[Suzbe]

I just feel like I’m at my wits end. Need some specific advice. My sleep just gets worse and worse. I my ave a lot of stress and anxiety right now. Help!!

[Bronte]

I’m feeling very sorry for you and know exactly how you feel. I’ve had insomnia for decades but have recently made a major breakthrough. Unfortunately not particularly due to Martin’s course, although I agree with his principles.

I have completely changed my mindset about sleep and I think the main key is to not care whether you sleep, or not. It’s hard when you are desperate for sleep, I know.

So what I did was I removed anything and everything I did to help me sleep, like any routines or techniques. You don’t need meditation, CBT thought games before bed. Go to bed when you are really sleepy, read a good book and say to yourself ‘I don’t care whether I sleep, or not. It doesn’t matter how I feel tomorrow because I’m going to get on with my day regardless’ . Sleep is natural, it will happen naturally and you don’t need to do anything to make it happen. What you have to do is stop analysing it, worrying about it and trying to make it happen. It doesn’t matter, you don’t care, be completely indifferent to it.

I know I have spent years being exhausted, lying in bed awake, stressing about how bad I’m going to feel the next day, struggling to stay awake in the evenings and then feeling wide awake when I get into bed. Feeling so desperate I would be in tears, so anxious, feeling like a freak. Then I thought I’m not going to do this anymore. I’m not going to care about it anymore. I’m not going to let it control me. Whatever it throws at me I don’t care. Eventually sleep will happen because my brain will naturally make sure it does. I don’t need to do anything except get on with my life and stop thinking about it.

So I go to bed now, read, feel sleepy and lie down. If I get all the usual negative thoughts I acknowledge them and tell my brain it’s ok I’m not bothered. I think about how comfortable my bed feels, how warm, soft, whatever. I tell myself ‘just wait, be patient’ and if it doesn’t happen I can read again. I get through a lot of good books!

I now generally sleep about 5-6 hours and if I get up for the toilet I can get back to sleep afterwards. Some nights are better than others but I am feeling so much better. I don’t think about sleep anymore during the day, or even in the evening. My worse nights are when I have something important the next day and I start to think ‘I really need to sleep tonight because I need to be feeling good tomorrow’ and when I do this I often then can’t sleep. So I have learnt to maintain my mantra of ‘it doesn’t matter if I sleep or not’ and I don’t allow that switch in my head to go across and let the anxiety back in again.

Martin’s principles are great but I found the most help with mind/body work which teaches you to calm your nervous system, you can use meditation but during the day and not specifically to help you sleep before bed. There is so much information out there about mind/body work as every symptom we have comes from our brains 🧠 (the control centre) whether it be chronic pain, insomnia, migraine, gut issues. I can recommend a lot of authors but it’s not fair for me to do this on this forum.

Insomnia is all about anxiety and forming negative neural pathways in your brain that you can learn to change. Think about people in your life who sleep well. They don’t need to do anything special to achieve it, they don’t even think about it! That’s exactly what you need to do. Take away its importance and take charge. I hope this can help you a bit and good luck, you can get better.

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