On fear of sleep efforts

Hi there!

Debunking common fears and paradoxes can help us move on our paths to peaceful sleep. If we don’t know where a particular fear or other emotion comes from, it is difficult to overcome it.

Today I want to talk about the common but difficult-to-spot fear during insomnia – the fear of sleep efforts.

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Note: This letter might be more helpful to those who are more advanced on the journey – as I see this kind of fear happening to people who’s already familiar with the whole philosophy and have been on this path for some time (which also can be seen as a sign of progress, as weird as it sounds!). For those who are new to this, this letter might not be super useful. The beginners might benefit more from readings such as the books by Daniel Erichsen “Set it and forget it“ or “This is NATTO“.

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When everything we do seems like an effort

Let’s start with reminding ourselves what sleep efforts are.

Sleep effort is anything that we do with the intent to force sleep. And since sleep has a passive nature any effort paradoxically makes us more awake and hyperaroused.

Sleep is something that happens rather than something we actively do.

So naturally, the path to peaceful sleep is through not trying to sleep and not doing any efforts.

But sometimes we get into a tricky situation. As we work on identifying and eliminating any sleep efforts, we might unintentionally turn that activity into some sort of a witch-hunt. We demonize the concept of sleep efforts, see it as an obstacle to sleep. From that place, almost everything we do starts to look like an effort… and understandably, that’s a very frustrating and confusing place to be in.

We try our best to not to try to sleep and yet feel even more worried and sleepless than ever.

Where it comes from

The fear of sleep efforts is not a strange thing. It is the same old survival-mechanism that created all our previous sleep efforts and there is no mystery to it.

It runs on the belief that sleep and our lives are in immediate danger if we don’t sleep and therefore we must do everything we can to ensure safety. Interestingly, that fear is based on a perceived threat, meaning that there is no immediate physical danger although the mind behaves as if it were.

In the search of that safety, the brain can start perceiving sleep efforts as an enemy that endangers our sleep.

While it is true that sleep efforts make it difficult to sleep, as such, they don’t pose real threat (of course in this letter we don’t talk about substance abuse or other physically dangerous behaviour!).

For example, people begin to worry that by trying to do something nice at night they are trying to sleep and they stop feeling comfortable doing it – because they don’t want it to turn into an effort.

Or they feel unsure about watching some educational content fearing it can be an effort.

Or they are afraid to check time because they feel like it can be an effort to control sleep.

Or they don’t know if wearing a sleeping mask is an act of self-care or an effort.

When everything seems to be an effort, we kinda feel trapped, don’t we?

What we don’t usually see behind that behaviour is that now the brain turned its problem-solving mechanism against sleep efforts themselves. So eliminating all sleep efforts becomes an effort in itself.

It seems like an impossible situation to work with but I see that the usual approach to fear and hyperarousal can be helpful with this type of situations too.

Paradoxical approach to the sleep effort paradox

Since fear (including the fear of sleep efforts) is an emotion, the more we try to avoid emotions, the more intense they get. Therefore, continuing our efforts on eliminating all sleep efforts from the place of fear only reinforces the fear.

But what if we stop pushing and go the opposite direction here? What if we change our relationship with the concept of sleep efforts? What if we stop fearing doing sleep efforts?

Can we recognize that sleep efforts aren’t inherently evil but are just a bunch of ideas sent by our brains? Can we think of times when we experienced the urge to do the efforts yet sleep happened even if there were some efforts? Can we allow ourselves to fall for some sleep efforts sometimes and don’t blame ourselves for that?

What I wrote can seem somewhat confusing to some people, as if I’m contradicting myself. And I completely understand them!

But I’m not saying that sleep efforts are helpful. I’m saying that if the mind started to fear sleep efforts, and this effort-hunt brings more suffering than relief, we need look at this situation a bit differently.

We can start to untangle it from teaching ourselves that it is okay to experience the urge to do sleep efforts. And even if some of our decisions do turn into efforts, nothing terrible happens. Because, frankly, whether we do sleep efforts or not – sleep will always come on its own terms (and it will eventually!), so aren’t we free to choose how to act, feel or think?