Casaundra’s insomnia first showed up in college. From then on, it would come and go during periods of stress. After getting married, insomnia showed up and this time it didn’t go away. Before long, Casaundra would notice a feeling of anxiety as soon as her head hit the pillow. Nights started to feel like a battle.

In an effort to fix her sleep, Casaundra tried blackout curtains, headphones, melatonin, medication, no screens, less water, strict routines, and even six kiwis before bed. The more she tried to control sleep, the more sleep seemed to control her life.

In this episode, Casaundra shares how things changed when she started making life bigger than insomnia. As sleep got less attention, her evenings opened up. Her days opened up. She reclaimed her identity — and sleep took care of itself.

Click here for a full transcript of this episode.

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, Casaundra, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to come onto the podcast.

Casaundra: Thank you for having me. I’m super excited.

Martin: Great to have you on. Let’s start right at the beginning as always. When did your sleep problems first begin, and what do you think caused those initial issues with sleep?

Casaundra: Yeah, it’s been a long journey. I feel like, you know, as a kid I slept fine for the most part, but then you get to college and I think my like first bout of insomnia was probably like stress induced, it was like I was TAing for a class, I was training for a marathon. I was trying to keep really high grades and, and doing all these things.

Casaundra: I’m like, I think I was just at the max and like it was just leading to me not being able to sleep because I was about all these things and all these projects and things to do. And so I think the stress kind of built and then that just started this like evolving journey of cycles of insomnia.

Casaundra: So it would like come in different waves. Right. I remember leading my first team at work and. Going into another insomnia cycle. And that was like the first time I ever was put on Trazodone. then, you know, it went away. I think it would kind of ebb and flow, right? Like, oh, I, I would figure it out and it would go back to normal and then it would come back. but I had some really big life changes in like 20 22, 20 23. my, my grandmother who had raised me, had, had died. I had a relationship end that I’ve been in for years. And from all that I was also moving back to my home state, Ohio. And so you cram all of those things into a month and any normal person would probably struggle with sleep, but to me it wasn’t normal. Kind of put me into like this really bad insomnia cycle, right? And so I went back on Trazodone and it was like a year on Trazodone, which is a really long time to be on something like that. Then I finally like, we, we probably can talk more about how that went and what happened in it, but it kind of resolved a little bit.

Casaundra: And then I married and I just went into like the hardest cycle of insomnia. And you know, for me it was like we didn’t live together before marriage. And so like having a person in my bed after I had just gotten my sleep, what felt like back on track was really like stressful to my body, I think. And it just was like, he could sleep anything all night long from like 8:00 PM on. And I was like trying to go to bed with him and like, you know, be married and, you know. Not stay up alone. And it just led to me trying even harder to sleep. And so those are, I think it’s been an ongoing thing, but those are kind of the most recent things.

Martin: So there were these ups and downs. Maybe then you either adapted or you pulled back a little bit and then sleep had the chance to get back on track.

Martin: But it felt like as time went on, when the sleep disruption showed up, it kind of morphed into its own thing. Like it didn’t respond quite as well to the changes that you made, the, the adaptions that you made, the efforts that you made to get things back on track. And then it soon became the main problem rather than all the actual stresses which had once triggered it.

Casaundra: Absolutely. Sleep was like the number one thing on my mind during those times in my life, despite like all the other craziness in my life which just made it even more consuming.

Martin: Was there such a thing as like an average night back then? If there was, what was it like?

Casaundra: When I had that second to last bout of insomnia, where it was after all of those life changes, it was like, that was different because I had just gotten off Trazodone, but I like stopped like. did a hard stop. I didn’t taper, which to anyone listening, please don’t do that.

Casaundra: Talk to your doctor about how to get, you know, taper down on medicine. But it kind of sent me into like, I wasn’t sleeping at all. Like there were two nights straight. I was like, did not sleep. And now I can look back at it and know it was probably the medicine. And there was probably nothing wrong with me outside of the fact that I stopped taking medicine inappropriately without tapering. But that was really hard. And so was really extreme in which the average night was like not sleeping. Where like my most recent bout was when I, you know, just got married and adjusting to living together and sleeping in the same bed. An average night was like, okay, I’m really tired. My husband’s going to bed, and I lay down and immediately just wake up. Right. It was like the adrenaline or the fight or flight. Like as soon as my head hit the pillow, I was immediately stressed and anxious about what that night was going to bring based on everything that I had experienced every night before that.

Martin: Would you find that as the night was approaching you, maybe you were downstairs watch TV or doing whatever you’re doing, and you felt like sleepiness showing up, you felt like really drowsy, really sleepy, and then you went off to bed and then suddenly you felt wide awake.

Casaundra: Yeah, and it was kind of a mix. Like I would be anxious, but I could feel tired, like I knew I was getting sleepy. Mm-hmm. But as soon as I felt sleepy, I got anxious, and as soon as I felt like I could go to bed, I put down my head on the pillow and it was, yeah. Complete anxiety about sleep and stress.

Martin: It was like that problem solving brain just fires up and it starts to predict what the night is gonna bring or it starts to prepare you for the battle or the struggle that experience tells you is about to show up.

Casaundra: Battle is such a good word for that. That is truly how it felt like so many nights.

Martin: Anyone listening to this is gonna be all too aware that insomnia isn’t just a struggle that happens at night, and it also affects the days as well. I’m curious to hear from you when you found yourself in this struggle, what, what were the days like for you at that time?

Casaundra: I think the biggest issue for me during the days was actually like the anxiety and like consuming thoughts around sleep. So for me, I like, I think I was like in such a high fight or flight and like high adrenaline mode that I didn’t feel tired, like I felt wound up despite not even, you know, consuming a ton of caffeine or doing anything crazy.

Casaundra: I felt on edge all day and like I kind of looked at it like a blessing, like, thank God I can get through my days, but my mind was constantly consumed with researching sleep. What else could I do? What are people, what’s the new fad for getting to sleep and how could I adjust to make sure that I could go to sleep that night?

Martin: A phrase associated with people struggling with insomnia is tired but wired. So it’s like you feel a real sense of tiredness or fatigue during the day, but at the same time you’re, you’re just completely wired, really alert. And like you shared, it can help get you through the day and in other ways it can also work against you perhaps if you kind of harness that energy to engage in ongoing problem solving and research, which is completely understandable ’cause you’ve identified a problem that you want to fix. But as we’ll probably explore a little bit more as the conversation progresses, it ends up consuming your attention and the focus of your day is no longer on doing the stuff that matters.

Martin: It becomes on fixing this problem.

Casaundra: And that’s exactly what happened to me. So it started with just those consuming thoughts, but then it completely changed what my evenings looked like and what I did and how I prepared to do all those things that I was researching.

Martin: So connected to that. Moving on from that, what kind of things did you try in an attempt to get sleep back on track to deal with all these thoughts and these feelings that were showing up?

Casaundra: I really feel like I did everything, and I’m sure you know, someone said something different, but I truly felt like anything that I read or someone told me, I was like. Open to try anything. Like I was so desperate that I would do anything to get my sleep back on track. And so it started with like environmental changes, right? The blackout curtains. Very expensive noise canceling like headphones for sleep because I lived in an apartment and I swore, well, like if something, just like, if I couldn’t hear anything and nothing could wake me up, then for sure I would sleep. And you know, it started with melatonin, but I had been on Trazodone before and eventually after that, those like sleepless, like absolutely sleepless nights, it led to Ambien after going to a sleep doctor and specialist. And oh my gosh. I feel like one of my coworkers was like, Casaundra, have you ever tried Kiwis? Like my boyfriend, he eats Kiwis before bed, like six Kiwis, and makes him go right to sleep. I’m like, oh my gosh. Kiwis must be magical. No. It turns out they just have like, they, you know, help you produce melatonin. And after I knew that, I’m like, I shouldn’t even waste my time because melatonin does nothing for me. But there was like several nights I ate six Kiwis every night. I have not had a Kiwi since. I, I’ve tried different foods, not eating before bed, phones for like, no phone, tv, anything screen related for like three hours before bed. It was to the point where I literally would stop drinking water at 6, 6 30 so that I wouldn’t have to get up to use the restroom during the night because I swore that was keeping me up. Right. If I didn’t have any more water, then I would, you know, not struggle to go to sleep. And then, you know, I was. also impacted my social life, right? I had a bible study that we would meet on Wednesdays starting at seven, which even now, like even after all of this, I don’t love late plans, but I really got anxious about anything starting at seven because that’s when my nighttime routine needed to start. That’s when I needed to like settle and not be excited.

Casaundra: So the fact that I went and get home until 10 and showered and ready for bed until 11 was really stressful for me. So yeah, if, if you can name it, I tried it and you know, in that first bout where I wasn’t sleeping at all, I did like a CBT-I app. But it kind of missed the mark on the control piece or like how you’re thinking about it. Like they obviously had some pieces of that, but it was just still felt more like controlling you know, just knowing that sleep will eventually come and the more I try to control it, the less it’s going to work.

Martin: There’s something, all of those things that you just share with us, they all have something in common, right? And it’s just this understandable attempt to control sleep to make a certain amount or a certain type of sleep happen. And that completely makes sense because you identified sleep as a problem.

Martin: You are a problem solver. You wanted to fix it. So you put effort into trying to fix it. And where it sounds like you noticed you were getting stuck was no matter what you were trying, no matter what you were doing, it just wasn’t having the desired result. So that just led you to doing more, doing more, trying harder, trying harder, and your actions just became dominated by serving sleep rather than serve you and the life you want to live. So not only did you find the actions were creating more struggle, they were also kind of pulling you away from who you are and who you wanted to be and the life you wanted to live.

Casaundra: Absolutely. I felt like a different person even, and especially that being like the first year that I was, or like first few months of being married, like I’m sure my husband was like, Who did I marry? Because everything we did, everything I ate, everything was about how could I sleep? And, you know, he slept like a rock. And I know it’s this cruel thing that, you know, all of us just marry someone that, you know, can sleep when we can’t sleep. he would, you know, be sleeping in bed and he’s the type of person that nothing bothers him. He could be woken up and go right back to bed. And so, like there were nights where I would just wake him up, just sobbing, right?

Casaundra: Just absolutely sobbing and so frustrated and so angry, like so, so angry that I couldn’t sleep and he would just scratch my back and, you know, try and help me get back to sleep. And, and two minutes later he’d be asleep and I would still be awake. And it was just all consuming my whole personality. My whole church group knew about it.

Casaundra: Like I was just the insomniac.

Martin: It’s like it takes over your identity, your sense of self, who you are.

Casaundra: Absolutely.

Martin: I’m, I’m curious to know, did you ever ask your husband at that time, like what he did, like what his secret was to just sleeping in the way he did?

Casaundra: You know, I, I never really asked him then because it was just like, he just went to sleep. Like no matter what, he would just, you know, be on his phone, do whatever, and he just went to sleep. But now, like, after your course, someone’s like talking to me about sleep or telling me to try something, you know, if we’re talking about my history with insomnia, and I’ll be like, well, like, you know, you sleep well.

Casaundra: Like, what do you do? Sleep? So I didn’t ask him, but now I ask people that all the time when they’re like recommending something, because a lot of times they’re like, oh, I don’t do anything. I just, you know, go to sleep. And so. But it was something like, through your course, I, I realized so much. I’m like, oh my gosh, the kid’s doing nothing and it just comes to him and he’s not a kid.

Casaundra: He’s a six seven grown man. But yeah, it was infuriating, also hopeful. Like I knew if he could sleep doing nothing and I could sleep. just wasn’t, which really made me feel like something was wrong with me for the longest time until I worked through a lot of things in this course.

Martin: That’s the insight right there, isn’t it? If we do know someone who is a fantastic sleeper. When we’re struggling with insomnia, it often tends to be a, a bed partner or a, or a spouse if we’re in that situation, and you just kind of get a, a blank look when you ask someone who doesn’t struggle with sleep, like what they do to make that sleep happen, because the answer is they don’t do anything.

Martin: And that can reveal opportunity and a new way forward if we feel like what we’re doing at the current time is keeping us stuck or not working for us.

Martin: I think you touched upon it a little bit earlier, but I’m curious to know, you know, as you were doing all this problem solving and trying all these different things to get your sleep back on track, especially these things that you, you know, read about online that is shared with such confidence that this is the thing that will fix your sleep. When you tried those things and it just wasn’t working for you, what was that experience like?

Casaundra: For me it was really difficult because I’ve always been like happy and you know, optimistic and able to look at things like with a glass like half full. with sleep, it was the first time I had some of those really dark thoughts. Like I felt not only alone, but hopeless, but also like. A different length, like level of anger that I’d never felt before.

Casaundra: But part of that like came to a head and like literally wishing I was in the hospital or wishing something so bad would happen to me that I had to go to the hospital to be like put to sleep. And, you know, it’s amazing what a lack of sleep and all this trying and all these things that you’re doing when they don’t work make you feel when you can’t get to the result that you’re wanting.

Casaundra: Like I had never been more desperate in my life. And, you know, as someone who loves your life and, and wants to live it to the fullest and was really scary to have those thoughts of, well, if I could just put an end to this whole not sleeping thing. And that was really eye-opening too for me. Like, I was like, wow, like I, I need some help and I need a way out of here.

Martin: It is really difficult and it’s. It’s not just about the problem of sleep, not happening as you want it to. It’s about all the stuff that gets added on top. You know, all the, all the trying to fix the problem and that, that repeated experience of, I’m trying this, this isn’t working, I’m trying this, this isn’t working.

Martin: You can just feel as though you’re completely out of options and that there’s no way out. It feels just, it just feels like you’re trapped.

Casaundra: Absolutely. And everything else in my life, I’ve been able to work hard enough, right? hard enough at school, get the scholarship, work hard enough at X, Y, Z, like get the promotion, like in life. So many things in life, like you’re able to control that way. And it was really hard for me for this to be. Something I couldn’t control. So it was, it was a lot of growth there for me as well, which I’m sure we can talk about later in terms of just kind of this being a process in which learning that control isn’t the best option in every situation.

Martin: Since you had already tried so much at this point, when you came across my website or my work, what made you think that there was something different here or something worth trying?

Casaundra: I can remember finding your podcast on Spotify. Like any person, like struggling to sleep. I was like, let’s get a puppy. And so, you know, I had a puppy. I wasn’t sleeping even more because of the puppy, and I was taking him on a walk and was just searching on Spotify for insomnia, you know, solutions.

Casaundra: And I, I found your podcast and I had already done the other like CBT-I app before this. And so I kind of recognized some of the things that you were talking about within that. But then there was this like resounding piece that everyone who shared their stories was sharing and it was this like relinquish of control. Like it doesn’t have as much weight on my life. And that felt really like encouraging and like hopeful because it was consuming so much of my life that I’m like, this seems different.

Martin: First of all, it felt different, but it was also in that context of, here are people talking about my experience, they’re describing the kind of things that I am going through, that I’m struggling with. So if this is something that these people found useful, maybe it’s something I’ll find useful too.

Casaundra: Yeah, and it was like, oh my gosh, like I felt like I found like the Disneyland of people who struggle with insomnia, and it was like the first time I saw heard actual stories of people working through insomnia that. It sounded so much like myself, right? And you find like certain episodes and you’re like, wow, this person’s so much like me and like my story.

Casaundra: And on those bad days I would just like replay it, right? And now to this day, you know, it’s amazing how quickly you forget. But I can’t remember the name of that podcast, but I remember the hope that it gave me on my really hard days that there was a way out and people just like me found that.

Martin: What showed up for you when you identified this theme of relinquishing control? Because after all, you were so invested in trying to fix this problem, and now you’re hearing, well, maybe the way to fix it is to give up this control. Like what did that feel like as, as an option or as a suggested way forward?

Casaundra: You know, it was actually so hard, like as the person that’s used control, not in a negative way, but just in a, hey, in our circle of control in our lives, we can get to places we’ve never been, accomplish things we’ve never done, escape generational cycles, and I had done all that, right? And so for me, this idea that if I just stopped controlling it kind of scary, right?

Casaundra: Like it, it was just born to the brain for me at least, right? It was something I’d always, I just always worked hard and if I, I work hard, it, it, it gets the result that I need. But then there was the second piece of it, right? So the first piece was like a shift from how I usually think. the second piece was, what does that actually mean?

Casaundra: Like, I think part of me was kind of like angry, like, okay, like. Just stop trying to control it. Sounds really easy, except when you consider the human brain and how we focus on things that are important to us and, and how we want to improve it naturally without even realizing it when it’s negatively impacting us or how our body wants to protect us, right?

Casaundra: So this thought of, oh, I’ll just stop controlling it frustrating because I’m like, but how, do I control, how do I stop, you know, controlling this or trying to control? So a lot of mixed emotions.

Martin: The two big ones being hope and fear at the same time. You raise a really good point. How do I do this? Like, how do I put this into action? How do I relinquish control? What do I do instead? Because I have to do something. I can’t just do nothing. So I’m curious to hear from you what kind of things you did to put this whole idea of relinquishing control or moving away from resistance.

Martin: How did you put that into action?

Casaundra: It takes a long time, right? And that’s something like even by the end of your course, I wasn’t like, healed, right? It was like I wanted to be, heck, week one. I wanted to be. But it’s just not how it works because I just had to keep doing little things each week to make my life outside of sleep bigger than the sleep issue. And so like, that’s what it started to feel like to actually stop trying to control it, was to build up my life outside of sleep so that it just got less attention. And by giving it less attention, it got less control and sleep could kind of move in. And so, know, a few things, you know, mindset was huge, right?

Casaundra: Just realizing and hearing and seeing the facts about like, I’m not gonna die because I’m not sleeping like I will survive. Like, that was a big one for me. Like, just hearing that and knowing like, I’m gonna be okay. Like all of these, you know, statistics that I’m seeing like does not mean that I am not going to be well, and plenty of people live long healthy lives without, you know, eight, nine hours of sleep.

Casaundra: And so that was part of the mindset, like realizing it wasn’t going to hurt me and so I, I didn’t need to fix it. realizing I could just. Go about my days, right? Like I didn’t need to think about it like sleep was going to come. That that simple sentence of our bodies are going to sleep when they need to provided so much rest for me it, I no longer was like, I’m not going to sleep. I’m like, well maybe it’s not tonight, but it will, it will come eventually. Like I can’t this up forever and so it will come. And so those were a few things or a couple things that stuck out to me in like the mindset shift and then you get into like what actions, right?

Casaundra: So the mindset kind of made room for new actions to come into play for me which sounds like trying to sleep, but it was like all actions to actually stop trying to force sleep. Like, so the first one I think that gets introduced is the sleep window, right? And this was like life changing for me, right?

Casaundra: And I had done sleep for, I just, I hadn’t had that mindset shift, so it didn’t mean anything, you know? And so you can first have that mindset shift, then these things can come in and actually be effective. And so the sleep window, like I remember the first night was like excited, right? Like I was like, I have so much time to get stuff done.

Casaundra: Like I’m a maximizer, right? And that goes into the problem solving all this stuff. And so the idea that, you know, I could cook and clean and do a hobby and take my dog Teddy on a walk, and I could just keep doing all these things until like 9:00 PM because I didn’t need to start a bedtime routine at like 6 30, 7, whatever time it was that night. so. That sleep window gave me more time in my day and I felt like, wow, like this is exciting. And, you know, started doing more yoga in the evenings afterwards and I had more time for my Bible study reading and shows if I, you know, wanted to stay up and watch it. ’cause I was actually allowed to, like, there were no rules, like everything before was, you can’t do this and don’t spend any time in your bedroom.

Casaundra: Like, I loved my bedroom. Like, it was so aesthetic and pretty, and I would never spend any time in it because of all these rules I had in place around the, you know, they say like, the bedroom can only be for three things. And that’s like, you know, sleep, we can all use our imagination on the second one and then sickness, right?

Casaundra: And so now I could just hang out in my bedroom. I could sit on my bed, I could watch a show if I wanted to, if I was really like just really needing to rest because other people did that, right? Like my husband could literally be on his phone, watch a horror film, like the craziest things before bed, and then like fall asleep. So like I could now, I had permission to do that. so the first action was kind of that sleep window, right? And it gave me a lot of freedom and just like time and what I could do and when I could do it. And also just, I wasn’t spending three hours trying to go to bed. Like part of the thing with getting married to my husband is that he likes to go to bed early, which I do too, but like he is an extreme degree of like. Eight 30, he can get in bed. And for most of us, that’s not good. And if we still to this day, like he’ll be like, I’m so tired, I’m gonna go to bed. I’m like, I’m gonna read because I am not tired yet. And I know that if I try to go to bed before I’m even naturally sleepy, like it’s probably not gonna be a good thing for me, even though I don’t say I struggle with insomnia anymore. So that was kind of all things into the sleep window. And then, you know, I dropped all the behavioral and environmental things.

Casaundra: Okay. I have, I lied a little bit. I still like use the earplugs, but only because now it’s just like a comfort thing. I don’t feel like I need them. If I forget them, it’s no big deal. It’s just like. I kind of imagine like a kid with a stuffed animal, it’s just like, oh. It’s like, okay, bed. so it’s like there’s no attachment to needing those, but I don’t take melatonin. Or I didn’t then. Right. It’s part of the change of knowing it wasn’t helping. Don’t take any of the harder, like Ambien that I was prescribed, and I just, I don’t have to eat six Kiwis and that’s really nice. So a lot of things have kind of let up on the behavioral and environmental changes and I can hang out with my friends, like, what a blessing in life. And so that’s kind of the environmental, behavioral and then you get to just like, well, everything wasn’t just fixed, right? And so what happens when I’m still awake at night and I can’t sleep even after that wake window ends and I’m allowed to, you know, go to bed. And there came in like. The just experiencing being awake. And so I, I took pieces from everything, right? I would go back to the mindset of sleep’s eventually going to come, I could use any of those, you know, tools or hobbies that I used to kind of relax during my sleep, like before my sleep window started. So I could do that if I wasn’t sleeping. But I could also just let the thoughts be and thank them for being there without them being so infuriating, right? I was no longer angry about being awake. I could just be awake. And I, I think one of my favorite things too, from the course was like, so much freedom in how you do these things. Like you would say, Hey, you can stay in bed if that’s comfortable still. And I love that because I hate getting outta bed when I am cold or it’s like. I don’t know. I just love being cozy in bed. So like the permission to just staying in bed as long as that’s still serving me mm-hmm. Really went a long way.

Casaundra: So those were a few of the things. I think there were definitely other things but those are some of the big things that impacted my recovery.

Martin: Something that really stood out for you. I think one of the first things you said was, which kind of encompassed everything that you shared, I started to make my life bigger than sleep. Those actions that we were talking about earlier, that when they’re so focused on serving sleep, serving insomnia, you took them back.

Martin: Those actions started to once again serve you. So you were, you know, reading more, you were doing yoga, watching tv, doing your Bible studies. The sleep window helped with that because it was one of those actions that moved you away from the chasing after sleep. You recognized that the amount of time you were allotting for sleep each night wasn’t really serving you.

Martin: It was kind of setting you up for long periods of being awake in bed during the night. So by compressing that down and more closely matching it with the amount of sleep you’re currently getting, there was more opportunity for you to do these things that mattered. It opened up all this additional time that you had available to do things that served you and the life you wanted to live, and that in turn helped reduce the influence of sleep in your life.

Martin: It was still there, like sleep or insomnia was still there, but now it was one of many things rather than the only thing. And like you touched upon that didn’t mean that suddenly there was this miraculous transformation and that sleep was happening exactly as you wanted it to, or the, all these difficult thoughts, difficult feelings, stopped showing up.

Martin: But it’s got you started on this new way forward where you were reclaiming your life, where life was becoming bigger and opening up again. And I’m curious to hear a little bit more about how you were addressing all the thoughts and the feelings that show up at night. You know, especially when sleep isn’t happening as you want it to happen.

Martin: You said that something changed there, where you kind of gave permission for those thoughts to exist. You even thanked them for showing up and that in turn kind of reduced how they were affecting you.

Martin: What would you say to someone that might be sitting here listening to this thinking I can’t possibly open up or accept those things ’cause they’re really difficult. And it’s just the idea of opening up to them in itself is really scary.

Casaundra: It is really scary, right? Because you’re like, I have fought this so hard, like, why would I, and, you know, invite them in. But it, it takes the power away, right? And, and they can’t hurt you, right? The more you let them in, the less they actually hold over you. I, I, I remember my thoughts would just kind of swirl and ruminate and, and keep going, but when I would actually like. Let them in and observe them and see what they were telling me, which is that sleep is important. And of course I have important things coming up in my life. Or you know, I wanna sleep for a certain reason. Telling me all these things were important to me. I could just thank them because I was like, yes, this is important.

Casaundra: Thank you for showing me that. It is important, but I’m gonna let you go now. Right. And I, I don’t remember if it was part of the course or, and I think it probably was, but I would just like imagine them like going out the window, right? Like the breeze would kind of pull them out the window. And I think maybe some people would do like, you know, flowing down water or something. And just that visual, even though it sounds really silly, helped me to just kind of watch them go, right? I let them come in, I let them stay. We had a good talk, but now they could go and they might come right back. Sometimes they just like come around the window and start knocking on the door. And you’re allowed to just do the same thing. I found like if I didn’t let them in, it actually made it worse. And I actually just kept ruminating over what I thought it was going to be. And this has helped me in like other areas of my life too, right? I can sometimes be anxious about, you know, driving on the highway, right? And what if something bad happens to me?

Casaundra: And just like recognizing, well, okay, that’s a really small chance that would happen, and what’s the worst thing that could happen, right? I go to be with Jesus and my family’s taken care of because all the things I’ve put in place, okay, that’s actually not that bad, right? And so it’s helped me in other ways too, of like not just insomnia, knowing, oh yeah, I’m gonna be fine tomorrow.

Casaundra: Like no matter how tonight goes, I’m going to be fine. I’m gonna do all the things that I need to do no matter what.

Martin: It sounds like you found it helpful to recognize that your brain wasn’t working against you. That all these thoughts and these feelings that were showing up, many of which can be really difficult to experience, don’t come from your brain working against you. It comes from your brain, like reminding you of what’s important, reminding you of what matters, looking out for you.

Martin: And that in itself just acknowledge being aware of that, that my brain isn’t an adversary can help support you in responding differently with less resistance.

Casaundra: Oh yeah. Even like to this day, you know, if I have a rough night or I’m just not sleeping as easy as sometimes I do. It’s like, oh yeah, like I’m, I was so excited about this new podcast I found, or something at work that’s happening, and so it’s like, oh yeah, like I’m excited or I’m stressed. Like this makes total sense. And you’re like, okay, yeah, maybe I don’t sleep the best at tonight, but it’s just because of X, Y, Z, not because I’m broken, not because I need to change anything or I can’t sleep. None of that’s true. It’s just the things that are now filling up my life.

Martin: The approach that you took that you found helpful, which, which to summarize, it sounds like it was, first of all, just kind of acknowledging what your brain was telling you. Maybe thanking it for looking out for you, then being more of an observer of whatever these thoughts and these feelings were.

Martin: You shared that as you did that it kind of lifted the weight of them a little bit, but you did notice that sometimes they would drift off, but then sometimes they would also come back. How did you respond to that experience of them coming back? Because I think often what can happen is when we practice this new approach of opening up, reducing our resistance, and we notice, wow, these thoughts, these feelings are losing their power.

Martin: They’re losing their influence. Oh, they’re disappearing. When they come back, suddenly it can feel like uhoh, the brain goes into alert. This is another one of those things that’s not working. Now we have to do something different. I’m just curious to hear what your experience was like with that and how you responded.

Casaundra: Yeah, I would love to say that every time I came back, I just did it all again and it worked just fine. The reality is sometimes they come back and it’s, it’s even more scary, right? Because there’s a part of insomnia that when little pieces that remind you of it come back into your life or a thought comes back up and it’s not easy. It’s like scary, right? Like you’re like, is tonight gonna be that night? Or is, you know, you start. Can start having negative thoughts about it. And so that did happen sometimes, right?

Casaundra: I didn’t spend as much time in that really dark place. Right. Which was a really scary place for me. Remember, because it’s not who I am. I was so much kinder to myself, right? It, it didn’t have as much weight. I, I didn’t feel like I was broken or that it was my fault. was just the nature of, you know, being human.

Martin: Were there any other changes that you wanted to mention or share that you found helpful on this journey of moving away from the struggle with insomnia?

Casaundra: Yeah, I think one for me that sometimes just kind of gets looped into like the sleep window thing was the buffer zone. So having that hour before bedtime to just do tasks that were not only just enjoyable and like full of life, but also more relaxing and the way of just like signal signaling to my body that I was preparing for sleep without controlling it. Right? Just doing a little bit more relax. And I honestly still use this like out of all the techniques. This idea of a buffer zone of, Hey, I know I’m a person that’s really sensitive to my environment, right?

Casaundra: My husband to this day can, you know, do what he does, but I know I need like a half an hour, an hour to just kind of relax and let my body be as it kind of prepares to feel naturally sleepy so that I am going to bed tired. so that zone or the idea that you have a window of time right before bed to just kinda relax and do things to bring you joy, really helped me.

Martin: Setting aside some time to unwind and just do things that you personally find relaxing and enjoyable rather than giving yourself a rule that I’ve gotta be home an hour before I go to bed, and I’ve gotta spend an hour making myself relax, making myself feel sleepy, and making myself have the best possible chances of making sleep happen.

Casaundra: Oh yeah, absolutely. Like now, sometimes it’s like five minutes, right? I’ll be like, well, I’m just gonna like wind down and I open the book and I’m like, oh, I am so tired. Close the book and go to bed. And other times where it’s like, oh, I’m really finding that’s enjoyable and that turns into more time, but it’s never something that has to start at 9:00 PM and it’s, you know, never something.

Casaundra: I feel like, oh my gosh, if I don’t have this, then I’m not going to be able to sleep.

Martin: And, and that’s the difference there, isn’t it? Because as we talk about any of this stuff for example, a buffer zone or like a time to unwind, where we can set the stage for struggle is with our intention. So if the intention with something like a buffer zones to make sleep happen, that might be an action that doesn’t really serve us.

Martin: If the intention with the buffer zone is to just set aside some time in the evening that might have once been filled with struggle and effort and trying to just be a period of time where we can do whatever we want, something that we find enjoyable, relaxing, pleasant, that can be productive, then that can be useful, then that can be a workable thing to do.

Casaundra: The intent changed so much for me and like not trying to force sleep and at first you, you’re gonna kind of be lying to yourself maybe for, you know, some people I, I’ll speak for myself, but at first it was like, my intent is not to sleep. Like, not to force sleep, but my intent was definitely to go to sleep at first.

Casaundra: But it, it involves and so you kinda have to lie and, you know, kind of trick your brain for a little bit occasionally to start actually believing that. And that might not be true for everyone, but as a control freak, like you might start off like just speaking a different truth over your body than is actually going on.

Martin: Something we touched upon earlier was about, you know, how in the insomnia struggle isn’t just a nighttime problem, it it, it’s a 24 7 problem. It goes into the days as well. And a change that you made with your days was to just really focus your attention on actions that served you, that were important to you, that mattered to you, rather than what might make a certain amount or a certain type of sleep happen.

Martin: Something else that can make these days more difficult too, are the thoughts and those feelings that can show up. You know, the anxieties, the worry and the time traveling that from the brain, like predicting what the night is gonna be like tonight or what previous nights were like, and that in turn could just make things.

Martin: More difficult and it makes it harder to do those things that matter. I’m curious to hear from you if you practiced anything or had this way of dealing with all those thoughts and feelings that would show up during the day. What did you find was a workable way to deal with them at that time?

Casaundra: It was kind of just like, you know, noticing and observing it. It was kind of like the abbreviated version of what I would do at night, right?

Casaundra: Like, I would observe what was happening, kind of ground myself back to my day and then just move forward. And I, I can’t remember it as much because I feel like my life was so busy, like between work and everything, the moment that I stopped you know, being so consumed about researching what could make me sleep, it gave me a lot more freedom in my days.

Casaundra: But that being said, like I definitely still had to redirect. And this is the same exercise when I was saying help me with like, being in the car and driving. It’s kind of that similar thing of like, notice what you’re feeling and let it be and observe it, and kind of grounding yourself and what’s actually happening around you.

Martin: It comes down again to less resistance. And every time you got that opportunity to practice developing that skill of reducing your resistance it kind of strips them of their power and their influence. You are better able to refocus. So you are noticing, first and foremost whatever thought and feeling was showing up.

Martin: Then you are opening up, dropping that resistance, allowing it to be with you, and then just noticing or refocusing on where you are. What you were doing or what you wanted to be doing, even when that thought is still there. So your goal isn’t to kind of get rid of it. Although sometimes when we lower that resistance, it does make it easier to flow, to come and go, but it was just to refocus your attention when those thoughts and feelings showed up.

Martin: So they didn’t kind of jerk you around so much.

Casaundra: And so many times I would be like halfway through the exercise and it would already start kinda working, right? I’d be like, oh yeah, and I’m, now, I’m gonna think about this without planning on it, right? Instead of it just like coming at me so hard with me trying to push it away, like I definitely am the person to like push away negative.

Casaundra: And so these like exercises helped a lot with me not pushing it away, but allowing it to come even though it was scary.

Martin: You make a good point there that this stuff can still feel scary. It’s not about trying to make something not scary or trying to make a thought or a feeling disappear. It’s just about acknowledging or accepting that your experience seems to suggest that these thoughts and feelings and emotions are out of your direct control.

Martin: There’s no magic switch that you can flick to turn them off. So continuing to try might be making them more difficult. So how about we respond in a different way? And that different way is really easy for us to talk about. It’s certainly a lot easier than putting it into practice, but with practice, we can develop this skill in experiencing all this difficult stuff with less of a struggle so it doesn’t have quite so much power and influence over us.

Martin: How long would you say that it took for you to get to a point where it felt like you weren’t just in this endless struggle with sleep, you know that you were out of the struggle, you could live your life independently of sleep, no matter what kind of thoughts, no matter what kind of feelings were showing up.

Casaundra: Like I said at the beginning of the call, like I wanted it to be week one, and I’m sure everyone listening is like, man, I, I hope it’s week one of this course. But for me, it, it really took like a month or two after, like, I can’t remember the exact time or date because once it stops being so big, you kind of stop remembering it, and so. For me, it was like ending the course and letting it not even be that big in my life. Right? Like there were a lot of tools I needed to learn, right? And all the videos and the how-tos, like all of those were so important and I needed to have all of those in my tool belt. But after that, I just needed more time to, to use those without a focus on it.

Casaundra: Right? And as soon as I, I didn’t have those things that I needed to watch or do every week, the less and less sleep became a big deal and the farther I got away from thinking about it as much as I was. And so I would say about a month or two, probably after I finished maybe a little bit more it really kind of start to settle and the idea of, you know, no night is ever perfect, but I really didn’t feel like I was an insomniac anymore.

Casaundra: I kind of felt just like a human with sleep.

Martin: What did progress look like for you? What were your measures of progress? What told you that you were heading in the right direction?

Casaundra: I think for me it was like the weight on me about my sleep. Like, did I wake up thinking I didn’t get enough? Or how big of an influence is this going to have? So, like early on that was really big for me. Like the progress within your course was measured by how was I feeling in my day and could I go about my day without this being bigger than the rest of my life?

Casaundra: And so that was it. And as much as I wanna say that I, you know, didn’t look at the amount of sleep I was getting as like tracker of progress, you kind of do it naturally, but it wasn’t like. I need more sleep. It was just like, huh, wow.

Casaundra: Like I slept really well last night. I didn’t do anything. So I think you kind of just notice it throughout your life anyways without putting too much of an emphasis on it. It really just also let me be a different person, right? Like my husband got back the person that he lost when we were first married, and I was struggling with insomnia.

Martin: It was interesting hearing you share what your markers of progress were because you didn’t really say in there, oh, the nights when I got like seven hours of sleep, I knew that was progress.

Martin: Or eight hours of sleep or six hours. There was no number of hours of sleep. You didn’t even describe the type of sleep. And that’s insightful because I think that for as long as we are measuring progress based on sleep, which, our experience, if we’ve been struggling with it, probably tells us is out of our control.

Martin: Then it sets the stage for that ongoing struggle. But your markers of progress, as you were reflecting were, you know, I was just noticing sleep wasn’t a big deal. It wasn’t as big a deal. It was losing some of its power or some of its influence. It was more about what, what am I doing with my life? Like, what am I doing day to day?

Martin: Are my actions serving me? Do they reflect my values? Do they reflect the life I wanna live? Are my actions moving me in the direction that I want to be heading?

Martin: I think you summarized it as well towards the end. You know, I, I got my life back, you know, I am the person that I want to be and all of those things are a ction based. They’re all things that you can control. It’s so helpful to use things like that as measures of progress rather than what kind of sleep am I getting from night to night.

Casaundra: Absolutely. And I think like, you know, even hearing on other people like them share on the podcast, it was, it was more about that too, right? Like it’s a beautiful thing of like, this is the power of not holding so much control over sleep.

Martin: One more question about progress whilst we’re on that subject. Did you find that as you were practicing these new skills, that it was like every single day or every single night was just kind of like better than the previous one? Or about the same of, did you notice there were ups and downs? I’m just curious what the journey looked like for you in terms of progress.

Casaundra: That’s probably two steps forward, one step back kind of thing. I, I, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say, yeah, it was just smooth sailing from course on out. Like, that wasn’t my experience either, right? Every, every night looked a little bit different and some made me fearful that I was starting over at the beginning.

Casaundra: But everything I learned taught me that, hey, that’s not the actual truth. Like this is normal and it will get better the more you keep working on these tools. So were definitely a lot of setbacks, but the mental mind shift, like the shift in mindset just makes it where it’s not as big of a deal.

Martin: I’m curious to know what it was that kept you moving forward when those setbacks happened, especially those, the initial setbacks early on, you know, you’re noticing the progress. Then you have like your first kind of setback, or you notice you have that awareness that you’re getting pulled back into the struggle or that you are struggling again.

Martin: How do you kind of reset or refocus and continue moving forward when that happens?

Casaundra: It always would start with like the reminders. Like I, I would remind myself, I know sleep’s coming, like I know that this isn’t the truth over my life. But then comes like the motivation of like why I keep going, right? So what gets me to keep going, but then why is, is more of a, I just wanted my life back.

Casaundra: Like, I hated being awake at night and wondering how the rest of the entire world had their lights off and were sleeping, and I just wanted to be that person with their lights off. And so I knew if I just kept putting one foot forward every day, I was bound to get there no matter if I had to go back a little bit every once in a while.

Martin: It sounds like you found it helpful to remind yourself of why it’s important for you to respond in a certain way. Why this idea of reducing resistance, focusing on workable action actions that matter to you why that’s important, why it matters, and that’s what helped you stay focused on continuing to do the things that mattered and keeping you moving in the direction you want it to be heading.

Casaundra: Absolutely.

Martin: What would you say that you’ve learned from this whole experience and in what ways do you feel that you’ve grown from it, if any.

Casaundra: Yeah, no a lot and summarize maybe two. So for me, like the perception of insomnia and, and what it actually is, and it’s, it’s shifted for me now. It’s not so much of a problem ’cause I know sleep’s going to come and if there is a disturbance in my sleep, it, it’s that, right? That word right there disturbance.

Casaundra: It’s just something disturbing my sleep instead of insomnia or this like chronic thing that can’t be overcome. And so there’s a big perception change around what insomnia even is. And, then the second thing is just control, right? I, it has really helped me not try to control other things in my life. Just like with sleep, you know, there’s other things that kind of work the same, right? Stress or, I am trying to think of another good example, but stress is kind of the only other one I can think of that’s as similar. Like the more you focus on it, the worse it might get and sometimes you just have to let it go and it’s really helped me with that.

Casaundra: Anxiety probably is another great example, honestly, better. So it’s really helped me with letting those things go and, and changing how I approach control.

Casaundra: I wouldn’t wish insomnia on my worst enemy, but at the same time, I’m like so thankful for what I found and what I learned in your course and how it’s enabled me to react so differently to things that feel so impossible.

Martin: I’m really grateful for the time you’ve taken at your day to come onto the podcast. I do have one last question for you, and then it’s this one. If someone with chronic insomnia is listening and they feel as though they’ve tried everything, they’re beyond help, that they’ll never be able to stop struggling with insomnia, what would you say to them?

Casaundra: I would say, you know, our creator God, designed sleep, and it’s going to come eventually. And the more you can relinquish control of trying to get sleep by filling your life with joy regardless of what the nights look like and the more energy you spend bringing that effort and attention to those things that fill up your life, the less you’re going to be controlling your sleep, and then the more you will.

Martin: thank you again for coming onto the podcast, Casaundra. It’s really appreciated. Thank you.

Casaundra: Thank you so much.

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.

I want you to be the next insomnia success story I share! If you're ready to stop struggling with sleep and get your life back from insomnia, you can start my insomnia coaching course right now.

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Today, I’m talking with Farrukh — someone whose experience with insomnia slowly began to take over more and more of his life.

At first, sleep wasn’t something he thought much about. It was just there. Something that happened naturally. But over time, that started to change. Nights became more unpredictable. Sleep felt less certain — and it began to consume his attention.

He started noticing how he slept. Then thinking about how he slept. Then worrying about how he might sleep. And from there, things escalated.

Nights became something to prepare for. Something to manage. Something to try and get right. He began experimenting with different routines, adjusting his environment, and doing everything he could to improve his sleep.

Everything he did was understandable. But instead of making things easier, the ongoing effort put more of his time and energy into sleep. It became something he had to figure out — something he had to fix.

And that pressure started to spread beyond the night. Sleep was no longer just part of his life. It was starting to shape it.

In this conversation, Farrukh shares what began to change when he stepped away from that constant effort and started bringing his focus back to living his life.

He talks about what that looked like for him and how that change in direction freed him from an ongoing struggle and got him to a place where sleep is no longer a big deal at all.

Click here for a full transcript of this episode.

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. Farrukh, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to come onto the podcast.

Farrukh: Thank you. Hi to you and hi to everybody i’m really excited to be here and I look forward to this conversation.

Martin: It’s great to have you on. Let’s just dive in and get started right at the beginning. When did your sleep problems first begin and what do you feel caused those initial issues with sleep?

Farrukh: The sleep issues, initially began with some other things happening in my life that I was a bit stressed about, that I was a bit worried about, and that worry creeping into sleep initially.

Farrukh: But after it creeped into sleep for one night, two nights, three nights, then the worry started attaching to sleep in itself. It almost felt like I’ve lost the ability to fall asleep and then it started to become a huge problem.

Martin: So at first there was some worries or some stresses going on in your life and when you noticed some sleep disruption, at first it felt, okay, this makes sense why I am struggling with sleep a little bit because I’ve got all these worries going on right now.

Martin: But then as the sleep disruption continued over multiple nights, the worries then became more about sleep than whatever might have first triggered the actual sleep disruption itself.

Farrukh: Exactly. I think after your brain sees multiple experiences of it happening, then it becomes a loop. And then you feel like there’s no way out. And I’ve lost the ability to fall asleep. And you ask the people, you ask your friends, you ask your father, you ask your mom, you ask your friends or whatever.

Farrukh: Because they have not experienced it. Because they have not faced it. For the most people, I would say. Like they would say things like, no, probably you were not that really tired. Or, and people say, try to fall asleep, right? So get into bed and try to fall asleep. Do your best to fall asleep and you will.

Farrukh: And then you try those things and they don’t work. And you feel like, why can they sleep well? And why can’t I sleep well? And it has been a month, it has been two months. And then you worry about your sleep and then you worry about that, oh, I’m not being able to fall asleep now I can’t do my work now I can’t exercise now I can’t earn money now I can’t study.

Farrukh: So then a loop starts over because now you’re worried about if I don’t sleep well, what would happen? And your mind started, starts attaching to that. And then the more you try to fall asleep so that you could fix those things, the more you can’t sleep.

Martin: You just encapsulated how this can all snowball so easily. There’s that trigger for the sleep disruption. And then you, as the sleep disruption continues, you find yourself trying to fix the sleep issues, which makes complete sense is completely understandable. You notice a problem, you wanna fix it, right?

Martin: And then the more you try to fix the sleep problems, the more difficult they seem to become, the more these thoughts and these feelings show up. And then it progresses, you had the worries about whatever the triggering event was, then you have the worries about the sleep, then you have the worries about the consequences of sleep.

Martin: And in amongst all that, there’s just more and more trying, more and more effort and you’re just caught in this big loop, just seems to grow and become its own kind of monster.

Farrukh: Yeah. It also does not feel good because you feel like you’re working hard, so hard for something that other people can do so easily.

Farrukh: And you feel like, why can’t I? Then you start to have that comparison. Then you start asking people and I remember every day I used to be like asking people like, how many hours do you sleep?

Farrukh: How many hours do you sleep? And then I would wake up in the middle of the night just checking my phone to see how many hours I have slept. I had to sleep eight hours.

Farrukh: I started dreading waking up at night. I hope I don’t wake up in the middle of the night because then it would be so hard to go back to sleep.

Martin: I think it’s human nature to compare ourselves to others, and there can be two sides to that, right? In some ways it may be it pushes us to be a stronger or a better person, and in other ways it can not really serve us very well.

Martin: And sleep is perhaps one of those things where that comparison often doesn’t prove to be very helpful, although it’s understandable. Because as we are gonna no doubt dig into a little bit more, sleep isn’t really within our direct control. So when we compare our sleep with others, we can then be inclined to put more effort into sleep and that tends to create more struggle and sleep just becomes.

Martin: I feel like what you touched upon there, it becomes almost like a judgment of who we are as a person. We attach it to our self-worth, there’s something wrong with me, there’s something broken. How comes these people are all getting a certain amount or type of sleep and I’m not. And that just then piles on all the pressure on all the harsh self-talk, which doesn’t usually make things any better.

Farrukh: Absolutely. And then like you said, you start to judge yourself on it and you start to look at it like somewhat of a test.

Farrukh: Okay, let me get into my bed, let me try to fall asleep and let me try my best if I’m able to fall asleep, okay, I was able to fall asleep one and a half hours, but I’m still not falling asleep for eight hours or seven hours.

Farrukh: I’m failing. So you start to feel like it’s like you have to perform and prove to yourself and it’s some kind of performance and you have to make it the best, the perfect it can be. And then that judgment comes in.

Farrukh: The harder you are working, the more you’re involving your conscious mind. I like the saying, I read a saying some weeks ago, it says that in all mental workings, effort defeats itself. And it’s not only with sleep, I’ve seen it with other things as well. It’s just if right now I try to not focus on the image of a red car and I try my best to not focus on the image of a red car, don’t focus on it.

Farrukh: That’s exactly what I would be doing. And I think it’s something similar that happens during the sleep issues. You are in your bed, you’re trying to fall asleep. If you are looking out for every single noise out there that can disturb you and wake you up, I remember I used to say to my family that I’m just closing my door.

Farrukh: Please don’t knock. Please don’t make any noise. Even like something like this would wake me up outside. So I was so worried about that there should be no sound that should wake me up because then it would be so hard to go back to sleep. And some people said some things, which helped for a day or two, but then it used to get back.

Farrukh: Someone who has faced it himself or herself and has gone out. I feel like only they can help you. Someone who has not faced it, they can never relate to what you’re experiencing.

Farrukh: And someone who’s not on the other side already and someone who has not also helped various people get over it. People like that can help but I feel like based on my experiences, people who have faced it and have got on the other side make it the easiest for you to get there.

Martin: The advice that we often get from other people is well intentioned but it often just repeats a lot of the stuff that’s already out there, which can just create more confusion, more pressure around sleep.

Martin: Like all the sleep hygiene stuff, for example. It’s, it tends to revolve around adding more, doing more in an effort to make a certain amount or a certain type of sleep happen. It takes personal experience or a really deep level of understanding to get to this point where you acknowledge that it’s that effort that is the actual problem.

Martin: And that’s probably the difference between someone who’s gone through the struggle and someone who hasn’t. But what you really encapsulate there, just the way that we can ramp up that pressure, to perform a certain amount or a certain type of sleep through effort, through creating the ideal or the perfect conditions.

Martin: And as we ramp up that pressure, just as you said, it just creates this kind of performance anxiety. The stakes just become so much higher. And that in itself just makes sleep even more difficult.

Farrukh: That is so true. That is so true. And. Judgment point is a huge thing. You judging yourself on whether it was a success, whether it was a failure.

Farrukh: I think that over judgment, and it’s not that sleep is a problem, then the next day you are all your thoughts. It’s sleep. I can’t sleep well. What if I don’t sleep well? Again, even if you sleep well, and this is something that I noticed that working, even if you’re working hard towards getting good sleep and you’re trying to lean your bed for hours and hours, and even if you get an amount of sleep, which is okay, even after you wake up, your mind would again be like, okay, I slept, but what about now?

Farrukh: What about the next sleep? Would I be able to fall asleep again? And then these thoughts all over the day became a huge problem. I wasn’t able to work, I wasn’t able to study because I felt like. I need to solve this problem. And I think there is where the issue comes. I need to solve this problem first and then do the other things in my life.

Farrukh: Once this problem will be solved, then I will be happy. Once this problem will be solved, then I will start enjoying life. So you start to see it like I’m doing something and without fixing it, I can’t do something else.

Farrukh: I did not know how to solve it. I had not watched your videos. I had not gotten in contact with you. I did not know that there was a solution.

Martin: I think it makes sense that you are gonna notice your brain focusing on sleep because the human brain is always trying to problem solve, right?

Martin: And any time it identifies a problem or even just a potential problem, it’s gonna really focus on that. And part of that does involve a lot of mental time traveling. The brain just focuses on the future, what each next night or each next day is gonna be, or what previous nights were like, what previous days were like.

Martin: It very rarely sticks to the present moment. That’s often a skill that we have to cultivate through practice. And you really highlight something, which I hear a lot, is that you just, you feel like you’re never satisfied with whatever happens, so you can have a really good night, and instead of using that as a reminder that Oh, I am able to generate sleep. Your brain immediately time travels into the future and it’s yeah, but what about tonight?

Farrukh: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. That just becomes a loop, I would say. Yeah.

Martin: If you had to describe what an average night was like for you when you were struggling, how would you describe it?

Farrukh: I think average night, I would start about it probably from the time, like two to three hours before I had to get into bed. The worry and anxiety started creeping in a lot, although that anxiety worry was there throughout the day. But when I know that, okay, two hours after this, three hours after this I have to go to bed, it was like I could feel something in my head.

Farrukh: It was something, it was like someone is trying to squeeze my brain, I’m worrying about it and stuff like that. And you feel so bad ’cause you see that the other people, they are working or doing something and then they come back home and they’re so excited to fall asleep and just rest and stuff like that.

Farrukh: And you feel like where people are finding enjoyment, you are finding like fear in that. So I think, and then when the time comes to get into bed, it’s like, it was like a constant moving around in my bed. Okay, let me try to fall asleep like this.

Farrukh: Maybe this will help. Let me try to do this. Let me try to do that. And then even you become so much conscious about it that there were times, and I’m sure you would’ve heard this a lot, that you’re trying to fall asleep and then you just notice that you’re about to fall asleep and then you wake up.

Farrukh: So you just notice that, oh, I’m going to sleep. And then you see your brain shutting down and the moment you start to see that you’re shutting down, you wake up because you once again pull out that monitoring thing on it. So I had to remember some nights where I did not sleep at all being in my bed, like all night long.

Farrukh: Some nights, like 15 minutes of sleep, half an hour of sleep, and then waking up. And then constant worry about I did not sleep well yesterday, how the next night is going to look like if I don’t sleep well, I’m not going to be. And your mind always shows you the worst case.

Farrukh: Worst case scenarios, okay, I’m not going to be able to fall asleep again at all. And when that happens, probably I’m going to even die. If I don’t fall asleep for 3, 4, 5 days, I’m going to die. And yep. A constant worry, a constant swinging around in the bed, trying to fall asleep.

Farrukh: Like a constant headache, I would say. And yep. Struggling to fall asleep. Even when you notice your mind shutting down a bit, being very conscious about it, and then it wakes you up. It’s like almost you’re looking for, just your mind is super, super alert. Like someone is going to come and probably kill you or something.

Farrukh: So you have to be very much alert what’s happening, what’s going around? Am I falling asleep?

Martin: I get this impression that at that time it just felt like your brain was working against you. At a time when you wanted to be winding down and relaxing and inviting sleep.

Martin: Instead, you found the opposite was happening. Your brain was generating more worries, more anxiety. You, it was like running through all these worst case scenarios and because you identified that as being something that’s not helpful. It can be human nature to then try to resist those thoughts or to try and fight those thoughts, get rid of those thoughts.

Martin: And then that pulls you into even more of a battle with them. And then they become even stronger and more intense just in the same way that the more you try to make sleep happen, you’re tossing and turning, trying to fall asleep, trying to make it happen. Find the perfect body position, the most comfortable body position.

Martin: And it’s like the more you’re trying, the more you find yourself struggling.

Farrukh: Absolutely. Absolutely. Like I said, it even the thoughts then you start to try hard to not have those thoughts. The more you try to avoid those thoughts, the more they come, the more strength they have.

Farrukh: I even remember like sometimes not going to work, sometimes not going to my place where I had to study ’cause my brain making the excuse that I have not slept well. So it means that I cannot work, I cannot do this.

Farrukh: So you decide not to go to work. Then the anxiety starts creeping in about your work as well. Oh, I’m not just now not sleeping, but now I’m not working. How will I work in the future? How would my earnings look like? How will I take care of my family and then instead of going to work or instead of going to your university or college or whatever it is, staying in at your home, being in your bed, and trying to like toss and turn, not only at night, but also during the day.

Farrukh: And I think there’s the concept of you feel like you have to make up your sleep. Okay. Yesterday I slept for four hours. Let me make up for the rest of the 2, 3, 4 hours or whatever in the afternoon or in the morning. And this is something that I’ve heard all my life, like eight hours sleep. And before I experienced insomnia, I never thought about it.

Farrukh: But it started impacting me after I started facing it because I was not only judgmental on how I’m sleeping, whether it’s deep sleep or whether it’s not deep sleep, I was so much judging myself on how many hours am I sleeping? Is it five hours, is it six hours? Is it seven hours? Okay. Yesterday I slept six hours, so I should sleep two more hours to make up for the last two hours yesterday.

Farrukh: And then you start to make up things like there is something that you like, there is an ideal sleep that you have to follow and you are always trying to catch up.

Martin: It just becomes more of a focus and your actions start to be more aligned with this idea that you need to serve sleep rather than your actions serving you and the life you wanna live. They’re now serving sleep, you’re chasing after it. You’re trying to create the perfect conditions for sleep. You’re trying to problem solve and troubleshoot. And that just gives it even more power and influence over your life just as you shared there.

Martin: It’s like sleep becomes a battleground. It makes sense that you notice this anxiety growing as the night gets closer, as your bedtime’s approaching because your brain is preparing for battle because it knows that there’s gonna be a struggle about to show up. Because that’s what it’s learned through no fault of your own. It is just doing its job of looking out for you. But that’s just what it’s learned. And then so you’ve got that struggle at night and then during the day, when your actions start to reflect the struggle rather than the life you wanna live.

Martin: For example, you might not go to work, and that’s completely understandable. And then at the same time, that can have the knock on effect of more time worrying about sleep. It increases the stakes. Now it’s really affecting your life. You’re not working. How are you gonna provide for yourself, for your future, for your family?

Martin: There’s more consequences, there’s more pressure. And it just perfectly encapsulates how this can so easily just take over your entire life. It’s not just a nighttime issue. It’s like a 24 7 issue.

Farrukh: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. You’re so right about it. And the point that you mentioned about sleep hygiene.

Farrukh: Now those sort of videos are good for people who are able to sleep well but are compromising their sleep. But someone who is struggling with sleep, when they start to watch those videos, that’s where the anxiety grows.

Martin: Sleep hygiene is really for those who are neglecting their sleep, who aren’t giving adequate opportunity for sleep to happen, or is for those who are sleeping really well, might just be looking to get those final opportunities to optimize the good conditions for sleep.

Martin: The thing is, people that struggling with insomnia, they are not neglecting their sleep. They are giving it a lot of opportunity to happen. They’re already clearing the stage as much as they can, putting a lot of effort in, a lot of trying. So the answer there is not usually more trying. By that point, something different is needed.

Martin: Sleep hygiene is like dental hygiene. It’s a preventative measure but once you’ve got that cavity, no amount of brushing is gonna fix that. You need something different.

Martin: Before we talk about what that different way looked like for you, what you had tried in an attempt to fix this problem?

Farrukh: The first thing, the foremost thing, I thought that the more time I spend in bed, the faster I can solve this.

Farrukh: So before I used to spend like seven or eight hours in bed. Now I started spending probably 12 hours, sometimes 14 hours, 15 hours, like compromising other things just for me to be able to fall asleep.

Farrukh: And you don’t realize that the thing that you’re doing to solve the problem is actually the cause of the problem.

Farrukh: Then I thought that the solution to this is make up to sleep, right? I have to make my sleep up. So I would avoid other things. I would not work. I would not do the things that are required of me. I stopped doing the things that I used to like, like my hobbies or things that I enjoy, thinking that I need to fix this first and only then I can reen enjoy the things that I was doing.

Farrukh: And only then, for example, at that time I was also working out. And I said that, okay, until I fix this, I can’t work out. So because I have not slept well, it means that I can’t work out.

Farrukh: Now it’s not just one problem, it’s impacting a hundred other things. And your mind is I have to solve this one problem before I look into the other things. So I think this is the stuff that I was trying to do, and then during the day, working hard to get rid of the thoughts. I should not think about this.

Farrukh: I should not focus on this trying my best, that these thoughts should not come into my mind. And just like we discussed, the more you try, the stronger it becomes as a whole.

Martin: There was a powerful statement in there that when you were describing all of these attempts to problem solve and to fix and it was something along the lines of it wasn’t just one problem anymore. As you tried to do more it upon reflection just created more problems. Now, it wasn’t about just sleep anymore, it was about the thoughts that come with it, the feelings that come with it.

Martin: The missing work because of it. Not working out, even though working out was important to you. Not doing things that you enjoy that matter to you. So it’s like there’s it, not only are you upping the stakes, but it just creates more problems. It’s not just about sleep anymore, it’s about all this other stuff on top of that.

Martin: So as you were deep into this problem solving mode. When you found my work, what was it about this approach that I share that made it feel like this could be a more useful way forward or worth experimenting with?

Farrukh: I would say that the first time I saw you, I watched two videos, three videos, and it’s like, you can relate to the things, right? And I started realizing how all the efforts that I’m doing so far are basically just feeding into the problem.

Farrukh: And then you, it’s like you hear someone talking about a more relaxed approach to sleep and someone basically talking about not giving sleep that much importance and realizing that you can be good without giving your sleep so much importance.

Farrukh: And you start to realize by doing these things or by watching and then trying that, Hey, even if I don’t sleep well, let me try to enjoy my day.

Farrukh: Let me still try to go. Let me still try to do the things that I’m supposed to do. Let me still try to work out. Let me still try to enjoy my day. Let me still work. Let me still hang out with friends despite the fact that I’m not getting much sleep. And after you keep doing this for a long time, just like sleep becomes a loop and sleep problems become a loop.

Farrukh: After you start to form this new loop and you start to realize that, hey, your brain starts to see, okay, I wasn’t able to sleep, or I wasn’t able to sleep that well. But see still I enjoyed a little more than the last week. I still worked more than the last week. I still had a hangout with my friends. I still did the things that I was supposed to do.

Farrukh: Then you start to dismantle this association of good sleep means a good next day. I was watching one of your videos with one of your clients and she mentioned a very good point about your mind attaches to a good sleep means a good next day, and a bad sleep means a bad next day. Whereas it can be the way around as well.

Farrukh: You can have a bad sleep and an awesome next day and a very good sleep and a very bad next day. And then the second thing, heavily reducing the time that I was spending in my bed.

Farrukh: And then you start feeling more sleepy. And I started to love that feeling that, hey, look, I’m starting to feel sleepy once again because my mind, my brain is now wanting sleep.

Farrukh: My mind is wanting my brain, my mind, my body is wanting to, like, sometimes it was dying to go and lay in bed, but I wasn’t doing that because I knew that only this is the time that I have to spend in my bed and that’s it. So during the time when I would go into bed, because now this is something that my mind is now dying to go to bed, whereas before it was dreading that when I go to bed, all these thoughts and stuff like this.

Farrukh: Now when I’m not giving myself that much time to rest time on my bed, my mind was like, I want rest, right? I want to lay down. Let’s just lay down for five minutes. Let’s just lay down for 10 minutes. But I won’t. I would save that for the sleep window.

Farrukh: You start to trust your natural ability to fall asleep. Your mind starts to realize that, hey, when I feel when the body needs sleep, I will fall asleep. When my body is feeling very, very tired, like when the body is very, very tired, I would go to sleep.

Farrukh: And then you would sleep for a few weeks in that sleep window and then you would realize, Hey, I’m sleeping even more so I can increase it even more. I can increase it even more.

Farrukh: I started to enjoy my day. So my brain started to get some sample size of, hey, even a bad sleep can have a good next day, can have an enjoyable next day.

Farrukh: I can still work. I can still do this. Even if I feel sleepy. I would, let’s say, have a coffee. I would have some tea, and I would still be able to work. I would still be able to enjoy it. And I realized after starting to work out, after starting to work, that, hey, my, I was wrong in letting myself know that I have not had these eight hours of sleep so I can’t work out, I can’t work. I can’t go out and hang out with friends.

Farrukh: I started realizing that I can do these things even when I sleep less. And I think that’s the breakthrough point where your brain starts attaching less importance to sleep ’cause now it’s not the most important thing in life, although it’s important, but it’s not the most important.

Farrukh: Even if it’s less you can still do what you want to do.

Martin: When you found the YouTube channel, you felt heard, it felt like your experience was understood, that it made a little bit more sense, the struggle that you were in. And that offered some reassurance and it also gave you opportunity. It revealed opportunity for a different way forward, a way to break that loop that you found yourself in.

Martin: And thanks to your own willingness to experiment, to be curious, to play around with a different approach. You started to bring things back to your life that mattered, things that you’d been withdrawing from. Because of concern about how you might feel or how they might affect sleep, or this belief that I can’t do anything that I enjoy until sleep is fixed.

Martin: You flipped out on its head. You were like, okay, sleep isn’t fixed, but I’m gonna do the things that I enjoy anyway. I’m gonna start bringing them back into my life. And as you did that, it meant that even if sleep was still the same, it was starting to lose its power and its influence over your life.

Martin: Like you got that sense of power back a little. Even if it was just a tiny bit, you got some more agency over your life again, and you noticed that the quality of your day wasn’t always a hundred percent dependent on the quality of your sleep. Like you could still have some good days or some good moments, or even just some okay moments.

Martin: Especially if you gave yourself that opportunity for those things to show up by doing the things that mattered to you by doing the things that reflected who you are, who you want to be, and the life you wanna live. And you also reduced the amount of time you allotted for sleep, which in another way we could just say you stopped chasing after sleep quite so much.

Martin: So instead of spending, say 12 hours in bed, you allotted an amount of time for sleep that more accurately reflected however you were sleeping at that time.

Martin: Something that people often share as well when they first start to reduce the amount of time they allot for sleep, it can often then become the struggle is staying awake.

Martin: Which is quite ironic because someone with insomnia will probably say they struggle with trying to sleep and now it becomes completely the opposite and I’m struggling to stay awake. And what does that mean about your natural ability to sleep? It tells you that it’s still there. We just need to maybe remove ourselves from the process. Maybe it’s all the trying that becomes the obstacle.

Martin: I think you really touched on a key point there about how this can influence your identity. When insomnia becomes part of your identity, how that can just make things so much more difficult. And one way you reclaimed your identity was doing more of the stuff that mattered to you.

Martin: And that meant that as a natural byproduct of that sleep and insomnia, although it was still part of life, it started to lose its importance. It started to lose its influence over who you are as a person.

Martin: Also with all those thoughts and those feelings that might show up during the day, there was less resistance to them, less judgment about what they meant.

Martin: You were better able to make some distance between the thoughts and who you are. I’m curious to hear a little bit more about that specifically, like how you actually put that into practice. Because these thoughts and these feelings can be really difficult to experience. They can be really distracting.

Martin: I’m yet to meet a human being who genuinely says they like experiencing anxiety and worry and frustration and fear. So how do you put this into practice? How do you stop fighting those thoughts and feelings that you do not want to experience?

Farrukh: So the first thing is out of experience. I started to realize that even if I don’t sleep well, I can still work, I can still do all of those things.

Farrukh: And then out of experiences, you realize that your mind saying, oh, what if I’m not able to sleep? Well, again, you just go back and let your brain know that yesterday I was able to sleep. And then even on days where I did not sleep well, you start to accumulate those experiences of enjoyment during the next day.

Farrukh: See how I was still able to enjoy my next day? And then these thoughts start to lose their power.

Farrukh: Sometimes I did feel like I made a mistake of always looking at where I want to be at, how exactly I want my sleep to look like, because that can always make you feel like a failure because you will always feel like, I want that, but I’m still not there. But if you realize, but if you start to look back and realize how much you have been improving over time, that will give you a lot of enjoyment.

Farrukh: So yes, look forward towards what sort of sleep you want to have in the future, but also look back at how much you have been improving. How was your sleep like one month ago, and how it has improved.

Martin: In terms of dealing with these difficult thoughts and the feelings. It’s almost like there was a direct way in an indirect way, so to speak. So the indirect way just came from the fact that your bed and sleep became less of a battleground.

Martin: There was less struggle at night. There was less pressure to make sleep happen. Being awake became less of a threat, so there was less problem solving around it. You were doing more of the stuff that mattered to you each day, so that had the indirect effect that your brain’s not identifying being awake as much of a threat anymore.

Martin: So it’s naturally gonna produce maybe fewer or less powerful of those difficult thoughts and those feelings. And then you’ve got the, perhaps the more direct way, which is. Reminding yourself that these thoughts and these feelings are okay to experience that it’s okay to have them. That they’re natural and they’re normal.

Martin: They’re not a reflection of who you are. They’re not necessarily facts. You shared that when you draw on your experience, there could often be a discrepancy between what your thoughts were telling you and what your experience was telling you. And by responding with less resistance and having some more confidence or a plan of action in place in how you’re gonna respond to these thoughts in a way that’s not just resistance, they started to again, lose some of their power and influence.

Martin: They maybe showed up less frequently. Because your strategy shifted from not trying to get rid of them, fight them, avoid them, resist them. It just became about, I’m gonna maybe acknowledge them, tell myself it’s okay, and I’m gonna respond in a workable way. I’m gonna respond by doing something that matters to me.

Martin: I’m gonna respond by bringing my focus back to the present moment, bringing my attention back to wherever I am, whatever I’m doing, or whatever I want to be doing. And the more you focused on your actions, the stuff that was in within your control, the more you notice that you were taking all that power and influence over your life back.

Martin: And so that also snowballs and means that, this is less of a problem. Your brain’s not gonna be quite so active trying to fix this for you, generating all those thoughts and those feelings, you realize that there was just less effort required. It wasn’t about doing more apart from like doing more of the stuff that matters to you, but for sleep, it wasn’t about doing more, it was about doing less and just giving sleep the opportunity to do what it wants.

Martin: Same with all those thoughts and feelings. It’s not about what can I do about them? It’s about doing less with them, just maybe acknowledging them and then just refocusing on what’s a workable way to respond.

Farrukh: Yeah that’s so true. And you don’t even realize when a time comes, when thoughts about sleep just completely go away.

Farrukh: Like you don’t realize when it happens, you start feeling like the thoughts start getting less and less and less, and there comes a time and you look back and you’re like, Hey, I’m not, they have been a few days and I’ve not thought about sleep at all. How much I’m sleeping or how my next sleep is going to look like, or any thoughts about sleep in that regard.

Farrukh: When you, when there’s that moment of realization, that moment of realization is also quite enjoyable in a sense. And I know many people worry about, I’ve seen some people on the web that have gone onto the other side, but that I have seen some people worrying about relapse. That what if it happens again?

Farrukh: What if it comes up again? For me, that was not the case because now it was like, you gave me something, now I know how to solve it. Even if it happens, I know what to do about it. So I did not experience those thoughts of what if it comes back? It’s just you never worry about what if you’re not able to, let’s say, tie your shoelaces because you know that even if you mess up, you can once again change the way you’re tying it and it’ll be fine.

Farrukh: So that started happening with me during sleep, like the thoughts related to sleep as well. I realized that now I’m having great sleep. I’m back to where I wanted. Now I’m probably enjoying my sleep even more than the other people. Even if this is something that comes back later in life because of something, it’s a very easy thing to solve based on the things like even if it comes back, I’ll still keep enjoying the things that I’m doing.

Farrukh: If I feel like I’m not being able to sleep well, I will just reduce my time a bit in my bed. So you stop fearing about what if it comes back again? Because now you know there’s a way to address it.

Farrukh: Sleep starts becoming less of a big deal. So I realize that, I noticed that I’m on the other side of it when sleep was no longer a big deal to me, so it wasn’t like I have to achieve something.

Farrukh: I moved like my country and I had some things to do. There have been nights where I’ve just gotten two hours of sleep, three hours of sleep, and I did feel sleepy the next day, but it was no longer that, Hey, it’s insomnia. I cannot sleep well again, and stuff like that.

Farrukh: Because now it was like, okay, I wasn’t able to sleep well. I will be able to sleep well the next night. And now even if a thoughts like, oh, what if I’m not able to sleep? Okay, I’ll just have some tea. I’ll just have some coffee the next morning. I’ll still do the things that I need to do. It becomes like not a big thing at all.

Martin: You feel stronger and more resilient because of this experience and because of the skills that you’ve been practicing and developing.

Martin: So even if and when nights of less sleep happen again in the future, you know a way of responding that isn’t gonna create more difficulty and more struggle, that’s just gonna keep you heading in the direction that you want to be heading.

Martin: When nights of less sleep happen, they are nights of less sleep. They’re not, insomnia has returned. You’re not adding anything more onto the actual experience. You’re just acknowledging whatever the reality was. And that’s it. I think that’s important because insomnia isn’t a night or a few nights of sleep not happening as you want it to. Insomnia is struggling with sleep.

Martin: That’s really what it comes down to. So for as long as you’re able to respond to sleep not happening as you might want it to, and all the thoughts and the feelings that can come with that, with less struggle, really insomnia can never regain that foothold in your life because you’re not struggling, you’re not engaged in that battle again with it.

Farrukh: Yeah, if I don’t sleep well it was just less hours of sleep.

Farrukh: I don’t even call it a bad night, like just less hours of sleep. Some days have more hours of sleep, some days have less hours of sleep, some days have average hours of sleep.

Farrukh: And I realized that I’m no longer worried about what if a noise wakes me up, because now even if a noise wakes me up, I’ll just rest once again. And I know my body trusts itself now that it’ll fall asleep once again.

Farrukh: And then there’s a thought that came, I’m not sure if it was an unconscious thought, I started to enjoy my rest more than my sleep. So my mind started to feel like even if I don’t fall deep asleep, at least I’m like resting in my bed.

Martin: Resting is an action, so it’s something you can control versus trying to make sleep happen, which is something that’s not in your control.

Martin: And so when your goal is, I’m just gonna rest, not only is that beneficial because rest can be quite restorative, especially versus struggling, but it can also, when you’re resting and not putting all this effort into trying to make sleep happen, it can also just naturally make conditions for sleep a little bit better too.

Martin: How long would you say it took for you to get to this point where it felt like you were free of this ongoing struggle with sleep, that you could just live your life independently of whatever kind of sleep showed up and whatever kind of thoughts or feelings might show up.

Farrukh: Sleep was something that I started to really dread during my journey with insomnia, I would say. But after I started doing the things that we just talked about, I started to feel like my emotions towards sleep, it started to improve. Like I started to feel good emotions.

Farrukh: Another mistake that I was trying to do is I was trying to fix insomnia so that when I wake up the next day, insomnia is completely gone.

Farrukh: But when you realize that it’s a process, i’m gradually improving. I’m slowly moving forward. My thoughts started to change around it I think by three months time I was at a point where sleep was no longer a big thing.

Farrukh: But you still realize that after you start to have enough sleep, you have some thoughts regarding sleep.

Farrukh: It’s good that it takes time, because see, if you could solve it in one day, it means that it can also get back in one day, right?

Farrukh: So the point that it takes time is because it takes time, because it’s long lasting, it’s going to end the rest of your life. That’s why it’s taking time.

Farrukh: You enjoy the process when you see how far you have come and you don’t just keep looking at where you want to go.

Martin: Was progress constant improvement night after night, week after week, or were there lots of ups and downs, what did it look like for you?

Farrukh: Definitely like any other thing in life, ups and downs. There are days even after you start the process where you feel like. See, I tried another thing and it also did not work right? There are some thoughts that it’s not working. Probably like Martin helps the other people out there, but it’s not for me.

Farrukh: I’m unique. My case is different, right? You still have those thoughts, but visualizing the progress. It was more like this. It was up and down. But if you see the next high was always higher than the previous high, so it was like down and then back up again. The overall movement was going upwards.

Farrukh: I would define it like that. So yeah, if you have some downs, if you have some really bad nights of sleep, you have some thoughts. There could be some days where you feel like, oh, those thoughts are back in the game and I’m still struggling with it, and all of that. That’s very normal. That’s very usual.

Farrukh: Still keep doing what you are doing and don’t just keep switching things. Okay, that’s not working. Let me try this. Okay, now that’s not working. Let me try this. Because people often just try something for one night, for one, two nights and then switch on to something else.

Farrukh: There would be days where you feel a bit discouraged, but just realize that it’s normal, it’s usual. Still keep doing the things. And you still keep moving forward.

Martin: Yeah. Those downs or those dips are really just opportunities to reflect on how you wanna respond. They can be disappointing and frustrating.

Martin: Your brain can fire up and tell you, oh, this isn’t working. You are this unique person that this is not gonna be helpful for. But really what they are just opportunities to reflect on how you wanna respond, because it’s your response that matters. Your experience already tells you that sleep itself is out of your control, but how you choose to respond is always within your control.

Martin: And just acknowledging that can be really powerful and empowering. What does an average night look for you these days Farrukh, if there is such a thing?

Farrukh: I look forward to sleep now. I look forward to having a good rest now. I look forward to having an enjoyable night regardless of whether I sleep or not.

Farrukh: It’s no longer deciding my days it’s no longer a big deal. Sleep is no longer a big deal at all.

Martin: How is your daytime life different now compared to when you were tangled up in that struggle with sleep?

Farrukh: No longer seeing yourself as a successful person or a failure based on how much you’re sleeping. Not looking back at your previous night. And looking at how many hours you slept or what happened or what did not happen.

Farrukh: During my struggle, I used to ask some people like, how many hours do you sleep? And oftentimes people don’t know because people don’t look back and that’s what you start to notice with yourself once you start to move forward, that during the daytime, oftentimes you won’t even know how much you slept because you would just wake up and you would start to do whatever is required of you instead of like looking back and having to check your phone, okay, I have slept for these many hours, or I should make up, or I should do this, or I should do that.

Farrukh: I do every other thing that I enjoy in my life. Like I’m doing my masters, I’m walking, and then I sit with my friends, like joke around, play around sometimes doing the hobbies, doing the things that I like and. Yeah, and sleep is no longer a decider into what I do the next day. If sleep happens, I do this if sleep does not happen, I do this whether sleep happens or whether sleep does not happen, I still do the same things the next day.

Farrukh: So sleep is no longer like the deciding factor of what’s going to happen the next day or what I’m going to do or what I’m not going to do.

Martin: You’ve got your life back from insomnia.

Farrukh: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. That’s the sentence that summarizes everything that we’ve talked about.

Martin: Farrukh, I’m really grateful for the time you’ve taken out your day to come on and to share your whole experience from the start of the struggle to the depths of the struggle to your emergence and your transformation.

Martin: I know it’s gonna be really helpful for a lot of people. I do just have one last question for you. And it’s this one. If someone is listening and they feel as though they, they’ve tried everything that they are beyond help, maybe they’re that unique case, that they’ll never be able to stop struggling with insomnia, what would you say to them?

Farrukh: I would say that everybody feels like they’re unique and somehow their problem is unfixable until you start to do things and stick with things for a while. So if things have not been working for you, the things that we have been talking about so far, either you might not be doing it the right way.

Farrukh: Or you have not done that enough in order to judge whether it’s working or not. Sometimes we don’t do that enough and we constantly keep switching between things. Okay, this is not working. Let me try this. Trial and error is a very good strategy, but once you try something, you need to give it time to see its effects.

Farrukh: You need to give it time to see how it’s working and once you start doing it for some time, and notice once again, whenever you judge yourself on how much you’re improving, judge yourself on how much you are improving actually, and not only on where you want to get. Because even if you’re improving slightly, even slightly, and that slightly could mean having even a very small bit good emotion towards sleep than before.

Farrukh: Or having a little bit more sleep than before or enjoying sleep or rest or whatever, a little bit more than before, or being able to enjoy your day a little bit more than before. Even that should show you that it’s working. It’s just a process that you need to follow for some time. ’cause if you keep looking for where you want to get, then you might look like then always everything will feel like it’s not working because you will always be like, okay, but I’m still not there, but I’m still not there, but I’m still not, yes, you’re still not there, but perhaps you are further from where you were when you got started.

Farrukh: And this gives you confidence. This gives you motivation, so stay on it, stick with it. This is something that’s going to make you learn a lot about your mind. This is something that once you’re on the other side, you’ll enjoy sleep even more than you used to do before.

Farrukh: And I know it’s hard to say or it’s weird for someone to sound to hear this, that it. For me, it often feels like a gift that I got and I got to learn so many things about it. Now I can sleep well as well. Now the things that I learned, I can apply to other things in my life as well. I know it feels weird to hear this once you are struggling with it, but once you’re on the other side, you start to really see what Martin means when he talks about these things.

Farrukh: So stick with it. It just takes some time, but you will get there.

Martin: Great. Well, thank you again, Farrukh, for the time you’ve taken to come onto the podcast. It’s really appreciated.

Farrukh: Thank you, man. And just before we go, I would say that I’m very, very grateful for you, for all the work that you’re doing, and I just wish you the best of luck. Just keep doing whatever you are doing.

Farrukh: I just wish your work goes out to more and more people and I hope that you keep doing this work and you keep impacting more and more lives, as many as you can moving forward.

Martin: Well, thank you. I appreciate that.

Farrukh: Thank you.

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.

I want you to be the next insomnia success story I share! If you're ready to stop struggling with sleep and get your life back from insomnia, you can start my insomnia coaching course right now.

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Courtney’s experience with insomnia didn’t start overnight — but when it hit, it hit hard.

Looking back, she could see some early signs. As a child, she was sensitive to her environment. New places, travel, small changes — sleep didn’t always come easily. But it wasn’t something that took over her life.

That changed in 2020.

With a new baby, the stress of the pandemic, family tension, and untreated anxiety, everything began to build at once. Then the nights started to change. She began waking up in the early hours of the morning, wide awake.

At first, it was confusing. Then it became frightening.

The moment she noticed she wasn’t asleep, panic would take over. Her heart would race. Her body would react as if something was wrong. Nights became something to fear. Sleep became something she felt she had to make happen.

She tried everything — supplements, routines, changes to her environment, and eventually medication. But nothing brought consistent relief.

Her days started revolving around sleep. Avoiding things. Planning everything around the night ahead. Trying harder, doing more — all in the hope that sleep would finally come. But the harder she tried, the more difficult it became.

What began to shift things for Courtney wasn’t another strategy — it was a different way of understanding what was happening.

A realization that nothing was broken. That her body already knew how to sleep. And that the struggle itself might be what was keeping her stuck.

From there, things didn’t change overnight. It took time. Practice. Setbacks. Learning how to respond differently to difficult nights and the thoughts and feelings that came with them.

But slowly, something began to change. She started trusting her body again. Sleep became less of a battle.

And instead of her life revolving around sleep, she was putting more of her energy into the things that mattered to her each day — and insomnia lost its power and its influence.

Click here for a full transcript of this episode.

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, Courtney, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to come onto the podcast.

Courtney: Thank you very much for having me on.

Martin: It’s great to have you on. Let’s start right at the beginning as always. When did your sleep problems first begin, and what do you feel caused those initial issues with sleep?

Courtney: So I think what caused the insomnia battle that I dealt with was some background things that got, had, had gone on in my life. For example my mom has always struggled with sleep, so I have wondered if there’s a genetic component to that. Even as a kid, I’ve just always been more sensitive to my environment.

Courtney: For example if I went to a friend’s house, I wouldn’t sleep very well. There was times I’d have my mom come and get me because I wasn’t sleeping. Probably get really anxious if the, if we’re traveling, I don’t sleep well, if the room is too hot, I don’t sleep well. Just things like that. Just very sensitive to shifts in my environment.

Courtney: And then in 2020 is when I began my battle with insomnia. What also added into that was just some unhelpful beliefs about sleep that I just picked up from the media.

Courtney: For example, like I feel like there’s a lot of times that they’ll do a study or they’ll release an article that doesn’t tell the full story, but is enough to cause fear in you about insomnia. So for example, if someone doesn’t get seven to nine hours a night, that could lead to whatever catastrophic thing or.

Courtney: Insomniacs are, you know, shown to struggle with, you know, fill in the blank there. So I had that kind of fearful mindset already. And then yeah, you just add in. My husband and I had our first child in 2019. Around that time I was struggling with an un untreated anxiety disorder, and I was trying to muscle my way through that.

Courtney: And then, as you know, the years progressed. We had some family and relational tension and my husband has some job changes due to the pandemic that happened, let alone the pandemic itself and the fear around that. So there was just a lot of lifestyle changes at that time that I think I had a hard time with, and I just never slowed down to kind of process that or make space for that.

Courtney: And I think my body was trying to communicate that to me through anxiety, but I just didn’t slow down to listen. And then it, it. Overflowed into a, a sleep disorder or insomnia right around 2020. And I’ve struggled with that for quite a few years and finally I’m in a better place where I feel like I can talk about it having been on the other side of it.

Martin: So it sounds like for you, concern or a focus or issues with sleep was always something that was kind of with you, maybe perhaps more in the background. It would show up every now and then, but then in 2020 around then there was lots of change going on. Lots of stresses, lots of different stuff happening and so the sleep issues resurfaced, but this time it felt different.

Courtney: Yes. There was just a few nights that I started waking up at like 3:00 AM just wide awake. And I was like, huh, this is weird. And then it started getting more and more frequent, and there was a few nights that I did not sleep at all. And what shifted was my focus on it and my fear around it. So I started becoming very fearful, like, what is wrong with me that I can’t sleep? So as that fear grew, I started to become more fearful of nighttime.

Courtney: And it was on the week of Halloween. There was a few nights that I, I didn’t sleep at all. Like, I would lay down at night and I, I lay there for maybe about 15 minutes or so, and it’s like, as soon as I was aware, oh, I’m not sleeping yet, I would instantly have a panic attack. I mean, I was sweating, my heart was racing.

Courtney: I was in full panic mode. I had my, I called my dad up ’cause he lives, you know, nearby. And my husband stayed with our son and I had him take me to the emergency room at about 3:00 AM just panic stricken.

Courtney: And I didn’t even know, I just, I needed help and I didn’t know where to go. So he took me there and I mean, I went in and I was just like, I just can’t sleep. I, I can’t sleep. And I’m sure they thought. You know, I was on something ’cause they ran a full drug screen and of course that came back clean. I was just panic stricken, severe anxiety.

Courtney: But it probably looked to them like I was taking a stimulant of some kind. ’cause how else, like, would I end up there? Not able to sleep. But unfortunately, like they didn’t really have any answers for me. I remember talking with the nurse and just telling her my story and she acknowledged, she’s like, you’ve been through a lot of life change and, you know, that can contribute to this.

Courtney: But there was no real like, help. I think they gave me two Benadryl and I think that made me doze off for an hour in the ER while I was waiting to be discharged. And I think that only came from the fact that they were treating me for something like they were taking care of me. So I feel like I could like come down a little bit and then went home and I don’t think I slept the rest of the night after that.

Courtney: The next morning I think I crashed on the couch for maybe an hour, and then the following Thursday, I ha ended up having my husband take me into the emergency room. ‘Cause we had stayed at my parents’ house that night and so they were with my son and my husband took me in and I was again just begging them to help me sleep.

Courtney: Prior to that I was able to get in with the local psychiatrist’s office and I think I went to them that Thursday and, you know, they gave me medication and they gave me an anti-anxiety medic medication. And then also she called it a heavy hitter sleep medication. I think it was Restoril, which is an older generation drug.

Courtney: And I was like, okay, this will do it for me. And she was pretty confident. She’s like, well, you know, put you on this for a very limited time, maybe two weeks. And we’ll see how that goes. So I went home that Thursday night and I took it and it didn’t help. And I, so I can’t even tell you the fear, the shame, the confusion of, they gave me a heavy hitter as she put it, sleep medication.

Courtney: And that was not enough to help me sleep. So hence, I, I ended up back in the ER and all they could do was give me another dose of that, just because I think you were allowed to take two and that was the maximum. So I, from then on, I was taking the maximum dose of that much longer than the two weeks. And so I felt completely just weak, broken alone, confu, I mean, anything you can think of in a dark season like that, I felt it because I was like, this is not helping.

Courtney: Like this is the strongest that they have and this is not enough to knock me out, like, what is wrong with me?

Martin: Well that was a really difficult situation that you were going through. And so the way it sounds like it was different, apart from the obvious in terms of the visits to the emergency room, was when the sleep issue showed up.

Martin: This time around, they, they felt different. Like you were waking up during the night and sleep just wasn’t getting back on track like it was in the past. So that led to some understandable concern ’cause you’re a human being. But then the more that concern raised. Perhaps there was like more pressure to make sleep happen, more effort to make sleep happen more trying.

Martin: And then that in turn just made it more difficult until it reached this crescendo where you’re just kind of, you can’t try any harder. And then we’re told, well, this, this is the most powerful medication we have. This will make sleep happen. And when that isn’t working, especially after you’ve been told that, then you’re feeling really alone out of options.

Martin: Confused, scared, as you said, you can feel broken and it just makes it just even so much more difficult and scary.

Courtney: Yes. And so what even made it worse was I was back in the psychiatrist’s office a few days later and I think she was very concerned that I had to take the maximum dose. And that it wasn’t helping.

Courtney: So on top of that, on top of the anxiety medication, on top of the heavy sleep medication, she prescribed a anti-psychotic, not because I was psychotic, but because it was also used off-label as a a sleep to induce sleep. So she’s like, maybe this com, you know, combined with the Restoril, will help you go back to the one pill, the one dose, and then you don’t have to take the two.

Courtney: We can get you off of it faster. Well, I wish that was the case, but I still had to take the two, I had to take the anti-psychotic and I was on it longer than the two weeks. So then that snowballed into fear of dependency on the medication. And I will say I was dependent on it because it got to a point where if I even thought, okay, maybe I can try to not take it tonight, I would instantly have anxiety.

Courtney: So. After, after, you know, the, the hospital trips and the trips to the, the psychiatrist, I, the medicine did help temporarily. There was a couple nights that knocked me out for like 10 hours. So I was taking everything that they gave me and I, I got some sleep, but it was like, one night would be 10 hours and then the next night, you know, I might get four hours and then another night I would make that up, like my body would sleep longer.

Courtney: So it was kind of like a rollercoaster of sleep. I just had the hardest time getting balanced again.

Martin: So it sounds as though you felt just really dependent on all these different medications. But at the same time you felt that this was just unsustainable, like continuing to take this much medication, especially when it wasn’t even generating consistently good sleep for you.

Martin: But as far as you are concerned, you had no other options.

Courtney: Exactly, yes. And so it was hard because the, the other feelings, it wasn’t just about the sleep anymore. So there was nights that I would get up and just go for a walk around our neighborhood at like 3:00 AM And I, I remember thinking, this is like so weird how like, physically I am up walking in the dark when everybody else is asleep and I should be asleep, but I can’t.

Courtney: And then emotionally I’m in the same place. Like I’m dealing with something that no one around me knows what to do with. I, you know, I remember talking to family and friends and even my husband just like, you know, they were telling me, oh, have you tried melatonin? Have you tried lavender? Have you tried CBD oil?

Courtney: And I’m like, yes, I’ve done all of it. But they just, they don’t know. And I remember my husband saying maybe try not to think about it. And so then I’m like, okay, maybe he’s right.

Courtney: Maybe I just need to not think so much about it. And that’s when I was, I lay down at night and I would try to control my thoughts and I would try to, I started changing my environment because I was of course researching everything, being a problem solver. And I’m like, okay, so I need to, you know, wear the blue light glasses.

Courtney: I need to not drink coffee afternoon. I need to do all, all of the things that, you know, I’m sure many people have talked about with you that you’ve discussed on your channel that other people have done. Like I did all of them, but the intention behind them was to induce sleep. So every time I did those things, it backfired.

Courtney: And I think those things are, can be helpful if you’re trying to relax your body. If you’re trying to. I was actually just talking to my dad about this. He asked me about like a, a sleep supplement. I’m like, well, if you’re trying to, you know, support your body, great, but I think it can backfire. If you’re trying to induce sleep, if the goal is to make yourself sleep, that can be very problematic.

Courtney: And that was my case. So it was just a very lonely place of people suggesting things and telling me things, and I’m like, I’ve done all of it. None of it works. Something’s wrong with me. Like I, I remember thinking my, something in my brain must have just broke. And when you look online about insomnia outside of the community that you have created, there’s not, there’s nothing that’s helpful.

Courtney: So it was just, it was a very lonely place of trying to navigate this until I came across your channel.

Martin: You made an insightful point there that all the things that you did for as long as the intention was to make a certain amount or a certain type of sleep happen. It was going to backfire because sleep is out of your direct control.

Martin: But when you were going through this struggle, was, was that insight present? Like did you realize at the time that the more your intention was focused on trying to make sleep happen the more you seemed to struggle? Or was it more of a case of I’ve just gotta keep trying, sooner or later I’ll find something that works.

Courtney: Yes. So initially I think I was just so frazzled that I was trying anything and everything, and I mean, I, it took me quite a while to come across your channel. I was looking at different, I was researching things, I was looking at different videos and for me personally, my faith is very important to me.

Courtney: So I was looking thing, looking for things through that lens. And the first thing that I came across that was even a little bit helpful was there’s, there was this guy who was talking about his struggle with insomnia, and he talked about the importance of surrender.

Courtney: And just for him, you know, he talked about just surrendering everything to God and giving up and not trying so hard. And that was enough for him. And I’m like, okay, I can, you know, I can do that. I can surrender. And, you know, I did have a night where I was like, all right, you know, if I’m never gonna sleep again, I can’t help it.

Courtney: Like, I, I give up and, you know, but for me, and that helped for a little bit. The surrender or the acceptance did help for a little bit. But for me, I just, I needed more information. I’m someone who, I, I love to know the why behind why I’m doing things. I love to, you know, learn as much as I can. And so when I finally stumbled across your channel, you explained everything with the why behind it, why in insomnia develops, why your body’s doing what it’s doing, why your efforts are failing.

Courtney: And I’m like, okay, this is, this is filling in the gaps that I have needed in order to move forward.

Martin: Mm. So perhaps it’s education, perhaps that educational component of it. A greater understanding of where insomnia comes from, what keeps it alive, what gives it power and influence just felt reassuring.

Martin: Now things started to make sense for you. Maybe you didn’t feel broken anymore. You realized that you weren’t broken, you were just stuck. And I think you made a good point too, because when we hear people talk about surrender or acceptance. That, that can be a new option that’s available to us. And like you said, you experimented with it but without that kind of understanding on, you know, why is this helpful?

Martin: How is this helpful? It can make it harder to commit to that kind of approach.

Courtney: Exactly, exactly. And so it was frustrating because like, everything that I was looking into felt like just a bandaid. And it, it, it was hard because the things that I was doing was not helping, like, it wasn’t addressing the root cause.

Courtney: And, you know, I, I did everything I could. I had, there were nights my husband would stay up with me to talk with me. I had people praying for me. I was praying about it, like trying all the supplements and nothing like, you feel just helpless. You’re like, I’m doing all the right things. And in my mind, or in the way we’ve learned in our culture is if you try harder.

Courtney: You will get results. Well, I’ve learned with anxiety and I’ve learned with insomnia, the opposite is true. The harder you try, the more your body’s like this is not gonna work very well. So it took me a while to get to that point, but I feel like once I did there was so much more freedom and I was able to take that pressure off.

Martin: One thing that you touched upon earlier was how this wasn’t just an issue at nighttime, it would also be present in the daytime as well. When you were still tangled up in this struggle, how was this affecting your days?

Courtney: It consumed my thoughts. So in the morning, okay, so for example, nowadays, like if I’m having a rough day and maybe I didn’t sleep well, I will tell my husband, Hey, you know, I’m having a rough day.

Courtney: I didn’t, I maybe slept, you know, four or five hours, just bear with me. But back then. I would get up in the morning and be like, telling everybody, oh my gosh, I only slept two hours tonight. Last night I only slept an hour. I didn’t sleep at all. I was telling anybody and everybody just desperate. And my entire day looked like cultivating the day to support the night.

Courtney: So not drinking coffee after noon, as I mentioned. Not over exerting myself because I didn’t wanna overstimulate myself to keep myself awake at night. There were times I stayed at home more often and just kind of avoided the things that I normally enjoy. I started worrying about what I was eating.

Courtney: I started worrying about like how much screen time I had. I started worrying about how much I was outside. You know, anything that you can think of. Like I was doing all of that in order to try to provide myself the best opportunity to sleep that night. And it never worked.

Martin: It’s almost like sleep or insomnia was in charge of your decisions each day.

Martin: And so all your actions were intended to serve sleep rather than serve you and the life you wanted to live. And so not only was this kind of maintaining that struggle because none of that stuff really had much influence on sleep anyway, but it was making things even more difficult because then you’re getting pulled away from doing the stuff that’s important.

Martin: Doing the stuff that matters, like through no fault of your own because you’re a problem solver, you’re trying to fix this. But it’s just a, a really clear illustration of how easy it is to get pulled into this struggle. And to find it consuming your attention, consuming your life, and just becoming increasingly more difficult the more you try to deal with it.

Courtney: Yes, exactly. And it’s, it is just, it’s crazy how you can’t, like, you can’t even help it. It’s not like you’re intentionally trying to do that. You’re just trying to survive in that moment, and that’s what happens. Unfortunately, that’s the opposite of what needed to happen. So it’s just, it’s, I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

Courtney: It is such a confusing and lonely and just disorienting space to be in when you’re struggling with insomnia to that level. And then on top of that, it took me a while to realize that like the, the brain fog or forgetfulness or irritability or whatever I was struggling with during the day wasn’t necessarily because of the sleep that I lost.

Courtney: It was because of the anxiety that was consuming me as well.

Martin: Yeah, it’s, it’s just so difficult, isn’t it? Um, You mentioned that you listened to a podcast episode where someone talked about moving away from the, trying, from trying to make sleep happen, and that kind of prompted you to explore a new approach.

Martin: So as you dove into that, and now as you reflect on that journey, what were some of the changes that you made to your way of approaching sleep and responding to insomnia and other thoughts and the feelings that can come with it that helped you move away from the struggle and got you to where you are today?

Courtney: So definitely the education behind your videos, like the, the early videos that you’ve posted. I found that so helpful because I remember it was like a big breath of fresh air when you said something like insomnia is not the same thing as sleep deprivation. Therefore it doesn’t have the same effects and.

Courtney: The second thing was your body is wise in that it will make up the sleep that you need through deep sleep. And even if you’re not getting the full eight hours that you would like to get, your body’s going to get the sleep then it needs. So it allowed me to kind of take a step back and be like, whoa, if I just, if I just let my body do what it is designed to do, maybe I can get back on track.

Courtney: And so, yeah, just the, the, the initial moments of just surrendering to that and letting go and trusting the physiologic, the physiology of my body is what helped me to kind of loosen my grip a little bit. But I will say unfortunately for, well, in my mind, unfortunately it took a lot longer than I would’ve liked it to.

Courtney: I would call that week of no sleep traumatic for me. I, I don’t use that term lightly, but I say that because I’ve come to learn that our bodies keep the score of things like they remember. And there are nights even now, you know, five years later where if I, I’ll be okay for a night or two, but if I go a little bit, you know, maybe three days more of just struggling, those, those fears start to creep back in.

Courtney: And my body, it’s almost like I’m back in 2020 and I’m like, oh, okay, are we going back here? And that’s where, you know, for me, it helps to get out of bed to kind of separate myself from that environment and then go back downstairs. And I found coloring before bed during those times to be really helpful.

Courtney: So I’ll get like an adult coloring book with like, you know, the intricate designs and I will sit there and color and that calms my body down. But allow, it also allows those thoughts to just be there, but I don’t have to pay attention to them. Something else that has been helpful is if I’m really struggling with like thoughts, I would just get my phone out real quick and I will just journal ’em.

Courtney: I will just type ’em all out and there’s been nights I can’t even finish, finish journaling before I fall asleep. So there’s different, you know, tools and things I can do now to support myself to not go back to that place. But it took me a very, very long time. And a lot of, you know, I’ve heard the term relapses or setbacks or however you look at it, you can look at it as like, okay, this isn’t just another opportunity to take care of myself.

Courtney: This is another opportunity to try to implement what I’ve learned and grow and teach my brain through behavior that I can move past this point. You know, I don’t have to go back to 2020, but it, it takes a long time. At least it did for me.

Martin: Yeah, absolutely. I always like to think of this different approach as being skills-based.

Martin: And so like with any skill, it’s gonna take time to get better at that skill, and it’s gonna require a lot of practice, a lot of ongoing practice. And there are gonna be times where it feels that that practice is useful and helpful. And there’s gonna be times when it feels like that practice isn’t doing anything.

Martin: But what matters is just continuing to get the practice in if developing this new skill. Is important to you. And I like how you shared the, the educational component of it was just so reassuring that you learned that you don’t need to intervene with sleep. Like you don’t need to do anything to make it happen.

Martin: Your body wants to take care of that by itself. So that just immediately takes so much of the pressure off, right? You don’t have to do anything anymore. With that, once you’ve got that understanding, I mean, is that, is that what that felt like for you?

Courtney: Oh, yes. And it’s interesting how like. And the health circle of things like, you know, sleep gets grouped in with like, if you want to eat healthier, do all these things.

Courtney: If you want to exercise, do all these things. If you wanna be healthier, do all these things. And then sleep gets thrown in there, like, make sure you’re getting your seven to nine hours. Make sure you’re practicing sleep hygiene and it gets grouped in there. But that’s the only thing that doesn’t work with effort.

Courtney: So it took me a long time to unlearn that, that okay, sleep’s the one thing I can just, you know, take, take my hands off of it. And I found that to be true with other people that I’ve known. It seems like the best sleepers I knew were the people that like could sleep by the, like my husband could sleep by a campfire outside, like, no, doesn’t need anything.

Courtney: And so it’s those people that don’t even try that seem to sleep the best.

Martin: Yeah. And that’s another great insight, isn’t it? Is just looking to what other people are doing. Especially those people that seem to have no issue or concern around sleep. They get great nights almost every night. What are you doing to make that happen?

Martin: You ask that question, you kind of get this dumbfounded look right as they try and figure out what they’re doing, because the answer is they’re not doing anything. They’re just setting time aside for sleep to happen, and that’s it. So perhaps all this messaging around sleep, you know, get seven to nine hours of sleep.

Martin: Maybe it should be make time for sleep, you know, make sufficient time for sleep. The issue is the people who are reading that kind of advice are the people who are struggling with sleep and then, and people with insomnia are often allotting even more time than necessary for sleep. And then setting themselves up for more wakefulness at night.

Martin: So it’s, it again, it’s just so easy through no fault of our own, to just get pulled into this struggle with the kind of messaging around sleep that is predominant.

Courtney: Yes. Yep. And then you add in the, the, like the fear behind it. Like the fear-based, if you don’t do this, this will happen. So then you feel even worse.

Courtney: Like if I don’t, if I don’t get sleep soon, something bad’s gonna happen to me. So that’s why like during that week, I remember at one point I told my husband, I’m like, I just want them to admit me to the hospital. Check me in, send me up to, you know, the mental health floor wherever I need to go, and just, can they just knock me out?

Courtney: Can I just sleep? Just to get, you know, get back into sleeping again. Because I thought if I don’t do that, I’m, my health is gonna self-destruct. Like this is harmful to my body, which puts you into fight or flight even more. And then, yeah, just the shame of, like I said, like walking out at night and looking around at the world and it’s dark and everybody’s sleeping and you’re like, what’s wrong with me?

Courtney: Like, something’s wrong with me, that I’m not like everybody else, that I can’t sleep. And so that’s a whole nother component to this is those thoughts that creep in when you do lay down at night. And for the longest time I was just trying to control them. Like, don’t think about that. Think about something else.

Courtney: Like try to be calmed down. I was trying to breathe, you know, do all the things and I learned, you know, through, you know, your resources that just letting those thoughts be there and let ’em float away, you know, just don’t get too over involved with them. That can relax your body. So you can go to. And then, yeah, another thing that was kind of counterintuitive was the sleep restriction, but that I think had the biggest impact for me is because I was trying to allot aot of time for sleep, but I was going to bed at like nine o’clock and I’d lay there for an hour and a half and that would just increase the anxiety to where I’m like, okay, what’s the minimum sleep I can get?

Courtney: And so I would go to sleep at like, or I’d go up at like 10 or 10 30 when I noticed my eyes were actually drowsy and I would lay there and some nights I would fall right asleep. If I didn’t, I got back up and came downstairs. But that is what helped me to actually be tired enough to go to bed. But again, the message is, well, you have to, you know, you have to make sure you’re getting enough sleep, so you have to go to bed early.

Courtney: And it just, it creates such a mess for people. I, ugh, I just feel bad for anyone going through it right now because I know I, I’m not too far removed to forget what that feels like.

Martin: Absolutely. And it comes down against that theme of the more we chase after sleep, the more elusive it becomes.

Martin: You mentioned that one thing that was really helpful for you was to open up a little bit more to whatever thoughts and feelings were showing up compared to trying to fight them, avoid them, resist them, control them, reason with them or anything else with them. And I think the, for a lot of us, this idea of opening up to what can be really scary, difficult, and uncomfortable thoughts and feelings can itself feel really scary, difficult, and uncomfortable.

Martin: What was your experience like with that? What showed up for you when you first heard of this approach of opening up to this, these really difficult thoughts and feelings?

Courtney: Oh my goodness. I just, I instantly flashed back to just laying there in bed with all these crazy thoughts in my head, but making time to allow that.

Courtney: And I just remember thinking like, oh my goodness, if I do this, like, I’m gonna end up even worse. Like, I’m gonna end up even further into insomnia if I allow all this, all these feelings, and I don’t do something to try to calm them down. And it, it makes so much sense because as I’ve learned with anxiety slash insomnia, it’s that the more you try to control things, the worse it gets.

Courtney: Because your anxious response is to get you to do something like it. Your body thinks it’s in danger. So the more you respond with trying to grab a hold of it and like do something, it’s gonna get worse. Where if you just kind of say, all right, I’m okay. I’m gonna lay here as uncomfortable as I am.

Courtney: This is terrible, but I’m just gonna lay here and let them be. I’m gonna let these feelings be here over time they do pass. So it took, again, it takes time. I still have to practice that, but I’m much better at it than I was. But it does take time.

Martin: it is definitely an ongoing practice. I think to get better skilled in experiencing the full range of human thoughts and feelings with less resistance making space for them to exist. I’m curious to hear from you what that first night or what the first few nights were like when you tried to practice this new approach of making space for that stuff to show up compared to that default response of resistance.

Courtney: So it was. It was very, again, I would say a rollercoaster in those hours of like, you know, 10 30 to seven or whatever, I was in bed. Like initially I would be like, okay, this is uncomfortable, but I’m gonna try this. And I would try it and I would fit, I, I would feel myself relaxed and I would calm down. And then a new thought that would really jar me would come in or a new feeling.

Courtney: And I’d be like, and then I’d have to do it again. So it was constantly, constantly grabbing a hold of those thoughts and being like, okay, you know, I’m just gonna let this be here. I don’t have to believe this, you know, this is what my body’s feeling, but my brain. And it helped for me to separate myself a little bit or create some distance between my, my identity and my brain.

Courtney: Like my brain is the one, you know, churning out all these crazy thoughts. ’cause my body doesn’t feel safe right now. And that’s okay. That’s okay. But I am safe. I’m just gonna lay here. That would work and then I’d have to do it again. So it was a lot of rep repetition over and over. It wasn’t like a one and done, like tonight’s the night, I’m gonna challenge my thoughts or allow them to be there, or you know, breathe and calm down and I’m good.

Courtney: It was repetition over and over again.

Martin: That’s where I think a lot of us can give up because we can still have that, whether it’s, maybe it’s a little bit hidden away in the background or more of a covert goal of I’m practicing this in order to get rid of these thoughts and these feelings. So every time they kind of pop back you’re like, ah, this isn’t working.

Martin: So I’m curious to hear from you with that very common experience of, I opened up to the thoughts, they felt like they were starting to lose their power. I got a little taste of how this could be helpful, but then again, another one would come in and I’ll be back to square one again. What prompted or motivated you to keep up with that practice to feel as though this was an approach that you wanted to commit to and develop skill in?

Courtney: I would see incremental progress. Like I would see little glimmers of hope that I was working my way out of this. So, for example, like I said, with the emails, like I did see through the, the email practices I was putting into place, I would see incremental progress there. And I would do that with the thoughts as well.

Courtney: And then there was a point where I, I just kept going back to, well, I can’t go back to the way it was because that got me nowhere. So there were weak moments where I’m like, I just needed, you know, I need to go back to trying harder, trying all the things, or maybe I should try different sleep medication.

Courtney: And I would be like, well that didn’t get you anywhere. That’s not getting to the. So I think I would love to say it was this big, profound moment of like, breakthrough, but it really was just incremental progress that I saw in myself. Like I’ll never forget the one night I was sitting on the couch and I was drowsy because I had implemented sleep restriction and I was color, I was doing something calming before bed.

Courtney: My husband and I had the TV on. I was just coloring and my eyes got drowsy. And I was like, normally at this time I’m getting hypervigilant. Like I’ll be tired during the day, but then nighttime comes and I’m wide awake. So when I got drowsy, that gave me hope. And so there were more things like that that happened along the way.

Courtney: And then I remember nights where the thoughts weren’t as bad and I was like, okay, here’s my next step. So I, I saw little bits of progress along the way that kept me going.

Martin: Yeah, you got like little hints that this was an approach that held some promise. You started to feel more sleepy as the night approached or as bedtime approached compared to more alert.

Martin: And with those thoughts and those feelings, they were still showing up. But every now and then, perhaps they felt a little bit less powerful or a little bit less influential.

Martin: We have to fight, we have to put effort into sleep. What medication can we explore? But you harnessed your experience. You drew on your superpower of self-reflection and your experience told you that that stuff doesn’t work. So. Your brain is suggesting that’s a route we should carry on pursuing. But you recognize it’s doing that ’cause it’s doing this job.

Martin: It’s doing its job of looking out for you. But you knew from experience that that approach wasn’t getting you closer to where you wanted to be, so you wanted to stay committed to this approach of less resistance and building that skill and experiencing all this stuff with less of a struggle.

Courtney: Exactly.

Courtney: Yes. And I think when you mentioned the struggle, like my laying, laying in bed at night had become a place of struggle and just it felt like I was battling all night with my mind. And so I tried to make a point of not making my bed that place anymore.

Courtney: So when I’m having those nights, I get outta bed and I come downstairs and I’ll journal or color or what have you, and try to do all that there, and then go back to bed when it’s calmer.

Martin: So you withdrew from the battleground when you found yourself getting pulled into that fight. And this is another thing that some people can struggle with because they’re like, should I get out of bed?

Martin: Should I stay in bed? And my answer is always, well, it’s really up to you. It doesn’t matter if you stay in bed or get out of bed. What matters is, are you engaged in a battle? And if you are, how might you withdraw from that battle? So you might want to color or read or watch TV in the living room, or you might want to do that in bed.

Martin: It really doesn’t matter. What matters is you’re awake and you’re not fighting. You’re doing something other than battling away, struggling more, making things more difficult.

Courtney: Yes. And that, you know, there’s that. I’ve read that somewhere. There’s a rule, you know, you don’t use your bed for anything but sleep because you don’t wanna create an association.

Courtney: Well, on good nights, I can color in my bed, I can watch a show. I can read and I, there’s nights I can’t even get through a paragraph and I set it down, I’m out so I can, I can do activities in my bed and not associate it with anything.

Courtney: But the night that, like you said, it is a struggle, I gotta get out of bed. I gotta go do that somewhere else. Because that is part of, I, how I think that that habit became created with insomnia is I would lay down at night in instant panic because my body was like, well this is, this is associated with the panic place.

Courtney: You know what I mean? So that was a learning curve too.

Martin: Yeah, absolutely. It, listening to you share that experience, really, you kind of just played around with some of this, this stuff, right? You gave it a try with an open and a curious mind. And with this understanding. You’re thinking, I’m just gonna see what I take from this.

Martin: What am I gonna learn from this? Because we’re always gonna learn something from what we do. And so you’ve really learned what was a helpful way forward for you, and that kind of gave you that motivation or that impetus to keep you moving in that direction. So to, to bring this together, what you, what you’ve shared as the most helpful things was the educational component.

Martin: You know, really understanding where insomnia comes from, what keeps it alive. And in short, it’s really all of our attempts to get rid of it. Ironically what keeps it alive. And you also learned how easy it is to get drawn into the struggle. And so when you are struggling, it’s not because you’re broken.

Martin: It’s just because what you are understandably doing is you’re just kind of pumping insomnia full of oxygen in effect. You know, it is just kind of feeding the beast through no fault of your own. You found it really helpful to go to bed when you were sleepy, like finding it hard to stay awake rather than going to bed based on what time it was at night.

Martin: And that led to less time awake or less time awake for potential struggle. You found it helpful to be aware or to cultivate an awareness of when you were struggling at night, when you were getting pulled into that battleground and with that awareness, you then chose to respond in a different way. So instead of putting effort into sleep fighting or avoiding thoughts and feelings, you’d do some coloring or you’d do some reading and you found it helpful most of the time to get outta bed to do that.

Martin: And you found it helpful to practice opening up to whatever thoughts, whatever feelings are showing up, even though you might not want them to show up, there they are. You’re acknowledging them and you’re just allowing them to come and go to flow, to be an observer of them. And one way you did that, that you shared was you would just journal them, you would write them down, not as a way to kind of reason with them or change them, unless I’m wrong, in which case please correct me.

Martin: But just as a way to acknowledge them. And it was almost a way that you were putting into practice this idea of opening up to the thoughts and feelings, just writing them down.

Courtney: Yes. Yep. And I will say, yeah, it was both like there were nights I would journal just to get the thoughts outta my head. ’cause then they’re not spiraling while I’m laying there.

Courtney: And there were nights that I would have old fears come back, like the old thoughts that I would write them down and then challenge them. Like for example. I feel like if I don’t sleep, I won’t be able to function tomorrow. And then I would be like, well, actually that’s not true because you have had many good days on, two hours, no hours of sleep.

Courtney: And so for example, like a month ago, I had the first all night, or I’ll call it, you know, I was all night. I haven’t had one of those nights in years, but my husband and I were leaving for the airport that morning, I think at three 30. And so I was wired from packing and tra we were getting ready to travel.

Courtney: I knew I, we had our flight we had to catch. So I gave myself a lot of compassion, like, this makes sense for you. Like, you know, this is, you’re about to travel. It’s the first time we left our boys at home. So there was a lot there. Like it made sense why my body would react that way. And yeah, you know, I, I think maybe I napped on the plane.

Courtney: I don’t remember, but I tried not to pay too much attention to it and. Again, it was the first all nighter in years that I’ve had where I didn’t sleep all night long, but it was okay. Like I, we got there, we had our full day. I think I, we came back and I did take like an hour and a half nap or something, and then we went on with our evening and that night my body made up the sleep.

Courtney: So I can have really good days, like if you’re struggling with insomnia, you can have normal days, you can function fine even if you don’t get sleep. So back to the thoughts, there was a lot of thoughts that I was able to challenge with the educational component that I found through your videos, which was very helpful.

Martin: Yeah, I’m, I’m glad you mentioned that there are still times when sleep isn’t perfect or exactly as you want it to happen, because when we’re struggling, we might have that as our goal. You know, we just have a great night of sleep every single night. But the truth is that no human being has a great night of sleep every single night.

Martin: The difference now is when sleep doesn’t go as you might want it to. It’s not this huge focus of your attention. It’s not something that creates a huge, difficult struggle and pulls you away from the life you want to live. Now it’s more like water off of a duck’s back. You know, it comes and it goes, and then you are moving on from it.

Martin: It really has just lost all of its power and influence over you. And I do want to emphasize, you used the phrase self-compassion. And I think that’s huge because when we are struggling, we can be so hard on ourselves and mean to ourselves, and that doesn’t make things any easier. So giving ourselves some grace, some kindness can be immensely powerful.

Martin: You discovered that thoughts are thoughts. They’re not more than thoughts. They’re not less than thoughts. They’re thoughts. So they’re not facts. Sometimes they might be true, but sometimes not. They’re not a reflection on who you are as a person.

Martin: They’re not always an accurate prediction for the future. They’re not always an accurate reflection of the past. They’re thoughts. And so by listening to your thoughts being more open to them, it kind of came with that bonus that you were able to recognize, Hey, some of these thoughts aren’t even true.

Martin: This thought is telling me that tomorrow is gonna be a disaster, but hang on a minute. The other day I had no sleep and I had a great day, or I had a good day, or an okay day. So you notice that with that acceptance, there’s a reminder that thoughts are nothing more or nothing less than thoughts, and you’ve got that separation too between your thoughts and your body.

Martin: One thing you shared with us a little bit earlier was that as you practiced opening up, especially at first when it feels really scary, like what’s gonna happen if I start allowing these thoughts and these feelings to come in? It feels really uncomfortable. It can feel more and more intense. Then something happens, it kind of reaches a peak at some point, and then it kind of flows back down again.

Martin: And you realize that even though it can feel really scary, really threatening your body is lying in the bed or on the couch in a safe place. So even though it feels very unsafe physically, you are safe. So with that openness and acknowledgement, you also got that reminder or that awareness that your thoughts are separate from your body.

Martin: There was that detachment there, and that in turn can reduce some of their power and influence too.

Courtney: Yes, and that’s something like I think with anxiety in general or insomnia, is like for someone like me who is, like I said, a recovering perfectionist type, the type A. You can have the bar set really high to where your idea of progress or success is.

Courtney: I will never have a rough night again. I will not struggle with, you know, scary thoughts. My thoughts will balance out. I will be peaceful all the time, and that’s just not realistic, nor is that life and so much of our anxiety or other emotions or our body just responding to life. And so life is not perfect and that would be my encouragement to anyone struggling with it is maybe lower the bar a little bit.

Courtney: I had to lower it many times to where, like I mentioned earlier, my idea of progress was just when my eyes got drowsy, like nowhere near a full night of sleep. But I was just happy with that. And so you can build on that versus trying to get your thoughts to be what you want them to be. Get your body to do what you want it to do all the time.

Courtney: Because then what if that’s your standard? What happens when you do have a rough night, a couple, you know, down the road or a couple months, a couple years, for example? How are you gonna respond to that? So I even had that challenge last night. I had, you know, some troubling thoughts pop into my head and at first I was like, oh geez.

Courtney: And I was really kind of dwelling on ’em, and I’m like, wait a minute, wait a minute. Just because I’m thinking it doesn’t mean it’s true, you know, separate a little bit. So it’s still a practice. But that I think is a huge part of insomnia is the thoughts that, that come in during those late nights when you’re, you feel like you are the only one awake in the world or in your neighborhood or wherever, and it’s dark and you are alone with the loud, intense thoughts and you just feel like you’re, you’re crazy.

Courtney: You’re nuts because you can’t move past it. And really, like you said, you’re not broken. It’s just the dynamic of the situation. But you can separate and you can challenge them or write them down and. It will peak and it will, it will pass At some point. It will pass.

Courtney: In the beginning, and I’m sure anyone who has struggled with this, can attest to this, that the beginning of anxiety is such a lonely place. And you feel so alone, like I mentioned, but then you start to hear from other people, especially on your channel. And it, it’s mind boggling to me how.

Courtney: Insomnia starts and progresses is almost like a formula. Like we’re not alone because it almost plays out identically person to person, regardless of their job, where they live, if they’re a parent or not, if they’re married or not, if they’re male, female. It’s amazing to me how similar everyone’s experiences.

Courtney: So you’re, it’s not, it’s not you, it’s the insomnia, if that makes sense. Or the response to it.

Martin: One thing that you touched upon was how we’re measuring progress as we’re on this journey away from the struggle.

Martin: Because for as long as we are measuring progress on sleep or what thoughts and feelings are showing up, we might be setting the stage for more struggle because our own experience probably tells us that we can’t directly control those things. So if we’re measuring how well we’re doing against something we can’t control there’s just so much potential to still be in that quicksand and not be free from the struggle.

Martin: Looking for action based markers of progress can be more helpful. Like, am I doing more of the stuff that matters? Are the decisions I’m making more related to what I want to be doing or how I want to be protecting sleep or preparing for sleep? There’s so many potential markers of progress out there, but focusing on action based markers of progress can be really helpful because it keeps us focused on what is in our control.

Martin: Which are our actions.

Courtney: Yes. I remember like in the thick of it, there were days where I had said that, you know, the sleep consumed my thoughts. And I, I was walking around like a zombie in this in the sense of, all I thought about was I didn’t sleep last night. I probably won’t sleep tonight. And just like feeling so jealous of all my friends and family, like they’re sleeping with no problem.

Courtney: Like, this is not my life right now. This is horrible. And now I, there’ll be nights I don’t sleep well and it’s like, oh yeah, I forgot I didn’t sleep that great last night. Okay. You know? It’s not always like that, but more often it is. And like I can look at my day and be like, oh, I had a great day. I laughed a lot.

Courtney: I had a lot of joy. The weather was beautiful. I exercised, you know, I had a great day despite what my night looked like.

Martin: There’s just so much in your life beyond sleep. Sleep is still a part of your life, but it’s not the main part or a huge part of your life anymore. It’s just one thing of many things.

Martin: How long would you say it took for you to practice this new approach of less resistance, less effort, not trying to control sleep, thoughts, feelings, to get you to a place where you felt that you left the struggle behind, that you can now live your life independently of sleep, and even in the presence of whatever thoughts and feelings might choose to show up?

Courtney: So let me see. For me, I think my full. Severe anxiety struggle was about two and a half to three years. So I had that, you know, under my belt before implementing these, these strategies. I wanna say it probably took me about six months, give or take to, to where I, I didn’t feel burdened by it anymore.

Courtney: Now I will say the nights or the episodes I would have where I would have a couple nights in a row, I would start to get a little weary again and a little doubtful and a little nervous, but I would get through those. So despite those, or setting those to the side, I would say about six months.

Martin: I’m really glad that you emphasized that there was still ups and downs along the way. It doesn’t mean that over the course of that six months, every day or every night was incrementally better than the previous ones. There were sometimes when things felt really good and other times where it felt like, oh, I’m getting pulled back into the struggle again.

Martin: But what mattered was you just kept on with that practice. You acknowledged what was happening. Maybe you were being a bit kinder to yourself when you noticed that maybe you were getting pulled back into the struggle again and just refocusing your attention on acting in a way that you wanted to act in response, acting in a way that you knew was gonna be moving you closer or in the direction that you wanted to be heading.

Courtney: Yes, yes. I remember in the thick of it too, like wondering how long it was gonna take me to feel better. And I remember hearing someone say, oh, it takes as long as it takes. And I was so frustrated by that. ’cause I’m like, I just want a number. Like, is this gonna be like a year? Is it like six months? Like what am I?

Courtney: But it does, I mean, everybody’s different. Your body handles it differently. Like mine remembers very vividly what happened. So I, that I wouldn’t say presents a challenge, but like I said, I have to be more mindful than someone else might. So everybody’s different. But yeah, it’s just keeping in mind where you want to go and keep.

Courtney: Keep going through what you’ve learned and holding close to the va, what you value about your life, and allowing the space and the compassion for the upsets or, you know, setbacks or whatever you would like to call those.

Martin: How were you able to be patient with yourself when no doubt you wanted progress to happen like immediately, which is human nature. How did you practice being patient and just staying committed to the practice?

Courtney: Yes, that was very challenging. Even with anxiety in general, I still struggle with being patient with myself initially because I do, like I said, I have unfortunately high standards for myself that I always have to lower. And so the nights of, you know, bad sleep or a really anxious day, I just constantly had to be like, okay, you know, I can’t, I can’t control this.

Courtney: I just have to accept it. I will get through this. Like this will pass. Just constantly refocusing. But yeah, it was very hard because there’s so many days, even now with different things, I’m like, man, I’m still struggling with this aspect of something, or I haven’t moved past this yet. And again, that’s the initial response.

Courtney: But then I have to, you know, kind of be mindful of that and respond with, I’m growing. Life is not perfect. Progress is not linear. And that kind of helps with the patience part. But it is very challenging, I will say that.

Martin: So it sounds like when you felt impatient you reminded yourself that you are on a journey.

Martin: You are learning that you are growing that you’re heading in the direction you want to be heading. And on any journey there’s gonna be ups and downs. What matters is just continuing on the journey if it feels like that journey matters.

Courtney: Yes. One thing that like was frustrating for me is like, I would hear different success stories and of anything, like, you hear success stories or you read about ’em, and people don’t always share that they’re still working through things.

Courtney: Sometimes it’s just like, oh, I struggle with this thing now I’m here on the other side of it, and life is great. So when you are like me and you’re still working through different things, it’s hard not to see that as a sign of failure and understand that that is the normal, it’s normal to ebb and flow and you know, like you said, sleep is not perfect.

Courtney: It can’t be controlled, so you can’t gauge your progress off of that.

Martin: Yeah, that’s a good reminder that we are never gonna reach this perfect end point moment in our life where everything is perfect for the rest of time. When we’re struggling, we often feel like, if only I can get rid of this one obstacle, then everything will be perfect.

Martin: But the reality is once one obstacle goes away at least one more is gonna show up because life is a journey and that journey involves many obstacles. Courtney, I’m curious what would you say an average night is like for you these days?

Courtney: Oh, I would say most nights I probably, I don’t know, I wander upstairs around like 9 30, 9 45, you know, and then I’ll get in bed and my husband will, I have chat real quick, and then he passes out within 30 seconds, which is amazing.

Courtney: But I will grab my Kindle, read. It depends how tired I am. Read maybe a paragraph, maybe a page, and I’m out. Around 10 o’clock, 10 30, and I get up about six or six 30. And yeah, sleep. Sleep pretty good. I would say.

Martin: I think what really stands out for me there is that there’s no kind of mention of, well, I come home I, I turn all the lights down in my house, I make sure the thermostat is set to a certain temperature.

Martin: I put on some blue blocking glasses. I drink some warm milk. You know, there’s, there’s just nothing there. It was just, I wander up to bed I talk to my husband for a bit, I read and then I get outta bed in the morning. There was just like nothing else. There’s none of that effort. None of that trying, none of the, the rules, none of the rituals.

Courtney: Yeah. And I’ll say, you know, there are a couple, you know, nights here and there where like recently I was anxious in general about different things, and I was like. Struggling with some night sweats and just feeling on edge and maybe some vivid dreams. And so I got up and came downstairs and just got some water and sat for a minute and went back up to bed.

Courtney: And those are the nights that, like I said, I just had to be more mindful that, you know, maybe through my anxiety, my body’s trying to tell me to slow down or pay attention to something. But it’s not an indication now of like, oh, something, you’re gonna go back there. You’re doing something wrong. It’s because I know most nights are like what I just told you prior to that.

Martin: You’ve got a normal human brain that’s gonna generate anxiety and all different thoughts and feelings from time to time. Now they’re just not pulling you into so much of a struggle. You’ve got that skill in your back pocket now to kind of acknowledge them to make space for them.

Martin: To be kind to yourself and to not feel as though you have to do anything with them because they are thoughts and they are feelings. And ultimately you get to choose how to respond to them.

Courtney: Yeah. And that’s something that is super beneficial about this insomnia journey is not only have I learned to how to relate to my thoughts at nighttime, but during the day, ’cause there’s, you know, during the day I’ll just be going through my day like anybody else would.

Courtney: And I’m sure anyone can relate when you get a crazy thought that pops into your head and you know, before it could really jar me and it could cause anxiety or something like that. But now I’m just like, oh, okay, that’s just a thought. Like, doesn’t mean it’s true. So the benefit I think of this insomnia journey is it can benefit all areas of your life.

Courtney: You learn some skills that can apply to everything.

Martin: As you become less of an opponent to certain thoughts and feelings, they become less distracting. So they can show up during the day. You are able to just quickly acknowledge them and refocus on where you are, what you’re doing, what you want to be doing, rather than, you know, the magnifying glass comes out and you’ve got some, a pair of tweezers and you’re kind of looking through that thought and it’s just the whole focus of your attention.

Martin: And you miss out on the whole world around you. You’re missing out on where you are and what you’re doing.

Courtney: Yes. Yep. Exactly. Same as like the insomnia monster, if you will. The more attention you give to it, the more it grows. And same with those thoughts that pop into your head. The more attention you give to them, the more they can get, they can really grab a hold of you and then you’re dwelling on them.

Courtney: I just remembered, I never shared how I was able to get off the sleep medication because that can be a huge source of shame and like struggle is the sleep medications themselves. So coming from someone who was on three and I, and that was just at one time, like there was a lot of adjustments, made a lot of changes.

Courtney: What did it for me was tolerating those uncomfortable thoughts because I told myself, okay. As I try to decrease my dosage and wean off of this, this is gonna create some really uncomfortable feelings and thoughts and I, it’s okay. This is expected. So it did. And as I expected that to happen, I was kind of prepared for it and I was able to sit with that and over time it got a lot better and I was able to challenge the thoughts that like would say, well you still need sleep medication.

Courtney: And I would be like, well no. ’cause I took half a dose last night and I slept really good. So that was huge for me, was able to get off of those through challenging and tolerating the thoughts. And thankfully I haven’t had, I haven’t had to take a sleep aid in, gosh, three or four years I think. So it’s possible if you feel completely like gripped by sleep medication, it is completely possible to get off of it and sleep well.

Martin: I’m really glad you touched upon that because we talked about so much good stuff. I feel that that kind of got a little bit lost because you were telling us right at the start that you just felt trapped in this life of medication dependency almost. It felt like you had to take this medication even though you knew it really wasn’t giving you the kind of results you wanted, but you felt like you had no alternative to it.

Martin: So was it a case that you got some practice in first with this approach of lowering that resistance to being awake at night, lowering the resistance to the thoughts and the feelings, and then as you started to feel as though you were building that skill, then you started to tackle them moving away from the medication.

Martin: Like what, what was the start of that journey like for you of moving away from the medication?

Courtney: I had enough self-awareness then to know, okay, I need to get some of these practices under my belt and be, you know, comfortable with them before I try to make a big change like that. Because as I mentioned, there were nights I would try to think about, okay, maybe I could not take that medicine tonight, or maybe I could decrease the dose and instantly I would be like panicking.

Courtney: And I was like, okay, okay, so let’s tackle this first. And then once I realized like those strategies were working and I, the one night I was feeling drowsy before I even took my medicine, that was an indication, okay, I don’t need the sleep medication to induce drowsiness. So that was the first step and then I was able to build on that later on.

Courtney: And then I think what also really helped was one of your videos talking about how or I had read, maybe you shared it, there was a study that talks about how sleep medications what on average give you 40 extra minutes of sleep or something like that. I had read, it wasn’t even anything significant and I’m like, why am I taking this medicine if I’m trying, if on average it helps you gain an extra, you know, however many minutes of sleep and I’m awake all night anyway.

Courtney: So it was just a logical, like, this is not actually helping me. So it was that combined with the, the step taking the building on each step that I took.

Martin: Was it a long process for you of moving away from the medication or did it happen quite quickly?

Courtney: It was a very gentle, slow, prog, slow process for me, and I knew it would have to be just because of how, like I, how I handled change in general.

Courtney: But especially with that, I was like, Ugh, I’m just gonna give myself a lot of grace and a lot of time and yeah. Yeah, I was able to get off of it, but for me it took a while.

Martin: Did you have that temptation as you were moving away from the medication, reducing your dose, that you’re starting to feel more confident and, yeah, I don’t need this medication to make sleep happen and then may be a really difficult night shows up and then your problem solving brain fires up and it’s like, well, we need to go back to the medication.

Martin: Was, was that something you experienced and if it was, how did you respond?

Courtney: Yes, those old thoughts would creep back in and I would be like, oh, you know, ready to go back to that. And I had to challenge that. Like, no, this didn’t help you before. You will get through this. You don’t need them, you don’t actually need them to sleep.

Courtney: So those were the thoughts that I would have to challenge. I couldn’t just, you know, write ’em down like I would actually have to challenge them. But yeah, much like my body remembers what happened, the old thoughts are very much there to, so I would have to. Re just be, make, be mindful of that, that it’s gonna be, it’s gonna take a while.

Courtney: My body remembers that, and therefore those thoughts might come back again.

Martin: You reminded yourself of that conflict that can happen between our problem solving brain and our experience, maybe like the wise mind perhaps. So your problem solving brain was like, no, we need to go back to the medication.

Martin: And it’s so easy to listen to that problem solving brain because it serves us really well in so many areas of life. But not all the time. And you drew on your experience and you reminded yourself that, you know, I’ve got this bank of evidence here that tells me that I don’t need medication to make sleep happen.

Martin: That sleep can happen without it. With less of it, I can feel drowsy. So there’s what my problem solving brain is saying isn’t always true in effect. And it was helpful for you to remind yourself of that. What does it feel like now that you’ve eliminated that medication from your life and that you are sleeping and living your life independently of that?

Courtney: Oh man. It, it’s just so freeing to be out of, out of that place. I didn’t ever think I was gonna get out of, I thought once I’m dependent on medication, like I, I don’t even know how I would be able to get out of this, this place, but I did. And also, like, it just, it’s so much more trust for my body. Like my body knows what to do and I can just, I can trust it to do that.

Courtney: So that has been cool that I don’t need to intervene. So again, a lot of freedom.

Martin: Courtney, if someone with chronic insomnia is listening to this and they feel as though they’ve tried everything, that they’re beyond help, that maybe they are the one person that’s truly broken, they’ll never be able to stop struggling with insomnia.

Martin: What would you say to them?

Courtney: Like if they’re already watching this, they’re already on your channel. Like just try to stick to these videos and drown out anything else, because that can be very confusing and you can easily fall back into, well, maybe I need to try that supplement, or maybe my sleep problems related to that.

Courtney: Like just keep it focused on the educational content here, as well as the success stories that you’ve shared on here. Because like we said, you know, it’s a common theme through everyone that has struggled with insomnia and we all have come to the same place maybe a little bit differently, but we’re essentially on the other side of that big battle that we had.

Courtney: So that should give people hopefully a lot of hope that. There’s, this is where the space is to heal from insomnia. So try to drown out other advice or articles or videos. You know, it can get very confusing and it can make you feel a lot worse. You are not alone by any means, and as many people have been where you’re at, I have as well, and I, I thought I was the exception.

Courtney: I didn’t ever think that I would be where I’m at today with how much medication I was on, how many doctor’s appointments I had to go to, how much sleep I had lost. I, I was in such a dark pit that I didn’t think I would ever get out. And if you’re willing to give yourself time and have self-compassion, you will get out.

Courtney: And, and don’t feel bad if you know you’re someone like me where you, you, your, you know, your prayer life isn’t working or you feel like it’s not working, or all the supplements you’re taking are not working. It’s not you. And. It’s okay to be there. Like it’s okay to not be okay, but you do have a lot of hope in this entire channel here that you’ve provided and the videos, the testimonies is proof that there’s hope and you can be one of the people talking about your story.

Courtney: So hanging there, it’s, it’s awful. It’s really, really hard. Like, I, I don’t want to glaze over that. I wouldn’t wish insomnia on anybody. It is a very, very dark and scary place. But you, there is so much hope.

Martin: Thanks again for the time you’ve taken out for your day to come onto the podcast and to share your experience, your insights, your journey, your transformation.

Martin: I just know is gonna help a lot of people. Courtney, so thank you.

Courtney: Thank you for having me.

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.

I want you to be the next insomnia success story I share! If you're ready to stop struggling with sleep and get your life back from insomnia, you can start my insomnia coaching course right now.

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Amber had always been someone people counted on. A nurse. A mom.

For most of her life, sleep wasn’t something she worried about. It just happened. Then life changed.

After her second baby — who arrived early and had some health problems — nights became more difficult. She’d lie down only to wait for the next cry. It felt easier to stay awake than to sleep.

Years working as a NICU nurse added another layer. More responsibility. More pressure to perform. Sleep felt increasingly fragile and one night she couldn’t sleep at all. Panic showed up. Heart racing. Mind spinning.

Insomnia became something to fix.

She researched. Tightened her routine. Optimized sleep hygiene. Tried teas. Tried prescriptions. Got in and out of bed. Tried relaxing harder. Tried doing everything “right.” Nothing worked.

In fact, the harder she tried, the more she struggled. Nights became lonely and exhausting. Life started to revolve around sleep.

Then, in the middle of the night, searching for help, she stumbled across stories of people who weren’t fixing sleep — they were changing how they responded to being awake. Less fighting. More flexibility. More focus on living.

It wasn’t quick. It wasn’t perfect. But little by little, Amber’s struggle loosened.

And sleep stopped being the boss.

Click here for a full transcript of this episode.

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. So Amber, thank you so much for taking the time out for your day to come onto the podcast.

Amber: Thank you.

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

Amber: Yeah. For the most part I’ve been a pretty good sleeper.

Amber: However, I’ve had some points in my life where it’s become a little bit hard and I would say the first time that I noticed a significant change was that was after I had my second baby, he was early, he had some health problems. And I noticed, that I started losing my sleep then. Obviously every new mother does anyways, but I was worried about feeding him.

Amber: I was worried about him getting enough to eat. I would get him settled and then I would lay down and just be waiting for that next cry. And so it was like almost easier to stay awake in a way, but not in the long run. So that was the first time I noticed it. And then the bulk of my career I have been a NICU nurse, which also made me a little anxious about my newborns.

Amber: Sometimes I would be a little bit anxious before certain shifts. Not always, ’cause I worked for 25 years and it was great. But occasionally I would be anxious about getting to bed and in time and getting enough sleep. And so I noticed it there. And then I went back to school a few years ago to become a nurse practitioner and I probably had a little bit of a harder time sleeping during school.

Amber: I got a lot more sensitive to my husband’s snoring during that time and, very light sleeper. And then after that, when I got my first job as a nurse practitioner, I was very on edge and very anxious. And while I was orienting for that job, I did not get a lot of sleep. I still at that time wasn’t paying a lot of attention to the sleep itself.

Amber: Just aware that I wasn’t sleeping enough. Then I would say a couple years ago is where it really came to a head. I had various just normal life stresses going on with various kids and things. And one night I just could not sleep. And I started to recognize that I was having a bit of panic attack and I had some experience with panic and anxiety in the past, like mainly around that baby that I told you about.

Amber: I had learned to work through that and I really hadn’t experienced a lot of it for probably a good decade and a half, but I noticed it that night and that generated a real fear response to me. And I thought, I remember distinctly having thought, oh my gosh, is this gonna keep me from sleeping now? And that’s, that was the hallmark.

Amber: That’s what started it. And it became its own beast from that point on.

Martin: You can recall a lot of times in your life when there were some stressors going on, for want of a better word, and that impacted your sleep. But it tended to be the case that once those initial triggers were no longer present or as relevant, things tended to get back on track.

Amber: I had experienced times in the past where my anxiety was higher and I have always known that my personality goes a little in that direction, but it was manageable. I had been able to manage it and I had learned to manage it pretty well previous to that.

Amber: But this time it I think the fear that it was going to affect my sleep, I did not know how to deal with that, and that scared me on a whole new level. And so now I feel like I was dealing with two things, just, being an anxious sort and now not being able to sleep on top of that.

Amber: I value my health and I work in healthcare and so I do pay attention to details for sure.

Amber: And getting enough sleep was very important to me. I know all the health benefits of that I’ve, and so the thought of not being able to have that and trying to function without it was quite terrifying to me, especially thinking of taking care of other people’s health.

Martin: So you’ve got that added pressure to perform sleep because it’s not just about you, it’s also about all the other people you’re interacting with and caring for each day. What were you doing to try and get things back on track?

Amber: I just go right to trying to problem solve. And of course that’s an important part of my job. That’s how I’ve dealt with being a mother and any other role I’ve had is to figure out, okay, what do I need to do differently?

Amber: I need to understand this better. I’m gonna research it. I’m going to read about it. I’m gonna see what other people do and I’m gonna try all those things just, and I’m gonna, I’m gonna fix this. That’s what I thought. I’m gonna fix it. And so I did several different things. A lot of things that I’ve heard described on your other episodes.

Amber: Sleep hygiene was a big thing, and that is actually something I talked to patients about. And so I thought I need to make my sleep hygiene better and I need to make sure I get in bed at a certain time and have everyone be quiet. I can’t have my noise in my room. I need to be really relaxed, so I’ve got to force myself to be relaxed.

Amber: Try some of the sleep herbal teas. I don’t love medication, so I was trying not to go there in the beginning. Eventually I did go and try some medication. I have plenty of nurse practitioner friends that could write me a prescription for something. And so I tried various things, but only briefly I will say I, because I quickly realized that there was no medication that was helping.

Amber: It might help initially. And then very quickly I discovered that my alarm system was stronger than the medication. And I think I tried maybe two or three different things and I just thought, I’m not gonna do this anymore. ’cause I don’t really wanna be on it anyways and it’s not helping. So yeah, I tried all those things.

Amber: It was a difficult time.

Amber: There was one night where I tried Ambien. I had tried hydroxyzine, I had tried Trazodone. Those two didn’t help at all.

Amber: And one night I tried Ambien and I knew as a professional that’s not a medication that you want to take for very long ’cause it can really be disrupted to sleep. But by that point I was so desperate that I thought maybe if I took it a couple nights, it would help reset me. And that was even the term that the provider I talked to and I had was that maybe I needed a couple nights of reset.

Amber: And I, so the first night I tried it and I was really relieved knowing that I had it that night. So I think my anxiety went down quite a bit right there. ’cause I knew I had something that was going to help and I just slept like a log that night. And so I thought, great this is it. I’m gonna do this a couple nights, I’m gonna get rid of it and I’m gonna move on and be normal again.

Amber: And the very next night I took it and I slept really hard for maybe two hours and then I was up the rest of the night and I was pretty blown away that I had overpowered that medication that I knew to be pretty strong. And so from, I just threw it out at that point because I thought this isn’t working and it’s not gonna, it’s gonna, give me side effects anyway, so I don’t want it.

Amber: So yeah I was really to the end of my rope at that point. I didn’t know what else to do.

Martin: I think a lot of people will identify with at least some kind of aspect of your experience with the medication there. You’ve got that thing and it can feel like a sense of relief.

Martin: It’s almost like you’re delegating all of the effort that you might felt you had to put into sleep to try and make it happen, now it’s not your issue anymore, it’s down to whatever this thing is. So you take it and it’s that’s it. Now there’s no more effort. There’s no more trying, there’s no more pressure, there’s no more performance anxiety, and that in itself can just immediately create better conditions for sleep.

Martin: Maybe the real issue is all the understandable trying and the pressure and the effort.

Amber: Yeah that’s very true. And as you were talking, I actually was thinking of something else I tried. I had an another provider tell me to at night it was a CBT thing. It was to get out of bed when I started feeling those anxious feelings so that I wouldn’t associate my bed with that anxiety.

Amber: And I thought that makes sense ’cause I’m really struggling when I’m laying in my bed. And she told me also to pull out the Old Testament and read Leviticus ’cause it’s really boring. And maybe that would help. And I did it and it was boring. But I found after a while it, it helped a bit initially, but I found after a while that the exercise of getting in and out of bed when I was feeling anxiety was adding to my anxiety.

Amber: ’cause I was just like, oh, here I go again. I’ve, been in bed for 15 minutes. I gotta get out again. It was just something else I had to keep track of.

Martin: Did it almost feel like an additional punishment on top of being awake, this kind of obligation that I should be getting out of bed as well?

Amber: Yes, it did. Very much yeah, it was not relaxing to me.

Martin: I’ve had guests on the podcast that have found it really helpful to get out of bed during the night, and I have other guests just like yourself that did not find it helpful to get out of bed during the night.

Martin: And I think really it just comes down to what our intent is. If we are getting out of bed because we are trying to get rid of anxiety or thoughts or feelings or to get rid of insomnia, to make ourselves feel sleepy again, to make sleep happen, then we might be setting ourselves up for some struggle if our experience tells us that’s out of our control if we’re getting out of bed, just because to us, that feels like a more productive way of spending our time awake during the night.

Martin: Maybe that is gonna be helpful for you. And if your goal is to just use that time awake in a way that’s more useful, that involves less struggling, we can then see that it doesn’t matter, does it? You can do that in bed. You can do that out of bed. Because our goal is just to experience this with less struggle.

Martin: It’s the struggle that kind of adds all that extra difficulty on top.

Amber: That is very true. And that is what I had to come to. It took me a while. And I know I actually emailed you a few times about, I wanted you to tell me exactly what to do and of course you won’t do that.

Amber: Your answers are to help people search themselves to find out what they need to do because it is very individual. And I finally came to. I just need to see how I feel in the moment. If it feels better, if I want to stay in bed, then I’m gonna do that. But if the feelings of, I don’t know, anxiety or restlessness, get too much for me and I would rather do something out of my bed, then I’ll do that.

Amber: So I really ended up not having a certain way of doing things, which I think was a key.

Martin: You were giving yourself more flexibility. Whereas when we were in problem solving mode, it’s I have to do this, I have to do this, I have to do this. And they’ve got this long list, haven’t we?

Amber: Yeah, the algorithm.

Martin: Exactly. Yeah. But then when we start to ease up a little bit, don’t cling onto it quite so tightly, we can become a little bit more flexible. And that in itself can be quite freeing, right? Because

Amber: it is

Martin: now we realize we’ve got options again, and that just opens things up a little bit.

Martin: That doesn’t mean that things are just immediately gonna change, but it can just relieve some of that weight from our shoulders and help us realize that we can choose what we want to do.

Amber: It’s quite liberating actually, when you get to that point.

Martin: Just to rewind a little bit, what was an average night like for you back then, if there was such a thing?

Amber: In the beginning, just sheer difficulty. It was miserable. It was absolutely miserable. I felt very isolated and very alone because of course everyone else in my house is completely out sleeping beautifully. And I am not.

Amber: And it seemed to me like everybody in the neighborhood was sleeping great too. And I am up pacing and walking the hallways or trying to, focus on something that I can’t focus on. Having a lot of an anxious feelings. It just was awful. And then dreading the next day when I was going to be exhausted and very certain I wasn’t going to be able to perform in any of my roles the way I wanted to.

Amber: That was the beginning. As time went on, that very slowly improved, but I did still have a lot of difficult nights as I moved forward.

Martin: How was this influencing your days when you were still tangled up in the struggle?

Amber: Yeah, that was really hard. I called in sick the next day at work and I hardly ever call in sick. I think I’ve missed, gosh, two days and two and a half years. I really, but I didn’t think I could be capable of my job the next day, and I was terrified of myself and terrified of how I would let down other people.

Amber: And so I stayed home and just continued to suffer at home. And then, I mentioned my job a lot. That’s a really important role to me. But of my most important role is that of mother. And as family member to my family. And I also felt like I was not able to do a good job there. I felt like I was not quite present.

Amber: They could tell that I just wasn’t as happy or didn’t have the energy. I wasn’t doing things that I enjoyed as much. It was just really became enclosed in myself and an obsessed about how I could fix this problem, not a good way to live.

Martin: It makes sense why you called in sick to work not only for yourself, for your own wellbeing. It felt what if I might make a mistake at work because I can’t really focus. I’m so distracted. So it’s completely understandable why you would do that. And then at the same time, when you call in sick, you’re not doing that career or that job that might feel important to you.

Martin: That’s reflection of who you are. It’s all this stuff influences your actions in a way that you get pulled away from that life you want to live. And that could be your work, your home life, your family life, your identity. It just feels like your actions start to serve insomnia, sleep, all these thoughts and feelings rather than your actions serving you, who you are and the life you want to live.

Martin: And that just makes it all so much more difficult.

Amber: Yeah, that’s so true. It’s like insomnia became the boss.

Amber: I wasn’t new to the sensation of anxiety or panic. I had episodes of that in the past and I was feeling pretty confident that I knew how to handle that. ’cause it had been so long and I had moved through some really difficult things in my life.

Amber: And I did okay. So then this thing came along and it was mysterious because I’d had this confidence so I could handle anxiety and difficult things. But this was a whole new thing and it caused me to go right down to the bottom again and go, what is wrong with me? What is wrong with my brain?

Amber: Why I felt like I wasn’t doing it to myself, but I couldn’t understand how or why I was doing it to myself. So yes, very mysterious and very difficult for me to understand in the beginning.

Martin: When you came across my work, what made you think that there was something different or something new or opened up this possibility that there’s a new way forward here?

Amber: As probably most people that encounter your work it was in the middle of the night while I was on, looking for help in the middle of the night because I was just desperate. And I stumbled upon some of your, maybe one of your YouTubes, I think, and you were interviewing somebody like this.

Amber: I listened to the person’s story and I thought, oh my gosh, that sounds exactly like how I feel right now. They were really expressing how desperate they were in the beginning and how confusing all the feelings I was feeling at the time. And so that really grabbed my attention because I heard the same level of desperation in this person’s description of themself, and yet they were now being interviewed by you and having worked through that.

Amber: And so it gave me hope. And as I listened to it more, I realized that it actually was very similar to how I had learned to manage anxious thoughts or anxiety in the past. And that was to let them happen. So it was a different level of learning how to let something happen. So that cognitive understanding started coming.

Amber: The more I would listen to your things on YouTube and your podcasts, I had, I felt like it made sense. It resonated with me.

Martin: This is why I’m just so grateful that people like yourself are willing to come on because it, it can be so powerful to hear these journeys and these stories.

Martin: There’s that validation. There’s the acknowledgement that you’re not alone, and then there’s that hope, and you had the bonus of being familiar with an approach of opening up to insomnia, opening up to panic, fear, anxiety.

Amber: It’s a paradoxical thing that, that is how you get through it is by actually allowing it to happen.

Amber: So that, that was a pivotal moment for me and started my process of recovery, which certainly didn’t happen overnight. But the cognitive understanding was there.

Martin: So in terms of allowing it to happen, in a practical sense, how do you allow insomnia, for example, to happen when you really don’t want it to happen.

Martin: How do you allow anxiety to happen when you really don’t want it to happen? What does that look like in, in terms of practical action?

Amber: Yeah. That that, that was the next big hurdle was trying to figure that out. I asked that question of myself and of you, I think several times again, and it’s not something that you can figure out overnight.

Amber: It takes a lot of practice. I think ongoing practice, I don’t think that practice ever ends because there’s always a new layer of things.

Amber: One of them was to not beat myself up for things, because I realized that when I would get really frustrated and go, why can’t I do this? Why can’t I? What’s, why do I think this?

Amber: Why is my brain so busy? Why do I think I have to problem solve everything? Why? I realized that I was just throwing fuel on the fire. I was just putting more pressure on myself. Friend said to me one morning, something that stuck with me, and you actually repeated in an email something very similar.

Amber: She said I would never change your problem solving mind. It makes you who you are and look at all the things you’ve been able to do and accomplish. Because of the way your mind works and who would you be without your mind the way you were? And you had said something pretty similar to me about that too.

Amber: So from that point on, I started looking at that differently and not flogging myself for just being who I am and seeing the benefit of the way my brain works. That was a big realization for me. And then another one was to realize when I was starting to try to prob over problem solve, maybe, oh, it worked this night but this didn’t work that night.

Amber: Maybe I did it a little bit wrong. Maybe you know, I’m not following the algorithm. It was frustrating ’cause professionally, I really do have to follow algorithms a lot. And so I was having to pull away from that natural way of thinking. And not get stuck in this loop of problem solving and just letting it be, not worrying about it so much.

Martin: Step one perhaps was, not beating yourself up over something that your own experience is telling you is out of your control. If you could have made a certain amount or type of sleep happen, you would’ve, you’d be doing it, right? If you could magically and permanently delete anxiety from your mind, you would’ve done it.

Martin: But your experience tells you that’s not possible. You tried and tried. The conclusion from your experience was that’s not possible. So it sounds like part of your journey towards opening up a little bit more to this difficult stuff that you’d rather not experience is to acknowledge that it is out of your control and that your mind isn’t working against you, it’s not your adversary, even though it can sometimes feel that way.

Martin: Because anxiety generally speaking doesn’t feel good. We can see it as a negative thing or a bad thing. If only this anxiety will go away, I would be able to sleep. If only this anxiety would go away, I would be able to be the person I want to be.

Martin: But the brain generates anxiety because it’s trying to give us information about something. It’s trying to remind us of something that’s important. It’s trying to protect us. It’s trying to look out for us. It’s trying to keep us safe, and it’s gonna do this whether there’s a real threat or not, because it’s hyper cautious.

Martin: It’s focused on doom and gloom. ’cause all the good, happy, fluffy, safe stuff isn’t a threat or a concern. So the brain spends no time on that. It’s only ever gonna focus on what might happen or the worst possible outcome or the worst possible experience.

Martin: If we feel anxious that maybe we left the gas stove on. And so we turn around in our driveway and we go back in, we find out we did leave the gas stove on. Is anxiety still a bad thing when it stopped our house from exploding? It’s like what we add on top of it that is the source of so much of our struggle.

Amber: Yes, very true. I think, I started using an analogy in my head as I was figuring this out more as a NICU nurse, which.

Amber: All those years, if you’ve ever been in, in a neonatal intensive care, there’s a lot of alarms that go off all the time. And so sometimes the nurses get a sense of whether it’s an alarm that needs to be paid attention to or not. And people who haven’t been in there are really on edge because they can just, why are we not getting on top of all these alarms, but the nurses like this one, this is okay.

Amber: We’re okay. We don’t need to do anything about it. And I started to realize that’s what was probably going on in me is I, I had an alarm that had some value to it and at times I needed to, of course I need to attend to it. I don’t wanna not be fearful of anything. But it also can go off for things that are not really urgent or really emergent.

Amber: It might be a mistake, it might be like in the nicu, maybe the baby’s wiggling and setting off their alarm, and it’s not a problem. So realizing that a little more was helpful to me.

Martin: I think that’s a fantastic analogy and I love how you connected it to a real ongoing experience that’s relevant to your life.

Martin: ‘Cause that always makes this stuff so much more powerful. And yeah, there’s, these alarms are going off. Sometimes they’re helpful, sometimes they’re useful, sometimes they’re less helpful, sometimes they’re not helpful, they’re not useful. Sometimes maybe they’re more of a distraction than anything else, but what are they?

Martin: At the end of the day, they’re snippets of information and we get to decide how to respond. The alternative approach if you’re in that ward is to just be so focused on, I must not hear any alarms today. I can’t hear any alarms. That’s first of all, that’s just gonna take so much of your energy, focus and attention.

Martin: How are you gonna be able to care for your patients and do the stuff that matters when your brain is, all of its capacity is on trying to avoid hearing an alarm.

Amber: And as time went on, I think my alarm system got a little smarter. I wasn’t going off as much because it wasn’t bothering me as much.

Amber: One other thing that’s come to me while we’ve been talking that I also realized I had a few different epiphanies while going through this, and I realized, I kept realizing different levels at which I was trying to force something to happen. Initially it was trying to force sleep.

Amber: Then it was trying to force myself to relax and not have anxiety. And then when I started doing your program and going about it that way, then I was trying to force myself to be okay or maybe even being awake or be okay with the anxiety. And I wasn’t. And it took me a while to realize, oh, I don’t have to like this actually, I can acknowledge this is hard.

Amber: It is not. This is not ideal. This is not what I wanna do. This is not how I wanna feel. And that’s okay. But I can make a choice here. I do have a choice in what I’m gonna do next. I can have a choice in my discernment. And that was probably one of the bigger epiphanies that I had. ’cause that one really carried out over into other parts of my life too.

Martin: I’m glad you made that point because when we hear about this idea of reducing our resistance to something that we don’t really want to experience or to accept it, this whole philosophy of acceptance, a common reservation I guess that people have is but I’m not okay with this. How do I make myself be okay with something that I’m not okay with?

Martin: I want to be asleep. I don’t want to be awake. And that’s where we can get tripped up. Because it’s not about pretending that you are okay with it. It’s not about pretending that you enjoy being awake pretending that fatigue doesn’t exist, pretending that anxiety doesn’t make things more difficult, that you enjoy it, that it’s great to experience.

Martin: It’s about accepting that this stuff is gonna show up and it’s trying to fight it or avoid it just makes things more difficult. And it’s about, just as you touched upon, bringing your focus back to how you choose to respond to it when it shows up. Choosing to respond in a workable way, a way that isn’t going to layer on all these extra pieces of difficulty and struggle on top of it when it shows up. So I’m really glad you mentioned that because I think that is important.

Amber: Yeah. Yeah. I think that is important. I think that’s a really common misconception when someone starts back on this journey, whether it’s insomnia or trying to deal with anxiety, is then trying to figure out how am I supposed to be okay and enjoying this? And you really can’t, that’s not, that’s really not what we’re trying to do here.

Amber: It’s okay to acknowledge that it’s hard.

Martin: It might even be essential to acknowledge that it’s hard and that in itself might be part of opening up to it.

Amber: Yeah. Agreed.

Amber: I have memory of when I was young, when as a child and I’d get the stomach flu and I had to throw up. It was just a horrible thing. I did not wanna throw up. I would fight it, and my mom would come with me to the toilet, she would hold my head up and she would just rub my back.

Amber: And she would keep saying, just let it come. Just let it come. And I trusted her, and I would let it come, and I would let you know, have the release, and then I would feel better. And it’s more like that to me now. It’s I can let this happen. It doesn’t feel good right now. Might even feel worse before it’s done, but it’s not gonna stay this way.

Amber: I know that now. So that’s a different thing. And then instead of getting really frustrated with my busy brains that likes to think about everything and figure out everything. Now it’s more oh, let’s just see what’s on, what’s on TV tonight? What’s on the brain tonight?

Amber: I’m more like, wow, look at my busy brain. Isn’t that amazing? It can bounce back and forth. To this, that and the other. And it goes fast. Sometimes it’s a little fast for me, but I’m actually more grateful for it now ’cause it helps me keep track of a lot of things and stay on top of a lot of things.

Amber: So I look at that differently as well.

Amber: Another big learning point is what what I can control and what I cannot, and to, there are a lot of things we cannot control and to try to control them, escape from them, or numb yourself to them, distract yourself, it just adds to something that might already be difficult.

Amber: So letting those things be, and then finding where I can control, which is my actions, my response I went into, when I started this out, I did try some meditation, but my understanding of meditation has changed so much in the beginning. I was trying to force myself to relax. I was trying to make my really naturally busy brain not think of anything, and it just doesn’t happen.

Amber: And so that would become more and more frustrating to me. It was just a frustrating experience. I thought I’m never gonna get this down. Now. I choose to relax. I can relax my muscles and my body and I can let myself breathe. But it, you mentioned the word intent or motive in the beginning. My intent of my motive is different.

Amber: It’s not to force total relaxation and calm and quiet my brain and not have thoughts. Now it’s, I am relaxing myself to allow them, if that makes sense. And it has been that has been a real game changer for me as well, because I realize the more I do that, oh, actually, I. I don’t really feel that anxious anymore.

Amber: It’s just gotten better and better. It doesn’t mean I don’t have anxiety, but I’ve, I have a very different approach now and it feels so doable to me compared to the way it used to feel.

Martin: Would you say it’s almost like you are practicing and building skill in experiencing, I’m just gonna say anxiety ’cause that’s the last one that you mentioned.

Martin: Experiencing anxiety with less struggle. So it’s showing up, but it’s losing the more you practice experiencing it with less resistance, it’s almost like it starts to lose its power and influence. So it still shows up, but it’s not as strong, it’s not as distracting. It’s not got that power it once maybe held over you.

Amber: That’s exactly what’s happening now. The thing if I, if for example, if I go to bed and I’m worried about one of my kids or a patient I saw, and it’s leaving me with this unrest inside. I, now we’ll just realize, okay, I’m going into one of these loops where I’m thinking about this a lot, worrying about it all.

Amber: The worry in the world is not gonna change it. I’m gonna just name I’m feeling this way because this is going on, or this is happening and I’m just gonna allow it to happen. I’m gonna relax and allow it to happen. I can maybe think of some more solutions tomorrow, or I can check in on the thing. I just start coming up with things I can do.

Amber: To help it. And it really has it has more of a profound effect on me in helping me get through this.

Martin: Whilst you were talking, I was thinking back to that alarm analogy you were sharing, and I was thinking that maybe a brand new member of staff, maybe they’ve just finished their training and they’re in that ward for the first time, hearing all those alarms go off, it must be terrifying.

Martin: It feels like you’ve really thrown in the deep end, but then as you build up that experience of listening to those alarms going off nonstop choosing through experience on how you’re responding to each of one, each of them, the alarms are still going off, but they’re not having that huge effect on you, that huge physiological effect on you anymore.

Amber: Yeah, that’s exactly right. It’s very it’s very comparable to that experience.

Martin: How does this transfer to sleep then? So we’ve talked about opening up to the thoughts and the feelings. How does that get you to a place where you are not struggling with sleep anymore?

Amber: With sleep it’s really was the same thing.

Amber: The, I bring up anxiety a lot because I feel like the anxiety and the lack of sleep was just so intertwined with this experience. I did have to become more okay with being awake and that took time. And your direction on choosing values, value-based activities was very helpful to me because I’m very aware of what my values are and you know what things lead me more towards those and that type of life I wanna live and.

Amber: So I did go I went through a very sleepless period of time. I think there was one time where I felt like I didn’t get sleep for three nights in a row. Sometimes I don’t know that we’re totally aware of how much sleep we actually get, but that’s what it felt like to me. And I actually carried on.

Amber: I didn’t feel my best. Of course it wasn’t great, but I carried on very normally for those days and I was able to see, wow, I was able to accomplish, these things at work, at home. I had connection with people. I laughed with people. I had some good conversations. And so that was a big confidence builder to see that I actually really can do a lot without sleep.

Amber: It doesn’t feel, the way I like to feel, but I can do it. And so it took some of the fear out of that for me, and that was very helpful.

Martin: Maybe it comes down to exploring what we can do that might make this whole experience a little bit less difficult or a little bit less traumatic. It sounds like one way that you moved toward that goal was by committing to actions that reflected your values, living the kind of life you wanted to live, even when sleep wasn’t showing up.

Martin: And by doing that, I think a natural byproduct maybe, is that we do start to get a little bit more comfortable with being awake because it’s not having such a huge impact over our lives anymore. Even if it’s just a 10th of a percentage point better, we’ve got that 10th of a percentage point more control over our lives now.

Martin: It can snowball. So we become a little bit more comfortable with being awake. That’s not to say we want to be awake, but we just start to get a little bit more comfortable with it. We are less resistant to it. It’s not gonna pull us into quite so much of a struggle and in effect. That kind lowers it down on our list of priorities, perhaps for our problem solving brain.

Martin: Our brain’s oh, maybe we don’t have to fight this quite so hard. We don’t have to engage in this battle. And when we are not engaged in that battle conditions for sleep just become better because we’re not in the middle of a battleground at two o’clock in the morning. We’re awake. We’re experiencing all these thoughts and these feelings, but we’re not in a battleground anymore.

Amber: That’s absolutely correct. And since then, my attitude now I’ve had a couple of circumstances with maybe a teenage child that’s, been late for curfew coming home or maybe a medical issue with somebody that I need to help with. It’s late in tonight. And instead of thinking, oh my gosh, I’m not gonna get sleep now, I’m like, bring it. I can stay up and I can handle tomorrow. I’ve done it for three nights in a row.

Amber: I, it doesn’t scare me like it used to. So it’s a big shift in my perspective on that now.

Martin: That is a really big shift. I’m curious to know, as you were practicing this whole new approach that we’ve been talking about, did you find that progress was just it was kinda like this up upward curve where things just progressively got better and easier and less struggle.

Martin: Or was it more kind of ups and downs, or was it more just like someone had thrown a plate of spaghetti against the wall and it was just all over the place? What was it like for you?

Amber: I like the spaghetti analogy that it probably felt like that for a while. All over the place. I keep using the term cognitive understanding because in my head I could understand what you were saying or what I was hearing from other people.

Amber: It made sense to me. It resonated and I knew this was the way to do it, but anything else I’ve had to learn, whether it is becoming a nurse or a nurse practitioner or I used to run a lot of marathons, learning the best way to do that. Learning it in the book can make absolute sense.

Amber: And you think you’ve got it, but then actually putting it into reality and doing it experientially is an entirely different thing. And that does not come as quickly and it takes a lot of practice. And that’s exactly what happened with this. It took a lot of practice and I had a lot of ups and downs. I have a plate of spaghetti.

Martin: Yeah. And like when you’re learning any new skill there’s gonna be times when it maybe things feel easy, that you’re making great progress, you’re ahead of schedule, and then there’s gonna be times where it feels like nothing is working. You’re doomed to failure, you’re beyond help that you need to go back down that rabbit hole of looking for some something else to do instead.

Martin: I love the fact that you drew in your experience, in marathon running in your own career, the skills, achievements, they take a lot of practice, they take a lot of action, they take a commitment to action, and they also come with ups and downs, and they also come with all those thoughts and feelings that I just gave a few examples of, this isn’t working. We should give in.

Martin: If we think of where we’re most skilled in life, that wasn’t just immediately given to us, we had to earn it, and we earned it through committed action. Even if it’s just doing a little bit every day, it all adds up. It’s just continuing to do things that move us in the direction that we want to be heading.

Amber: Absolutely. And I do think when you start making that initial improvement, so when I first started to improve and I had a few good nights of sleep and I thought, oh, this is it. I’ve arrived. I figured it out. And then you have your first whatever you wanna call it, set bump, or, barrier in the road and you have another bad night.

Amber: It can be really deflating. ’cause you thought, oh, I figured this out and now this isn’t working, and what did I do wrong? You start, you catch yourself going through all of the same rabbit hole again. And so it is, there is a lot of patients required with those setbacks, they are going to continue to happen.

Amber: And I heard. I don’t remember where I heard it, but I heard someone say that they those types of setbacks come up for a reason. It’s an opportunity to practice. It just means that you need to practice again. It’s not really a bad thing, it’s just an opportunity to refine a skill. And again, changing the way I looked at those, ’cause those were pretty, they’re pretty hard, those setbacks once you start on the road to recovery.

Martin: 100%. And especially like you said early on especially if you’re really early in your journey and maybe you string some good nights together, or you have a few days where you notice you’re not completely overwhelmed with all these thoughts and feelings and you can feel really confident and motivated, yes, this is working, I’m doing really well.

Martin: And it can be so deflating and difficult when the difficult stuff shows up again. And even when you are further along in your journey, there can be lots of ups and downs and it can feel like you’re, it’s almost like your brain is, whoa, you’re back to square one.

Martin: Everything you’ve been doing up to this point was a complete waste of time, waste of effort. The truth is that it’s just your brain looking out for you. Again, the truth is you’ve just had this experience of some difficult nights or some nights where less sleep happened or some nights of no sleep, or you’ve noticed those thoughts and feelings showing up and gaining a little bit more power.

Martin: That’s what’s happened. Anything else that you are getting from that is stuff that we are understandably adding on top because we still don’t want to experience it. But what matters is identifying this is a normal part of any journey and that it is about how we choose to respond. And that’s something that we always have power over.

Martin: We have the power over our choice of actions, and it’s easy to respond in the way we wanna respond. When things feel good, when things feel easy, it’s when things feel difficult, that it’s most important we respond in the way that reflects how we wanna respond, and that’s really what counts.

Martin: How long would you say it took for you to get to a point where insomnia and all the thoughts and the feelings that can show up with it and after it weren’t creating a struggle for you that you could do things that matter, live your life, do what’s important to you, independently off sleep, and even in the presence of uncomfortable, difficult thoughts and feelings.

Amber: I think it’s hard to put a specific number on that because in the journey, I feel like I, I would go to that for quite a while and then maybe have a little, regression or whatever, and then I would go back to that.

Amber: But I will say, I think over time those regressions would get further and further apart. And so maybe six to eight months is where I started feeling like I was settling in back into my more normal self, my more baseline self.

Martin: Yeah, that’s helpful because I think it’s a reminder that really what we’ve been talking about this whole time are skills. They’re action-based skills and skills. Take time to learn, to develop, to practice. There’s gonna be ups and downs, there’s gonna be setbacks. And that takes time. We all obviously want immediate results. We wanna be able to just deal with this right now.

Martin: If I could offer that to people, I would offer it. I’d be a trillionaire. But it doesn’t work that way. It’s not easy, it’s difficult, and it requires ongoing practice.

Amber: I can honestly say that even though there were times where I just feel like this really brought me to my knees I wouldn’t change it now because of the benefit I’ve gotten from it. I don’t think there, there’s things that I don’t think I could have learned in another way. I think it’s benefited how I’m able to help others and of course my values, my roles, my role as mother.

Amber: Professionally as nurse practitioner or family member or friend, the people in my life, those are really important to me. And so this outlook and this focus of what I can and cannot control and how to allow these things to move through, to just be able to move through them and not go down the rabbit hole has been really helpful.

Amber: I’m very empathetic towards people that are going through something similar and it doesn’t have to be insomnia because so many struggles go down this road, right? They don’t necessarily have to be insomnia. And of course professionally I hear a lot about these types of things. I’m in that type of a position, and so I do, I have a lot of empathy.

Amber: I understand how things feel how difficult thoughts and feelings can fill, and I can give better guidance and direction. I can do that for my children and other people in my life.

Martin: It can be really hard to think of any positive aspects to this struggle when you are in the midst of it. It can almost sound disrespectful to think that there could be a growth opportunity, or it could have somehow have any positive impact on our lives. But a common theme that runs through so many of these podcast episodes is this sense of growth that can only come from that journey that has been experienced.

Amber: I mentioned how when I have had setbacks with insomnia or anxiety, I can see it more as an opportunity to practice. And so now when other things occur in my life that are difficult I think I can go to that maybe a little more quicker now because of that experience that here’s another opportunity.

Amber: This is happening. How can I go about handling it? What can I control, what can I not? And let myself move through it. And then I would say even just day to day, I think I take more I have more gratitude for things too, because. I’m not struggling with the battle and the calv calvary, as you mentioned.

Amber: Now I have more awareness of things around me that are important to me, or even small things like, good weather or flower. It does, it opens your eyes to other things.

Martin: These are transferable skills.

Martin: They don’t exist only for insomnia, only for anxiety. They can enrich or enhance your life in so many other ways, and that’s where you can end up coming out ahead. So like you shared, maybe now you’re finding yourself better at practicing gratitude. You find yourself better able to focus on values-based action.

Martin: Maybe you’re getting more from life because your values have just become more front and center. And so you’re ensuring that your actions reflect who you are, who you want to be and your, you focus, the focus of your attention is expanded. So maybe you are able to savor a few more of those moments that we might once have been on autopilot and missed out on.

Martin: 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.

Martin: What would you say to them?

Amber: Yes, I’ve anticipated that question and that’s really the reason I did this. I was a little reluctant in saying yes, but because this helped me so much, I couldn’t say no to you. Because this is doable. Even though you may be at the point where you feel like you’re completely broken, you’re completely alone.

Amber: No one understands. I’ve tried, A through Z, it’s not working. It is doable. It’s not gonna happen overnight. But it will happen. And it’s the key things that we’ve been talking about. It’s practicing, it’s being patient with yourself in the process. It’s being kind with yourself in the process.

Amber: It’s identifying what you have control over and what you do not. And, practicing those things over and over is really what will help this settle down. It’s very doable.

Martin: Great. Thank you again, Amber, for coming on. It’s just been a pleasure listening to you describe your journey and your transformation. So thank you.

Amber: Thank you.

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.

I want you to be the next insomnia success story I share! If you're ready to stop struggling with sleep and get your life back from insomnia, you can start my insomnia coaching course right now.

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Before insomnia entered Abbie’s life, sleep was effortless. She’d never had to think about it. She fell asleep quickly, stayed asleep, and moved through her days without giving sleep much attention at all. It was simply there — reliable and unremarkable.

That changed in the fall of 2021 after a short illness. One sleepless night turned into another, and before long, sleep became the center of everything. What started as confusion quickly grew into anxiety and pressure. Each night felt like a test. Each morning felt heavier. As the nights passed, fear took over — fear of being awake, fear of not functioning, fear that something was permanently wrong.

Like many people facing insomnia, Abbie did what made sense. She tried to fix it. She went to bed earlier and earlier. She canceled plans. She followed strict routines. She tried supplements. She searched for answers. And each attempt came with hope — followed by disappointment when sleep didn’t show up. Over time, life began to shrink around sleep, and the struggle only intensified.

Days became just as difficult as nights. Her mind stayed locked on one question: Am I going to sleep tonight? Anxiety filled the hours. Dread set in as evening approached. Even when she was exhausted, her heart raced and her thoughts refused to slow down.

What began to shift things wasn’t a new fix — it was a change in how she responded. Abbie started noticing that withdrawing from life wasn’t helping. Staying in bed wasn’t restoring her energy. And fighting her thoughts wasn’t bringing relief. Slowly, she began doing something different: showing up to her life even when sleep felt uncertain.

She experimented with staying up later instead of trying to force sleep. She returned to the gym. She made plans. She studied. She lived — without waiting for sleep to cooperate. And over time, something important changed. Sleep became less of a battleground. Her thoughts lost their grip. And trust — in herself and in her body — started to rebuild.

In this conversation, Abbie shares what it was like to move through insomnia, how her relationship with sleep changed, and why easing the struggle — not fixing sleep — made all the difference.

Click here for a full transcript of this episode.

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. Abbie, thank you so much for taking the time out for your day to come onto the podcast.

Abbie: Yeah, thanks for having me. Great to be here.

Martin: Let’s start right at the very beginning. When did your issues with sleep first begin and what do you feel caused those issues with sleep?

Abbie: Yeah. It was fall 2021, so like almost four years ago, which is crazy because it feels so vivid in my memories.

Abbie: But I had gotten sick, I think it was like the cold or a flu or something, just like a normal sick, and I wasn’t able to sleep which was really jarring for me at the time because prior to this sort of period of insomnia, I had been a really great sleeper. Like I, had my whole life I had basically like.

Abbie: I never really thought much about sleep. I fell asleep immediately. I stayed asleep. Yeah I had gotten sick, I wasn’t able to sleep. And then I remember the next night I was like, okay, tonight’s the night like, I have to sleep. So I was already, like putting that pressure on sleep it has to be tonight.

Abbie: And so that kind of started, I would say like the feedback loop of okay, I am stressed about sleep. The more I stress about sleep, the less I’m gonna sleep. Yeah, I think I was also dealing with just like a period of more heightened anxiety in my life at the time too. I was applying to graduate school and taking, the admissions tests for that and so maybe it was just like, kinda like the perfect storm.

Abbie: I was like, okay, if I’m gonna get better, I need to sleep. I think it was also like, this was the first time in my life I had experienced a sleepless night. And so it was just like, that was really uncomfortable, like laying there awake all night. The longer you’re awake, the more stressed you’re getting, your heart’s kind of beating fast.

Abbie: Like the whole thing was just uncomfortable and new for me. So I was like I don’t want that to happen again. I better sleep tonight.

Abbie: I feel like each night I wasn’t sleeping, I was just getting more and more anxious about sleeping. I think I was like a week in at that point and I had probably slept two hours each night and I was like, what is going on?

Abbie: Am I ever gonna sleep again? And yeah, I mean it was, I would fall asleep around four or 5:00 AM and then be back up again at 6:00 AM for work. And yeah it was just super uncomfortable and yeah, anyone who’s. Insomnia knows how stressful it is.

Abbie: It was like, every hour that passes, I’m like, okay, I gotta get up in what, in three hours, two hours, one hour. And then, just this intense desire to stay in bed in the mornings. I think to see if you’re tired and you haven’t slept, and you’re like, all I wanna do is stay in bed.

Abbie: I do think, like looking back, I think having my work routine and schedule was like really hard at the time, but really beneficial in some ways because I couldn’t just sit in bed and all day and try to go back to bed and I had to get up and get out and go to work. And that was also ended up being, I think, a good distraction.

Abbie: At least for like the eight hours a day I was working. I wasn’t thinking about sleep. I think that was positive.

Martin: What about that day, those days when you didn’t have any work obligations? Were things different then?

Abbie: Yeah, I would definitely I think early on I would definitely, stay in bed all morning, like trying to quote unquote rest or see if maybe I could eventually fall asleep.

Abbie: And just like really dreading the day because I had slept it all and I was like, Ugh, another day I’m gonna be really tired all day. It’s gonna be so bad. Like kind of those typical anxious, catastrophic thoughts of I just, I don’t wanna do the day. Like I didn’t get any sleep. So if there was, if I didn’t have work and nothing was like forcing me outta bed, I think it was, it would’ve been hard.

Martin: So at this point. Things are really difficult as you’ve just described. And when we face difficulties in life or problems in life, we look to solve them.

Martin: So what was your next step? What other things were you trying to do to get your sleep back on track and get yourself back to where you used to be?

Abbie: Yeah, I think I was trying everything. One of the things I started doing early on was like, canceling all my plans and I would get off work and, as soon as I was done with work like the dread and the anxiety about sleeping that night would kick in.

Abbie: And so I would be like, okay, I gotta go home. I gotta make dinner and I gotta get in bed. So I was like, my bedtime was becoming earlier and earlier even though I just, I wasn’t tired. And I think I was also pretty much trying every sleep supplement out there that there is like about a month in, I think I’d seen my doctor and she had prescribed me I think it was like Ambien or something, and I never ended up taking it, but I did try every over the counter supplement, magnesium, melatonin, all the things.

Abbie: And I would get like really excited like, okay, this is gonna be the thing, like this is gonna work for me. And then every time it didn’t, it was like a letdown of okay, it was like more evidence in my mind that, my sleep is broken and there’s nothing out there that’s gonna fix it.

Martin: I think a lot of people are gonna identify with that.

Martin: And all the things you shared are completely logical to try, right? If we want more sleep to happen it’s almost ground into us that we go to bed earlier, that it’s important to go to bed early get more sleep, give sleep that opportunity to show up. And there can be, it can be, it’s almost like we can become really enthusiastic or we can just try so hard that it backfires on us to the point where we do less with our lives and sleep then grows in importance.

Martin: It becomes more of a focus. So it’s almost like we’re up in the stakes. It becomes even more important for us to perform sleep and then when it doesn’t happen as we want it to. You did a great job of just describing what that’s like yourself. We can just, it feels, it can feel like a personal failure and it can reinforce perhaps this belief that there is something uniquely wrong, that maybe our sleep system is somehow broken.

Martin: But the truth of the matter is, it’s. Perhaps it’s all the ongoing efforts and the trying, which now exists when it never existed before, when we slept fine, that might be the true source of the problem.

Abbie: Yeah, definitely. And I think yeah, along the lines of just like trying everything to control sleep, I was like doing all the sleep hygiene, things like that were recommended.

Abbie: Like I was no screens before bed. Like I just, I had this whole routine of I got a no caffeine, no alcohol, blah, blah, blah. That was just like adding more and more things when, like you just said in the past I had no sleep routine. Like I was, I would pass out on the couch watching TV and go to bed.

Abbie: So yeah, I think that’s exactly right.

Martin: Often as we’re engaged in this pursuit of sleep, we end up removing things from our lives that, either give us meaning or are enjoyable. And that could be something like we, we might give up coffee altogether, for example, even though that’s something we really enjoy.

Martin: We remove that from our lives. We remove TV from our lives. We remove going out with friends late at night from our lives. And so our sleep generally stays the same because sleep doesn’t really care about any of that stuff. But at the same time, our situation has gotten worse because we’re taking all of that stuff away in order to serve sleep.

Martin: And it just makes us, it can make us just feel trapped in this just endless spiral of more difficulty and a less joy from life. More withdrawal and more struggle.

Abbie: Yeah. Yeah. I definitely think that was my experience. The more I. I stopped my usual routine. The worse, I think the worse that it got, for sure.

Abbie: Which is counterintuitive at the time I was like, I can’t be out until 10 o’clock, like I gotta be in bed. And that ended up being one of the things that I, that down the road really helped me was actually staying out late and doing things late at night and doing all these things despite not being able to sleep.

Martin: I’m curious, you mentioned earlier that you went to the doctor and they gave you a prescription for the Ambien, but you didn’t end up taking end. Curious to know why that was?

Abbie: Yeah. I was really nervous about taking it, but I think what I was really nervous about is that I, that it would work and that I wouldn’t rely on it to sleep and.

Abbie: That was like my worst nightmare. It was like, okay, I can suffer and try to sleep and all these things, and if I took this medication and it worked is that gonna be the rest of my life? Am I never gonna be able to sleep again without this medication? So I definitely was like, I think I was really tempted and really close to probably taking it after a month of not sleeping, but I was like yeah, I just wa I didn’t wanna rip the bandaid off, I guess you could say and go down this like spiral of that I felt like I, I couldn’t get back from.

Martin: And I think that’s a good illustration of how any effort or anything that we do to try and make sleep happen can so easily backfire. Because if we try something and it feels like it works. We can feel that reinforces this belief or this idea that we need something to generate sleep, that we’re incapable of generating it by ourselves.

Martin: And on the other hand, if we try something and it doesn’t work, then we reinforce this belief that we need. We still need to keep looking, that we can’t generate sleep by ourselves, that we failed at that thing or that we failed at sleep. So we’ve got this potential that regardless of the outcome, every time we try, we might be reinforcing this idea or this belief that there’s something wrong with our sleep system, that there’s something wrong with our situation, that something is broken when that’s never the case, as we’ll explore a little bit later in our conversation.

Abbie: Yeah, definitely. I think the reliance, like you said on these external things was really big for me early on and that didn’t end up being the solution.

Martin: You also made a good point too, that if we do feel like we’re reliant on something, there might be a point in the future where we don’t wanna be reliant on that thing anymore.

Martin: So if we haven’t addressed what the real root cause of this issue might be then we are gonna be having to revisit that at some point in the future. So it never really goes away. It’s always gonna be with us.

Abbie: Yeah. Yeah. It definitely felt like a short term solution and I was like, I gotta try, I gotta try something else.

Martin: People that aren’t too familiar with insomnia will usually only think of insomnia as like a nighttime problem, but when we’ve been struggling with it or we’ve got that experience of struggling with it, we know that it really is a 24 hour problem, right? It affects our nights and it affects our days.

Martin: Maybe it affects our days even more than it affects our nights. I’m curious to hear from you. How was this affecting your days? Not only in terms of like you touched upon your, those kind of withdrawal from the activities and doing things that are important to you, but the way your mind was responding. What was that experience like for you?

Abbie: Yeah, I would say it was like really intense anxiety. Pretty much from the moment I got outta bed of just these thoughts of am I gonna sleep tonight? And like I had said going to work was a good distraction, but of course I was like exhausted at work and I was like, I don’t know how many more days and nights of this like I can do.

Abbie: And you’re just spiraling. Is this permanent? Is this forever? And I think I also developed a lot of health anxiety around it, like I had all these concerns is this gonna have long-term sort of negative consequences on my health? I think, rightfully there’s so much out there about the number one thing you could do for your health and your longevity is sleep.

Abbie: And you Google sleep and there’s 15 articles about the negative consequences of not sleeping. And not to say that the science isn’t true. I just think that was like really unhelpful for me at the time of okay, not only is the consequence, like I’m tired and anxious and I, I physically feel bad, but there’s, if this keeps going this is gonna be bad for my health in the long term.

Abbie: So I don’t know. All these thoughts were like spiraling all day long. And then as soon as it. I got dark out, like as soon as the sun started to go down I would get this like intense feeling of dread. And yeah. So it was definitely, like you said, an all day thing, not just like a nighttime thing.

Abbie: I think at night it was definitely more I’m sitting in bed and my heart is racing and my thoughts are racing and the more you’re trying to sleep, the more your heart is racing. And so it’s like a lot of physical symptoms. And then during the day it was just like a lot of my mind is consumed with, am I gonna sleep tonight?

Martin: The messaging around sleep out there is very focused on sleep is very important and I would agree with that. Sleep is very important, just like breathing is very important and we’re still waiting for a study to come out that shows that insomnia causes any health problem or increases risk of mortality. But boy, when you read some of that stuff that’s online, it really does sound like a life or death situation. And when you are already putting so much importance on sleep, it can just make things so much more difficult.

Martin: Because it, again, it ups the stakes, right? And you’re gonna put more pressure on yourself to perform sleep. So yeah, I just wanted to emphasize that yes, sleep is important, but the body can generate it by itself just like it generates breathing by itself. And I think a lot of people here listening to this will really identify with how you described what your mind was doing at the time, it was problem solving for you. It was trying to fix this problem. It was brainstorming, and as it was doing that, it was generating lots of difficult feelings, difficult thoughts. It was generating anxiety to ensure that you were giving it attention.

Martin: And there’s also that fatigue, right? That sense of exhaustion. And it can just be when you combine that with your mind is just being focused on sleep and generating all these predictions or these stories it can be really hard to focus and to concentrate on doing stuff that matters.

Abbie: Yeah. Yeah.

Abbie: That, that was definitely my experience. I think, the anxiety is like enough to deal with and then you’re exhausted, and so that’s only feeding it. And you, I just remember feeling okay, if I don’t like. Die from lack of sleep I’m gonna lose my mind. Yeah, it was just a big spiral.

Martin: How did you respond to what your mind was doing at the time?

Abbie: At the time I had family and friends and a partner who were really supportive and I could confide in and that was great. But I also think unless you’ve experienced insomnia, I still just felt like very alone, in the experience.

Abbie: And finding Insomnia Coach was like huge in realizing that I wasn’t alone and that these aren’t unique thoughts and experiences in, in a good way. So yeah, I was trying to cope I think, as best as I could. I was distracting myself. Trying to distract myself at work and yeah, as soon as I realized that the withdrawing from day-to-day activities was making it worse I think that was a really good kind of switch for me in okay, if I can’t sleep, I can’t control the sleep, but I can control my response and I can control what I’m doing.

Abbie: So instead of going to bed at 8:00 PM like I’m gonna go and go to the gym. And I, with no expectation that the gym was gonna make me tired, just like I like to go to the gym and I’m gonna, if I’m up anyway, like I’m gonna study for the GRE and do my grad school application.

Abbie: So I think, yeah, as soon as I had that mindset shift from withdrawing to. Going back to my normal routine. If anything it, it was a good distraction.

Martin: It sounds like you noticed this conflict between some of the thoughts or the stories that your mind was your problem solving brain was telling you as it was trying to fix this problem for you, like you need to withdraw, you can’t do those things.

Martin: You need to do less. You need to say, no, you need to go home. All of these things. And compared to your experience, your experience was telling you well, actually withdrawing isn’t making things any better. It’s not making me feel less fatigued or more rested. It’s certainly not making my life any better.

Martin: And once you notice that conflict, maybe there was this kinda light bulb moment there that I can hear all these thoughts. I can listen to all these thoughts and stories. I don’t necessarily need to fight them. I just need to respond in a way that’s of my choosing. I get to decide how to respond to these thoughts.

Martin: I don’t have to battle with them, struggle with them. I don’t have to let them control me ultimately. I still have the power here.

Abbie: Yeah. I do think that was like the first sort of light bulb going off of okay, all of my thoughts and beliefs about anything but about sleep are not necessarily reality.

Abbie: I don’t have to believe that, I have this thought, I’m never gonna sleep again. That doesn’t make it true. Or you have this thought like, I need to go home and cancel all my plans and otherwise we’re gonna be exhausted. I was exhausted anyway yeah I do think the realization that I didn’t have to, I guess believe my.

Abbie: My thoughts was also like a really big switch for me.

Martin: What did it feel like to realize that what your brain might be telling you or what your brain might be saying might not actually be true?

Abbie: Yeah, honestly, it felt like a big relief. I and I also think I realize the worse I feel and the more negative the thoughts, the less true my thinking is and the less serious I need to take my thinking.

Abbie: So yeah, I think this big relief of there’s a whole reality that exists out in the world and I can always come back to that and whatever my thoughts, my brain are telling me, it doesn’t always match up with what the reality is. And so as soon as I gave myself like, permission to not believe my thoughts, and I still practice this today.

Abbie: Like it’s not easy, but you have an anxious thought or something and you’re like, okay, or here’s the alternative and this isn’t true. So yeah, as soon as I gave myself that permission to, to not one take my thinking so seriously and to two not trust it, especially like when I’m feeling down or bad I think yeah, that, that was a huge sort of flip for me and in my kind of journey with insomnia, but also just like my overall mental health journey.

Martin: I think it might be human nature to resist what’s difficult or uncomfortable. So for many of us. We will resist anxiety, for example, or try really hard to fight it when it shows up or avoid it from showing up in the first place. As you develop this insight or this light bulb moment that maybe the thoughts aren’t always true, did that change how you were able to respond to them?

Abbie: I think the big thing was just like not taking it so seriously like not taking every thought so seriously. And that in turn helped me take some of the pressure off of sleep because if, if I am, my brain is telling me that, if I don’t sleep tonight there’s gonna be all these consequences and blah, blah, blah, then, but if I don’t have to believe that, then it’s not so much pressure that I sleep tonight or the next night or whenever.

Abbie: I do think like getting some distance from my own thoughts was also good. Like I, you’re just, I was so in my own head and every thought that came up, I had to follow that train of thought and act on it. When I realized that I didn’t I think I had a lot more freedom to, to actually do the things that felt Right.

Martin: So when you found Insomnia Coach, at this point, you’d already been trying lots of different things. What made you think there might be something here rather than it just being yet another one of these things that you’ll probably try and not get much from? What made it feel different?

Abbie: Yeah, I think the main thing was there, this sort of like notion that there’s actually nothing to do, I think a lot of other content, like I had mentioned was like, do this, and this before better or don’t do this and this. And when I found Insomnia Coach, I just really, it was the first time I had seen the messaging like, the more we try, the less sleep will come.

Abbie: And so I think when I first found it, I was like, it’s like when some, when you’re stressed and someone tells you to calm down, you’re like, yeah, okay. Stop trying. Sure. That I think at the time seemed like pretty much impossible. But yeah, I think the, there was a lot of content in the emails that you sent that was like one, like I mentioned, making me feel like I’m not alone in this and this isn’t unique to me.

Abbie: And two. Maybe I can just let go a little bit, like maybe I can stop trying so hard. And there were some other like specific sort of techniques and things that, that you had mentioned that ended up being really helpful for me, which I am happy to talk about. But yeah, I think it was just the permission to stop trying so hard.

Martin: If we are able to remember a time when sleep wasn’t an issue or a concern, what were we doing to make sleep happen so well back then? And maybe our own experience can reveal the most valuable insight, which is that sleep was effortless. It required no effort, there were no rules, there were no rituals. It just happened by itself, and that’s really where we want to get back to.

Abbie: Yeah. Yeah. I think that sort of idea you’re mentioning about some of the most valuable information being like my own experience. I think that came up again and again it later in my journey with insomnia. Like when I would have like bumps along the road, I would go back to okay, I’ve had insomnia before.

Abbie: I pretty much didn’t sleep for like months on end. And I survived, and I. I went to work and I functioned and all these things like that is evidence for me in my mind that I can do it again. And I think what made this like first like intense bout so hard was that I, this was the first time it had happened.

Abbie: Like I didn’t have evidence that I could go back to my baseline, but as soon as I had that, like first night of like normal sleep, I think that was really powerful for me to be like, okay here’s your own experience and evidence that it’s possible to sleep. Again.

Martin: It really is a learning experience, I think.

Martin: And there’s that classic phrase that we don’t know what we don’t know but if we can approach things with some kindness that we aren’t these all encompassing, all seeing individual geniuses, that there are gonna be things that we don’t know. And we can be kind to it to ourselves about that and be curious and be willing to learn or experiment.

Martin: There is so much value there because I think that really is what gives us the opportunity to make change happen.

Abbie: Yeah, I definitely wish I had been easier on myself when things were at their peak. I think I, yeah, just like the self-talk and like the things you’re telling yourself why can’t I do this?

Abbie: My sleep must be broken. It’s all just negative reinforcement instead of positive sort of affirmations for yourself. I think that can be really hard in the moment. But yeah, looking back, I, I think that would’ve been really useful.

Martin: It’s amazing how hard we can be on ourselves when things, when we’re experiencing difficulty and struggle, because I like to believe that there’s good in all of us, and I think that most of us, if we were sitting down with a loved one and they were describing exactly what we were going through themselves, we would talk to them in a completely different way to how we talk to ourselves when we are experiencing that exact same thing.

Abbie: Yeah. That is so true. I think that’s something I, I’m still working on, like in every situation what would I tell my loved one, or my friend or my family like I would, if the roles were reversed and a friend had come to me with this insomnia problem, like I would’ve been really like concerned and worried for them.

Abbie: But of course I wouldn’t have been like. And I would be like, you’re gonna sleep again. Of course you’re gonna sleep again. And I couldn’t tell myself that at the time.

Martin: And if nothing else, again, if we pull on our own experience, we can ask ourselves, how does talking to myself in this way? Or how does acting toward myself in this way help?

Martin: Is it improving the situation? Is it making me feel better? Is it helping me emerge from the struggle? Or is it making things more difficult? And I’m a big, I’m a huge proponent of us using our own experience as our best guide, because every person is the expert on themselves. I’m not the expert of anyone other than myself.

Martin: But what I can do is encourage people to look within themselves and reflect on their own experience. When it comes to so many struggles in life maybe all of them, the answers that we need are already within us. It’s just a case of. Looking for them. And sometimes we need some kind of external influence or source to tease them out, but all the answers are already within us.

Abbie: Yeah. Yeah, that’s a great point.

Martin: Let’s get into the changes that you made, that you found most helpful. What ones would you like to share with us?

Abbie: Yeah, the most like tangible thing I did was give myself this sort of like wake window in which I couldn’t go to bed. I think I started with three or 4:00 AM or something, and I was like, I’m not even gonna attempt to sleep.

Abbie: I have to stay up until 3:00 AM and then I can get in bed and whatever happens, but like until 3:00 AM I am watching tv, I’m doing something, whatever. And I think this like definitely tricked my brain from I have to sleep, I have to sleep, I have to sleep to, I can’t sleep until this time.

Abbie: I think that was like really powerful for me. And, it wasn’t like a cure all, like all of a sudden I was sleeping, but it took probably a month when I was like slowly pushing back this sleep sort of window earlier and eventually I would, it would be like 2:00 AM and I would be like passing out to sleep on the couch.

Abbie: And I was like, okay, we’ll push it back to 1:00 AM and midnight. And that was really helpful for me. And something that I used, even once my sleep improved, if I had, a bad night or a bad week, I’d be like, okay we’re going back to this like wake window and tonight I’m up until three and we’ll see what happens.

Abbie: So yeah it was totally just a mental thing of telling yourself you need to sleep versus telling yourself you have to stay awake. Which is such a simple thing when you, when I look back, but that was like really transformative. Yeah. And the other thing, like I talked about, I think was just like really returning to my routine.

Abbie: So like I, I would hang out with friends after work. I would go to the gym, take, my roommate at the time was like a night shift nurse, so she was up anyway, so I’d be like, let’s go do something. And, I’d be out, it’d be like midnight and I’d be like, okay. That was all time in which I was distracted and not thinking about sleep.

Abbie: And then I come home and I found sleek to just be a lot easier as soon as I, yeah, sleep to be a lot easier. When I wasn’t laying in bed at 8:00 PM every night waiting for it to happen.

Martin: I think what you’ve shared is a great example of there’s no unique way of doing this that is gonna work or be appropriate for everyone.

Martin: It’s about finding what’s helpful for you with the intent, as long as the intention is workable, as long as you’re not trying to control what can’t be controlled. So for you, your intent was to move away from trying to make sleep happen. And as a way of helping you reach that goal, you decided I’m gonna make myself stay awake till 3:00 AM instead of trying to fall asleep, I’m gonna try to stay awake.

Martin: And that could be such a powerful mindset shift, right? Because then when we’re trying to stay awake. What might happen differently? What was your experience? How did things change when you went from trying to sleep to trying to stay awake?

Abbie: Yeah, I just felt like the, I had a new goal, like my brain had a new problem to solve, and the problem was like, we gotta stay up till 3:00 AM and I gotta find stuff to do until 3:00 AM.

Abbie: So that was helpful. And just yeah, taking the pressure off from and getting outta my own thoughts of okay, it’s another hour and I’m outta sleep. It’s another hour and I’m not asleep. And into just a more calm and peaceful state of mind. And then of course once that happens, like I would just, I would fall asleep.

Abbie: And even on those nights, like when I. I was trying to make to 3:00 AM and I would like doze off at two or something. I would, the next day I would be like, okay, like what did I do? Like how did I do it? And every night it was like I didn’t do anything, like my body just fell asleep and there was enough sleep drive to, to put me to sleep.

Abbie: And then, yeah, as soon as I had, like even I, like I mentioned I was really sleeping like very little. So even when I had three or four hours of sleep a night, that was again, more evidence in my mind that my sleep is not broken and it is possible. So it was that positive feedback cycle, whereas before it had been this negative feedback cycle.

Martin: When you weren’t trying to make sleep happen, you were now all of a sudden trying to stay awake. That urge to sleep just became stronger because you’re no longer putting that pressure on or putting the effort in. And that came too with the bonus of, it’s a powerful reminder that your sleep system is still there, it’s still intact, it’s not broken.

Martin: You are feeling that sense of sleepiness and a sense of sleepiness isn’t always required for sleep to happen, but it can be a nice reassuring reminder when you feel that sleepiness and the difficulty staying awake. And even if someone is listening to this and they don’t really wanna stay awake until 3:00 AM again, that’s not a requirement.

Martin: A lot of people just look to stay awake later than they have been. If they feel like they go into bed earlier and it’s not really doing much for them, then how about we just move it a little bit later?

Martin: It’s just a tool that’s there for you to practice if and when you as the expert on yourself, feel is gonna be useful.

Abbie: Yeah, definitely. We’re trying to get away from here’s the one thing that’s gonna fix everything and that’s not the case. But I do think anything that can flipped the script in your brain from sleep whether it’s distraction or whether it’s staying up later or whatever, I think can be really useful.

Martin: Yeah. And sometimes staying up later can be more appealing than going to bed earlier. If we find that when we go to bed earlier is a lot of tossing and turning and struggling and battling, it can be somewhat of a relief to give ourselves permission to stay out of bed and not go to bed until later.

Martin: Whereas on the other hand, someone else listening to this might find that time in bed quite pleasant. In which case, why not go to bed at the time you’ve been going? It really does, again, come down to the individual, but there is that potential opportunity, bonus opportunity there of being able to do something else earlier in the night rather than struggling.

Martin: The other helpful change that you’ve said that you made was reengaging in life and doing stuff for example, going to the gym which maybe you were doing less of in response to the difficulties with sleep. And I think maybe a lot of people listening to this can recognize that. Yeah I would love to do all these things that matter to me.

Martin: But it just feels so difficult to do that. It maybe, it even feels impossible to do that. I’m curious to know if you had those kind of thoughts, and if so, how did you stay committed or how were you willing to experiment with this idea of still doing some of this stuff, re-engaging in this stuff that matters?

Abbie: Yeah, I, I think early on, like fighting the urge to just go home and do nothing was so hard. Like the last thing it did, it felt impossible to think I’m gonna go do something with friends after work, or I’m gonna go to the gym or whatever. And I did kind of shy away from everything for a long time because it was so hard. But I think even like that first time that I made plans after work or went to the gym and realized like, okay, nothing bad happened I’m still just as tired as I was before. It wasn’t, I think also at this point, like my body was in such like fight or flight mode that like nothing, like I just was exhausted and nothing was making it better or worse honestly.

Abbie: And so when I realized okay, I can either. Go home and toss and turn in bed all night and feel horrible. Or I can go to the movies after work and then come home and feel horrible. I’m gonna pick the thing that at least gives me a little bit of joy for the time that I’m doing it. And yeah not to say doing any of that, like somehow cured my sleep or anything.

Abbie: But I started slowly to like care a little bit less and less that I wasn’t sleeping because it, one of the things I had been telling myself is okay, why is it so bad that I can’t sleep? It’s so bad because I’m not gonna be able to live my life.

Abbie: I’m not gonna be able to go to work. I’m gonna get fired. All these things. And when you realize that, okay, these things are not conditional on sleep, like I can still do these things. Despite whether or not I sleep, I think there was a lot of freedom in that.

Martin: What did progress for you look like? How did you measure progress?

Abbie: I definitely think early on it was still all about sleep and the quality of my sleep. And every night was like either a success or a failure. Like I either slept or I didn’t, and things were very black and white. And I think slowly over time I was able to realize, okay, maybe there’s a little bit less anxiety and a little bit less dread before bedtime because I’m excited to go out with my roommate or to go to yoga or whatever.

Abbie: Like eventually I got to the point where success, I think I, I always was gonna like care about sleep, but I definitely got to the point where success was a lot more like. What is my mental state about sleep? Am I wrapped up in this like anxious bald spiral or am I thinking and doing other things with my day?

Abbie: So yeah, I think measuring progress definitely changed. Does as time went on. And I do think measuring progress in did I sleep or did I not sleep is, was not useful for me personally.

Martin: It makes sense why we would want to measure progress based on how we’re sleeping from night to night because that’s the main problem that we are looking to solve.

Martin: And yet it can set us up for struggle ’cause our own experience probably tells us that sleep is out of our control. So I think it can be useful to dig a little bit deeper and ask ourselves. What makes sleep important to me? Why do I want to get rid of insomnia?

Martin: And on the surface it can sound obvious, but if you do a little bit of digging, we can often find that it reveals bigger insights that are often more related to, we see this as an obstacle to us living the kind of life we want to live. We don’t have freedom over our lives or power over our lives anymore, and we want that back.

Martin: And so when you uncover something along those lines, if that’s something that you do uncover. It can help you redirect your attention towards action. And maybe then your markers of progress become more related to action. And that can be so helpful because action is within your control. So if insomnia is an obstacle to you doing things that matter, or if you’ve started to do some things that matter, maybe then that’s the true progress.

Martin: ’cause it’s actually moving you closer to where you want to be, rather than trying to eliminate something which you might not be able to direct your control.

Abbie: Definitely true for me that one of the worries with insomnia was like, like I said I’m not gonna be able to go to work, I’m not gonna be able to be successful in a career or maintain my relationships, giving myself evidence that’s not true in the form of well, I’m gonna do these things anyway, was so powerful.

Martin: It’s connected to that power and influence all these thoughts and these feelings that show up alongside insomnia have over your life. So you are able to reflect on the fact that they were almost certainly still showing up maybe less over time as you’re less tangled up in them.

Martin: But I’m sure they would still show up because they’re natural, normal human feelings and thoughts, but they’re not consuming all of your energy and all of your attention. They’re more like water off of a duck’s back rather than some, rather than this huge pair of stadium speakers right in front of your face just blaring heavy metal music.

Martin: They’re just starting to lose some of that power and influence.

Abbie: Yeah, definitely. And it’s so interesting to reflect now when I have a period of sleeplessness or something like. Just how now it’s like an annoyance. I’m like that was annoying. I might be tired today. When before it was like, the world is ending, so I think the seriousness at which I view not sleeping has, is definitely definitely lessened, which is good

Martin: When it shows up it’s more like a mosquito rather than a huge black bear frothing at the mouth.

Abbie: Yeah.

Martin: As you were making these changes, was it just a case that things just got progressively better?

Martin: Or did you find there were periods when things went well and then there were like these road bumps or setbacks? Was there any kind of patterns you were noticing, or was it all over the place? What did that look like for you? What did that journey look like for you?

Abbie: Yeah, definitely was not linear.

Abbie: I think about maybe after about six months, I felt like I was sleeping okay, maybe six hours a night in my own bed. But I think sleeping elsewhere or having my partner stay over, traveling, all that stuff was like still really hard for me. And like on one pattern I noticed was like on Sunday nights I really had trouble sleeping because I was like, again, putting pressure, like this is my last night before I have an entire work week to get through. If I don’t sleep tonight, I’m gonna be tired all week. And then by the time like Thursday came, I think sleep was like a lot easier ’cause it just was like, okay, I’m at the end of the week. I’m tired.

Abbie: But yeah, I would say it was probably about like a year until I felt like I could really sleep elsewhere, like travel or stay at my parents’ house or anything, and sleep.

Abbie: There were definitely bumps along the road and about a year in I ended up going to grad school and that was just like a big change in my life and a period of kind of stress and some of the sleep issues came back and I just went right back to the things that I had worked last time.

Abbie: Like I went back to my wake windows and I think it was just so much easier when it did come back because instead of thinking like I, I mean there were some thoughts of oh no, like it’s happening again. But more so there were thoughts of I did this before, I can do it again. And I have better tools now.

Abbie: So I think looking back, it was like each bump along the road made things better in a way. ’cause it was like, again, more evidence that these things are gonna ebb and flow, but I’m always gonna return to baseline.

Martin: You can’t have those bumps in the road unless you’re moving forward on your journey.

Martin: And that’s something we can easily lose sight of. We focus on what hasn’t gone right or we focus on the setback but that wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t within that context of some kind of progress.

Abbie: Yeah, I definitely had a lot more gratitude, like going from sleeping one or two hours a night, like every next hour that I was able to sleep.

Abbie: Like I was just grateful for. And even now if I consistently will get eight hours of sleep and every once in a while I’ll be like, I need to remember to be thankful for that because there was a period in which like four hours of sleep was like the ultimate goal. So yeah, definitely a good exercise in practicing gratitude too.

Martin: I think when the difficult nights show up or when the nights when we get less sleep than usual or what we were hoping for, it’s a reminder that as human beings there are gonna be nights when we have less sleep than we want. Just there will be thoughts that show up and some of those thoughts will feel good, some won’t, some will be helpful, some won’t.

Martin: And it really is just a case, like you said, of the ongoing practice. You’ve got that experience at that point of what has helped you. It’s just a case of going back to them or refocusing on them. Because every time you practice, you also get better at them. You gain more skill In all these things that we talked about, you develop more resiliency, you become better at it.

Martin: But that doesn’t mean you can reach this ultimate peak of enlightenment when none of this stuff affects you and never shows up ever again. Life doesn’t work that way. There’s like this magnet force trying to draw us back into a struggle. But it’s a case of you’ve got that awareness now of when that’s happening, you know an alternative way to respond.

Martin: And you can focus on those action based responses to continue moving forward. As you reflect on the journey that you’ve been on, how has it changed your life? What have you learned from this whole experience?

Abbie: When it was happening I remember, like I said, just having these really negative thoughts of this is gonna change my life for the worst.

Abbie: I’m gonna have long-term, health or otherwise consequences from this. And not only has that not been the case but also I feel like it, it really has had a positive impact in that. I just feel like a lot more equipped to handle. The ebbs and the flows. There was a point in my life where, you know, thinking about having kids and traveling and all these things that were gonna disrupt my sleep, like really stressed me out.

Abbie: And those things are a little bit quieter now that I have this like trust that, that I can handle these things. And I think that extends not just to like insomnia, but other areas in my life like these thought patterns and this mentality like can be applied to any sort of like area of anxiety or just any sort of thoughts that I’m having.

Abbie: Yeah, I’ve definitely found it just like mentality shift to be useful in other areas of my life as well.

Martin: You’re not the first person to say that, and I completely agree with you. A lot of this stuff that we talk about can really powerfully impact our lives in a positive way. It’s not just a way to respond to insomnia.

Martin: The experience can be a real growth opportunity, which sounds crazy when you’re still in the struggle with it, but once you’re able to reflect back on it, what you learn from the experience can be a huge asset.

Abbie: Yeah, definitely. I think it, like you said, at the time I would’ve just like totally rolled my eyes that this is gonna be a positive thing in the long run. Okay, sure. But yeah it really has been. Given me a lot of coping skills I think that I can take into the future and into other areas of my life.

Martin: Abbie, I’m really grateful for the time you’ve taken out your day to come on. If someone with chronic insomnia is listening 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?

Abbie: I think first I would say you are not alone. And in the nicest way possible, like your anxiety and your insomnia is not special. I remember feeling like that’s great that all these people have found these solutions, but somehow my insomnia is worse and mine is different.

Abbie: And these things like peace and returning to this baseline is not possible for me. And the funny thing is that’s what we’re all thinking. That our insomnia, our anxiety is somehow different and special. And yeah, just to say that, me overcoming this also isn’t special.

Abbie: That is possible for everybody. And yeah the path might not be linear, but I think it’s possible for everybody and we can’t control sleep, like we’ve been saying. But you can control how you respond and I think that’s the best way forward.

Martin: Thanks again for taking the time to come onto the podcast and to share your journey, your experience, all the insights you’ve picked up on the way.

Abbie: Yeah. Thanks so much. It was great to talk.

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.

I want you to be the next insomnia success story I share! If you're ready to stop struggling with sleep and get your life back from insomnia, you can start my insomnia coaching course right now.

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Natasha’s insomnia journey began during the long grind of the pandemic. Life was full, intense, and stretched thin. She and her husband were working and their young son needed to take school classes online. When their nanny suddenly stopped coming, Natasha brushed it off at first. But that first sleepless night turned into another… and then another. Before she knew it, she was caught in a spiral she couldn’t make sense of.

Like many people who’ve always slept well, she didn’t expect sleep to suddenly feel impossible. She tried going to bed earlier. She tried teas, essential oils, supplements, white noise, antidepressants, anti-anxiety medication — anything she could find and all the things the internet tells you “should” help. Each attempt only made her more aware of how badly she wanted sleep and how far away it felt.

Her nights became long stretches of alertness mixed with exhaustion — awake while everyone else slept — and her days were filled with worry about the next night. Over time, insomnia started to shape her choices. She avoided travel. She canceled early meetings. She relied on her husband sharing a bed with her for sleep to have any chance of happening. Insomnia slowly became the center of her days.

The turning point didn’t come from a pill or a hack. It came when every one of her “solutions” stopped working — and she realized she couldn’t keep building her life around avoiding insomnia. That moment of exhaustion and honesty pushed her to look for a different approach.

When we started working together, Natasha began noticing something important: even after a bad night, the next day could go better than she expected. And sometimes, after a good night, the day didn’t feel great at all. That simple observation helped loosen the grip insomnia had on her.

She also began changing her actions in small, meaningful ways — not to fix sleep, but to take her life back. She scheduled breakfast meetings again. She made evening plans without checking the clock. She traveled. She stopped organizing her days around sleep anxiety. And she created a calmer routine at night by watching shows she enjoyed instead of lying in bed trying to force sleep.

Today, Natasha has her life back. Sleep isn’t a project. Nights aren’t battles. Insomnia no longer runs her life. Natasha runs her own life and sleep takes care of itself.

Click here for a full transcript of this episode.

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. Natasha, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to come onto the podcast.

Natasha: You are welcome, Martin. Thanks for having me.

Martin: It’s great to have you on. Let’s start right at the very beginning. When did your sleep problems first begin and what do you feel caused those initial issues with sleep?

Natasha: I think it was 2022 and we were still very much within the pandemic. And so there was of course like bad news all around, but I wasn’t necessarily stressed by that. All our children were outta school in the sense that all the schools were shut down.

Natasha: At that point, my like 5-year-old or 6-year-old son, he was having to do his online classes and the day was just relentless, right? Because me, my husband, we were both working, we didn’t have any help at home. And then he had these online classes. So I had found this sort of nanny person who could help out during the day so that we could get our work done.

Natasha: And I think she basically just called in sick. And I think like now, and this is all in hindsight, but I think it was some sort of like anxiety from that. And she wasn’t being very specific about whether she was, she had COVID or whether she was just, she said, I’ve hurt my foot. And, I think it was basically the fact that there was a lot of uncertainty about when she would be back and whether she would be back.

Natasha: And I couldn’t sleep that night when she said, I’m not coming tomorrow. And, I think that was fine because the next day rolled around, but then the day after that, again, I sort of couldn’t fall back to sleep. And you know what happens when you haven’t slept one night and you feel like you have this huge day to get through the next day you try to overcompensate.

Natasha: So I think I probably try to get into bed really early and I couldn’t fall asleep. And then I think I probably still just got out and read a book and got on with it.

Natasha: So the days had been quite difficult to get through with a small child and work. I think by the third day I started noticing, I suddenly noticed the fact that I hadn’t slept very well and that I wasn’t being able to fall asleep.

Natasha: And so the third night, I just really couldn’t sleep at all because I’d become very attentive to the fact that I was having this difficulty and that I had to. And so I think that’s what set it off. I don’t think there was anything more than that. Once it got started it just became this kind of vicious spiral of crashing pretty much after two or three days of sleeping very badly.

Natasha: And then feeling slightly recovered the next day only to not be able to go back to sleep that night. And yeah, I think I started paying so much attention to the fact that I was having difficulty sleeping, that it was just getting harder and I think it, it turned into a huge full-blown problem.

Martin: I’m gonna guess that there’s been other times in your life where you might have got a little bit less sleep or a lot less sleep than normal. And then things figured themselves out and sleep got back on track. What do you think was different this time around?

Natasha: So I think a few things might have been different.

Natasha: One was of course, that I think the pressure in the pandemic was very high on productivity and just somehow getting through the day. So not just, you had a lot of things to do at work. You had very little help and I had a child and I think also because there was this idea that there was some degree of latitude with your partners.

Natasha: If for some reason you are sick, then he can pick up the slack more than what he’s normally doing. But I think he was completely slammed as well. As a family I think we’d become very aware of just how we were stretched beyond like capability.

Natasha: So I think maybe that was one like predisposing condition that it, it made the need for rest so much higher. And therefore I think there was some kind of a, psychological reaction to the fact that when you thought that you really needed to rest, you weren’t being able to. I also do think, I do think it maybe had something to do with COVID because I did get COVID early 2022.

Natasha: And I think I got, ever since then I’ve had COVID twice. And every time I’ve had COVID I’ve had a little bit of difficulty with sleep and a little bit of hyper arousal. So I, I think maybe it was a combination of these two things. But normally now if that happens, it just resolves itself because I don’t sit and, I don’t get too upset about it.

Natasha: But at that time, perhaps, maybe some sort of like the physiological part was there, and then there was this huge psychological reality.

Martin: Would you say that because it was such a stressful period it felt like maybe the stakes were higher than they were in the past. So as a result, you put more pressure on yourself to get sleep back on track.

Martin: There was more trying, more effort, more pressure.

Natasha: Yeah. I think there’s also one of the things I have realized and listening to your podcast, it’s something that I’ve observed. There are a lot of people who say that they develop insomnia. Many of them say that they were excellent sleepers.

Natasha: They were brilliant sleepers before and they could sleep anywhere, anytime. And that was me as well. I could sleep anywhere, anytime. But the other thing is also that I think there are people who say that, I can’t function without sleep. I need my sleep. I love my sleep.

Natasha: And there are others who are like, yeah, I can get on with it. It’s fine. I think you and I feel like if you’re the type who has told themselves for years that, oh, I can’t function without sleep, which is what I used to tell myself, and that’s why I used to sleep very adequately because I’d be like, oh, I need my nine hours and I need like my naps in between.

Natasha: I feel like if you’ve spent years telling yourself that you can’t function without sleep and then a stressful situation comes that requires you to compromise with sleep or where your sleep gets affected, perhaps you are more susceptible to then developing anxiety around it, right? Because you’ve told yourself that you don’t know how to kind of function without it.

Natasha: So maybe it’s also personality or like prior mindsets.

Martin: It’s like the more important we deem something in our lives, quite naturally, the more we’re gonna focus on it. And if it deviates from whatever we want it to be doing that’s gonna immediately generate a lot of concern.

Martin: And where we get trapped with insomnia and sleep is really, it’s beyond our direct and permanent control. So it, it kind of backfires, that additional effort. We might not be able to control the thoughts, we might not be able to change the fact that we see it as something important.

Martin: It’s okay to see it as something important, but it’s our actions around that. The more we try to make sleep happen the more we can end up struggling with it.

Natasha: Yeah, and I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that now there is so much literature and all the things you can do to improve your sleep, right?

Natasha: So there is this perpetuation of this illusion that somehow sleep is something you can entirely control and engineer. And I think I was doing so much of that as well.

Natasha: You go through this strange, five stages of grief or something through that period of night where, you just, at some point you’re very angry. At some point you’re very depressed with your situation because it’s also this, it is a strange experience of being wide awake when the whole world is sleeping.

Natasha: It’s different from being a night owl and it’s different from someone who’s, voluntarily working or relaxing or gaming or whatever.

Natasha: You are alert and exhausted. So because you’re alert, you can’t go to sleep and because you’re exhausted, you can’t actually do anything productive. So you’re literally just sitting awake and not being able to do anything and not being able to relax.

Natasha: And I think that in that whole process you do end up, of course you start googling feverishly and I’ve done everything right. I think over the last two years, before, before I met you, I think I’ve done everything I must have done. Like the primrose oil, the lavender, the magnesium, the chamomile tea, the Yeah, like I think the white noise and I’ve done, I think you try everything and the more things you’re throwing at it, the worse it’s getting.

Natasha: And I think every failure after you’ve tried something and that failure is even harder to reconcile. But some of that comes from the fact that you’re reaching out for answers into Google and Google is giving you some solutions. It’s not telling you that, the way to, to get to sleep is just to let it go.

Natasha: It’s not telling you that, it’s actually telling you, do this, and then you start doing it.

Martin: The information out there tends to be about doing more, it’s, if there’s a problem, do this. And with sleep, it’s all about doing less. If anyone has a recollection in their own experience of a time when sleep wasn’t an issue or a concern, what did you do to experience sleep in that way?

Martin: And it was nothing. It was going to bed. It was getting out of bed, living your life, and it just took care of itself. But then we just exposed to this proliferation of advice and information and hacks and gadgets and gizmos and this and this. And when we are feeling stuck it’s completely understandable that we are gonna be looking for a solution.

Martin: And almost everything in life, the solution is do this or do more, put more effort in. Try harder. That sleep is one of those outliers. And we can so easily through no fault of our own, get tangled up in that quick sound, so the more we fight it. The more we struggle with it, the more we try and escape that quick sound, the deeper we find ourselves sinking.

Natasha: Yeah. You said this and I think I, this is printed in my brain because I remember in one of our first sessions you said exactly this, you said that most things in life respond well to effort, but sleep doesn’t, sleep does not respond well to effort. And because we all have such a bias for action and effort, you think that if there’s something I can do.

Natasha: What happened to me was like one night I didn’t, I think again, my husband, I woke him up at 4:00 AM because I was like, I think I’m having a heart attack.

Natasha: Because, ’cause you are just palpitating now obviously your body’s completely dysfunctioning because you’re exhausted and you haven’t slept. And so I was sweating and I was feeling this like pinch in my heart and he got really worried.

Natasha: So I said, okay, let me just go and buy sleeping pills. And I didn’t know what that was. So I went to this pharmacy and I was like do you have sleeping pills? And they were like you need a prescription for that. Because in India you don’t need a prescription for a lot of things. A lot of things you get over the counter, but hang on, this one is one that we do need a prescription for.

Natasha: So then I started texting you can only get prescriptions from, obviously a licensed doctor or a psychiatrist. And I didn’t know any, so I texted one, a friend saying, do you know? And then she said yes. And so she connected me with somebody. But they said that you have to, you have to have a session with a therapist.

Natasha: For her to for them to evaluate you. And I was desperate, right? Because I hadn’t slept all night. And I said, listen, I just, I need something to knock me out and I don’t need therapy. I don’t need a therapist. I’m fine. Literally the only problem in my life right now is that for some reason I’ve developed this mysterious inability to sleep.

Natasha: And, but they of course, had the responsible practice was that I should talk to a therapist. So I did. And of course, at the end of the hour she was very sweet and she said it does seem you are fairly self-aware and your relationship with your partner is very good and everything is fine and maybe you just need medication.

Natasha: And I was almost like, yes, I told you so then she put me through a psychiatrist. And that person, but that was the interesting thing, right? When I went to the psychiatrist and it was, she spoke to me literally for 10 minutes, and this was on Zoom because we were still in the pandemic.

Natasha: And yeah, she was like okay, are you anxious about something? And you, you mentioned one or two things because if you are living life and if you’re adulting, of course you’re anxious about a few things. So I said a few things and she was like, okay, great. And here’s an antidepressant, which kind of surprised me because I’d never taken antidepressants before.

Natasha: And I have studied psychology, so I do understand SSRIs. So I asked her, I said, oh, why are you giving me an antidepressant? She was like basically this is, it’s just going to relax you. So I said, fine.

Natasha: So I took that, but I wasn’t happy about it because I wasn’t happy taking it. And I think what also what happened was I started taking the antidepressant for a couple of weeks. And predictably. So I slept okay on the first couple of times because it was a sort of a placebo, right? You had this like safety feeling that I’m taking a pill and I’m fine.

Natasha: And then I think I was traveling to Delhi for work and it, I had my pill and it didn’t work. And I was up all night and I had to work the entire day. And then the same thing happened the next day. I came back to the hotel, I was exhausted and I was like, I’m going to just absolutely crash.

Natasha: I think I fell asleep in the cab on the way to the hotel, but I popped my pill. I got into bed and I couldn’t sleep. And then I was like, okay, this medicine is not working. So I remember being, that, that makes you really worried because you see, I went to a doctor gave me something and now this is not working.

Natasha: So then I came back and then I tried different things. When I got back home, I remember that night I went to bed and my husband Suraj was sitting next to me, and that was very comforting. So then began this whole era of me saying, okay, I need you to sleep in the bed with me, right?

Natasha: You have to be in bed with me. So whether you are reading or whatever you’re doing, you need to be in bed. Because I wasn’t sure the medication was working. And so I stopped taking that, but then I didn’t have any other crutch, so I said, okay, you have to be in bed with me. And so he would have to get into bed and sometimes he likes to sleep a bit later and I get tired sooner.

Natasha: It was adding these layers of something is wrong with me to my sense of self, right? Because you’re like, first you can’t sleep, then you, now you need your husband to come and lie with you. And you’re affecting his life as a result.

Natasha: And then I became very averse to traveling as a result. So I said, I don’t want to, I don’t wanna go anywhere because I I don’t know, I, I don’t wanna sleep alone, so I don’t wanna go on business trips and I don’t want to go, but more than business trips, because those couldn’t be avoided.

Natasha: I was almost like, I don’t wanna go on personal instead of holidays with my girlfriends, and I just don’t wanna go on a holiday with somebody where if I’m not sure where I would have to sleep alone by myself. So I was supposed to go for this hike and we would go, we were gonna sleep in a dorm. And I was so terrified of the idea of being like, absolutely wide awake at 3:00 AM in a dormitory full of girls, I don’t know, which was not me at all.

Natasha: ’cause that, that I was not that type of person ever. So I opted out of that. I said, no, I’m not gonna do that. And it just started adding up right where I stopped making evening plans because I said, oh, if it’s too late, and then I get home late and then it I won’t have enough time to wind down and get to bed.

Natasha: So I think all of this was happening and even when I was traveling. In 2022, I remember we went for this, I had this huge event in September or so. And it had been like eight months since my issues with sleep. But I had to go to Bombay for this event for a whole week. And my plan was that I’m basically going to night cap it through I’m going to have a drink every night and then I’m going to somehow knock myself out and just get through the entire week.

Natasha: And that’s exactly what I did. Which, in hindsight, that’s, it’s just such a terrible strategy. But there was no other way to imagine being able to do things like this. So I feel like this was carrying on and I had sort of, because I’d already been to a psychiatrist, one I once, I didn’t consider going back to anyone because what I was very aware of was that I really wasn’t struggling with anything in my life in a big way other than sleep, so I. And that was the other thing. ’cause again, anytime you ever told anyone or even hinted to somebody that you find it hard to sleep, the first question they’re like, oh, are you stressed out about something? Or or and that can almost start grating you. ’cause you’re like, no, I’m not stressed about anything.

Natasha: I’m not stressed, I’m not per se stressed and I, but this thing that, you’re losing sleep because there must be some something underlying and something subconscious and you’re like, no. The only thing that’s conscious, subconscious and all pervasive is sleep anxiety. And I think the fact that sleep anxiety, again, is its own category of anxiety, of, it’s a type of anxiety that perhaps happens.

Natasha: And there are no other underlying hidden, Freudian reasons for why you’re not being able to sleep. You’re really, you’re just having some, you’ve developed a strange relationship with sleep and your bed. So you are passing out on your couch and then the minute you hit the bed you are like wide awake, so I think this thing was something that I have only processed a little bit in hindsight and through, conversations with you and understanding this whole situation. But like throughout 2022, it was just, it was some, it was a hack, just hacking my way through it. And because things were working out really well with having my partner in bed with me I was like, okay, fine, this is fine.

Natasha: How bad is it? And even through 23, I think like 23 actually was very stable because like I said, whenever I was traveling, I had become that person where I said, okay, I’m not gonna sleep when I travel. But even then, I think there was. There was a, I remember again, I went for a team retreat and I was up the entire night, like the sun came up and I just got outta bed and we all had, and this was this big strategy retreat, which you had to talk a lot of strategy.

Natasha: And that was the, and I was confused about whether I should tell my teammates that I didn’t sleep all night. And so I, but I decided to, ’cause I said I can’t, I’d come to that point where I was like, this is just who I am. This is going to be forever. So I have to start telling people that I find it hard and I’m, I have lovely colleagues and they’re all wonderful people.

Natasha: So I said, maybe I can trust them and I could just tell them that I couldn’t sleep all night, because, if I’m spacing out in the middle of the dates, it’s only fair that they know. And I did tell them and and they were very kind about it, but I think I was so tired.

Natasha: At the end of that day, I remember, and I was so terrified, Martin, that I was not gonna be able to sleep again. And so I actually asked my one of my teammates who I’m really close with, and I really like her. And I told her, I said, and this is gonna sound very strange ’cause we were all living in a house.

Natasha: So it was nice. It was like a large, huge villa. And I said, is it okay if I sleep with you? And she was like, yeah, sure. And she was very sweet about it. And so I actually had went and I slept in her room with her. And I think that there were parts of me that was so embarrassed by this, but also so helpless about it and feeling like what is happening.

Natasha: Whenever you tell people they, I mean they are sympathetic, but either they don’t understand or it’s the sort of you’re stressed.

Natasha: And again, I think I was talking to someone and they recommended the psychiatrist and this therapist to me. So then I went to her and she prescribed me a whole other set of SSRIs and anti-anxiety medication. And again, I took it for a while and it does make you feel slightly different. So I think I started feeling a little bit. Not okay on some of that medication.

Natasha: Especially, I think the worst experience which I’ve had is taking medication, going to bed, not being able to sleep, and then you are waking up with half, slept with this half digested medicine in your brain and you’re just getting through the next day because you know you, ’cause you have to.

Natasha: All of us end up going through all these rabbit holes because there is no direction and the experts are actually giving you wrong advice and Google is definitely leading you in the wrong direction. And then you’re just stuck with all of the, this sense of helplessness and this huge sense of the fact that something is broken inside you.

Natasha: And it’s funny, because I do actually work in the mental health field and there is a lot that’s said about the stigma associated with depression, with anxiety because even though there has been so much awareness building and conversation still, if your team members or someone in your organization is going through depression and they’re not able to perform, very few people can actually come and say, this is what’s happening to me when it’s happening.

Natasha: They can talk about it once they have figured it out and gotten over it. And in a strange way, like insomnia is like that because if I hadn’t slept all night and if I slept at 4:00 AM and I woke up at seven and I had a call at nine 30 in the morning and I had to cancel it, or I had a call at seven in the morning, which I had to cancel.

Natasha: I couldn’t be like, I’m sorry, I have to cancel this call because I couldn’t sleep all night. I would say I’m sick, or something else. But it sounded absurd to see, it almost sounds like you’re not a, you’re not a capable functioning adult if you say oh, I couldn’t sleep. And I think that sense that something that everybody else is just doing so effortlessly and everybody else is just doing without thinking and you’re just not able to do.

Natasha: And it’s so basic. It’s, I would look at my son he’d just pass out. It feels so basic. I think that was the hardest part, like now in hindsight, right? It was of course the tiredness and all of the other things. But this, the psychological experience of going through insomnia, I think is very difficult.

Martin: I completely agree with you. Just the way you were describing it there, you could tell how insomnia or sleep just started to become more of your identity. It was almost like taking over more of who you are. And in a way you were just losing this independence, this independence, this sense of agency that you have over your own life, because so many of your actions became geared towards protecting sleep, avoiding insomnia compensating for difficult nights, all of which is completely understandable.

Martin: And when all of that stuff just doesn’t feel like it’s proving to be a long-term solution, it can then feel really mysterious, right?

Martin: It can feel like there’s something uniquely wrong. There’s something going on here that is different to what other people might be experiencing, and then we can get all of that kind of self-judgment and maybe some shame and some embarrassment and the negative self-talk, and we can be really harden ourselves that just piles it on and makes things even more difficult.

Natasha: Yeah. I don’t wanna start like blaming, Google and blaming the sort of sleep culture, but I think the thing is that scientists the people who are closest to the science are the most humble about the conclusions. But the health industry is the exact opposite, right? There are just lots of claims and there’s lots of stuff.

Natasha: And now the algorithms just push it to you because for sure at some point my algorithm figured out that I had, and probably very quickly that I was anxious about this.

Natasha: So everything that I was being prompted. Was just like this about sleep and that about sleep and women in sleep and something and constantly actually the reverse, which was the extreme benefits. And so everything from like longevity to dementia to osteoporosis, every single thing is linked to sleep.

Natasha: And of course it is, in the sense that, but it’s also linked to diet and it’s also linked to happiness and it’s also linked to genetics. And it’s linked to a hundred thousand things.

Natasha: Once the algorithm finds you and finds your weakness, it starts then. And then I actually actively stopped looking at any of that content. ’cause I very quickly realized what it would do to me, right? In the sense that it would just make you feel even worse about where you were. And I think that, that’s one big part of sleep anxiety as well, because you are convinced that you are like hurting yourself.

Natasha: You’re convinced that you’re becoming very unhealthy and that you’re going to die, because because you’re not being able to sleep well and that, your brain is going to deteriorate very quickly and everything is just gonna deteriorate.

Natasha: I do know people who sleep badly and they run marathons and they just it doesn’t matter, like they just live their lives despite the fact that they sleep badly and they continue to sleep badly and they continue to live their lives. But I do think that there are others. And then me especially I was not being able to reconcile these two things, that I would not sleep well, but I would just get on with my life. I think the, the sense of the control and the pop science was also hurting quite a bit.

Martin: When we have a problem, we wanna look for a solution, right? And there’s just so much out there. And I think there is also a lot of misinformation and misleading information out there because that’s what gets the attention. If someone writes an article that just said Sleep, it’s important, you can’t control it.

Martin: No one’s gonna read that, right? But if someone comes up with a headline that says 12 Sleep Hacks that guarantee eight hours of sleep, or 12 things you can do tonight to prevent cancer ever showing up in your life, loads of people are gonna read that.

Natasha: Over those two years I did lots, I accomplished lots. A huge part of life was continuing.

Natasha: But the point was that I was not entirely myself and that’s the bit that I was missing. It had become a new mutation on my identity, the sleep thing, right? So 99% of my identity was still the same, but there was this new 1% that had just emerged from somewhere.

Natasha: You’re not accepting your situation. You’re quite distressed by it. That’s another thing that comes with insomnia.

Martin: It becomes more powerful the more we try to resist it. You can find yourself acting in ways that don’t really reflect who you are or who you want to be.

Natasha: Actions are a powerful way to signal to your brain what, where your attitude lies, so I think that sometimes you can’t just intellectualize your way out of a problem.

Natasha: Like sometimes you have to change the way you’re behaving. In that sense, this kind of almost subterranean signal to your brain that your attitude towards something has changed because now your body’s doing different things than what it was doing.

Martin: You’d already tried so many things. You had a strategy, a roadmap that you were following with kind of mixed success.

Martin: What made you think it would be productive or there would be an opportunity here for you to get something from us working together?

Natasha: What happened in 2024, which is when we met, was that everything just started failing. And I don’t know why necessarily. I think we went on this holiday for New Years in 20 23 we went to this holiday.

Natasha: And at that holiday, our entire day routine was starting very late. And we were not sleeping before 12 or 1230 every single night as a family. And I think because we’d lived that kind of routine for about two weeks, when we got back home early 24 I think I was like, I have to go to work, so I should get to bed at night.

Natasha: And obviously your body was in attuned to sleeping at nine. And and then that, and this time I went to bed. My husband and I went to bed. He promptly fell asleep. I don’t know his bo his body can sleep as much anytime. I dunno, it just doesn’t seem to bother him. But I couldn’t. And then there was that like, oh shit moment, right?

Natasha: That, oh my God, my last standing hack has stopped working. And there was all this legacy of failure as well in the past. And so then I think basically I went through a couple of weeks where I, it was exactly as bad as your peak struggles where you’re just not sleeping before you had figured out your placebo or your hack or your safety behavior before any of that, ’cause once I figured some of those out in 22 and 23, then there was a whole period of stability. But again, I was back in this tumult and we had to go for, to celebrate a function for the same sweet teammate of mine who had shared her hotel bed with me. And she, her sister was getting married and we went and we flew to another town for this.

Natasha: And again, basically all of us landed. We got to the hotel really late. Everyone’s exhausted, husband and child pass out. I don’t sleep at all. At 5:00 AM I think he woke up to get a glass of water. And he saw, and I was reading and he said, oh, why are you up? And I said, I haven’t slept all night. And so I think for him, he was like, oh my God.

Natasha: What is, this is bad. Because, I think he could really empathize saying You must be exhausted. And I was tired and I was just, I was so upset because I’d come for this wedding and I’d been really looking forward to it. And I didn’t feel like participating in anything because like literally my body, my brain, everything was hurting.

Natasha: So he then said we should go to, he found some sleep clinic and we went there when we got back. When we got back home again, it was the same, it was the same thing. So again, I went to the sleep clinic, the doctor prescribed me some other, like tricylic or some other cocktail of drugs. And even as the doctor was talking, and this was like a neurologist who literally told me, and I have no issues saying that, this is what he said to me.

Natasha: He was like, oh, that’s really strange. Oh, you should be able to sleep, but if you’re not, here are some pills. And if these don’t work then you’re going to be on sleeping pills your whole life. There’s no other solution. He said that. He was like, oh, come back to me in a month because if this doesn’t work, then, and he literally shook his head and said, oh, then there’s no hope.

Natasha: And then you’re just gonna have to be having sleeping pills for the rest of your life. And even as he was seeing it, I think something in me just got really pissed off. I was like, this is ridiculous. He didn’t even listen to my story.

Natasha: It was just like, oh, you have sleep problems? Okay, here you go, here’s some drugs. So as soon as we got home, I told Suraj, I was like I don’t think he, he doesn’t know what he is talking about at all. I have actually had this situation for the last two years and I don’t think he knows what he’s saying.

Natasha: And Suraj of course, trying to be the very like, supportive person. He said no, you should not. Don’t reject the doctor’s thing, just take the medication. You will be fine. And sure as hell, it didn’t work. Like after three, four days it stopped working.

Natasha: And then basically I think I, in one of my, fever dreams at 2:00 AM 3:00 AM like as I was awake I was just typing into Spotify ’cause I was listening to different podcasts to to keep myself entertained at night.

Natasha: And I was like, oh, there must be some podcast. Somebody must have talked about insomnia. And I typed that into Spotify, and then I found your podcast, and then I started listening to it. And Martin, for me, I was so desperate by then, I was so tired and so desperate that I said that I won’t even bother listening to all these episodes.

Natasha: And, piecing together the wisdom. I said, I’m just going to write to this person and I’m just gonna directly reach out to him. Because at that point, I was very sure that I really needed like somebody to work with me, somebody to talk to. I couldn’t do some sort of self-paced, self-help. I really had to feel like I had shared my side of the story with somebody and then they understood and then they were going to kinda help me.

Natasha: So that’s how I actually, I found you. And that’s what brought me. So in some sense, it was the ultimate failure of everything that got me here.

Martin: When we started working together what kinda concepts did we explore or what kind of changes did you make that were different, that you feel helped you move forward and start emerging from this struggle?

Natasha: One of the things that I really appreciated was that you actually asked me to list out my own strengths, right? And I think when you did that, one of the things that you noted was the fact that I do actually lead with intellect to some extent. And so for me, being able to understand like psychologically and cognitively understand things.

Natasha: And once I see them in a new light, I think that’s very powerful. So that was the first thing where I think I still, this was like, I still remember our first conversation right where you said that sleep doesn’t respond to effort. And that line, it just almost like immediately, I think I just completely changed my behavior almost immediately in response to that.

Natasha: I remember you mentioned in the early days itself was the fact that you can sleep really badly so you can have a bad night, but you could have a good day and you can have a good night and you can have a bad day. And so I started attending to that.

Natasha: And I actually started noticing that was true. Like I could have had a very bad night, but the next day many things went well. Many things went my way, and the day was pretty effortless, even if I was slightly tired and whatever.

Natasha: And then there were other times where I’d slept perfectly well and I was like, whatever, restless or fidgety or the day had gone badly. And so this dissociation of sleep is this thing that, produces this perfect day for you the next day, and you are just like this perfect person the next day.

Natasha: I think for me the dissociation of those two things was also very important from, again, a kind of intellectual lens.

Natasha: And then of course there was the whole bit around how do you change your actions, right? What will you do differently? And why I mentioned these two reframing sort of points is that I think they help you take those actions because sometimes you can’t take an action without conviction.

Natasha: If you’re not convinced or if you don’t understand why you’re taking the action may not yield very much, but if you do understand why you’re taking that action, it helps.

Natasha: I was always so conscious about like setting up breakfast meetings. I would never set up breakfast meetings. I had stopped doing that ’cause I was like no. I don’t know.

Natasha: I started setting up breakfast meetings. I started like setting up dinners. I said, that’s fine. I’ll deal with it like however it goes. Calendaring your life the way you would if you did not have any issues with sleep. There was perhaps something powerful about that.

Martin: It sounds like in terms of that perspective, really when we were working together, it was just a process of teasing out what you already knew, what was already inside you. This idea that sleep doesn’t need or want or require all of these kind of efforts or attention or rules or rituals or accommodations, it just wants to take care of itself.

Martin: And as we explored that, you were able to reflect on your own experience and you realized, huh, yeah, that is the case. Like my experience has been telling me that, but because I’ve, my superpower of problem solving is the dominant force right now that has almost been clouded in a way. And you got this pressure to continue trying to problem solve, continue putting effort in, even though the experience says that might not be useful for you.

Martin: And then the second approach was the actions you started to chip away at that power and the influence that sleep was having by focusing more on actions that served you rather than serving insomnia. And as you did that it kinda lost some of its power and influence over you.

Martin: So maybe in turn you might have been less inclined to put that effort in, and so it becomes a cycle again, but maybe a more positive cycle compared to before.

Natasha: Yeah, very true. I also of course, owe a debt of gratitude to K-Dramas because I one of the things that we discussed and we talked about was also like, I think nighttime awakening is a very unpleasant experience, right?

Natasha: And that’s the other thing that people who struggle with insomnia will talk about that. Just the experience of being awake at night is for some reason really unpleasant. But if you flip that and if you start looking at it as some sort of invitation to binge watch K-Dramas, and for me it was fine because you the day is very busy and you’re, you’ve got children, you’ve got work, and so you can’t exactly just watch silly television all the time.

Natasha: So for me, I tried to, I started thinking that so I actually intentionally found certain series and. I said, okay, I’m gonna watch these at night and I’m not gonna watch them through the day or at any on the weekends. I’m not going to and I’m gonna watch this at night. And I, and the other thing I told myself was also this idea of, a little bit of like sleep consolidation, I think.

Natasha: Which did help with the hyper arousal part because I think that’s so physiological. It had to be trained out. Was this fact that no matter what, I’m not gonna sleep before 1130 or 12 even, so I’d start watching like my TV at, nine 30 and then I almost used to feel, I was almost looking forward to the TV time.

Natasha: ’cause I said I have two and a half hours to watch tv. I have so much like time, actually, I don’t have to turn it off. I could just watch the next episode and the next episode. Because, I’d get up and I’d make myself a beverage and I’d come back, I’d make myself a snack, so it became this I have this whole day, which is relentless, and then I have these three hours that are just mine.

Natasha: So looking at it from that point of view did help because once I told myself that I’m not gonna try to sleep before 12 I think it helped because then, yeah, by the time it was 12, I was quite tired and I hadn’t spent two or three hours in bed trying to sleep, working myself up, on the kind of arousal lad because when you’re tossing and turning, you get kinda worked up in a way that’s very different from when you’re just watching like Korean tv and then you’re genuinely tired.

Natasha: And then by 12, 12 30, I was so there were many nights where I started successfully falling asleep at the time that, I decided to fall asleep at, which was 12 or 1230. And I think that also helped quite a bit because this idea that your relationship, like I was saying, that relationship with your bed literally and your body’s own cues that, when it lies down, it starts to feel like this.

Natasha: I think it suddenly started changing because of accepting the night. I am accepting the fact that the night is going to be long, and so why don’t you make it nice?

Martin: Your relationship to being awake at night had changed through your actions. So even if sleep was exactly the same, in other words, you never fell asleep before, let’s say three o’clock in the morning.

Martin: The difference is one time you might have been in bed tossing and turning, really struggling, battling away until three o’clock in the morning. This alternative approach involved watching some TV shows that you like doing stuff that’s more pleasant, setting aside time for yourself making it a more useful way to spend that time awake and that in turn.

Martin: Although there’s obviously no guarantee that’s gonna make sleep happen because it’s out of your control. It just makes that time awake more pleasant. It doesn’t get you so exhausted and tangled up in that struggle. And it can also help train your brain that maybe being awake at night isn’t such a threat that we need to be on action stations to try and protect you against.

Natasha: Exactly that.

Martin: What would you say if someone is listening to this, and we’re talking about making being awake more pleasant, we’re talking about accepting that sleep might be out of your control, that the difficult thoughts and feelings might be out of your control. But someone’s listening to this and they’re thinking, I’m not interested in any of that.

Martin: I just want to sleep. I don’t want to. Read a book or watch tv, I need to get rid of these thoughts and these feelings. I don’t wanna learn how to deal with them. I just wanna sleep. How do you respond to that?

Natasha: I would say that’s a perfectly understandable reaction. So the first thing is that, that’s a completely understandable thing to feel when you’re going through this.

Natasha: And I felt exactly that. I think I also had this, you have to go through your arc because you do go through this like resistance and anger and you feel very, yeah, you feel resentful at the fact that you’re being asked to accept something that you don’t like at all.

Natasha: But, I think there is, again I think humans are very resilient in the way that at some point I think you realize that there is no choice. There is no option but to accept because not accepting this is not serving you very well. And so that was the other thing that I think this feeling that you should not be having negative emotions about insomnia.

Natasha: That’s not true at all. Like of course you’re going to feel bad. Recovering from insomnia requires you to not think that sleep is important? No, it’s none of that. Because of course you, you’re not gonna think sleep is not important or you’re not gonna value sleep.

Natasha: You do value it and it is important. And it is. It’s perfectly fine to exist in that contradiction of, knowing that this is important, wanting it, desiring it, but not becoming completely agitated. I think because that’s the really important part. How do you find routines and rituals, and how do you find maybe just the first level of acceptance.

Natasha: That’ll help you feel a little less agitated. And then I think that, these are positively reinforcing loops because when you experience that slight, like release from not feeling very agitated, from that first level of acceptance, you accept a little further, and then you practice acceptance and it gets better and better.

Natasha: And the funny thing is, it is true. There are times of course, and I am sure that many of your other like people might have said the same thing, but when you start sleeping better again, there’s a part of you that’s I should not be noticing this. I should not be noticing that I’m sleeping better, that this is working because I don’t wanna notice it.

Natasha: A part of you is noticing the fact that, okay, I’m relaxing and I’m, I’ve let go. I’ve just let go now. So I’m gonna watch TV and I’m just gonna stay awake and I’m gonna embrace whatever this is. And then you’re like, and it tends to work. And the more you do that, the more it works, so I think it’s a com. It’s this whole like positive loop.

Martin: All thoughts and all feelings are okay. So much of our struggle can come from this belief that we shouldn’t have certain thoughts or we shouldn’t have certain feelings, and that can just set us up for a struggle.

Martin: The alternative way forward is to acknowledge all of our thoughts and our feelings as normal valid human. That as human beings we experience the full range. Some make us feel good, some don’t. Some are useful, some aren’t. Some are true, some maybe not. We have the power to decide how we choose to respond to them, and I think that’s really what you’ve encapsulated so well because it’s when we respond with resistance, which is completely understandable, it feeds into it and it gives that stuff more power and more influence, and it just gets as tangled up.

Martin: If we’re feeling stuck, if things feel mysterious, perhaps there’s an opportunity here to respond in a different way with a little bit more acknowledgement, acceptance, and letting go, as you said, not holding this all so tightly just opening up to it a little bit more.

Martin: If nothing else, perhaps that would just free up a little bit of energy and attention that otherwise would’ve been consumed by battle for you to do more of the stuff that really matters to you.

Natasha: Yeah, and if anyone’s listening to this, I think they’re already halfway there in the sense that they have at least found something that’s giving them, that’s helping them square their own experience with some amount of knowledge. And at least, like I said, for me it was really helpful. Like the hardest part was all the misinformation, like when you are being, when you are consuming something that’s not actually helpful for insomnia and then, and so it’s either lack of information or it’s misinformation.

Natasha: But I think once you get the right information, even if there’s resistance initially, resistance gets spent, eventually you are spent, right? Because how much are you gonna struggle? Because you will resist, and you will resist. And then eventually, if it’s not working, you will be tired and you will let your guard down.

Natasha: And at that point, at least you’ve got the right information and you are ready to receive it. The problem is when there’s just no information and then you just continue in these loops of confusion. So I think for me, awareness generation is really important.

Martin: I remember when we were working together, you had this concern about acceptance. How do we achieve acceptance without it feel like you are in a position of helplessness and you’re giving up, versus how do I achieve acceptance with a sense of power of individual empowerment?

Martin: And that can be a bit difficult to wrap your head around, right?

Natasha: It is. I remember writing to you and saying that I’m not feeling like I’m choosing acceptance. I’m being forced to accept, in which case it’s not acceptance, it’s just something that’s forced on you.

Natasha: But the thing is, like I said, I think that resistance and that friction was required for me to get over the hump as well. And there are people who may perhaps come to acceptance easily and there are others who may not. And I think both reactions or like a whole spectrum of reactions is perfectly natural.

Natasha: What I do feel is from my own journey also, is that eventually, like acceptance is inevitable because, the friction doesn’t yield anything that’s helpful in this situation. And so the only thing is that, like I said, having somebody to talk through on when you’re going through this, having someone to talk through with is important because, some of the words and the reframing and the perspectives, they’re there at least.

Natasha: And it’s like when your acceptance portal finally opens. It’s available for that information to go inside. If there was nothing there, then you may accept it, but from a place of helplessness or sorrow or just, I don’t know. And then you would have to work a lot harder perhaps to generate solutions and kind of perspectives for yourself.

Natasha: But if there is some perspective, initially the door is closed and it’s not going in, but that’s okay because at some point the door will open and then all of that stuff that’s waiting to be heard and understood will go inside.

Martin: Yeah. There’s value in every part of the experience, even when it feels like we’re really struggling, there’s always something to be learned from that, and it might not feel like it’s useful at that time, but at some point in the future, we will serve some kind of value as a learning experience or something we can pick and choose from to help us move forward in a different way or to keep us moving forward in the way we want to be moving.

Natasha: Yeah. Yeah, that’s true.

Martin: What did progress look like for you on this journey? Did you find that as you were starting to get this sense of independence back, sleep just suddenly magically transformed and you were having great nights of sleep and every single night was better than the last?

Natasha: I wish I could say that. There is no such thing as perfect sleep. And no one is sleeping perfectly. I mean, you may have less sleep for multiple reasons, right? You’re traveling and then there’s other disruptions and someone is sick and so on, so forth.

Natasha: So I think, I think the important, the huge tangible change, I think and it’s not a change that, let’s say that if you just looked at the surface of my life in terms of like, how productive is she and how active is she? And how creative is she? I think a lot of that is probably looks the same because you are still doing things.

Natasha: But I think what did change, one of the things that did change Yes, is that I think this idea of traveling definitely came back for me. Traveling for leisure. Not just work, but traveling for leisure. And so I did actually travel last year a couple of times for leisure. And so that was one small change.

Natasha: Yeah, like having late nights and it’s totally fine having early mornings and it’s totally fine. And just so that sense of like release with your own. Calendar and not having anxiety about it, so I think for me, there are, of course, even today, there are several times where, you will get, six hours or five hours, because maybe you’re traveling.

Natasha: But I’ve noticed that not only I don’t talk about it, like that’s the other thing, right? I don’t, I’m not talking about it with like my husband or my sister or anybody that, gosh, like I wouldn’t see that talk about it at all because I’m yeah, it’s fine, I’ll go to bed tonight and tomorrow or whatever.

Natasha: And even if I’m, even if I’m like, I’ve got three straight like events and for some reason the three straight nights I’m going to be pulling like late nights, I’m okay. I’m not very stressed about that. So I think basically there’s a certain sense of relaxation and I will say that, look, this journey is not linear, right?

Natasha: And I suppose like the longer you’ve struggled with it or the harder you’ve struggled with it, and the more intensely you have felt about it, like it is gonna take you some time to feel like this isn’t a theme in your life at all. And like for me, for instance, even like this showing up here to talk about it and to have it recorded, there was for a long time I thought that I wanted to write about it actually for last year, early last year, I started wanting to, when I experienced a lot of these benefits, I said I should write a whole piece.

Natasha: And then I just couldn’t because I said that, I don’t want to jinx it. And so there were these lingering feelings, right? Saying that if I talk about it, if I, and if I go out and announce that I’m fine and I had this problem and I no longer have it I don’t wanna say that. But then, over time it just faded away.

Natasha: Even that, even holding onto that kind of goes away. Time actions, consistency and of course this underlying reframing is the journey. It happens in fits and starts, but I think eventually you do get to a point where. Your relationship, like you said, the relationship with sleep changes.

Natasha: One of the things I do appreciate about this journey has been that I have actually learned a lot about sleep. There is no perfect, there is no eight hour, eight and a half, seven or whatever. There is no, you have to find your rhythm and the more you dissociate with the sleep dogma that has become a culture I think the better off everyone is.

Martin: In terms of the timeline here, how long would you say that it took you to get to a point where you felt like you’d left the struggle behind?

Natasha: I think there was this whole period of, there, there was also like micro progress and then there was like a little bit of a slide back and there was frustrations. Like I said, it was non-linear. So I would say that it was probably only by the summer, so about maybe four months or so, four or five months.

Natasha: And I did actually start scheduling like work trips and travel and so on so forth. And the more I did that, I think by the time summer rolled around, I was starting to feel like I could plan my days and plan my weeks and plan my time the way I wanted to. And yeah, and it’s been like a steady stabilization from that point all the way, till now.

Natasha: I do wanna again stress that when somebody says that they no longer struggle with insomnia, it doesn’t mean that they sleep like nine hours or eight hours every single night consistently all the time. That is not the, that’s not what resolution looks like.

Natasha: Resolution is you’re not controlled by it.

Martin: It’s very rare that someone tells me that they’re able to change everything and transform their lives in a few days or a few weeks. And it often requires ongoing practice too, right? There’s ups and downs.

Martin: We’re always gonna get pulled back into a struggle, whether it’s with sleep or insomnia or anything else that goes on in our lives. It’s just that awareness when that’s happening and being able to change course to refocus on actions that matter to us and to live our lives and allow sleep, the opportunity to take care of itself rather than trying to fix sleep so that we can live our lives.

Martin: If we can just flip that around, it can just be such a transformative way of approaching this.

Natasha: Yeah, I agree.

Martin: Your whole learning experience, your whole journey maybe comes down to this realization through action that you have the ultimate power over your life. And as you reinforce that, sleep just becomes a thing. It doesn’t just, it doesn’t become the most important thing in your life when you are not resisting it so much when you’re just accepting sleep is gonna turn up and do whatever it wants or insomnia’s gonna turn up, do whatever it wants.

Natasha: And you do start sleeping much better. I think the listeners especially need to hear that if they’re going through it right now, they don’t want to, feel like the takeaway of this is that, oh, you’re just gonna reach some radical acceptance, but your sleep is not gonna change.

Natasha: The truth is that the sleep does change and you do feel rested and you do sleep more and you get back to sleeping normally. The idea is to just not expect that. That every, you’re going to be in some sleep paradise all the time because that’s just, that’s not even normal life, and I think by the time, if you’re going through a lot of insomnia, what you want is that you want sleep paradise.

Natasha: You just want something where every day you’re just knocked out cold beautifully because you develop that kind of a, sensitivity to sleep. But once you get over it, you realize that most of the times you’re sleeping well, sometimes you’re not. And irrespective, it’s just not on your mind anymore.

Martin: Natasha, I want to thank you for all the time you’ve taken to share your experience with us. I do have one last question for you. If someone is listening and they just feel like they cannot end the struggle with insomnia, that there’s nothing they can do, what would you say to them?

Natasha: The first thing I would really say is that it’s understandable to feel that. And it’s hard. It’s very hard feeling that, it’s a really hard place to be in when you are feeling like that. But I would say that there are many people now who have figured out how to come out of this.

Natasha: It’s not a pharmacological technical solution, it’s something that’s inside you, everybody has it. Your sleep is not broken. Your brain is not broken. Like nothing about you is broken. It’s a phase and I think like everything this will pass and some of just a little bit of intentionality and just to some amount of, perhaps, hopefully perspective and reframing and then just changing your actions a little bit and a combination of all of that and patience will get you through it, so I think that’s probably what I’d like, anybody listening who’s struggling to take away.

Martin: Thank you so much again for coming on.

Natasha: Yeah. Martin, thank you so much. Thank you for what you do.

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.

I want you to be the next insomnia success story I share! If you're ready to stop struggling with sleep and get your life back from insomnia, you can start my insomnia coaching course right now.

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