INTRODUCTION
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the podcast. I hope you are doing really, really well. Today, I want to talk about a question that comes my way quite often, and it's usually from someone who is perhaps interested in the mentorship or someone who is a bit newer to this work.
THE QUESTION EVERYONE ASKS
But that question is, how long will it be until my insomnia goes away? Or some version of this question? And this is such an understandable question. It is a very human question because when you are going through insomnia and you are really struggling with your sleep and so much uncertainty around sleep, you just want to know when it's going to end. You want to know when you're going to be free of it, what this process looks like, and when you're going to get your life back.
But here is the honest answer to that question. I don't know when that's going to be for any individual. And I know that is not going to be a popular answer to this question, but it is an honest one.
THE QUESTION IS PART OF THE PROBLEM
And I will share some general observations or general patterns of recovery that I've noticed inside the mentorship later on in this episode. But it's a hard question to answer because the question itself is a part of the problem. So what do I mean by that? There is a hidden assumption inside this question.
The question assumes insomnia is something you have, right? But insomnia isn't really something you have in the way you have a common cold or a broken bone. It's something the brain learns to do. It's a conditioned alert response called hyperarousal.
HOW INSOMNIA STARTS
And this usually starts after some sort of difficult experience with sleep. So maybe it's a medication reaction. It could be an illness.
Maybe you've gone through long COVID. It might be a trip. Sometimes it's a single sleepless night, but that triggers some worry or concern.
And from that point forward, we start engaging with sleep differently. We start paying more attention to it. We start problem solving it.
We start approaching it from a place of effort and control versus the passive process that it's always been. And then before you know it, we're dealing with this hyperarousal response that seems to kick in on automatic. And I know from personal experience what a perplexing thing that is, because when this response is rooted in fear or worry, there's often a lot of monitoring or predicting or analyzing and just overall wondering what in the world is going on with my sleep.
And these are all a part of the insomnia structure. So insomnia isn't something we have. It's something the brain learns and we can absolutely work with that.
And that is such great news. But here's the tricky part. Conditioned responses, especially those that are built in survival, generally don't disappear on a timeline.
They disappear when the brain no longer sees something as a threat. And that is not an easy thing to predict because every brain is different.
TIMELINE THINKING
Now, this is something important to know with regards to timeline thinking.
When we start putting time constraints on something like sleep, the brain can interpret that as what's happening is very, very bad. This needs to stop. There's a deadline attached to this.
This is unacceptable. We must fix this now. We are behind schedule, all of which can amp up the perception of threat versus bringing it down.
What we're actually trying to do is the opposite of all of that. We're wanting to bring some safety into the experience of sleep. We're wanting to let go of all the pressure and performance anxiety.
We're wanting to connect to the idea that there actually isn't anything dangerous happening. We've just learned some fear around this whole situation. So timeline thinking can keep us in the loop we're trying to get out of because it's based in expectation and control.
And those are the opposite conditions in which sleep generally happens.
THE WAITING GAME
There's another piece to this timeline question that I want to point out because when we're living in the energy of when is this going to go away, it creates this sort of waiting game. We start living in the anticipation of it going away.
We start looking for and monitoring for if it's going away. And of course, this also perks the brain up instead of winding it down. And it keeps us in the energy of what we don't want versus what we do.
PUTTING LIFE ON HOLD
It's also very, very common for people with insomnia to put their life on hold until sleep gets better. And of course, I'd completely get this because I basically arranged my entire life around insomnia for decades. I'll travel when I start sleeping better.
I'll date again when I start sleeping better. I'll exercise more when I start sleeping better. I'll be happy when I start sleeping better.
I'll get the job I really want when I start sleeping better. So I wasn't just waiting for sleep. I was waiting for my whole life to start alongside that sleep, which definitely no pressure there, right? But this was not the most helpful approach because it was making insomnia more powerful.
It was putting sleep up on the pedestal. It was creating a high stakes situation. I had to start living my life first because that's what teaches the brain.
There's no danger. That's what takes sleep off the pedestal. That's what lowers the stakes in your mind around this whole thing called sleep.
So your brain goes from, oh my God, my entire life is depending on the status of my sleep to I can live my life or parts of my life, even on little sleep. So I had to show my brain versus it leading me. And this is how the brain starts to learn safety again.
And I did this in such small increments, right? Change starts small. If you were to imagine a dripping faucet, I took it drip by drip. But over time, the bucket underneath that faucet held a greater capacity for life.
THE PARADOX OF RECOVERY
And this leads to the great paradox of recovery. The paradox of recovery is that it begins when you stop waiting. It speeds up when you're willing for it to slow down.
It goes away when you stop needing it to go away. Recovery doesn't happen on a timeline. It happens when you let go of the timeline.
And these are not easy concepts for the perfectionist brain, right? We basically want the exact opposite of this.
A PRACTICAL NOTE
But I will leave you on a more practical note today. In my experience, people who come into the mentorship generally need at least 60 days to really understand this approach and start thinking about sleep differently.
And then usually somewhere around the two to four month mark, those new pathways start to feel more natural and people start to feel more confident about the path they're on. And they feel more solid that they're not going to fall back into fix-it mode if there's some sleep disruption that comes along. That said, I've had people come in and watch the first week of lessons and they're pretty much good to go.
I hear from them a year later and they're doing great. And I've also had people like me who take much longer. My brain wouldn't let go of hyperarousal until it was ready.
And I understood that because even though I didn't consciously identify as someone with insomnia anymore, my subconscious had been working off that identity for a very long time. And there has to be enough capacity at the identity level to let that not be the case anymore. And that's really a whole other podcast.
But it was never really about the timeline for me as much as it was about who I was becoming in that process.
CLOSING
So I hope this episode was a helpful one. I'm Beth Kendall and you've been listening to the Mind Body Sleep Podcast.
Bye for now.
