How will accepting utterly help me end this struggle?

Hi friend ❤️

Acceptance is a tricky topic, don't you think? Some people find liberation in it, while others might react protectively to the message of letting go of control.

🧠: So you're saying that there is nothing I can do to make myself sleep. Then what's the point of all this? Are you saying I just need to give up trying, give up hoping? See no chance of getting better? How is this helpful?

I understand this reaction very well. And, of course, the purpose of all this is to help anyone struggling to find the way to peace and freedom from insomnia. If I saw no way out of this for myself, I would have never started this project in the first place.

There is a way, but the path leads us through places our controlling brains don't want us to go. They actively resist these places. Therefore, acceptance is often misunderstood and mistaken for apathy or depression.

The state of acceptance is neither of those. But it also doesn't mean, "Aaah, I get it. I accept *wink* that there is nothing I can do to fix this *wink*. Are you buying this, brain?"

No, acceptance in a real sense. No tricks, no backdoors, no "ifs."

🧠: But I still see no benefit in accepting. How will accepting utterly help me end this struggle?

Recently, I stumbled upon a comment that explained it so well. I'm going to write it in my own words to fit our context:

Acceptance is a coin with two sides. One side is "there is nothing I can do to make sleep happen," and the other side is "there is nothing required of me to do for sleep to come."

When true acceptance comes, it might come with sadness, but it also has the capacity to lift the burden of figuring it all out off our shoulders.

Have you considered what a burden it is to be perceived as the smart one?
To be the one who figures it all out?
To be the one who always knows the answers?
To be the one who, for the rest of their life, needs to live up to the "good sleeper" ideal?

Have you tried to complete these steps? How did it go? It was painful and fruitless, wasn't it?

Well, acceptance will love you no matter where you are on this journey, no matter what you feel, think, or do. It will help you get where you want to be without having to complete all these steps above (which are unachievable anyway).

It's such a simple thing (though not easy!). It's a bit too simple for our brains to trust initially, and they will resist at first. And that's also part of acceptance – accepting the brain's resistance to accept.

Acceptance becomes more and more available to us as the brain exhausts its energy to figure it all out. In my latest blog article on obsession with how-tos there is a great analogy on acceptance:

Imagine holding a big heavy stone in your hand. You don’t need a manual to tell you how to let it go. Instinctively, you know you simply need to open your palm to release it. Yet, our minds can be deceptive. They may convince us that the stone we clutch is actually precious gold, vital for us to hold onto. This is precisely why letting go is so damn hard! The moment we truly realize that holding onto something costs us more than releasing it, we will release, and it will be effortless.

The mind convinces us that we will lose something if we accept. And that's true; we do lose something, but not what the brain thinks.

It thinks that it will lose precious control, but it never had it in the first place. What we really lose is the extra weight that's been making our journey so excruciatingly painful.

Yeah, there is nothing we can do... but that also means that there is nothing required from us – isn't that an exhale we've been wanting all along?

Anyway, I will conclude my letter with the links to my two recent blog articles, which you might have missed:

👉 Stuck in “How do I do that?” loop

👉 Success Story Fatigue (I got overwhelmingly positive feedback on this article)

Give this letter a like if you enjoyed it (I will greatly appreciate that!) and feel free to share it with others who might benefit from it as well.

See you next time ❤️

Alina