Decision 'paralysis' during insomnia
Have you ever felt on your insomnia journey that sometimes you simply don’t know what you should do? Should you get up or stay in bed? Should you stay with your emotions or shift your attention on something else? This indecisive state is very familiar to me.
In a way, it acts as a part of our freeze response. We have our usual “fight or flight” which gives us energy to do something to escape to safety. Freeze response, on the other hand, immobilises us, which can happen either physically – when we feel frozen from the intense fear emotion - or mentally, when we can’t seem to make any decision and we remain in that state for some time, or both.
I’ve recently touched this topic with some of my clients on Bedtyme (where I coach) and I wanted to share my thoughts on this with you too.
As we learn to identify sleep efforts and see how some of our actions lead to more peace while other - to more tension, the mind can enter the mode when it can’t decide what to do next. From that point, anything begins to look like an effort and of course it can be a very unpleasant place to be.
When the brain can’t decide what to do, this often means that it is trying to figure out the “right” path...in order to control the outcome! So it is the same problem-solving mode (which created the problem in the first place) but it just takes a bigger scale, that’s why it might not be too obvious. But the moment we begin to see that behind that decision “paralysis“ there is the fear of making the wrong choice or take the wrong turn, we can begin to see things clearer.
Now, how to move on from that indecisive state?
To me, it all starts with the understanding. Understanding that our actions as such don’t really matter. They don’t matter because nothing can change the passive nature of sleep. Sleep will come at some point, whether we do efforts or not, we can’t predict when and how that happens but sleep is pretty much unavoidable. But fearing making the wrong choice can affect the present moment when we are awake, which reinforces the belief that wakefulness at night is bad. Hope this has been making sense so far :)
Let’s say a person can’t decide to get up or not from bed when they can’t sleep. Each option can both turn out to be an effort and not an effort. So in fear of making the wrong choice, the person enters decision “paralysis” state which keeps them stuck. But when they begin to realize that they are free to choose anything they find more favourable (moreover, they can also change their mind at any moment!), this is when the “paralysis“ begins to break and we get ourselves un-stuck.
As I wrote in one of the previous letters, trying to eliminate all sleep efforts is an effort in itself. So allow some imperfections on the path because there is no such thing as the “right“ path.
Take care!
Ali