dishes now,” and you’re just lathering up the sponge, scraping off all the plates, and stuff. And if you just bring yourself back, you’re thinking of all the other things you got to do, but if you just bring yourself to the present, it’s actually pretty cool. Martin Reed: We turn on a tap, this hot water comes out on demand. We’ve got all these different sensations coming off of our skin. There’s all these different light patterns reflecting off the plate. There’s all these bubbles just floating all over the place. And it’s not life changing to wash the dishes. I’m not trying to say it is, but we miss out on so much when we are just not present on all the stuff we’re doing during the day. Our mind just wanders. We just do things on autopilot. We miss out on so much. So sometimes, just telling ourselves, “I’m going to savor more.” Do some more savoring during the day. It can really just open us up to more of the good stuff that’s around us. More of the stuff that we can be appreciative of too. I think. Nick Hobbs: Yeah, absolutely. All those things are there. One of the memorable feelings you asked me about, how is it? When your day and you haven’t slept. And it definitely comes to mind that the difference is, it is just hard to feel sometimes. You just don’t feel. You’re doing the dishes and it’s a savior in a way to have those little moments, and to focus on that. I think that, so often, when we are having troubles sleeping, when I’ve had trouble sleeping, there is a sense I want to fix it, that I want to solve it, that I can do something, and take a pill, or drink alcohol, or go Shiatsu acupuncture, put a hot water bottle on my head, hide up in a little hole. So many things I try and do to fix sleep as a problem. Nick Hobbs: Whereas your example, I guess it connects to something that I’ve learned, which was that, actually, it’s reframing. It’s not so much a fix as it’s a noticing. It’s as much about just becoming aware of other things other than your preoccupations. It’s about being connected to the present as opposed to being always preoccupied with the past, or the future, which is where the sleep problems sit. They’re always in the past or they’re always in the future, and we are living it out in the present, but our minds are somewhere other than here. And we are not taking in what you were just talking about around that example of a household task. Nick Hobbs: So the power of the program is partly about trying to get us to reframe, and the very counterintuitive response that we have to actually, where we want to fix a problem, to actually not be so focused on fixing a problem, but become aware of noticing things. Noticing what’s going on with your mind and learning about you teach about sleep, and the cycles of sleep, and you teach about what we know about sleep, and you also teach us structure, and strategies, and teach us to focus on being aware, noticing. And that is, again, like values, it’s a different way of responding, isn’t it? It feels more relaxing. It feels much more relaxing to be noticing and paying attention. Martin Reed: Yeah. I think it’s definitely more relaxing than being engaged in that battle. Donning the suit of armor and just trying to fight everything that’s going on inside of us. Nick Hobbs: It takes away your confidence and it’s just so debilitating on so many levels when you’re trying to battle with the way your mind, the way my mind behaves. So hearing your validations when you go through each week and you give a introduction to each week, and really validate the struggle, but at the same time, invite us to do something different about it. Nick Hobbs: That’s that is really helpful actually, because it does just, “Ugh, trying to relax.” It’s ironic, isn’t it? That you’d need to relax to get out of the situation, when you feel like you really need to fix it and battle with it. But ultimately, it doesn’t help. It’s never helped me really, not when it comes to my emotional life anyway. You’re very right. Values don’t ever arrive. There’s really nothing there to fix, is there? It’s just more about taking steps. Martin Reed: Yeah, exactly. So we’ve talked a lot about exploring our relationship with all the stuff that goes on inside our minds, when we’re struggling with stuff. You’ve touched upon the actions we can take during the day that just help us live a life that’s aligned with our values, or just keep us on that toward side of the road, rather than the away side of the road. So we move toward the life we want to live, even when we’re struggling. One thing we haven’t really touched upon was the things we can do at night. Any changes we can make there that can’t make sleep happen because we just can’t control sleep, but that can just help prevent us from training our brain that wakefulness is this big physical threat that we have to be protected from. Martin Reed: Because then the brain has to be alert to try and protect us from. So typically we’ll do things like spend less time in bed at night. If we’re spending a lot of time awake at night, so we give ourselves an earliest possible bedtime. Final out of bedtime in the morning. And it also helps prevent us from that temptation of trying to chase sleep. So if we have a difficult night, we won’t then go to bed a lot earlier the next night, or stay in bed a lot later the next morning, and perpetuate this ongoing sleep disruption, and doing things like just doing something more enjoyable, if being awake at night doesn’t feel good. Martin Reed: Why endure that? Let’s just do something else that makes wakefulness more pleasant. And I think trying to recall when we were working together, those were the two main changes that you were implementing when we were working together. That sleep window routine there and doing something more enjoyable when wakefulness didn’t feel good. Looking back on that, can you tell us a little bit about what it was like to make those changes? Any struggles or difficulties you had, and how you feel they might have been helpful now that you can look back in, and reflect back on this? Nick Hobbs: Well, the sleep window it was very helpful because it really focused me on trying to stay awake as opposed to trying to get to sleep. Hard to explain that reframing, that shifting, but I found that structure… It was a structure and all I had to do was just live by it. I didn’t have to think it. Nick Hobbs: I didn’t have to calculate anything. Oh, it’s just an action. I just had to stay awake. So that was helpful. It was really, really helpful, and slowly that widened. And then the nighttime, the time that I went to bed became more flexible just around not looking at the clock, but just gauging my sleep levels. Maybe I felt sleepy, tired, only going to bed if I felt sleepy. It just took a lot of pressure away. Nick Hobbs: The thing that really builds up before bed is pressure, expectations, weight of pressure. About performance. Your performance anxiety, isn’t it? Really in a way. So the sleep window was a really, really valuable thing. And of course, the thing that I chose to do in that period before bed was to read a book which made me feel even sleepier, and to do it on the couch. And then I found myself no, I’ve got to sit up and read. No, no, no. I think I’ll just lie down. I think I’ll just lie down and read. And of course, inevitably, I fall asleep and my brain was finding all these ways to trick me, to get me to lay down, all of a sudden, it became, no, I’m going to find ways to make you sleep. Nick Hobbs: And it became another struggle for me in a way. The same struggle mentality was there. And initially, really worried. Oh my God, but I fell asleep at 9:30, but I was got to stay up midnight. So then it would arc up. My thoughts would up again, but over time. And that’s the thing, it’s about patience in a way, isn’t it? Just allowing the program. Just work along the program. So I found not looking at the clock, watching TV, or doing things that were enjoyable in the night, and just going, “Okay. That’s okay. I can do that, and I can be okay with that, and I can try, and encourage myself to enjoy it, and not be too worried about the fact that I’m up, and it’s midnight, or it’s 2:00 in the morning, and I’m watching something on TV that I just wouldn’t be normally…” Doesn’t matter. Just enjoy it. Just try and go along with it and just see where it goes. Nick Hobbs: Take the pressure. So that was very, very helpful those two things definitely. Yeah, and they maybe see that I do try and fall asleep. I was really actively trying to force sleep to happen, and earplugs in. Try and block out all the noise because I can’t sleep if there’s going to be noise. But I can’t control the external environment, but focusing on that, and I realized, at some point, that that’s all pretty futile. Martin Reed: Yeah, exactly. And it does come down to that sense of control. It makes sense that we want to control sleep or avoid, be able to avoid wakefulness, because it doesn’t feel good. But unfortunately, we can’t, but what we can control are our actions. And it’s our actions that can create good conditions for sleep or that can make conditions less favorable for sleep. And it’s always our actions that determine the life we want to live. And it’s always funny that when we change, maybe how much time we allot for sleep from night to night, it becomes this thing where, instead of really trying to sleep, all of a sudden, we find ourselves really trying to stay awake. Martin Reed: And just that shift can be really interesting, because then, a lot of clients I work with, suddenly, they start to feel that strong sense of sleepiness again, rather than fatigue. And often what else happens is when we find that we’re trying to stay awake, we start to feel really sleepy because we’re not trying. We get that realization that, “Oh, maybe it’s because I’ve been trying so hard to make sleep happen. That’s been the obstacle there.” So sometimes, that recognition can make it a little bit easier for us to move away from the stuff that we can’t control, and just onto the stuff we can control. Nick Hobbs: Yeah. That’s right. It becomes a slightly different preoccupation for a while there, trying to stay awake. And it does, it takes off some of that emphasis on trying to get to sleep, which I can see now is yeah, it’s really… It’s pretty deeply, why? It’s still there for me. That urge to want to force sleep and make it happen. But you said, I think just then before, it’s about the relationship you have with the way you feel and your behaviors. And so I guess it’s just a different way of allowing for that. Understanding that, of course, sleep is wired into us and the desire to sleep is wired into us. So therefore, of course, I’m going to be focused a little bit on times when I am sleep deprived or haven’t had enough sleep at least, under slept. Nick Hobbs: So yeah, I thought the window was just a stroke of genius. It was really, really helpful. And I still have a… I get up at 5:00 every morning and I get up, and that was the other thing you said. Get up at the same time and get outside, do some exercise. Wake your body up and get into your body, become aware of your body. And that’s what I did. And still to this day, I get up at 5:00. What I do in the morning is different changes over time. But the moment I get up, I go to the gym, what time I go to bed, doesn’t really matter to me so much anymore, but I’m always up at that 5:00 in the morning. I’m always out the door, down to the gym, being active and then going to work, whether I get the sleep or not. And so that was also a part of it. It’s just that commitment to just doing those things, holding that line regardless of what happens. Martin Reed: Yeah. And I just love that word that you use, commitment, because it is a commitment, because it’s difficult. Especially at first, especially in the short time, it is really difficult to do things that are important to us when we’re really struggling. And we’ve had really difficult nights, when we’ve got a lot of anxiety, or stress, or worry. It can feel very overwhelming and it is difficult to commit to doing things that are still important to us, even with all that struggle going on, and to commit to behaviors that can help. They can’t help make sleep happen, but they can help create better conditions for sleep. Like getting out of bed a reasonably consistent time in the mornings can be so helpful. If nothing else, it just prevents us from chasing sleep and just reinforcing to the brain, that wakefulness is this physical threat that must be avoided at all costs. Martin Reed: You must be alert against wakefulness, to protect me from wakefulness. And like you touched upon really early on in this conversation, it’s not unusual for things to feel worse, to feel more difficult when you step out of that comfort zone, and make these changes. For your sleep to get worse in the short term and that’s often a time when everything’s screaming at you, so just go back into your safety zone, to go back to the way things were. But the way things weren’t really helpful either. We really do have to put in a lot of commitment to make some changes and to be open, and curious to exploring new ways of thinking really to put this behind us. I think that’s what it comes down to. Nick Hobbs: And it does feel like breaking into a new space. Sleep Diaries and sleep windows, and I knew about sleep hygiene, and I went and read books, but I didn’t really have anyone like you. I’d never come across a course where you could just like engage with someone about it. Send off the diaries, get some feedback, have a discussion, and have these messages, and this education reiterated, and learn to apply something. So it did feel like a new space and in a way, a new space is a chance to reset, isn’t it? Not that I would’ve necessarily seen it like that at the time. I was just more probably just desperate. And my commitment came from just not having alternative, not really having another option, having nothing to lose really, and having everything to gain, and wanting so much to be well, and feel good. Nick Hobbs: And that was enough to start, but having someone there, having a certain level of accountability like committing, but also, right, I’m going to see this through, and yeah, I’ve got to fill out these diaries, and I’m going to send these in, and I’ve got to read the email feedback, and implement that. And that level of buy in, so to speak. Having that level of accountability, someone there, you, Martin, waiting to receive those Sleep Diaries, going through the content each week. It was just helpful as well to have that weekly structure to keep me committed, to keep me accountable to on some level to myself, that I’m doing it. Martin Reed: Yeah. It does often get more difficult in the short term, before it gets better, and often progress isn’t linear. It’s not every week, it gets better and better and better, although that can happen for most people. There’s ups and downs along the way as well. Again, so we’ll stuff this out of our control. We can only control our actions. We can control our actions on the journey to the outcome. We can’t control the outcome itself. What would you say an average night is like for you these days, Nick? Nick Hobbs: Good enough. I always generally get a pretty adequate sleep, but not always, not always. But it doesn’t really loom. It’s not the specter. Sleep’s not the specter that it was. It’s just something that I need. It’s a part of my day. It’s a part of my wellbeing, and if I get five, six hours like last night, yeah, I’ll probably go about six hours sleep. Feel good. It’s fine. It’s not something I have to really spend too much mental energy on anymore. But I do at times, for sure. Still have all of those kinds of thought patterns and conversations. Martin Reed: Yeah. I guess the changes, just your relationship with them. Sometimes we refer to it as psychological flexibility. We just become more flexible in how we choose to respond to them when we’re really trapped in the struggle. Our response is try and push them away, try to fight them, avoid them, and they can really influence our behaviors. Whereas when we get to that stage, talking to you, insomnia is just in the background now. It’s in our past. We still struggle every now and then because we’re human beings, but what’s really changed is our relationship with the sleep. With wakefulness and with thoughts, feelings, emotions. Nick Hobbs: And I think your message in the course is always to normalize, isn’t it? To normalize sleep as not necessarily being something that we all experience the same way, the same time, in the same periods of our lives, and in comparison to each other. We all have some sense of an ideal, but that’s what it is, isn’t it? It’s an ideal. And there are things that we can do that are either going to support sleep or not help. And so it’s about learning about what’s supportive and putting your energy into that, because that’s the things that you can do. So I like it. It’s a simple message, and in a way, it’s a very simple thing to understand. Not so easy to put it into practice, but that’s the art of it, isn’t it? That’s why we do the programs, that’s why we learn, and we figure it out. Nick Hobbs: So, I found it really good. And I guess that’s what I would say to people really. It’s just to stay connected to what’s important to you and persist. That’s one of the values really that keeps us going, doesn’t it? Through all of this. It’s that capacity to persist and to hold onto that is important. Because it’s hard to trust. Sometimes, it’s just really hard to trust. You can say all the things under the sun, Martin, but you have to go through the program, and you have to commit, and you have to try it, and you have to apply it, and you have to do it for yourself, and you have to find it. Nick Hobbs: That’s where the confidence comes. So the confidence is built upon that effort and it’s there. So I guess looking back now, I don’t know how long it’s been since I finished the program. I’m really not aware, but it’s been some months now, hasn’t it? Maybe a year even, and looking back, I could really just encourage people use that word, curiosity. Be curious about it, give it a go. If you can’t trust it, you don’t need to. You just need to go through the program and be open to learning, and just trying things out, and experimenting. It’s that mindset, isn’t it? Really, that you can bring in to the program. Martin Reed: Thanks again, Nick, for all the time you’ve taken to come onto the episode and just talk about your experience. I know that a lot of people are going to be finding this really helpful to hear your story in your own words. And I think they’re going to really identify with a lot of what you’ve said as well, but I got just one last question for you that I think would be just the icing on the cake for everyone listening, and it’s this. If someone with chronic insomnia is listening and feels 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? Nick Hobbs: You see, the dilemma it is, isn’t it? That you’re faced with something that is inside of you and there’s no real easy escape, because you keep coming back to yourself at the end of the day. And what does it mean to give up and not do anything? And you can do that, but we can’t really leave the situation. So at the end of the day, we still have to keep taking those steps. And I would just encourage people just to keep that in mind that even though we can’t trust necessarily that by doing the program, we’re going to get to what we ideally want for ourselves. Like you say, values are never something that you necessarily ever reach the end of, but we can always be taking steps towards that. Nick Hobbs: And I think there’s nothing in this program that takes me away from what’s important for me. Everything in the program really emphasizes and puts me in touch with what’s important to me. So therefore, I’m never going to be harmed by this. So I would suggest to people to please just give things a try, stay open, stay curious, and find what it is that will enable you to commit to this next six, eight weeks, and then see where one gets to. It’s a bit of an unknown process, isn’t it? It is about accepting to some degree that, that’s just the nature of where we are, and that’s just what we found ourselves doing. So I would just encourage people not to give up and I would encourage people to stay in touch with what’s important to them. And hopefully, that this program is one of those steps for them because there’ll be other steps to take too. How’s that? Martin Reed: That’s great. That’s perfect, Nick. I think that’s a great note to end on. So thank you again so much for taking the time to go onto the podcast. Really appreciate it. Thank you. Nick Hobbs: You’re welcome, Martin. Thank you. 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. 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 at insomniacoach.com. Share this page

Listen to the podcast episode (audio only) 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. Safety behaviors such as canceling plans or avoiding activities in order to protect his sleep helped Adam feel a bit better in the short-term but over the long-term they were preventing him from living the kind of life he wanted to live. In other words, his comfort zone became more like a prison. 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. Today, Adam has released himself from that prison cell. He is living his life and sleeping a lot better! Click here for a full transcript of this episode. Transcript 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: Hi, Adam, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to come onto the podcast. Adam Currie: Thank you for having me. Martin Reed: It’s great to have you on. Let’s start right at the beginning like I do with every single guest. Can you tell us a little bit about when your sleep problems first began and what you think triggered that initial sleep disruption? Adam Currie: Sure. Yeah, so I probably first experienced real problems with my sleep I would say about probably two, two and a half years ago. I think the trigger was I had an event where I had to present to some quite important people at work and the night before I found myself thinking about what I needed to do the next day. And I thought I’ve got an early start tomorrow and I need to be up at 5:00 AM and I’ve got the train to catch and I’ve got a taxi and I’ve got all these big things to do. And what if it goes wrong tomorrow? And I just had this kind of snowball of really quite intense negative thoughts about what would happen the day after. And I had a very difficult night. I actually had no sleep at all to the point where I actually unfortunately called in sick the next day. Adam Currie: And I felt that I couldn’t go through what I needed to go through. And that unfortunately, was then imprinted in my mind. So every time I had something like that that cropped up again in the future, I then felt the same anxiety and I was worried about whether I would sleep or not. And it was almost like the trauma of having a completely sleepless night. It had never happened to me before. And so it really made me stand up and get quite concerned, which looking back was obviously making things a lot worse for me. So yeah, probably about two years ago. Martin Reed: Yeah. So did you find the sleep got right back on track after once the event that seemed to have triggered that sleep disruption was over? Whether you went to it or not, did you find that your sleep then got back on track afterwards or did those sleep issues kind of linger for a bit? Adam Currie: They lingered for a little bit for a day or two, they did get back on track. But what I found is that the longer I had problems with sleep or rather not the longer, the longer I was not addressing the problems that I was having with sleep, the longer the impact would be and the longer it would take me to recover. So I would quite often find that one night may actually then develop into a succession of poor nights. So maybe a chain of two or three nights. Initially it did get a little bit better, but then it got worse again over time, but it always corrects itself eventually. But how quickly it corrects itself is obviously dependent on the tools that you have and how you respond to it. And my toolkit early on was just not really up to the job. Martin Reed: Yeah. So apart from the nights where you got no sleep whatsoever, when those difficult nights were lingering around, what were they like? Was it difficulty just first falling asleep or was it more to do with waking during the night and then finding it hard to fall back to sleep, or maybe it was a combination of both of those things? Adam Currie: Yeah, it was, I mean initially, and I think still predominantly the issues I have with falling to sleep, in my mind I’m just ruminating and ruminating and how that feels and how that kind of represents itself for me is lots of toting and turning, flustered, throwing the covers around. And I would be acutely aware that I wasn’t entering the first stages of sleep and then I would get frustrated and that would lead to more tossing and turning, clock watching, chronic clock watching to the point where I had to start removing the clocks in the room because I was obsessing over the time and I’d be like, well, now it’s midnight and that means I’ve only got five hours sleep and now it’s 1:00 and I’ve only got four and so on. So that’s how it manifested itself. Adam Currie: Very, very uncomfortable nights that would just snowball with anxiety. And I would end up by five or six in the morning just so anxious and actually sometimes quite frustrated as well. Frustrated that I wasn’t able to do something that I’d naturally done for the last 30 years of my life without even thinking about. And now all of a sudden it’s this big performance and it’s an act and I was just stuck. That’s probably the best way to describe it. I just frozen with an inability to sleep that was just fueled by anxiety and it would get worse every time. Martin Reed: Yeah. And I think a lot of people are going to really identify with the effects of insomnia on the nights. You know, obviously there’s not much sleep going on, but it’s also just that whole struggle with the anxiety and that can manifest itself in the clock watching and this frustration, because we feel like we should be able to control this. Why can’t I make sleep happen? It’s something that I used to be able to do okay. I used to be able to sleep pretty well. Why is this not happening now? And so it all just kind of feeds into itself. So it’s not really the only struggle now is being awake at night, which is definitely a big part of it, but it’s also everything that comes with that. Right? It’s all those thoughts and those feelings and those emotions that come with it during the night. Adam Currie: Absolutely. Yeah. And I completely underestimated how difficult it might be for me. It’s really funny because when I was a child, I used to play this game and I’m sure people who are listening may have played the game themselves where you try to stay awake for as long as you can and the whole goal and the aim of the game is can I stay awake all night? And I always remember failing hopelessly by about maybe 1:00 or 2:00 AM because the whole objective would stay awake. And then looking back on that now when the objective is go to sleep, it kind of has the opposite effect and I suppose I was aware of that subconsciously, but I was so fixated and focused on the idea of a perfect night’s sleep before I needed to be up early and now it’s okay to say I was failing miserably in sleeping because I was just placing such an emphasis on the ability to fall asleep. And I was lost, completely lost. Martin Reed: Yeah. You know, I think that what goes on during the nights is probably only about 50% of the struggle with chronic insomnia because we deal with all these struggles during the day as well, whether that’s just how we feel during the day or all the stuff that our mind wants to tell us during the day like, oh, you can’t do this because you had a difficult night or you should cancel those plans with friends, what’s tonight going to bring? So we are having insomnia. That’s not just a nighttime problem, it’s a daytime problem as well. So I’m curious to your thoughts on whether that was true for you too and what kind of effect insomnia was having on your daytime life as well? Adam Currie: Yeah, definitely. I mean, it definitely was having an effect on me. I feel like it wasn’t having as much of an effect on me as I was trying to lead myself to believe it was because my whole reference and frame of thought when I was really, really tired was often making things worse than they actually were. Physically, I would feel exhausted, I would feel drained.I would actually struggle to concentrate and I would feel hot and bothered quite often. And I would just want to find a soft cool nice quiet place where I could just sit down and I often used to commute via a rail. So I would have a two hour journey back home and I would find myself on the train so tired that I was falling to sleep. Adam Currie: And then obviously the worry then was, what if I don’t wake up? What if I actually fall asleep on the train and I missed my stop and I don’t get where I need to be? So no, the effects were quite negative in the day. But since having done several sleepless nights and actually done something quite successfully with little to no sleep, but with a completely different frame of mind, that was what really made me compare and contrast to how things used to be. And I think it’s mostly psychological about how if you think you’re going to fail the next day, if you tell yourself, if you positively reinforce the fact that you’re going to struggle, you tend to struggle. If you allow yourself to separate the night from the day ahead and you put the night behind you and you just move forward, there is very little difference in performance. Adam Currie: You know you’re tired, you know you feel worn down and certainly exhausted, but if you can frame it in such a way that you can catch up the next night or eventually at some point you will regain the sleep you lost, it makes things much easier. So I found that, yes, it affected me in the day, however, over time, I’m doing a better job of separating the previous night from the next day, whereas before they were inherently linked so I was setting myself up for failure from the moment I went to bed until the very next night. Martin Reed: Yeah. So looking back on your experience before you found Insomnia Coach before you found the resources that I offer and these podcasts, et cetera, what kind of things had you done to try and turn this around? Because whenever we’re faced with a problem, we want to fix it. What kind of things had you personally tried that looking back on it now, maybe they weren’t that helpful. Maybe they could have even been perpetuating the problem? Adam Currie: All of the wrong things. I did all the wrong things, all around control of sleep. So I tried peppermint oil. I tried a glass of warm milk before bed. I tried waking up at 3:30 or 4:00 AM the day before thinking that I would build up an obsolete sleep drive so I’d fall asleep easy the next night, it didn’t work. I was listening to certain sound wave frequencies in the belief that they promote relaxation and sleep. I would listen to hypnotherapy guided talk downs. I would listen to old classical music and old time radio because for some reason there’s something I felt in time was comforting about that. So I would listen to that. I would eat bananas because I’d read about high potassium content and promote sleep and reduce certain chemicals or promote certain chemicals for sleep. I’d take a hot bath, a hot shower. Adam Currie: I would watch a film, read a whole book cover to cover from say five in the afternoon until midnight. And I hope that would also promote sleepiness and I would be lying if I said any of them worked, they may have worked in isolation, although I probably think they’ll probably just coincidental. None of them had a lasting impact, otherwise, we wouldn’t be having the conversation now. So yeah, all in vain, the efforts were all in vain, but yeah, I tried so many things and that was what made it more difficult. And I think probably people listening to this, it will probably resonate with them is that the more you try and the more things you go through, the more you then start to think, okay, this is a real problem now and this is getting out of control and I’m not normal and this isn’t right, and maybe something’s really wrong with me. Adam Currie: And you limit yourself for options of how you might promote sleep. So the net closes in on you a little bit. And that obviously makes things 10 times as bad as they ever would’ve been in that frame of mind. Martin Reed: The reason I asked that question about all these things we’ve tried is definitely not to gloat or make us feel bad or to ridicule the things we do. Although on reflection, some of them can be quite amusing when we’re at that place where we can look back and think about some of the things we tried, but really it’s just to legitimize the fact that when we have a problem, we are understandably going to try and fix it. And this leads us down this path of trying all different experiments, different rituals. In other areas of life efforts can be really helpful, but with sleep, it’s just that exception to the rule the more we try just as you touched upon you took the words out of my mouth, the more we try, the more difficult it becomes. Martin Reed: So I always like to ask this question just because anyone listening can recognize that other people are in the same boat as you. They’ve been there, they’ve tried all these different things. So the fact that you are not necessarily find them helpful too is perhaps understandable and normal. It’s not a sign that your insomnia is unique or you can’t put that insomnia behind you, because at the end of the day, all these things that we usually try, they don’t really get to the root cause of what keeps insomnia alive, which is really our behaviors around sleep and how we allow sleep to influence our behaviors and our relationship with all those difficult thoughts and feelings and emotions that always come along for the ride when we’re struggling with anything. But especially when we’re struggling with chronic insomnia. Adam Currie: Definitely. And I think as humans, we tend to self stigmatize and we tend to believe that we are failing in our ability to do things and somebody else drinks peppermint tea before bed and they swear by it and they fall asleep, whereas, I can’t do that. And it can bring some other unwanted baggage with it in terms of your overall wellbeing. And I found that I was questioning my ability just to do normal things and I was questioning my ability to hold back automatic thoughts. It got to the point where I just doubted my ability to be able to wake up on a morning and say I will be able to sleep tonight because that in itself would trigger a series of competing thoughts and competing feelings about sleep. Adam Currie: And I started to develop those really negative thought habits and processes around sleep. And it’s not just isolated to sleep, I found that I would start to doubt my ability to do other things because I started to treat sleep as a performance. It was as an act, it was the start of a race I needed to be out the blocks just at the right time, not too early, not too late. And as soon as I put that kind of pressure on it definitely does affect and impact other areas of your wellbeing definitely. Martin Reed: Yeah. And those thoughts and those feelings, they’re not good to experience, right? Nobody likes to experience them so that natural human inclinations to try and suppress them to try and fight them, to avoid them, maybe distract ourselves, to think positive, all those attempts to control how we’re thinking and how we’re feeling, ultimately, they’re doomed to backfire at some point because we just can’t control how we feel. You know, sometimes the brain will generate thoughts and feelings that makes us feel good. Sometimes it’ll generate thoughts and feelings that don’t make us feel good. It’s when we get trapped in that struggle trying to control them, which is completely understandable because they don’t feel good that we tend to get the most trapped. I like to think of it as that the brain dangles this hook with these difficult thoughts and these feelings, it can hook us and jerk us around and throw us down this path where we end up doing things that move us away from the kind of life we live rather than toward the kind of life we want to live. Adam Currie: Such a good analogy, yeah. Martin Reed: Yeah. Then we’re stuck with the insomnia. We’re still stuck with the difficult thoughts and the feelings, but then we’re also stuck with moving away from the kind of life we want live, which just compounds our struggle. So I’m curious, how were you able to change your relationship with all those thoughts and those emotions like the stress, the worry and the anxiety? Adam Currie: Well, it’s a good question and I’m still working it out. I’m still perfecting that, but I’ve definitely improved and I’ve definitely solved most of the problems, but I suppose the best way to phrase it is just letting go, letting go of the anxiety, letting go of the anger and frustration of being unable to sleep, letting go of the fear that would wrap around you for the rest of the day about your inability to perform. Letting go of the fear of what other people might think about you and how you live your life and or how you perform or how you do certain tasks the day after. I really think that was the most liberating thing. But propping that thought process up for me was, and this was something that I was drawn to so strongly in your emails and your support was identifying that not falling to sleep for an evening or maybe for a few hours is not the end of the world. Adam Currie: You can still perform, you can still live a normal life. You should live a normal life irrespective of what happens in your place of sleep the night before. And so I think it was breaking the chain between what happened in bed the night before and what I then did the next day. That was really really key to me solving most of the problem. And the truth is I still do have bad nights even fairly recently, just a couple of weeks ago, I went to Venice and the first night struggled because I couldn’t sleep the night before because I was getting a flight early, but rather than worry and panic and say, will I miss my flight? What if I can’t drive to the airport? Adam Currie: You know, I was quite relaxed about it and I actually did get a couple of hours sleep in, but it was again just stopping yourself, stopping the cup from overflowing and just recognizing it is filling up and then separation and letting go of the water that’s pouring in and just step back from it and exercise and control, keep a containment on the thoughts and then allow the process to go on and know that at the right time and under the right conditions, your body will provide you with the state that it needs. Adam Currie: So it was absolutely breaking that thought process that was key because without that, I couldn’t then implement some of the other additional techniques that obviously you may talk about shortly, but that was critical for me was just breaking that chain and refusing to allow myself to continue to make the problem worse and recognize that I was making the problem worse by trying to assume control over a situation I have no control over. Martin Reed: So is that what you meant by letting go? It was just no longer just trying to fight or change all the stuff that’s going on in your mind, just recognizing that it’s happening, it’s going on, and then just shifting your attention on to what you can control, like your actions like going to Venice, for example? Adam Currie: Absolutely. Yeah. And actually not necessarily inviting difficult evenings, but expecting them sometimes. So I say, I know I’m going to probably struggle to sleep because I need to be up at 4:00 AM. I need to get to the airport for a 7:00 AM flight. I don’t normally go to sleep until 11:00 PM. I’m probably going to struggle. And even if I did fall asleep at 11:00, I’m still not going to get her for eight hours anyway. So why worry? You will find other opportunities the next evening or even after to regain that. So yeah, letting go of that was absolutely critical just allowing it to happen and releasing control over things that I’d artificially tried to control for the last two years. Martin Reed: Yeah. Yeah. And I think looking back on your life in a hundred years from now, you’re probably going to be more likely to remember, for example, that trip to Venice than how you slept like the night before or how you slept while you were on that trip. Because although we can’t downplay this, insomnia, it doesn’t make us feel good. Everyone wants to get rid of it. But at the end of the day, it’s our actions that are the primary contributor to the kind of life we live. We could be the world’s greatest sleeper, but if we’re not engaged in actions that are aligned with our values, we’re not doing stuff that’s meaningful to us that gives our lives a sense of enrichment and joy, then we are not going to live the kind of life we want to live regardless of the insomnia. Martin Reed: So if we can turn that on its head and we don’t necessarily have to do huge things, we can take baby steps if that feels more appropriate if we’re really struggling. But if we can just ensure that we engage in something each day that’s aligned with our values and it just keeps us moving toward the kind of life we want to live, instead of allowing all those thoughts and feelings to jerk us around and push us away from the kind of life we want to live, it can be really, really helpful and really help separate us our thought processes and our feelings from our actions, because our actions are really key. That’s really what helps us live the kind of life you want to live. Adam Currie: Absolutely. Yeah. I 100% agree. And I found myself originally engaging in some really quite difficult avoidance behavior. If I thought that I was going to struggle or I did struggle the night before and I had an engagement somewhere, I’d say, oh, I’ll meet you guys late because I thought that I would then stay at home and catch up on some sleep. And I felt so traumatized from the night before I couldn’t sleep anyway. So not only was I missing out on, like you say, meaningful events in my life, whether it was socializing or doing things, but I was also fixated on my issues with sleep. And the truth is that when you refuse to engage those thoughts and you just draw a line under the evening and try not to think about it again, you haven’t got a point of reference for how you feel physically. Adam Currie: So you just go through your day and you do the things you want to do and then you treat the next night as a new one and it was like a paradigm shift for me mentally because I could not come out of that place, I could not uncouple those two things. And when you were speaking, it just reminded me of one evening I was struggling so bad and I think it was a couple of evenings after I found you and what you do. I remember watching a video. It was actually one of your earlier podcasts I think. And that on its own was enough to promote sleep for me just because I realized that I wasn’t alone, this doesn’t happen to just me and that on its own was enough to help me rationalize what was happening. Adam Currie: And the next morning I thought, what was it about the video that maybe fall asleep? Was it the video? Was it the people’s voices? And it was just the relief of knowing that this isn’t going to kill you and you are not unique and you are not alone, that was enough to give me the comfort to calm my thoughts down and promote sleep quite quickly. So yeah that on its own was giving me the ability to live a meaningful life. Just knowing that I wasn’t alone, whether I slept or not, didn’t matter. But as long as I knew that I wasn’t alone and hearing other people’s stories, I was like that’s me and that’s what I do, and that was a relief almost. It was a relief that there’s a possible way out of this and it isn’t unique to you. Martin Reed: Yeah. And that’s why I love doing these podcast episodes. And I’m so grateful for guests like yourself coming on because it can be so powerful. I mean, it’s one thing for me to be here, just talking about in insomnia, but it’s such a different thing to have guests on talking about their own experience, talking about the transformation that they made, because it gives us hope, it gives us reassurance. And like you said, it helps us realize that our insomnia isn’t unique and as individuals, we’re definitely unique and our circumstances around it might be unique, but insomnia itself, it’s the same animal from person to person and the way it affects us is the same, and the way it doesn’t respond to certain things is the same. And that can be so encouraging to hear in people’s own words, because it helps us realize that if these people had the same problem as me and they were able to put it behind them, then there’s no reason why I can’t do the same. There’s always that light at the end of the tunnel. Adam Currie: Absolutely. Yeah. And I’ve actually stopped referring to myself now as having insomnia. I believe that just that on its own, it’s not denial, it’s kind of an empowerment. I’m empowering myself not to identify as having a problem with sleep. I have problems with evenings sometimes. Sometimes I struggle to fall to sleep. I try not to identify as an insomniac or us having insomnia because I feel that labels me in such a way where I then expect things like that to happen more frequently. And the truth is they will happen for the rest of my life, probably they will continue to happen, but it’s how you respond to it and doesn’t it stop you from, or what does it stop you from doing now is a lot less now than it ever used to. Adam Currie: So I’m hopeful that I’ll just continue to break that separation and yeah, just keep discovering new techniques, but sticking to the core and core teachings, if you like, of your program. It was genuinely at the time I felt like it was a total relief, finding it, nothing had worked. And I know I’m probably saying the same things over and over again, but I keep going back to that point, just the realization of I found something that finally makes sense and that I could finally understand what’s going on and what the problem is and the triangle. And I just couldn’t understand it before. So yeah, it was genuinely life-changing. At the time I was in such a difficult place and it was genuinely life-changing at the time. Adam Currie: And I still regularly talk about that period of time where I found you and found what you do and found the techniques. And I often find myself trying to coach others who also have trouble sleeping. And it’s funny when you talk about problems with sleep, you start hearing everybody saying, well, I have trouble with sleep as well. And well, I can’t stay asleep and I start talking about these techniques that I couldn’t have dreamt of understanding, let alone talking about a few years ago. Martin Reed: Yeah. Yeah. And I think it is helpful to move away from that label that, we give ourselves so many different labels. Right? And so when we’re struggling within insomnia, I have insomnia I’m an insomniac and yeah, but I mean, we are not trying to trick ourselves and say, no, the insomnia doesn’t exist and it’s all in my mind, but we are more than that. You know, there’s more to us than how we sleep. There’s more to us than what’s going on in our minds. They’re just a part of the whole package of the human experience but when we’re struggling with insomnia, it’s really easy to label ourselves with that and have this really difficult connotation with it. We can use it as justification for those away moves, like I can’t go into work now. Martin Reed: I can’t meet up with friends now, I can’t do this, this, this now because of the insomnia. So I think removing that label, that identity, it’s almost like a symptom of we are moving on from this now, we’re just going to expand open ourselves up to look around and to observe that maybe we are more than just the insomnia. Yeah, the insomnia’s there, but I’m also a parent, I’m also a working professional. I’m also a comedian with so much more, there’s much more to what makes us, us than just the insomnia. So it’s funny, you said that because a lot of people have mentioned that shifting and just dropping that label has been really helpful. Adam Currie: Absolutely. And look, if anyone listening wants an example of how damaging it can be to hold onto those kind of labels. About 18 months ago, I was offered, what is my dream job. It was international travel. So I would’ve had to have flown to America three or four times, five times a year. I would’ve had to have flown to the far east China and Japan and south America. I would’ve been doing exceptionally interesting work with really, really talented people. I declined the offer of the job because I was worried that having to get up early and get on a plane and travel or going to a hotel would disrupt my sleep. So I actually decided to withdraw from an opportunity that would’ve been a dream job because I was limiting myself to that label. Adam Currie: So anyone listening who might be thinking about panning themselves in or giving themselves a life which isn’t as enriching as it could be because of a label like that, THAT sometimes it’s worthwhile to see how far that can sometimes impact you negatively. And I regret that massively and looking back, I understand why I rejected the job. But it was on floored grounds completely. And that’s just an example really of what you can miss out on if you allow yourself to be penned in and labeled like that, it’s not based on reality at all. Martin Reed: That’s really powerful to hear you say that. And like you touched upon, it’s completely understandable why we make those decisions when we’re really caught up in that struggle and we’re really tangled up in it and we have this really strong connection between what’s going on, like what we’re struggling with and how that is going to dictate our behaviors but it doesn’t have to. But I like how you refer to it as like this paradigm shift because often we have to hear it many times over. Because it’s one thing to hear that there’s more to us than our thoughts, for example, there’s more to us than how we feel, that our thoughts and our feelings don’t always have to dictate our behaviors, we can’t control sleep. We can’t control what’s going on in our mind, but we can always control our actions, things like that. Martin Reed: They sound good to hear and they can be reassuring or some people might just think this is ridiculous what you’re saying, but gradually, when you hear it a few different times maybe in other people’s words and other reason why it’s great to have guests like you on talking in your own words is it can slowly start to make a little bit of sense. And then if we can start taking those baby steps, we just start making some moves toward the kind of life we want to live even after difficult nights or even when we’re really struggling with our thoughts and our feelings, that can really help make that big shift occur. And that’s what I hear time and time again from clients that have gone through this big transformation, it’s that recognition that look, there are things in my life I can’t control. Martin Reed: Unfortunately, that means that there’s going to be struggle in my life, there’s going to be pain in my life, but at the same time, I still do have control over my actions. So even in the presence of that pain and that struggle, there are still some things I can do to bring some joy to my life, to bring some enrichment to my life and just keep me on that path of moving toward the kind of life I want to live, even in the presence of all that difficult stuff. Adam Currie: Definitely. And I think meaning is really important. And when I look back on the times I’ve struggled with sleep, it’s usually preceding an event that has some meaning in my life. And if I look back at all of the nights before, the next day where I’ve obviously been deprived of sleep, they have been some of the most meaningful days of my life. I’ve got married on days where I’ve struggled to sleep the night before, I’ve been in far fun places on holiday where I’ve not slept the night before. I’ve had long days out with friends and I’ve been to weddings, all the things that happen in my life that have real meaning and have brought me real happiness I’ve actually done whilst I’ve been sleep deprived. So in some ways, when I struggle with sleep, I try to treat it as a precursor to something that’s going to be good and try to treat it more as an excitement and try to change my feeling around the emotion. Adam Currie: Because I lie in bed and I’ve got adrenaline and my stomach’s churning, but then the same thing happens before I get on a plane somewhere or a rollercoaster, I’m in an excitable state. So I’m trying to reframe the thought being one thing, well, actually, maybe I’m just excited about what’s going to happen tomorrow. And maybe I’m just thinking about all the good things that can happen and I’m getting swept up. I mean, I’m lucky and unlucky, I’m lucky in the sense that my wife is very supportive and she’s always there to listen to me when I’m projecting and I’m worried and I’m saying things that might not help sleep, she’s there to keep the checks and balances there and check me back. But I’m unlucky in the sense that if they handed out gold medals for sleepers, she would be in the running for one, she’s the kind of person that can just get into bed and then immediately is in some form of deep sleep. Adam Currie: And sometimes I watch her get into bed and I actually watch what happens and watch her lie down and then she’s gone. And I just look at that on with such envy and that consumption and I’ve heard this on your podcast before that sometimes makes it even worse because you’re like, why can’t I do that? How did you do that? I feel like waking up and saying, what did you just do that? How did you do that? And sometimes it makes it worse, but you can’t pick and choose your partners on their ability to sleep. You pick and choose your partners because of who you love. And fortunate, for me, my wife, when she’s awake is really understanding and she helps me get through it quite a lot. Adam Currie: And she helps me reframe some of the thoughts and some of the feelings I have around it. And I used to wake her up in the night when I couldn’t sleep and looking back, it was quite a selfish behavior, but I used to wake her up because I was in distress and I would wake her up and say I can’t sleep and I’m having real trouble, but it took me a while to recognize and even fairly recently recognize that behavior doesn’t lead me to sleep, it’s just me trying to give someone else my problem in the hope that it fixes the problem. And of course, it doesn’t. So that’s when I learned about getting out of bed and going downstairs and putting the lights on dim light and reading. And I weed myself off my reliance on my partners to hold the burden, if that makes sense. So I’m standing alone with it now, if you like. Martin Reed: Yeah. So like you said, it can be a blessing and a curse, right? When it seems to be that everyone I speak to with chronic insomnia has the best sleeping bed partners in the world and it can lead to that resentment, but also it can be that opportunity to just speak to that person. All right. When you go to bed, when you lie down, what do you think about, what do you do to make sleep happen? And you’re probably going to just get this blank stare, this blank look, I don’t know, because that’s how sleep happens. We do nothing, and it’s when we try doing something for sleep to happen that we get caught up in that struggle. Adam Currie: Absolutely. Yeah. And obviously, in your emails and the teachings and the theory, I fail to believe or understand the two mechanisms for sleep. You talk about you need enough sleep drive and you need a lack of arousal. And if those two elements balance, you will have the right environment or the right conditions for sleep. And in my mind, I was just never cracking the lack of arousal state. I was definitely building up sleep drive because I was having three or four nights in a row where I might have only had two or three hours or one hour or nothing the night before, plenty of sleep drive, but such was the power of the state of the arousal. And I was in such a heightened state of arousal and negative frame of mind that was enough to tip the scales in favor of arousal, but it was understanding that, and I didn’t know that was happening at the time. Adam Currie: I probably knew subconsciously something like that was going on, but it wasn’t until someone had spelled it out for me and put it in black and white and I understood it for what it was. I think that was the paradigm shift. It was understanding that, understanding that those are the two conditions you need and then feeling incredibly stupid about all the gimmicks that I look back on now that I tried to try to control that. And like you say, quite often, great sleepers, they don’t know how to answer the question, because when I ask my wife, she says, I lie down and I close my eyes and then it’s the morning. It’s the day after then. It’s like, yeah, but what did you do? It’s like I did this and of course, because they have no arousal, no preconceptions or feelings or thoughts or expectations about sleep. Adam Currie: They just have this well ingrained habit where they lie down, they close their eyes and they go to sleep and it’s not as easy for everyone to achieve that. But yeah, it’s understanding that was massively key to improving my thoughts and about how I approach sleep. I talked about my wedding too a couple of times, that was key for me. I actually did sleep for about four or five hours a night before I got married. And of all the things I’ve done in my life, getting married was way up there on the nervousness scale. Martin Reed: Yeah. Adam Currie: But actually I got more sleep on that night before than I had on other nights where comparatively the next day was very low stakes and the difference between the two was I was more prepared to let go the night before I got married than I was on other days. And that’s the common denominator is my ability to let go of those thoughts. Martin Reed: Yeah. Adam Currie: And just say, what will be? I think you actually told them the night before, very few people will sleep. I think you may have said that. I think you said you didn’t sleep very well the night. Martin Reed: Yeah, no, I didn’t sleep very well the night before my wedding, I think a lot of people would experience the same thing. And the thing is like, for people that have never gone through the struggle with sleep, they just kind of recognize all right, it’s a difficult night, but they would never kind of contemplate all right now I can’t get married. Or the wedding is just going to be a disaster they’ll just be like, oh, it’s just one of those nights and they’ll just still go on with their plans. But when we’ve really been caught up in this struggle within insomnia, really, it changes things. Right? Martin Reed: Because now we’re like, am I still going to be able to do this? Am I still going to be able to do whatever I’ve got planned for the day? Am I still going to be able to live the kind of life I want to live? And I think that’s where the real fear, the real arousal, the real struggle comes from because we see insomnia or we see nighttime wakefulness as this obstacle to us living the kind of life we want to live, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be. Adam Currie: Definitely. And like you say, it’s what you do in that time where you are awake that makes the difference. When I started, it was tossing and turning and throwing the blankets around. I would sit up in bed and I actually have this very vivid memory of being set up in my bed with my head in my undies, just in despair going, it’s like 5:00 AM, I’ve been lining bed since 10:00 PM. What on earth is going on with me? What is happening? And I would just pace up and down the room and then get back. So all of the things that makes sleep less likely I was doing versus now where if I know I start to feel uncomfortable, I just get out of bed and I go downstairs and read a book for 20 minutes, half an hour and I’ll try again. Adam Currie: And quite often that cycle will happen two or three times. Sometimes I won’t make it, I’ll get downstairs and I’ll read a book or pop the television on and I won’t make it back upstairs because I would’ve actually fallen asleep on the sofa. You know? So I’ve done the job, although that’s not the design sometimes that happens and sometimes you think, well, at least I got the sleep I needed, but yeah, it’s how you spend that time awake now. And I’m not saying that I find it incredibly comfortable when I’m awake and that I can think clearly, because still now it frustrates me and I can get anxious about it. Martin Reed: Yeah. Adam Currie: But I now no longer allow it to say, okay, this is now a deal breaker on the day after, because that’s just now off the table. Even if I don’t sleep, it’s no longer on the table skipping in the next day. And when you commit to that, life is a lot easier in general sleep then becomes easier because sleep now doesn’t have an impact on what you do the next day. It’s almost like reverse psychology. It’s like, well, you can sleep if you want, it makes no difference because you’re still doing this. So you can either do it with eight hours sleep or do it with none, it doesn’t matter, your choice. Martin Reed: Yeah. And yeah, I think the arousal side of the equation that heightened arousal that can temporarily suppress sleep is important. I think it’s important to emphasize that we are not saying as soon as there’s somewhere else or like sleep’s just never going to happen. Often what can happen is it’s our battle with everything that’s going on in our mind. You know? So I always like to say, it’s not necessarily, for example, anxiety, it’s not necessarily just because we’re experiencing anxious thoughts that means that we’re doomed to a night of wakefulness, it’s often our battle with that anxiety, we’re trying to fight it, we’re trying to push it away, we’re trying to think about something else, that requires so much mental effort that sleep becomes almost impossible once we’ve become engaged in that battle. Martin Reed: And I think that also contributes to so many of the symptoms we associate with all the time we spending awake like the fatigue, the brain fog, lack of alertness, lack of concentration. I think a lot of it is influenced by that battle we’re engaged in rather than it being exclusively a symptom of long periods of time of wakefulness. Adam Currie: Yeah. 100%. Yeah. And it’s kind of similar to how you framed it earlier and the analogy you used. It’s like, I picture my sleep as like Niagara falls, that’s how I was looking at it and I would see something interesting in the falls and I would want to grab ahold of something, that would be a thought like you’re not going to sleep tonight or I think you might have problems tonight. And I would almost compulsively grab hold of that and once you’re in the rapid, you’re gone, it’s very hard to swim back against the current to get out. And eventually you fall over the edge. And that is how it was with me until eventually I could then stand on the shore and just look at the rapid instead and I know it was there and I make the choice do I go in and grab the fish or not? Adam Currie: And yeah, every night I have that discussion almost with myself. I have to remind myself not to put my hand in the rapids. Sometimes I do, I’m only human. I’m not perfect. Sometimes I will succumb to that because I don’t know what your experience is with other people, but sometimes I would find those thoughts to be quite invasive, I would, for no reason whatsoever, the night before I’m just getting into bed with nothing happening the next day at all. I would decide to tell myself for some strange reason that, I don’t know why, I might struggle tonight. And that was enough to then set the chain reaction off. It’s incredible how impactful that kind of thinking can be. So it’s just about learning how to counteract that thought and separate that thought. Adam Currie: And like you say, come away from it and engage in something else and you can’t control how you think about something, but you control how you respond to that thought. And I think that’s the key. Martin Reed: I love that analogy that you shared. Did you say you just kind of visualized those thoughts as fish was it in the river that were swimming by? Adam Currie: Yes. Martin Reed: I love that. Adam Currie: I use Niagara falls because it’s rapid and then you fall off the edge and if you stay in there too long, eventually you get to the point where you can’t swim back and then when you fall off, it’s like that’s the night done then. So my thought was, can I get out of the rapids before I fall over the edge? But yeah, the fish were like, I’m not going to sleep or the fish were, you are going to struggle tomorrow or the fish were, oh, you don’t have to do that. That was how I saw it. Martin Reed: Yeah, exactly. And you’ve got all those different thoughts, all those different fish in the water that are all swimming by, some might swim right in front of you for a really long time. Some might just go whizzing right past some might disappear and then come back around again. If we can just get to that point though, where we’re just observing that happen rather than falling over the edge, as you said, just getting caught up in the rapids, just trying to grab all these fish and throw them out of the river, it just becomes a lot easier. Doesn’t it? It’s just like we’re abandoning that struggle. We’re using that phrase of letting go like that you’ve been saying. Adam Currie: Absolutely. Yeah. And in my experience of having insomnia now or having trouble with sleep rather for the last probably three or four years, I’m honest with myself, the real exhausting thing about insomnia isn’t the lack of sleep, it’s the battle and the thoughts that you have to deal with. And it’s the journey you take yourself on and the hard time that you give yourself as well in many senses, that’s what’s really tiring. It’s not the lack of sleep because you can prove to yourself you can be incredibly effective without sleep. It’s just the thoughts that come along with it, which are really exhausting. And the worry, I remember, I don’t know if you do recall but my real worry was about health. I was thinking, will I have a heart attack if I don’t sleep for three days? And you read all sorts of things online about your chance of developing diabetes and hypertension and all these awful medical conditions, which of course, makes it even worse. Adam Currie: And the truth is that I’m sure that there’s no real link to lots of these things, but of course, if you just keep reading, that makes it worse. Anyway, so my worry was about what it was doing to my health. So that’s the paradox, isn’t it? Is that you need to sleep to look after your health, but you can’t. And when you are sleepless, you start Googling, how bad is it if I don’t sleep? And of course, they say, oh, it’s quite bad. And you’re like, that’s even worse. And of course, it just send spirals. Martin Reed: Yeah, absolutely. And the interesting thing is that there’s no clinical studies that have found insomnia causes any health condition whatsoever. And one of the biggest studies that have been done that looked at the role of chronic insomnia on mortality I think it involved like 37 million people from all different studies and they found that there was no link. There was no link to between people that had chronic insomnia and an increased risk of mortality. It was the same across the board, but yet we see all these studies and these newspaper articles that find associations and it comes down to that example of if someone has an ashtray in their house, maybe they’re more likely to develop cancer, but is that because they got an astray in their house or is it because they smoke or is there something else that’s causing that? There’s this cause and effect and associations never show causality. So we find all these associations and then because headlines need to attract attention. The ones that don’t really sound exciting like chronic insomnia does not increase your risk of mortality may tend to not get much attention. Adam Currie: I hate newspapers where they have those kind of headlines. Martin Reed: Yeah. And one that finds that can used in a way that comes up with a great headline or that might attract more research funding, they’re the ones that get all the attention. And it is a shame because, like you said, when we are struggling with chronic insomnia, we are doing more research about sleep. We’re going to be coming across all these articles that are saying scary stuff and that just puts more pressure on ourselves to sleep. It increases that arousal we’re dealing with more struggle then. And we get tangled up in that struggle even more. It’s like more pieces of rope around us that we get tangled up in. Adam Currie: Absolutely. Yeah. And it fuels the obsession with sleep, that’s what I found. I became so obsessed about the science of sleep, and again, it was all just to try to have some kind of control, the more you look into these studies and the more you read, like you say, the more rope you surround yourself with the more difficult it is to let go. And yeah, it became a real obsession. Sleep for me became I could have studied a PhD in sleep. That’s what it felt like for the month that I had my first major episode. I was doing everything I could to rest control and the more information that came in the further I was away from realizing what it was I needed to do. It was actually an absence of information that I needed. Adam Currie: It was, again, things that would take my arousal away. But unfortunately, when you are in the midst of it and you haven’t got this benefit position of hindsight here, that’s just what you do. And I’m sure you hear it all the time. And again, anyone that’s listening who’s watching this or listening to this and is in that place right now, know that too much information and too much fixation and focus around the mechanics of sleep does not help you sleep. It never helps me sleep ever. In fact, it actively stopped me from sleeping. No good becoming an expert in sleep if you can’t get to sleep. Martin Reed: Yeah. That’s a great point. And I think it becomes even more problematic when we’re using that time that we could be engaged in actions that are more important to us in terms of living a life aligned with our values and doing things that we personally enjoy and find enriching. Often we can substitute all that stuff with that ongoing research and research itself. I mean, some research is probably helpful, but when it becomes that obsession and it kind of consumes our life, that’s when it can become really counterproductive. Martin Reed: We talked a lot about all these different behaviors that we implement some helpful, some less helpful, I think just to summarize the stuff that you’ve said has been helpful for you was that letting go, just abandoning that struggle with thoughts, feelings, nighttime wakefulness, and sleep itself, engaging in actions that are meaningful for you. Independently of sleep and even in the presence of all those fish running down the river. And then you touched upon just doing things to help create good conditions for sleep, better conditions for sleep as well. For example, like not trying to chase sleep by going to bed before you’re actually feeling sleepy. And if you’re really tossing and turning during the night, really struggling, if that wakefulness is feeling really unpleasant, just doing something that can help make that wakefulness more pleasant, whether that’s reading a book or watching TV, it really doesn’t matter. Martin Reed: Those things we do at night can be so helpful too, because they also train the brain that wakefulness, although we don’t really want to experience it, it’s not actually like a physical danger or a threat to us. It’s not the same thing as a 400 pound grizzly bear waiting for us in our bed at night. It’s not going to physically harm us. So if we can just embrace that weight from us to make it more pleasant, not only does that make the nights a little bit better, because we’re awake anyway, let’s make them a bit more pleasant, but they also train the brain to realize that this wakefulness isn’t a danger or a threat, it’s not something it has to stay alert for to try and protect us from. And that alertness in turn makes sleep more difficult. I just wanted to summarize because I know we covered a lot of stuff. Was there anything else that you had to add to that I maybe missed out on or anything you wanted to clarify? Adam Currie: No, I think you’ve done a good job of summarizing that, a much better job than I have. But then again, you’ve just been listening to me waffle on for the last hour. Martin Reed: Exactly. I have the easy part. Adam Currie: Yeah, exactly. But no, I think you’ve covered that quite well. And I suppose the only thing I would add is every time I have issues with sleep, every time I have a problematic night, I strengthen the healthier relationship of the understanding of what the problem is. So I try to reframe that. Every night I struggle, I get closer to less struggles in the future because I understand what’s happening and it was learning to show some sort of compassion for yourself as well. Martin Reed: Yeah. Adam Currie: I talked before about self stigma. I found myself incredibly frustrated at myself and the kind of language I would use with myself mentally I would, oh, I hate how you can’t sleep. That’s the kind of feeling and thoughts you would have and it’s not only unhelpful for sleep, it’s also very damaging to your self-esteem and self-confidence as well. So it’s showing yourself some love and compassion and understanding about when you are in those wakeful states. I just try to tell myself, oh, you’re having trouble again, but don’t worry, you’ve been there before. Everything’s going to be okay, it’s fine. Just go and do something and come back. Adam Currie: And you know what? If you don’t fall back to sleep, it’s not the end of the world, just carry on. And it’s showing yourself that compassion. And I talked before about information stream and looking too much. Information is good when the source of it is controlled and the stream of it is controlled. That’s why I found your emails so massively helpful because the right information was coming to me on the right cadence. And it was the right intensity. And I wasn’t trying to control the information. It was nuggets of information coming through that were really easy to understand on a cyclical nature that then it was almost like rhythmic and maybe that’s by design. Adam Currie: It’s like circadian almost, you wake up in the morning and you’re like, oh, here’s some information that you should know about sleep. And that was my ritual. I would wake up in the morning and it’d be like week one, week two. And it was almost becoming part of my routine, but information is good when you get it from the right sources and it’s controlled in the right cadence. Martin Reed: Yeah. That’s great. And I love that you talked about being kind to yourself, because that is really important because it is difficult to go through this, it is important to be kind to ourselves. Often we are really kind to other people when they’re going through a struggle, but we don’t turn that inward on ourselves when we’re going through struggle and pain. And that is important to recognize too. We don’t want to sugar coat it, what we’re going through is hard, we need to acknowledge that and be kind to ourselves. And I love how you talked about when I have these difficult nights now they’re opportunities and their opportunities to recognize, oh, there’s no mystery here, I know exactly why this is happening and there are opportunities to implement things that just help train your brain that yeah, this wakefulness, it’s not dangerous, it’s not a threat. Martin Reed: There are things I can do to make this wakefulness more pleasant. And then the next day when I’m awake, I can still do these things that help me live that kind of life. I got that opportunity to once again, prove to myself that because I spent time awake at night, it doesn’t have to move me away from the kind of life I want to live. Adam Currie: That’s right. Martin Reed: So it’s okay to feel these things, but we don’t have to be hard on ourselves when we have these difficult nights, they can be seen too as opportunities to reinforce what we’re learning and to practice this things that can help us over the longer term too training the brain that wakefulness isn’t a threat or a danger. Adam Currie: Absolutely. Yeah. And I think some really great advice I was once given is treat yourself like you are someone who you are responsible for looking after. And that was really helpful for me to think that you externalize and think you would help someone else the same way. So treat yourself like you are someone else who are you who you are responsible for looking after, that was really helpful for me, because it made me think of myself as somebody else. So I was less interested in stigmatizing myself and more interested in nurturing myself and caring for myself and that made a huge difference. Yeah. It actually probably did make me sleep better as well. But if it didn’t, I was kinder to myself and it would promote the chances of sleep that the next opportunity, whether it was the next night or night after, so yeah. Martin Reed: Yeah. Well that’s great. Well, Adam, I really appreciate all the time you’ve taken out your day to come on and we’ve covered so much great stuff. I’m sure that everyone listening to this is going to get some kind of value fr from it. But there’s always this one question that I ask everyone. So I don’t want you to feel left out. So I’m going to ask this question for you if you feel comfortable just hanging on for a couple of more minutes to answer it. It’s this, if someone with chronic insomnia is listening and they feel as though they’ve tried everything that they’re just beyond help, they can’t do anything to improve their sleep, what would you tell them? Adam Currie: I would tell them that they are closer to a good night’s sleep than they could ever imagine. And that the things that are separating them from a good night’s sleep are actually easily removed. And they’re not things that require monumental or Titanic efforts or lots of money or lots of fads and gimmicks and supplements, it’s straightforward healthy thinking and reframing your relationship with how you spend your time in your bed. It’s as simple as that. Martin Reed: All right. Great. Well, I think that’s a wonderful note to end on. So thanks again for coming on Adam. I really appreciate it. Adam Currie: You’re welcome. Thanks very much for having me, I appreciate it. 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. 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 at insomniacoach.com. Share this page