Sleep, my brain, and I

How to break the "impossible" insomnia standoff

Emotions aside, I find insomnia one of the most fascinating paradoxes in life. It’s so interesting how our brain – doing what it does best, trying to keep us safe – can create a loop and then lock itself inside it.

That’s why insomnia recovery is one of the hardest journeys a person can be on. Hard, but not impossible.

Why insomnia recovery isn’t easy – and why we don’t have to pretend it should be

There are two forces at play here, each pulling in opposite directions and creating tension:

☝️ First, there's the nature of sleep – it's absolutely passive. There's no action, trick, or thought that can make it happen. Sleep isn't something we do but something that happens to us. Any attempt to control it eventually backfires. At the same time, the sleep mechanism is incredibly robust – even anxiety can't keep it away forever! At some point, our sleep mechanism takes over and we sleep – with or without anxiety. We simply can’t control it!

✌️ The second force is our brain's built-in survival feature. Our brain can't help it: when it sees something as a problem, it immediately tries to solve it. All the sleep thoughts, the urge to fix sleep, the self-monitoring, the obsession – these aren't voluntary. It's not entirely what we consciously choose to do. It's what our survival instinct dictates. When that instinct is activated, it can overpower rational understanding. That's why we might understand things rationally, but emotionally experience them differently. That's normal.

So we're in a standoff: between a sleep process that won’t budge and a brain that won’t stop trying.

As impossible as this situation seems, we can break this catch-22 – but not with traditional logic.

We can't change sleep's nature, and we can't control our brain's survival instinct. But one of these forces is more malleable than the other: our mind.

So let's ask ourselves: why does our brain feel the need to deploy its survival instinct?

Because it truly believes something really bad will happen if we sleep less. Perhaps this sense of threat comes from things we've read about sleep, or maybe our past experience with being awake has been so painful that we naturally want protection from it. Either way, our perception of nighttime wakefulness is what triggers our brain's survival instinct!

The instinct itself isn't a problem. Sleep thoughts and urges to control aren't the problem – they're byproducts of our perfectly functional survival mechanism. They couldn't not show up.

What makes it problematic is interpreting wakefulness as bad or wrong. While we can't control the instinct, we can change interpretations!

Have you ever changed your mind about something? The moment we look at things differently, our reactions change too.

Let's say you've been trying to buy a house and finally found a perfect one – you're happy and excited. Then someone outbids you and gets the house instead. Your first reaction would probably be negative – that's disappointing. But what if you later learn that house had major problems that would cost a fortune to fix? You might feel differently about the situation – perhaps even grateful for not buying it.

Of course, this isn't the same situation, but I wanted to illustrate how changing our perspective automatically changes our reactions.

For recovery, we don't need to solve our sleep thoughts or the urge to control sleep – these are just byproducts. What needs to change is our attitude toward less-than-perfect nights. When that perspective shifts, the reactions shift. The thoughts, the urge, the pressure – they all vanish on their own because we've changed our mind about what being awake at night means.

This change takes time – there's no expectation to see wakefulness differently right away. It's a gradual shift.

That's how we break the vicious cycle – by learning to see wakefulness in a new way, little by little.

That was all for today ❤️. If you would like to explore the recovery process more in-depth, I’m inviting you to join my Fearless Sleep Library – with my extensive course, monthly live Q&As, and lots and lots of organized notes on the nuances of recovery.

Take care ❤️

Alina