The Spiral of Sleep Anxiety and Its Consequences

Transcript

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

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

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

Laura: Yeah. Thank you for having me.

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

Laura: Yeah, absolutely. So I would say that it started about two and a half years. It was like around August of 2022. So I’m going on three years of, since it initially started. And I would say there wasn’t a particularly like super stressful, like negative, stressful life event. But I remember that I was going on a trip abroad and right before I left for the trip, my husband proposed to me and I was very excited.

Laura: Like I was happy and excited but I was so excited that I couldn’t sleep that night. Going into the next night we went and I think we stayed at, like his aunt and uncle lived near JFK airport. So we went and stayed with them and I think like we were up late.

Laura: I wasn’t in my own environment. I struggled to sleep again the next night we had the flight. So it was a red eye and I can, I like, cannot sleep on airplanes. I can’t get comfortable. So I was up again and I remember that was kinda the moment where I like, and now I know like in retrospect that was the moment where I started to place this like level of importance on it, of this is bad.

Laura: But I didn’t know that at the time. I just thought okay, this is bad. I need to sleep. Like I really need to sleep tonight. And I remember the first day on the trip we get there, like I had a pretty good day, but leading like the hours leading into bedtime, I started to just get really nervous and like putting a lot of pressure on needing to sleep because I just didn’t, at the time, I couldn’t perceive myself being able to enjoy a vacation if I wasn’t sleeping.

Laura: So I went to bed that night and it was like full blown like panic. That like hyper arousal feeling like of Yeah, just anxiety and like shakiness having to get up to go to the bathroom every 30 minutes, like just so over the top anxious. And that kind of started it and I remember that was the first time and then that that led into nine nights on the trip.

Laura: I like didn’t sleep like almost at all. I would get maybe like an hour of sleep a night on the rest of the trip and I remember just being so overwhelmed by it. So that’s how it started and then that just spiraled from there.

Martin: As the stakes increased, the level of struggle increased, so it was like the more that getting a certain amount or a certain type of sleep felt important to you, the more pressure you were putting on yourself to make sleep happen, the more important it became, then it was attached to all these outcomes. I can’t enjoy this trip if I don’t get a certain amount or type of sleep.

Martin: I can’t be the person I want to be. I can’t do the things I want to do. And it just mushrooms from there and just pulls you into even more difficulty and even more struggle.

Martin: So you got back from vacation were you at that point there where you were thinking I’m gonna get back from vacation, things will settle down, I’ll get back into my life routine and sleep will get back on track.

Laura: Yes. And it did actually. So I, towards the end of the vacation I finally fell asleep, which again, like I, I’ve, I know so much more about it now, so I understand like the process and that the sleep drive had just built up and I crashed for 10 hours on the last night. And that brought my anxiety down enough that I was able to be like, okay, like I’m going home tomorrow.

Laura: It’s gonna be fine. I’m gonna be in my own environment. And for a couple of nights I was, but this was, I’m a teacher, so this was right before the start of the school year for me. And I came home. I had maybe a week before the school year started, and it was the night before the. First day back to school and I’m laying in bed and it just kinda kicked up again.

Laura: I have to sleep because I’ve work tomorrow. And that like really spiraled from there. So that turned into a night of like barely sleeping. And then I was like, oh my goodness, I cannot function at work like this. I’m not gonna be able to function at work like this. And that really led into the worst of it.

Laura: It was two months straight, I would say, of maybe one to two hours of sleep a night. Going to work, trying to push through and going to work every day.

Laura: Sometimes I would call out. So I was really overwhelmed by it. And some nights I’d maybe get three or four hours maybe, but most nights it was one to two hours.

Laura: I was really like going down the rabbit hole. It was like, this is terrible. I can’t live like this. And I would say days were just as bad as nights sometimes because my anxiety was so high about it. So I was even getting a lot of physical symptoms during the day.

Laura: So I would be really shaky really. My heart would race feelings of like panic and dread. I lost a lot of weight. I couldn’t, felt like I couldn’t eat ’cause I was just so scared and didn’t understand what was wrong with me.

Martin: I think a lot of people listening to this will identify that part of the journey where it just seems to almost take a life of its own, where it’s just becoming more and more powerful, more and more influential. And it’s like the more you try to fix it, the more you try to get rid of the insomnia.

Martin: The, just the more it grows, the more difficult it becomes.

Laura: It feels you start to lose so much trust in yourself and your body, and you lose trust that your body even knows what to do anymore. And you start, you really do start believing that you’ve lost the ability to sleep. So it’s it really feels like your body’s betraying you at that time, which I felt that heavily I would get mad sometimes.

Martin: It can lead to us being pretty mean or hard on ourselves as well. Like, why is this happening to me? This must be my fault. There’s something wrong with me or what I’m doing. But everything you were doing at that time, you were doing in an attempt to fix a problem.

Martin: So nothing you were experiencing was your fault. You were doing the best you could at the time that you were experiencing that.

Laura: This has been such a journey and it has unfolded over the last two and a half years and it’s included a lot of setbacks. And I do think that framing setbacks as opportunities is, it’s hard in the moment because it doesn’t feel like an opportunity. But you come out of it and you’re like, oh wait, okay it was.

Laura: The first time around where I was really like at rock bottom, I never had an all-nighter. But in my first setback I did, and then I actually had multiple all-nighters in a row and every single one I’ve uncovered like a new layer of like resistance that I hadn’t discovered before. I’ve learned so much about it and I’ve been able to like, take some of the meaning away from it.

Laura: And I do think that people with insomnia tend to get maybe a little bit more sleep sometimes than they think they do. I think there is some like hyper sleep in there because there would be a couple times where I thought I was wide awake all night and my husband would be like, I heard you snore.

Laura: Or you were breathing like really, like it really felt like you were asleep. Even if it’s just a couple minutes, I do think that there’s a little bit more of that in there than maybe we realized, which did help calm me down a little bit.

Laura: But I would say that even though there were allnighters I still could feel that I was on the path to recovery. It just, I was making it mean less.

Martin: Relapses or setbacks or roadblocks or obstacles whatever you want to call them they’re something that comes with any journey. And I love the way that you now are able to see them as learning opportunities because really that’s exactly what they are.

Martin: They’re not evidence that what you’re doing isn’t working or that you’re on the wrong path. It just means that there’s something there to learn to take from it.

Martin: Looking back, what were the things that you tried to do in an effort to get your sleep back on track that didn’t really prove to be helpful or useful for you?

Laura: It’s funny because I’ve watched so many of your success stories at this point, and I feel like we all start in the same place. We look up like, how to improve my sleep and the first thing you get is sleep hygiene. So I went all in on sleep hygiene. I was, my nighttime routine was like four hours long. I was like, it was exhausting, honestly, just to even have that routine. It was like very disruptive to my lifestyle. I would my husband eats is used to eating very late and I’d adjusted to eating very late, but I read that was bad.

Laura: If you’re trying to digest food while trying to fall asleep, it’s gonna make it hard, even though I’d literally never had a problem with that in the past. So I started eating dinner at 5:00 PM instead of seven or 8:00 PM with him. So I wasn’t eating dinner with someone. I was eating alone when I could eat.

Laura: ’cause I was really nauseous. I was, I would do I would avoid screens for two or three hours before bed and I if I didn’t have work to, or if, even if I did have work to do that’s on the screen. So it’s like just sitting there trying to read a book for a couple hours. I would go take a bath to relax every night.

Laura: I would do yoga, I would do meditations. I would put oh man, I would even do like lavender spray on my pillow. Like I think of the things that I tried and some of them were like really ridiculous. I, and even like during the night at that point too, I was like not really letting myself do what felt right at night.

Laura: So I would get up because I read, you should get up like 15 or 20 minutes after you’re not sleeping, and I will go into the living room and read something boring that I didn’t like reading because I was told you have to read something dull so that you get sleepy again. Which like intuitively felt wrong because I was like, I am very sleepy.

Laura: I’m very tired. That doesn’t seem to be helping though so I would, yeah, I’d read something boring. I would avoid screens, I would avoid harsh lights and turn on a really dim lamp. And I just remember at that time just feeling really lonely because it wasn’t just that I was struggling with sleep at night.

Laura: I was also making everything in my life around how I would sleep. I cut out caffeine, I don’t drink a ton of alcohol, but I would have a glass of wine occasionally. I stopped drinking alcohol together. I stopped going out late. So I would make plans around sleep. My husband and I didn’t really go out to dinner a lot at that time and we liked to do that together.

Laura: So it’s just like it was becoming so all consuming and like everything in my life was revolving around it. So it was very isolating. So yeah, that, that’s, that was kinda like the routine that I was following at that time. It was a long one. It was tiring.

Martin: I can just hear from you describing that, that you are very clearly a very strong problem solver. And you really threw everything at this. You were very determined, very focused to fix this problem. Something that stands out is that so many of the actions that you described seemed to be actions that didn’t really reflect who you are or the kind of life you want to live, so you started, for example, to eat separately from your husband.

Martin: You stopped going out in the evenings. You’d read boring stuff rather than interesting stuff. You wouldn’t go on screens. So all these things that you were doing were pulling you away from the life you wanted to live. And at the same time, when they weren’t f ixing sleep weren’t improving the situation that you were in then you’ve got all that on top. So you’ve got the issue with sleep, and then you’ve got all the things that you are understandably doing to try and fix that problem that are then adding on top of that and making things even more difficult because you’re getting pulled away from doing stuff that matters.

Laura: It was a very lonely time and I think a lot of people, I’ve heard a lot of people say, and I think a lot of people can relate. Like you feel like at the time you were the only person in the world going through this, which I think is why resources like this are it was like such a game changer for me because I was like, oh my gosh, I’m not the only one going through this.

Laura: I also do wanna mention that I did try a lot of medications too. Because I think that there’s a lot of like mixed feelings and like taboo on medications for this. And I’ve come a long way with my thoughts on medications and actually not even being like, oh, I don’t need them.

Laura: I’ve actually come a long way. And being able to be like, it’s actually okay. And that having less resistance as opposed to more resistance when it comes to medications, if you know that if it feels intuitively right, is actually okay. And I did try different medications and I’ll say most of ’em just didn’t work for me. Nothing was gonna override that feeling of panic and make me sleep.

Laura: I stayed up all night one time through an Ambien weird experience. I didn’t even know that you could stay up through an Ambien, but when you’re that like anxious about sleep it’s not necessarily going to cure it.

Martin: I can definitely tell that you’re being kinder to yourself and less judgmental. And I think that is important because like you said, everyone, every individual person is the expert on themselves. So taking something like medication, for example, if someone is comfortable taking medication, then how is that a problem for anyone else?

Martin: Why should that be a problem for them if they’re comfortable to do that? So just as other people shouldn’t judge another person, really, why should we judge ourselves if that’s something we’re comfortable with? And I think that as you do that, as you become kinder to yourself and less judgmental, there’s a lot, there’s a lot more opportunity to identify insights or take learning opportunities.

Martin: And you are able now to reflect on the fact that, okay, medication isn’t taboo. But at the same time, in your experience, it was something that was no guarantee it was gonna generate sleep for you. It was in that bucket of eating separately from your husband, avoiding screens, getting outta bed just because you’re awake.

Martin: It was one of those actions that came with the intent of trying to make sleep happen, and as soon as you tried to make sleep happen, it just made it more elusive and more difficult.

Laura: Yes, absolutely. Yeah. It was like it was a time where I, again, it was like, that was really rock bottom, was like realizing that, okay, actually medication isn’t gonna solve this. I have to work on my mindset and my thoughts around this. That was hard, like a hard pill to swallow, no pun intended.

Martin: You found an approach that you found helpful and that gave you that initial encouragement to try something new that didn’t rely quite so much on rules, rituals, trying, effort.

Martin: Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Laura: So I remember like stumbling across this article that this woman wrote and she talked about it was the first time I’d ever seen someone put into words. Exactly what I was going through. And she talked about how she, her struggle was even like, she was really in like the trenches for a year.

Laura: She was getting one to two hours of sleep a night. And I found this article and I was like, oh my God, like this is exactly what I’m going through. And I think I also intuitively just knew that this was an anxiety issue. Like I didn’t, I went to doctors, like I went to a naturopath.

Laura: I went to my PCP all for like anxiety medication and like sleep medication. But I never went to a sleep doctor or anything ’cause I just knew that’s not what it was. Like I knew that something didn’t just happen overnight that made me not be able to sleep. Like I knew it was what kind of, what it was rooted in.

Laura: And so reading that article was like, oh my gosh, like someone else is going through this. And then she linked to some other resources. So she had linked like the sleep coach school with Daniel Erichsen. She had, I think that’s how I found your account as well.

Laura: And then I went and did some more kind of research into those, and that’s where I find like all your success stories. And I was like, oh my gosh, wait a second. There’s I don’t even know how many, but there’s so many of these people that experiencing exactly what I am. And that kind of that really did change the game for me, and to know like intuitively it just felt right. It felt like what the people were saying was exactly what I could relate to. And so I just went with that. I’ve read like Claire Weekes’s book, I’ve read a lot into the ACT approach and like just working with the Anxious Truth Podcast with Drew Linsalata, like all these different resources.

Laura: It just all led me there and I was like, wow, this is there’s something here. And yeah, that, that kind of took me on, started the whole recovery part of the journey.

Martin: The big epiphany moment was first and foremost just realizing that you weren’t alone, that you weren’t the only person going through this, struggling with it. Dealing with all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it. And that in itself can be quite a relief and quite reassuring.

Martin: And then when you dug a little bit deeper you found that there was like a common theme among these success stories and that really resonated with you because you compared it to what your experience has been.

Martin: Can you share with us what the themes seemed to be that you were finding in these success stories?

Laura: The common theme is acceptance, I would say is the one underlying term. But what that looks is the idea of befriending wakefulness and coming to terms with with something you’re really scared of. Which like if you think if you’re have any sort of phobia, like if you’re agoraphobic you might start with the acceptance approach of trying to get, go out the front door for a couple seconds to come back in.

Laura: And I really think it’s very similar with insomnia of we’ve developed this phobia of being awake at night and we that clicked. ’cause I was like, that is ’cause I would spend all day scared of what the night would look like. And even though no single night on the entire journey was ever as bad as it was in my imagination leading up to it.

Laura: But at the time I couldn’t see that I was too in it. And I think the common like baseline here is just making, finding a little bit more acceptance. It just has to be a little bit to start before you’ll see improvements, honestly. But finding a little bit more acceptance with the thing you’re really scared of, which for us is being awake at night.

Laura: And so yeah, that’s really where I was like, okay, if I can if I can experience this thing I’m so afraid of with a little bit more ease, I wonder what that could lead to. And then it was also there was also a layer of like how I was experiencing it during the day as well. And realizing this was huge for me.

Laura: Two months into this journey, I was like, I’m gonna have to take a leave of absence from work. I can’t do this. I cannot work like this. And a huge layer of that acceptance came to me naturally from just getting to a point where I wasn’t getting any worse in the way that I was feeling during the day with the exhaustion.

Laura: And that was a organic thing for me. I realized maybe a month and a half in I, of course I was exhausted. And, but your body is so amazing at adapting. And so it was giving me more adrenaline during the day, which at the time I was like, oh, I don’t wanna feel so anxious.

Laura: But also it was keeping me awake during the day, which I needed at the time. And I was, I’m a teacher, like I said before, so I was a, I like had this intrusive thought that I was gonna forget my students’ names and not be able to remember them. ’cause it was the beginning of the year.

Laura: I remembered their names that year, just like I do every other year. Nothing was different. And I remember it hitting me that I’m tired. My brain is very foggy. It feels like there’s a hot air balloon inside my head. But that’s it. I’m actually okay. And I’m actually, if I didn’t tell, I did have a conversation with my, with the principal at the time about it just because I wanted I just wanted him to know this is what I’m going through.

Laura: And if I’m like, ever if I call out of work, take a sick day, like this is what I’m experiencing. And he was very supportive. But I remember just, it, it hitting me like it’s not, it’s been what it’s been and it’s not getting any worse. And I think that was the first layer of acceptance for me of I’m actually okay, this is really uncomfortable, but I’m not gonna die.

Laura: Like I was convinced I was gonna die. Like I’m gonna, I can’t, this isn’t sustainable. You need sleep to survive. I was actually okay and I was actually able to do my job. And if I hadn’t told my principal, I don’t think he ever would’ve known. That I was experiencing this ’cause I was still performing to that level.

Laura: The lack of sleep was not getting in my way as much, honestly as the anxiety was at the time, which is just so interesting to think back on. But yeah, I hit that that natural acceptance of I’m okay during the day. That was step one. Step two was then the befriending wakefulness at night.

Laura: That was really hard because it just does feel so counterintuitive. You, of course you would prefer to be asleep at night and it’s okay to have preferences and stuff, but I struggled with that.

Laura: I guess that was a really long-winded way of saying acceptance, but yeah.

Martin: I’m glad that you went into a little bit more detail because when we just say the word acceptance, it throws up lots of different connotations or ideas. So I am glad you gave it some context. There’s gonna be lots of people that come across that kind of approach. Maybe people that have really been struggling for years, if not decades, with sleep. And are very skilled at the approach of resistance, understandably who are gonna maybe think if I, what if I accept the presence of insomnia?

Martin: Surely it will get worse because I’m not resisting it anymore. If I remove that resistance, surely it’s gonna get worse. And the same with the daytime anxiety, for example, or whatever difficult stuff comes up during the day because of the insomnia, the fatigue the brain fog. This idea that if I stop resisting that.

Martin: What if it does get worse? What if these anxious thoughts get even more powerful, even more intense. What if I have a full on panic attack?

Martin: Did you ever have any thoughts like that or concerns like that? And whether you did or whether you didn’t, what would you say to someone who’s sitting here listening to this and thinking, yeah, that’s my concern, that what if this does get worse if I take an approach of acceptance?

Laura: I would say yes, first of all, absolutely I experienced doubt and I still do have, I call them intrusive thoughts now, anxious thoughts. I don’t consider them rational thoughts, but I do still get moments of doubt where I’m like, wait, what if this isn’t right?

Laura: What if this isn’t right? And I think that it would be abnormal not to have those thoughts because you really are putting a lot of trust in your body’s natural ability to do what it’s supposed to do. And you’ve lost that trust when you’ve gone through insomnia.

Laura: You’re not allowing the insomnia to happen because you’re accepting it. That’s not how sleep works. You can’t lose your ability to sleep. And it’s going to put you in a position where you can actually escape the cycle instead of just coping with it and having it keep hitting you over and over again.

Martin: I like that idea of escaping the cycle because it does feel like when we’re struggling or when we feel trapped, it does feel like a cycle of just we are trying more or we’re struggling more. So we try harder then we seem to struggle harder then we try harder, and round and round we go. And if nothing else, perhaps this idea of acceptance gives us an opportunity to try something different to try and get out of that cycle.

Martin: I cannot and you cannot guarantee that someone will find it helpful, but maybe it’s just worth exploring. Maybe it’s worth playing around with or experimenting with and just seeing what you take from it, seeing what you learn from it. And maybe just adapting it in a way that seems to work or just feel work for you or feel aligned with who you are and what you want to achieve.

Laura: Another thing I’ve learned is that you’re gonna feel like you’re doing it, quote unquote, doing it wrong sometimes and that’s normal. And I would say definitely just put continue to do. Practice the acceptance and everything through those moments. But at the same time, not all, not every approach looks the same for everyone.

Laura: And you can being, like, at this point, I can tell like subtle differences in people’s experiences. Some people find it really helpful to get out of bed at night and some people find it really helpful to just stay in bed and let themselves, and if somebody, if you listen to an interview and somebody says that it’s really helpful for me to get up and get outta bed and go sit in a different space and then get back in bed later, and you fall into the trap of then doing that the next night hoping that it will produce sleep for you.

Laura: That’s not the point. The point is to find that acceptance that works for you without trying to produce sleep. And that’s, it’s tricky, like to find the balance, but it’s possible.

Martin: I think it, maybe it comes down to whatever actions help you personally move away from struggle.

Laura: Yeah. Yep. Anyone who’s gone through insomnia knows there’s nothing that’s going to make you happy in that moment other than sleeping, but that’s not the goal. What will make you like 10% more comfortable? Just 10% more comfortable. What would be a little bit more enjoyable?

Laura: What would help you experience this with a little bit more ease is what I would turn to when I was struggling at night. Experimenting with what felt good at night, really trying hard not to find patterns that didn’t exist. That’s a huge thing. If something worked one night and didn’t work the next, it would make me spiral again.

Laura: And I had to just say, okay, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t really matter what you do, as long as it’s something that helps you experience it with more ease. So if it, if reading this book worked last night, don’t do it with the express intention of it making you fall asleep tonight.

Laura: I would say over time it went from one to two hours of sleep to two to three. Then for that lasted for a month, then four to five for a month. And then I was starting to get like a full night’s sleep. Very poor quality, like choppy sleep. I started getting really bad, like night sweats and really intense dreaming.

Laura: Like I would dream all night long, the craziest dreams, and I’d probably wake up every 45 minutes to an hour. But I was able to fall back asleep every time and I started to be able to reframe it instead of oh I am waking up every hour. I was like, oh, I actually fell asleep 20 times last night.

Laura: ’cause I had to, because I woke up 20 times. And when I used to think I couldn’t fall asleep at all, I did it 20 times last night. That was, it was cool to see how it unfolded. And I really tried hard not to fall into a trap of frustration with it, where I need my sleep to be normal. I really tried to focus on like progress, not perfection here.

Laura: Like I’m feeling better. I’m feeling more moments of joy every day. I am letting go of the insane nighttime routines. I’m watching TV at night if that’s what makes me happy. I’m a big Harry Potter fan, so I would read the Harry Potter books and watch Harry Potter movies at night.

Laura: And just, it felt good. And then it was from there, it was really just like my body learning how to trust itself again.

Laura: And it takes time. It is not something that happens overnight. I would say it was six, seven months. Like it was a while before I felt like I was quote unquote back to normal.

Martin: One thing that stood out to me was the way you focused less on what your sleep was doing from night to night ’cause it’s really easy to be like, I’ll know I’m making progress when I get a certain number of hours of sleep or a certain type of sleep, or I don’t wake during the night . Using that as our only measure of progress might be setting us up for more struggle.

Laura: That is one of the biggest pieces of advice that I would give to somebody on that journey is to not measure their progress by how much sleep they’re getting. Because that’s a trap and it can lead you to spiral pretty quickly if you’re only measuring progress based on the hours of sleep.

Laura: And even at that time when I was recovering, still grasping this new method or way of thinking, I was definitely measuring progress on the number of hours of sleep I was getting. And I think that kind of contributed to some of the setbacks I wound up having later on. So yeah, that’s a big piece of advice I give to someone is measure the progress based on what you’re doing during the day.

Laura: Look at how much you accomplished despite feeling this tired. That’s huge. You can measure measuring progress based on how, the ease with which you tried to experience the night. So I’m not saying it has to be easy, but if you are like, if you got, even if you got up and went and cleaned or read an a book or watch TV or something that made you feel like this is actually not so bad, but you still didn’t fall asleep, that’s progress.

Laura: That’s definitely a big piece of advice that I would give.

Martin: You hit this really smooth patch, everything was going really well. You weren’t really thinking too much about sleep. It wasn’t really the focus of your attention. You’re living your life. Sleep didn’t really have much of a role or an influence anymore.

Martin: And then something changed. This roadblock or this speed bump or this setback showed up. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Laura: Yeah, so I would say I was doing really well. And then it came back with a vengeance and that was when I experienced my first, I had three all-nighters in a row which was pretty scary for me.

Laura: But I was experiencing them with a little bit less resistance still because I did, I knew about that accepting and befriending wakefulness. But the sleep started to get better and the anxiety wasn’t going away. And I think a lot of people who experienced the insomnia struggle do relate to a lot of the physical symptoms that you feel.

Laura: Like for me it was a lot of digestion issues, nausea feeling very panicky, having panic attacks. That would definitely come with it at night. Heart palpitations, all this stuff and I found that even as my sleep is getting better, my anxiety was really sticking around and that I was trying to ask what is this?

Laura: What can I learn from this? And for me it was like, there’s still some fear here. And that setback, that was hard. That was a really hard one because prior to that it was like, I, it was all around sleep. And now this time around, the sleep triggered it and, but the physical sensations and like the panic and everything was just like so sticky.

Laura: Ultimately, I came out of it the same way that I did before, but I think there was a deeper level of acceptance that I was lacking in the past. And that was all around my thoughts on it. And it’s interesting because I worked with coaches from a couple of different programs and it all boils down to a very similar approach, again, with the acceptance and everything.

Laura: But like you said before, within it comes to acceptance. It, that’s just like a word. And I was hearing this word and I was like, I think I’m accepting. Like I think I’m doing it right. And it did help me. Sleep better for a while. But I remember reading Claire Weekes’s book, and she talks about having a truce with your anxiety, where you’ve gotten to a point where you think you’ve managed it but you might not have addressed the root cause.

Laura: And so you start smooth sailing for a while and you think things are good and it typically does come back because there’s still that layer of acceptance there that maybe you’re missing. And for me it really felt, like I said about my my thoughts around it. So I could accept being awake at night, but I was doing a lot of self mental, like self-soothing, arguing with my thoughts, rationalizing with my thoughts, trying to comfort my thoughts.

Laura: And I thought that was helping at the time. What I learned is that you cannot talk to the part of your brain that produces fear. It doesn’t understand language. It understands actions. And so it’s only through the things that you do that you can actually like work on rewiring your brain to know that you are safe.

Laura: And that’s when it starts. It’s right now, it’s like when you’re in the midst of it, it’s signaling everything as a threat. And it’s looking for threats everywhere. So your thoughts are gonna trend towards the negative. Your symptoms are gonna trend towards the negative. Everything feels dangerous and scary.

Laura: I realized through this process that the self-talk that I was doing was actually doing more harm than good. And that was a whole other layer of acceptance that was hard to come across because I was like, okay, I feel like I’m obsessing too much and doing a lot of trying to comfort myself.

Laura: You’re gonna feel uncomfortable in this process, unfortunately. That discomfort is gonna be there sometimes. And a big part of this process is learning to increase your capacity to be a little bit uncomfortable.

Laura: It doesn’t always feel good. I would say that is unfortunately part of it. But I would say that the sooner you can embrace that a little bit, the faster you can work through that fear.

Laura: I do think that mindfulness and meditation can play a huge role in the acceptance approach if you’re doing it not to get rid of your symptoms, but to learn how to sit with them. And that was a huge layer this time around. Honestly, I’m still working on it.

Laura: Like I, it’s been two or three months now. It’s hard to explain, but when you start practicing it and it starts to feel more intuitive, you really do. You’re like, oh my gosh, wait, they weren’t lying.

Laura: So I started implementing that layer this time around. And I think that was maybe a little bit of the missing piece of the puzzle of I was accepting that wakefulness and stuff at night moving through it with a little bit more ease, but I was still really resistant to all the fear and anxiety I was feeling in general.

Laura: And when I start learning, started learning how to sit with that. Man, I don’t do it with the intention of getting rid of the symptoms, but when you do start embracing and being okay with them, they really do start to ease pretty quickly, which is cool.

Martin: Wow. That’s really insightful. Just like you can’t directly or permanently control insomnia or sleep, we can’t directly or permanently control whatever thoughts or feelings our brain chooses to generate as it does its job of looking out for us.

Martin: And I love how you said that you can’t really communicate with these thoughts and feelings. Your brain only understands what you do in response, in your actions.

Martin: And I think that is actually really empowering because our actions are something that we can always control. So we always get to choose how we respond to those thoughts and those feelings and how we choose to respond often determines whether, we’re engaged in that tug of war battle with our minds, which our mind is always gonna win.

Martin: Or whether we choose to drop that rope. Let the mind just generate whatever thoughts and feelings it’s gonna generate, and we’ll put our attention, or our focus, to some kind of alternative action and do something else. And as we commit to those actions, maybe then the brain in turn learns, oh. Maybe that thing that I was generating fear or anxiety about isn’t such a big deal after all.

Laura: Yeah. And it’s so true because it’s gonna feel at first like it’s gonna feel like BS at first because you’re gonna be, like you say, refocus. And for me, that was so hard. I was like, okay, I’m refocusing every split second, I’m refocusing. You might refocus every split second for a while.

Laura: Like you might have to, you might have to keep refocusing over and just keep doing it. And measure your progress based on the actions you’re taking and the response that you’re giving. And just keep going. Keep going. And it can, you really are like, I remember it just, I would describe it as annoying.

Laura: It was like, I am. So distracted by how miserable I feel, how am I supposed to refocus? Just keep doing it. And it, because it takes practice. It really, it’s almost it’s like learning to meditate. You’re learning to let thoughts and feelings just be there and come and go at their own pace. And it’s not always going to take hours, days for those thoughts and feelings to pass.

Laura: This is, it’s temporary, but in the meantime just really keep going. It’s, and it’s powerful when you start to notice that it really works.

Martin: It does take ongoing practice. We don’t get to a certain state where thoughts and feelings never affect us. They’re always gonna show up. There’s always gonna be a mixture of ones that feel good, ones that don’t feel good, ones that are important, ones that aren’t, ones that are useful, ones that aren’t useful.

Martin: The brain is just pumping this stuff out 24 hours a day. So it does take ongoing practice to be able to to sit with them like you mentioned, to lower the barriers, to allow them to flow, allow them to come and go, hang out as long as they choose. And to refocus. Because these things are always gonna distract us.

Martin: And we can definitely become more skilled in refocusing, but that doesn’t mean that we are never gonna get distracted again for the rest of our lives. We’re never gonna hit that pinnacle of accomplishment. It does take ongoing practice, but with the caveat that the ongoing practice does typically get a little bit easier as we become more accomplished and more skilled in these approaches.

Laura: It really is like it, it pays dividends very quickly and it becomes easier and easier, pretty, like surprisingly quickly. I think if you really are continuing to like, respond correctly and refocus and just, yeah, just keep going.

Martin: So people listening to this might be thinking Laura sounds like a bit of a wise sage now. She clearly never has any difficult nights never has to deal with really difficult nights of sleep. Never has to deal with difficult thoughts and feelings. I’m gonna assume that’s not the case, but please correct me if I’m wrong.

Martin: What are things like for you now?

Laura: So I would say on average I’m sleeping well because I’ve, I’ve done a lot of that thought work and I, my sleep has as a result improved. I absolutely do still have difficult nights like any other human being, like it comes with being alive, but they are certainly fewer and far between, but I just handle them with less resistance.

Laura: I know you talk a lot about doing what matters, like living your life in a way that matters. And I think that has been such a big like game changer for me too. I go do the things that are important to me, like cooking, dinner and like training my dog and doing the hobbies I enjoy. Like I, I don’t have to not do those things just because I didn’t sleep great.

Laura: And I do think that kind of connects back to increasing that tolerance for discomfort a little bit, whereas before obviously I think most people who fall into insomnia are people that put a lot of that put their sleep on a pedestal. And before if I had gone to work after two hours of sleep, I’d been like, oh, I can’t do like self-fulfilling prophecy.

Laura: I can’t do anything after work today. I know that’s not true now, and it’s just not, it’s not on a pedestal as much anymore. So yes, I definitely do still have difficult nights. They just don’t mean as much now.

Martin: I like that phrase. They just don’t mean as much because we read into so much of what happens to us as human beings and when something’s considered to be an obstacle or a problem, we’re gonna read into it more and label it and categorize it and judge it and add so much more on top of what actually happened, which can in turn make things more difficult.

Martin: It sounds you’ve just become more resilient, I guess the word is to sleep not happening as you might want it to happen. Or when difficult thoughts and feelings show up. This stuff is still happening from time to time, less frequently now that you are less resistant to it, but these things have lost the power and the influence they once had over you.

Laura: It’s so powerful, like the approach in general that it will, I really do believe that it can change every aspect of your life, not just sleep. I had a really, I had a really stressful like thing happen at work today and in the past I would’ve ruminated on that for the rest of the day.

Laura: It probably would’ve made it hard for me to sleep. I don’t care what happens tonight maybe it will, maybe it won’t. I don’t, it doesn’t matter. I bounce back so much faster because I’m able to like I think I just I think, okay, this is the same type of anxiety as like the sleep anxiety.

Laura: Anxiety is anxiety. It is what it is. Use the same approach. Refocus. What do I wanna do now? Refocus. Keep refocusing. Keep refocusing. And pretty soon at first it was like every couple seconds this scary thing that has happened at work kept popping up in my head. And after an hour I, I’m like, oh, wow, I haven’t thought about that in five minutes.

Laura: I haven’t thought about that in 10 minutes. And with time this approach, you can apply it to so many aspects. And so when you say resilience, I think that’s huge. Like your resilience, like stress is never gonna stop. I was thinking that today when the event happened, I was like, oh my gosh this is bad.

Laura: What if this sets me back and I’m like. You can’t avoid triggers and like those things are gonna happen. You can’t, it’s unavoidable. This was going to happen at some point. Like something stressful at work is going to happen.

Laura: But having the tools to deal with it with a little bit more resilience is, it’s cool. Like it really does feel like a superpower at some point. Like you’re like, wow, I can apply this to so many other areas of my life.

Martin: So this stuff is showing up and you ask yourself, what do I want to do now? That can be so powerful because if nothing else, it’s a reminder that you have control over how you choose to respond. Often it can feel like you have no control over how you respond.

Martin: But ultimately you do get to choose. So this stuff shows up. Okay, what do I want to do now?

Martin: It can take us one of two ways. One way moves us closer to the life we wanna live, reflects who we are, who we want to be, and the life we want to live. And the other way pulls us away from the life we want to live or doesn’t really represent who we are or who we want to be.

Martin: It can just be so helpful when we just keep our focus on what’s gonna move me toward what’s gonna get me closer to where I want to be.

Martin: Because for as long as our actions are directed in that direction, they’re gonna move us that way. We’re always gonna be making progress. We’re always gonna be getting closer to where we want to be.

Laura: Yes, absolutely.

Martin: Alright. Laura, I really appreciate the time you’ve taken outta your day to come on and to share your journey with us. I’ve got one last question for you before you go. And it’s this one. If someone with chronic insomnia is listening and they feel as though they’ve tried everything, they’re beyond help they’ll never be able to stop struggling with insomnia, what would you say to them?

Laura: I would say, first of all, you said earlier that I sound like a wise sage in this, and I’d say, even though it’s easy for me to talk about it like this, it was not easy when I was in the trenches. I wanna preface this by saying that I know how hard it is. Like I know how hard it is. And it is, I, it was the hardest thing I’ve ever gone through.

Laura: I’ve never felt that dark in my life. So first of all, I just wanna say I get, I do get it. But I want to say that there is hope because. Like I, I was there and this approach really does work. I would say that there might be a period of time where it might even get worse before it gets better when you stop resisting.

Laura: And it’s going to be hard. I would say that too don’t expect the the work that you’re doing necessarily to be easy a hundred percent of the time and try really hard not to do it to produce a certain outcome. Try to accept and to accept, to move closer towards the, like you wanna live, like you say, accept for that reason.

Laura: And the rest will follow. And like I said before, don’t measure progress based on how much sleep you’re getting. Measure it based on how you are responding consistently and with time.

Laura: There’s a big component of getting out of our own way with this. Like when this gets better is none of my business. All I can control is what I do in the meantime. I can get up and I can go live the life that I wanna live with.

Laura: The anxiety come right along with me. You’re invited, let’s go. And that’s it. That’s all I can do. It will get better with this approach, when it’s not my business, I’m just gonna just keep on keeping on until things ease. And it will.

Martin: Great. Thank you so much again, Laura, for taking the time out to come on and share your journey with us. Appreciate it.

Laura: Yeah. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it too.

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

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