Hidden blessing of a setback
Hi there,
I know you hate “going backwards” on your journey, you hate the anxiety that appears out of no where, you hate the fact that despite the effort to not let yourself to spiral down you still sometimes do. That disliking is so understandable and normal. I have never enjoyed a setback either. You aren’t alone.
But in that layer of resistance and frustration we often fail to see what else a setback brings to us.
When can we get a chance to look into our beliefs about ourselves and the world if not in the middle of a storm? When can we see through all our bullshit we’ve built over the months and years if not in the moments of vulnerability? An activated nervous system is time when inner transformations happen. These transformations don’t happen when “everything is going well“.
I see this often in people who early on their journey started feeling and sleeping better and decided to close the whole topic: “I finally got what I came for: no anxiety and 8 hour sleep - that’s all that matters, no need to keep looking further“. I’m saying that without any judgement at all! I did exactly the same when I had “success“ early on, so I totally get the appeal of forgetting about all of that when things are going great.
That “not looking“ can bring some sense of comfort and control, but it won’t remove the hidden fear of losing that outcome. For some people, that “honeymoon“ season can last a couple of weeks, months or even years! But when the honeymoon ends and we hit a speed bump, that’s when we see that there is actually a lot more to work with.
After months of ups and downs I started seeing that all the valuable insights or aha moments came ONLY from the setbacks. Good stretches taught me nothing, they were just the evidence that my body didn’t forget how to sleep and self-regulate. But they didn’t help me learn how to be okay with uncertainty and lack of control – and that’s what this whole journey is about. They felt good, but they also gave my brain the chance to construct another illusion of control which led me to deep frustration when a good stretch ended.
Setbacks, on the other hand, allow us to break those illusions and offer an opportunity to teach the brain something valuable – there is nothing you need to do for sleep to come, or for peace to come. It happens by itself in the absence of any attempts, there is no how to, no trick, no matra that will make sleep controllable, so you can just get into the passenger’s seat and ride along dispassionately.
Setbacks are also very humbling. I remember the pride and cockiness I felt when things got better. I would talk about it with my husband and rejoiced: “I got this! I finally got this!!!“… until the moment a setback hit and I felt right where I started.
There is a good litmus test to see if we are under the spell of our controlling mind: if we think that we got it, we actually didn’t. “Getting it“ implies being certain in the outcome, and how can we be certain if we aren’t in control of our sleep? No one knows how their night will unfold and that’s alright, we don’t need this fake certainty for our body to do its job.
Success is quiet, ordinary and very boring. There is nothing to celebrate or “get” – the “good” and the “bad” nights are just the interpretation made by the brain that created this problem in the first place. As long as there is a concept of a “good” night, there are going to be “bad” nights – it’s a donkey-chasing-carrot situation. This is what setbacks reveal to us. They show us that there is nothing to hold on to when a “good” stretch comes, because no one is immune against occasional sleep disruption, and there is nothing to hold on to when a “bad” stretch comes, because it will not last either. The whole game of insomnia is pointless and we can never win by playing it. Even the word “recovery” creates an illusion, it is more about seeing through the illusion and not being tricked by it anymore.
Take care ❤️
Ali