How to Overcome Insomnia and Unlock Deep Sleep
Sinking into deep sleep can feel like a pipe dream when you’re tossing and turning, or you awaken wide-eyed in the night. I know how exasperating it can be! I suffered from insomnia for over 13 years, which felt never-ending at the time.
It was the most stubborn symptom in my recovery from chronic fatigue syndrome. It’s not uncommon for insomnia to arise with ME/CFS, Long Covid or other chronic conditions but it can come on its own too.
As I learned new ways of relating to my unwanted wakefulness, my mind and body finally got the memo that sleep is safe—and I found serene slumber again. Oh gracious night!
I feel like I got an unintended degree in sleep, sans the fancy title. I’ve studied the night—and my relationship to it—with devotion. In this blogpost and video, I’ll sprinkle stardust your way in four distinct chapters.
Please be compassionate while reading this in-depth blog and watching my video below, knowing that you don’t have to do it all. See what resonates and consider trying one or two strategies at a time. Insomnia is a state of hypervigilance. We want to trade pressure for peace.🕊️
Watch my 32-minute video on how to overcome insomnia. The blog and video each have some unique information so check out both!
🧠 The Awake Brain: Feeling Safe to Sleep
Like other mind-body symptoms, sleep woes typically start during a stressful time. We might feel worried about work, restless in a relationship or insecure about our income. Or we could be overwhelmed by life in general. These stressors put our brain on high alert and activate our nervous system.
For me, insomnia came after a traumatic experience that happened in the dead of night. Shortly afterwards, my health plummeted. For over a decade, I became mostly homebound with a diagnosis of ME/CFS. Stuck in a painful paradox, I was utterly exhausted but I couldn’t sleep. I struggled to walk around the house, yet I was wired when I’d collapse into bed.
Insomnia is common with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). But it doesn’t take trauma to disrupt sleep. A rash of routine stressors can trigger hypervigilance. When our subconscious mind feels threatened—by physical, mental or emotional stimuli—it shifts into flight, fight or freeze mode. In an attempt to protect us, our limbic brain won’t let down its guard.
In order for our brain to ease into sleep, we need to feel relatively safe in our body and life. If a saber-toothed predator were lurking around, my brain wouldn't want me to be unconscious. It doesn’t care that I feel like a bowl of jelly the next day! Its primary concern is survival.
Amazingly, scientists estimate that more than 90-percent of our brain is subconscious or unconscious. We’re not aware of these hidden thoughts, emotions and memories in our non-conscious mind. Like an iceberg, they’re below the surface of our awareness.
In this analogy, when heat accelerates, an iceberg starts to melt. Waters spills its banks. Likewise, if our stress levels exceed our capacity, we get submerged with symptoms. When our subconscious brain doesn’t feel safe, it can cause any neuroplastic symptom as a warning signal—from fatigue to fibromyalgia, brain fog to bloating, allodynia to anxiety.
Nervous system activation floods us with stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. On a biological level, we’re primed to defend ourselves. These are not ripe conditions to fall asleep or stay asleep!
Naturally, we develop fear that we won’t sleep the next night. Our bedroom becomes a place of anxiety rather than serenity. We get emotionally aroused. We start thinking doomsday thoughts about sleep.
We often change our behaviors, too. We might avoid evening activities we used to enjoy: entertainment, exercise or social engagement. This creates a stress-symptom loop. We first experience a stressful situation, which leads to sleep issues, which leads to fear of not sleeping, which leads to more insomnia. I know firsthand this is not a joyride!
Our brain becomes sensitized. Strangely, it learns this new coping pattern. Just as it once learned to tie a shoe or hit a tennis ball, our brain develops neural pathways for symptoms too.
But we can unlearn these sleepless pathways, and restore our slumber! Afterall, it’s hardwired into our biology. We simply need to remove the blocks to shut-eye and foster a sense of felt safety in our body.
The good news? Insomnia is a treatable mind-body condition, as long as you’ve ruled out pathological causes like sleep apnea or thyroid disorders. It’s important to get checked by your doctor to be sure you don’t have anything treatable.
Here’s some questions to consider for your own journey. You might write or reflect on the prompts I offer in each chapter.
Reflections ✨
What stressors were present in your life when you developed sleep issues? What emotions did those elicit in you? How have you reacted to insomnia? What thoughts or behaviors have been helpful? Which thoughts or behaviors have been unhelpful? How might you shift them?
😴 Mind-body healing: Befriend the night with neuroplasticity
There were countless nights when I thought my brain was permanently broken. The many diagnoses doctors gave me didn’t help. One physician said that viruses had crossed my blood-brain barrier and were causing inflammation. After that, I was sure I could feel the pernicious pathogens wreaking havoc in my cranium. Being up in the wee night hours gives your amygdala plenty of time for panic.
When I discovered mind-body healing, I felt massive relief. First, I realized that I was not broken. Second, I could recover from insomnia and a wide range of disabling symptoms!
I found the body of work called Tension Myositis Syndrome (TMS) by Dr. John Sarno and later referred to as Mind-Body Syndrome (MBS) by Dr. Howard Schubiner. These days, doctors often use the term neuroplastic symptoms or simply mind-body symptoms. New science shows that our brain can generate real pain and ailments due to high stress levels—even when there's no underlying pathology, like a tumor, broken bone or auto-immune disease.
Learning that my brain wasn’t damaged turned down my anxiety tenfold! Instead, I realized that my system was in a threat response. This was fueled by early and adulthood trauma, being misunderstood by the medical maze, becoming disabled and unable to work or socialize, being perpetually hard on myself, and the grueling symptoms themselves.
Here was the big pivot: I didn’t need to be treated as a collection of abnormal lab tests. I needed gentle care and compassion. This began with befriending my body and accepting my symptoms. I eventually learned to accept my wakefulness, rather than fight it. I fostered “outcome independence,” or indifference to how or when I fell asleep. It this sounds absurd, that’s how I felt at first too—but, with practice, it works!
Fearing and fighting our body only revs us our poor amygdala, which I affectionately call “Miggie.” We cannot try to get sleepy. Effort is the opposite of ease, and we need to be at ease to fall asleep. So I made sound slumber my long-term goal, and I embraced finding a felt sense of safety as my short-term goal. Admittedly, this isn’t easy when you’re awake and aching at nightfall.
Albert Einstein once said, “If you’re sitting on a hot stove a minute seems like an hour, but if you’re doing something pleasurable an hour can seem like a minute.”
Thus, it can be helpful to find simple and enjoyable evening activities that settle your system. Think old-fashioned things like jigsaw puzzles or word games. Try something creative or repetitive like coloring, knitting, reading or drawing. Gentle movements like qigong or yoga can be a lullaby for our body.
We also want to sow sleep seeds before bedtime. We cannot go from 100 mph to REM in an instant! For me, somatic meditations were pivotal in regulating my nervous system. They shifted me from fearing my body to befriending it.
Body-based meditations became an ever-present friend during the mercurial darkness. Specifically, I learned to reconnect to sensations and emotions through a lens of safety with somatic tracking. You can try a longer somatic tracking meditation on my website here.
Since emotional angst can stir us up, it’s helpful to give our emotions attention before we crawl into bed. One technique is through Expressive Writing; Uncensored journaling about our emotional world offloads pent-up feelings, especially when followed with a self-compassion meditation. Some people find it soothing to close the day with a gratitude list or meditation. If your mind is circling around your to-do’s, write those items on a memo and tuck it away for tomorrow.
In essence, give your brain space to process your day! This could mean taking slow belly breaths, playing with a pet, reading a rather dull book, settling into yin yoga, or candle gazing in a sudsy bathtub.
Hear more ideas in my video, and consider writing about the following prompts.
Reflections ✨
What emotional state do you notice before bed? How can you process emotions from your day? What relaxing activities do you enjoy in the evening? What settles your system?
🌟 Sleep hygiene 101: slumber by starlight
Mind-body healing worked wonders for my sleep. I stopped fearing and fighting insomnia. Alas, I fell asleep—or fell back to sleep—more easily. But, this symptom also called for sleep hygiene.
I needed to resuscitate my brain’s internal clock. Our circadian rhythm regulates sleep, hormones, gene expression, body temperature and more. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I) filled in gaps for me. It wasn’t easy but it was cheap. I mostly learned this through the excellent book Say Goodnight to Insomnia by Gregg Jacobs.
I will say that many schools of CBT-I are rigid, and this didn’t serve me. So I used sleep hygiene creatively, in a way that felt supportive to me. Remember, you don’t have to do everything to feel well again, and self-pressure is counter to our goal here! If a suggestion is creating tension, let it go for now. You can always return to it later, if needed.
It’s worth noting that modern humans have roamed the earth for about 300,000 years. Our ancestors relied on the medicinal power of darkness itself. Yet, the incandescent lightbulb lit up U.S. homes around 1925—less than 100 years ago. The iPhone was invented a mere 17 years ago! In a short span of evolution, our brains have been thrust from sleeping by starlight to scrolling social media.
Just as we can only eat so much food, we can only consume so many gigabytes. If we overindulge, there’s unwanted side effects. We need ample time to digest what we take into our body and psyche. We need space to process the thoughts and emotions of being a sentient mammal in a complex world. Make sure to create this space for yourself as an act of self-care and sleep hygiene.
On another note, a bright, sun-lit sky is conducive to foraging, frollicking and farming—not falling asleep. We want to minimize blue light at night because it suppresses the sleep hormone melatonin and signals daytime to our brain. Personally, I can watch calming videos before bed—Eckhart Tolle is more of a sedative than a stimulant!—but I lower the brightness on my screen. I also use free software called f.lux which filters out blue light as the sun shifts in your time zone. Some people don blue light blocking glasses, which work too.
How we use technology is just as important. Fast-moving bits of data flying into our optic nerve won’t help us wind down. Translation: active use of technology, whether that’s emailing our boss or scanning Instagram, sends bursts of stress hormones into our system. It’s not worth it to lay in bed with our phone!
Instead, we woo REM with hospitable conditions. We want to create a dark, quiet, clean and cool sleep cave. Remove stacks of papers, flashing lights and anything that reminds your brain to stay on. Make your bedroom a sanctuary of serenity. This trains our brain that our nest is for rest.
While it may be tempting to crawl into your cave when you desire sleep, wait until you’re actually sleepy. Some signs? Your eyes droop, your mind slows, or you’re yawning like a kitten. We can be tired and wired, but that’s not the time to boogie into bed if you have trouble falling asleep.
You may want to sleep or think you should tuck yourself in. But, if you’re not drowsy, do simple, repetitive, or satisfying activities. Fold your laundry, listen to low-tempo music, stretch into child’s pose, read a poetry book, doodle about your day, draw in a coloring book, work a crossword puzzle, knit a sock, take long exhales, do EFT Tapping or practice somatic tracking.
Remember, your goal isn’t to fall asleep in this moment. It’s to relax and enjoy the quietude of the night as best you can. Once you’re reasonably sleepy, trundle into bed and let yourself be. See how you might sink into your breath or your body being held by the earth.
If you’re tossing and turning or wrapping the blanket into a tangle, try getting out of bed. In CBT-I, they tell you not to lay awake in bed for more than 30 minutes. But such a short window created more anxiety for me. Plus, looking at the clock or keeping track of time activates the stress response. So I learned to feel into what my body and mind needed, rather than to figure it out in my head.
Usually, I felt okay staying in bed as long as I was relaxed. If I started feeling agitated or restless, I’d migrate to my yoga mat or the couch. We don’t want to train our brain that our bed is a den of distress. But I like to be easy about this. Those of us with mind-body symptoms are overly conscientious as it is.
When I did get up in the night, I’d usually resume a soothing activity like restorative yoga. But, if I felt like I could sprint or kick—meaning my nervous system was in flight-fight mode—I’d move my body more vigorously. Strange as it is to do push-ups, sit-ups and lunges in the candlelight, it can discharge stress hormones more quickly than forcing yourself into stillness when your biology is primed to move.
No matter how the night went, let’s fast forward to the morning. This may be the hardest part of sleep hygiene, but doing it for several months helped revive my circadian rhythm (and I don’t have to do this any more). Set your alarm at the same time each morning, and get up as soon as you can. When you’re bleary-eyed and cranky, this may feel grueling! But it can set you up for a better night’s sleep, and over time it can reset your rhythm.
Keep in mind: Morning light starts our 24-hour circadian rhythm and tells our brain when to make the sleepy hormone melatonin later that night. Dim light tells our brain that we’re headed into nighttime. So it’s medicinal to get out in the morning sunlight with our naked eyes. Prescription lenses are okay but no tinted sunglasses!
Neuroscientist Andrew Huberman suggests at least 5 to 10 minutes of morning sunshine on a clear day, and a minimum of 15 to 20 minutes on a cloudy morning. You might journal, jog, sky gaze or nibble on breakfast. It can be quite enjoyable if you dress for the weather. Just try to soak in that sunshine within 30 to 60 minutes of waking.
Other ways to trigger a cascade of wake-up hormones: move your body, take a cool shower or do rigorous breathwork. I like the Wim Hof breath or Breath of Fire. Stimulating activities raise your temperature and tell your body it's time to rise and shine.
By all means, concoct your own morning ritual—one you find enjoyable, meaningful and relatively easy. Depending on my time, I enjoy any or all of these: a morning walk, followed by sun salutations, shoulder stand (which can both lower fatigue and insomnia), breath work and a somatic meditation. My AM routine changes based on my needs, schedule and season. Create your own!
These sleep hygiene suggestions go without saying but I’ll say them just in case:
☕ An afternoon espresso could keep you awake at night! Caffeine has a half life of about six hours. So if you sip a latte at 2 pm, half of the caffeine will still be in your system at 8 pm.
🍷 While a glass of wine may make you sleepy at first, alcohol interferes with the sleep cycle and makes people wake up more often in the night.
🚭 Besides all the downsides of smoking, tobacco makes it harder to fall and stay asleep. Nicotine disrupts circadian rhythms and stimulates neurotransmitters not friendly to shut-eye.
😋 Big meals close to bedtime are not simpatico with sleep. Digesting food takes energy, which can keep you awake, cause restless sleep or trigger indigestion. Enjoy dinner at least three hours before bed.
🛌🏽 A catnap can refresh some people. If that’s you, nap under 30 minutes and before 2 pm. Longer, later naps lower “sleep drive” and make it less likely to get restorative sleep at night when it really counts.
A side note on supplements: I took a gazillion and they simply didn’t work for me. I didn’t even get a placebo effect from this expensive cache of herbal sedatives. Out of desperation, I tried sleeping pills. They never gave me prolonged or restorative sleep, and made me feel like a space cadet. But it’s worth mentioning that bio-identical hormones offered noticeable support when my hormones suddenly plummeted after a sexual assault.
Reflections ✨
What do you think could be disrupting your sleep? What’s one or two constructive changes you could make to your diet, lifestyle or sleep hygiene? How could you support a healthy circadian rhythm? What evening activities relax you?
🌒 Mind Medicine: Picking Positive Sleep Thoughts
People often wax poetically about the importance of eight hours of sleep. When you’re not getting your desired Z’s, such messages can flare more sleep anxiety. I eventually had to tune them out. Sleep what? Blah, blah, blah!
I was hugely relieved to learn about the eight-hour sleep myth. In his book, Say Goodnight to Insomnia, Harvard scientist Gregg Jacobs says that insomnia does not cause significant health issues. Let that soak in for a moment: lack of sleep does not cause physical harm, assuming you don’t have sleep apnea or a physical cause of insomnia.
Scientific evidence shows that we humans have an extraordinary tolerance for sleep loss. Think about resident physicians who work 36-hour shifts! Then there’s firefighters, emergency responders and new moms who perform herculean feats with little sleep.
Like many insomniacs, I was terrified about the deleterious effects of elusive sleep. Busting these often-cited sleep myths eased my mind.
Sure, poor sleep can impact our mood and energy levels. I often felt like I had a hangover the next day, without the fun night out beforehand. Eventually, I realized that my Negative Sleep Thoughts or NSTs—yep, it’s a real term!—were making my daytime mood and exhaustion far worse.
Negative Sleep Thoughts can cause a nocebo, actual physical symptoms created by fear and negative expectations. Studies show that up to 80-percent of people who get a fake medicine in a clinical trial report adverse effects! Why would sugar pills or saline injections cause symptoms like headaches or insomnia? Our brain responds to the data it’s given and creates an expected outcome.
Clearly, we want to use our mind strategically! We can calm our nervous system and create a placebo effect—a beneficial health outcome—with Positive Sleep Thoughts, or PSTs. These aren’t all rainbows and Pollyanna. They’re realistic thoughts that feel supportive in our body and mind in the present moment—rather than futurizing or catastrophizing notions that spike our cortisol.
Indeed, NSTs can be the number one culprit for insomnia, according to Jacobs. How could this be? Doomsday thoughts—or dooms-night thoughts in this case—trigger emotions like anxiety and frustration. This spikes stress hormones, increases heart rate, blood pressure, muscle tension and speeds up brain wave patterns. This is not exactly restful!
It took practice, but I couldn’t believe how much better I felt when I cleaned up my sleep thoughts! Sometimes, I’d fall asleep more quickly. Even if I didn’t, I felt significantly better the next day just from shifting my perspective.
Yet, NSTs are sneaky. Negative thoughts slip by like fallen stars in the dead of night. But with attention and intention, we can rewire our brain to gravitate towards more supportive, sleep-friendly beliefs.
😨 Examples of Negative Sleep Thoughts:
There is going to be another dreadful night.
Oh no, this can’t be happening again!
What did I do wrong?
My brain must be broken.
I’m going to be tanked tomorrow!
I won’t be able to function.
I’m going to have to cancel X, Y and Z.
Recognize any of these? During my 13-plus years of insomnia, I certainly did. It’s only natural. We don’t want to beat ourselves up for our very real suffering. Instead, we want to harness self-compassion, soothe our weary body and shift our menacing mind.
🥰 Examples of Positive Sleep Thoughts:
I’ve survived restless nights before and I’ll get through this one.
My brain will settle down as I do.
I’ll fall asleep eventually.
I’m not going to worry about things I can’t control.
I trust the process and accept this moment as it is.
My sleep will improve with the new techniques I’m learning!
Wakefulness doesn’t cause health problems.
I’m going to relax and do something soothing.
Through what Jacobs calls cognitive restructuring—a fancy way of saying ‘shift your thoughts to ones that feel better’—you can improve your mental and emotional experience in the moment. As your brain settles, it will realize it’s safe to conk out. For me, self-compassion, somatic meditations and supportive thoughts brought palpable relaxation. Over time, that led to serene sleep. This is possible for you too!
Reflections✨
What thoughts do you think when you can’t sleep? How do those make you feel emotionally and physically? What thoughts and beliefs would feel more supportive? What NSTs could you shift to PSTs? What’s one or two strategies you can start implementing now?
Thankfully, I no longer have to do much of this sleep hygiene! Now that I sleep well most of the time, I can lay in bed and read in the evenings. What a luxury! I no longer have to set my alarm clock, unless I have to be up exceptionally early.
However, I still bask in morning light and reduce evening light because it feels good, and it helps me sleep sounder. But these approaches rebooted my REM when I needed them.
It can take curiosity, consistency and compassion but sound sleep is our birthright. The lessons I learned over many years, and now share with you, are healing elixirs. Let my blog, and your self-reflections, coax you slowly but surely into slumber. Wishing you sweet dreams, dear one.😴
Looking for support with your recovery? I walk you through the steps to overcome mind-body symptoms including insomnia in my Be Your Own Medicine course. It offers 30 somatic meditations and a module devoted to sound sleep!🌜
Want to learn more about mind-body healing? Check out these blog posts:
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: My 13-Year Crash to Cure Story
Strong, Fearless and in Love with Life After Long Covid
How Feeling Body Sensations Helps Heal Chronic Pain and Fatigue