4 Reasons Why Focusing On Sleep is Not the Answer to Insomnia Recovery
Without a thorough understanding of insomnia, it is natural to focus all your attention on how to get more sleep. Focusing on sleep is often actually part of the problem though, since it is usually driven by fear. Had I realized this earlier on in my struggles, I may have not spent years spinning my wheels. Although better sleep is what everyone with insomnia wants, getting that does not necessarily mean that your insomnia will be healed. If the fear still remains, any disruption to sleep again could trigger the insomnia to come back. This is why it can continue for so long.
As an insomnia coach, therapist and recovered insomniac, below I explore why focusing primarily on sleep is not the most effective approach to recovery and where to shift your focus instead.
You will still have restless nights, even after recovery - it’s about how you respond that matters.
Sometimes it is easy to forget how normal it is to experience sleep disruptions from time-to-time. When you have insomnia, a night when sleep is worse than ‘baseline’ can trigger an onslaught of worries: ‘What if this becomes my new normal?’ ‘What if it gets worse and I lose my ability to sleep?’
If you can think back to before you had insomnia, it is likely that you had some sleepless nights - the difference is they occurred less often and you probably did not overthink them, or even pay much attention to them at all. But when you have insomnia, your nervous system stays in hyperarousal, i.e. fight or flight mode. In other words, when the brain feels under threat and our survival response kicks in, we tend to default to worry.
Because the brain and nervous system register a bad night as a threat, it can easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you have a bad night and the brain perceives this as a threat, your brain will likely become hypervigilant about this bad night and what it means. This can lead to monitoring any ‘signs’ of having a sleepless night, and trying to make meaning where there is none. When this happens, it keeps the brain and nervous system on high alert, or a state of hyperarousal, which is what gets in the way of sleeping.
When you work through the fears though, there’s no need for the brain to obsess or overthink about why you have the odd bad night anymore. It is a non-issue. Some nights I still feel like I’ve been tossing and turning, or I'll wake up in the middle of the night, or it will take me longer to fall asleep. This doesn’t happen often, and when it does I don’t think twice about it. Sometimes it’s obvious why - I accidentally booked a hotel on a noisy street, for instance. Other times it feels like more of a mystery, and that’s ok. I had mysterious restless nights before insomnia on occasion, and I still have them on from time-to-time now.
2. Getting your sleep back will not fix your entire life
While recovering from insomnia was life changing for me, it also made me realize that everything in my life was not going to be perfect once my sleep was fixed. Yet, it’s so easy to get caught up in the idea that it will - I have noticed this with clients too. Sleep becomes an obsession, until thoughts and worries about it overtake the mind. Then, an all-or-nothing perspective permeates, in which a life with steady sleep seems like absolute heaven, whereas the current state of insomnia feels like the reason for all discontent or upset.
In reality, it often plays out differently. Once I had worked through my insomnia, I naively thought my other fears would disappear too, as if the code for all fears had been cracked. It did not quite work that way, and any underlying issues I had still remained. Us humans can have all different kinds of fears stemming from different ages, and for different reasons. A fear that emerged from childhood, for instance, will likely not disappear after recovering from insomnia. Fears and worries can jump topics too, and that’s OK. In some ways, it’s comforting. Once you realize healing insomnia won’t solve everything, it puts less pressure on the need for insomnia to be fixed as quickly as possible. It is one piece of the puzzle, and it is an important piece, but it is often not the whole picture.
After my recovery I also assumed I would experience a sudden surge in sustained energy. Paradoxically, I went through a period of exhaustion. This is not uncommon. Insomnia occurs in a state of hyperarousal, or when the nervous system is in a chronic state of fight or flight. This is the same survival response that kicks in when we run into a sudden threat, like a bear. We have to be able to move quickly. So, that state of hyperarousal can make you feel like you have energy, even if you are tapped out at the same time. This is how it feels to be tired but wired. When you work through the fears though, the hyperarousal drops down, so even once your sleep stabilizes, you can feel tired for quite some time. It is because the body finally feels safe enough to no longer stay in the fight or flight state. Experiencing the chronic fatigue after insomnia recovery was a bit of a rude awakening, but it also further made me realize that sleep was not suddenly going to improve everything.
3. There is not a linear relationship between number of hours slept and how great your day will be
When the brain is hypervigilant for any threats to sleep, it can get stuck in monitoring and tracking. It’s very easy for the mind to get caught up in making assumptions between what X number of hours of sleep means, which is not only obsessive, but it can create more pressure to sleep.
This is exactly what we want to avoid when in recovery. It’s likely that my day will go smoother after a restful sleep, but I’ve also had really tough days after sleeping well, and joyous days after sleeping poorly, or barely at all. Sleep is just one ingredient of many when it comes to how my day will pan out. That’s why paying attention to when your day goes different from how you would expect based on how little or how much you have slept is actually helpful. Journaling days following a rough sleep that went better than expected can be a good way of tracking this, because it can be easy to forget those days happen, especially when you’re struggling. It also allows the brain start to cling less to the outcome. It provides the brain with information that is opposite of what it would expect, so that it can begin to dissociate being awake at night with fear. Once this happens, the hyperarousal starts to go down, and you are on your way to recovery.
4. Focusing on the outcome is part of the trap
It is so natural if you have insomnia to put all your energy into the outcome - better sleep. That is what is missing, and that is what is needed. It is simple, right? The issue, is that insomnia is not a beast you can run away from or beat into submission. It is something you need to befriend, or at least accept, before it transforms. It is the idea of seeing it as a benign beast. We can learn over time that it does not have to be scary or threatening. When the focus is on better sleep, it is akin to this benign beast standing right in front of you, and you trying to ignore it so you can get to what it is blocking you from.That does not work though, because it is not going to budge until you face it. The only way forward is through.
What do I mean by this? In practical terms there is an element of learning to be ok with being awake at night. Through exposure, the brain eventually realizes that while restless nights are unpleasant, they do not need to be feared. It also means acknowledging and working through some of the stories and emotions the mind can get hooked on. In this way, solid sleep is a natural outcome rather than the central focus. Oftentimes it is the fear that is placing all the importance on sleep: ‘If I don’t fall asleep in an hour I’ll be wrecked.’ ‘I can’t have another night like last night.’ ‘What if this lasts forever.’
Once the worries get worked through, the mind shifts to a state of greater neutrality. It goes, ‘Well if I don’t sleep that is not preferred and I might be very grumpy, but I’ll be OK’. In my experience, and through supporting others on their insomnia recovery, I see a problem of focus. Whereas nearly everyone comes in focusing on the outcome, long-term recovery is all about shifting that focus from sleep to facing the fears. Then it becomes less about a chase, and more of a gradual unfolding into acceptance, with stabilized sleep as the inevitable outcome.
I had some periods of remission during my 8-year saga with insomnia, but they were brief until I worked through the root fears. When I had a stressor, change in my life, or a few bad nights of sleep, the fear would come back and then guess what happened? I had full blown insomnia again. It turns out I had been focusing on the wrong thing (sleep) while letting my fears insidiously run the show. It does not have to be this way, and my wish is that more insomnia sufferers will realize this sooner than I did.
To get a better sense of my philosophy towards insomnia recovery, you can check out my free insomnia email course below.