Exposure is nuanced
Hi there!
Here is a brief letter for you 💌
The topic was inspired by a recent conversation I had with one of the people on the recovery path.
When we start working with the fear of being awake, we often hear the word ✨exposure✨. In the context of insomnia and sleep anxiety recovery, it makes so much sense. We can’t get around without facing our fears and looking into the eyes of the thing we hate the most.
But sometimes the brain takes the idea of exposure to the extreme and turns it into one of the many strategies it has used before.
This usually ends up with people trying to force themselves to stay up all night so that they get rid of fear of being awake.
Do you sense the effort here? The exposure becomes the tool to escape sleeplessness and emotions. And we are back to where we started. In fact, we are more likely to re-traumatize ourselves with excessive exposure.
Exposure has its nuances, and when it is done rigidly and unkindly to ourselves that can be unhelpful.
I received this question many times: “I think I will try to stay awake the whole night on purpose so that I’m finally done with that fear. Do you think it is a helpful strategy?”
My usual response is this: willingness and courage to experience a sleepless night is definitely helpful. But! We can’t forget about self-kindness. Courage without kindness can lead to more trauma and frustration. Entering the night with the openness to experience wakefulness, but not denying ourselves a possibility of sleeping is a much kinder thing than forcing ourselves to be up all night out of principle. Sometimes sleep will happen, sometimes not – all is good and allowed.
Staying awake just to prove the brain something and doing it from the place of pressure won’t lead us to the place where we want to be.
Of course, some exposure is needed for our brain to get familiar with these experiences and see them as safe, but we don’t have to go an extra mile and try to artificially create a bunch of discomfort just for the sake of it.
In fact, we don’t need to force exposure – it will find us anyway! The right lesson to learn will present itself in its own time.
👉 It will find us in those all-nighters which happen not because we choose them but because that’s where the journey takes us.
👉 It will find us in those early awakenings that happen without us asking for them.
👉 It will find us when our friends invite us for a late night dinner.
👉 It will find us when our family plans a trip.
👉 It will find us when the fear resurfaces after a longer time of doing better.
Life will give us plenty of opportunities to expose ourselves to the triggers, we don’t have to create them on purpose to prove anything to the brain.
So when exposure naturally finds us, what is left for us to do is to meet it with the utmost care, kindness and compassion for ourselves, making this time as comfortable as it is possible for us - whatever that looks like on a specific night.
Cheers ❤️
Alina