How Leah freed herself from the insomnia struggle by abandoning her efforts to control sleep (#48)

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.