You don’t have a problem with sleep. You have a problem with wakefulness at night.

That distinction is one of the reasons people recover from chronic insomnia.

“But Rusne, I really can’t sleep. That’s the biggest problem for me”, is what most of my clients tell me. And they're not wrong. But they’re describing the struggle, not what’s keeping it going. What's often keeping insomnia alive isn't the lack of sleep itself. It's what happens when you're awake at night.

Hear me out.

First - let’s agree on one thing. You can’t control sleep. No human can. No more than you can control other automatic bodily functions, such as your heartbeat, digestion or sweating. You can't make your stomach digest food faster because you'd like it to. You can't stop feeling hungry just because it's inconvenient.

Sleep works in a similar way. Sleep happens when your body decides that the conditions are right. One of the biggest obstacles to sleep is creating a tsunami of stress at night.

By design, stress exists to keep us awake long enough to deal with whatever threat is in front of us (or inside our heads). So when we start feeling angsty and scared because sleep isn’t happening, stress kicks in. 

Your brain doesn't know you're worrying about sleep. It only knows you're worried. And worried brains don't switch off.

Negative thoughts about being awake at night trigger strong emotions. Stress hormones are released into your bloodstream, and you stay awake even longer. So when some people find themselves ‘crashing’ at dawn after tossing and turning for most of the night, often it isn't simply because they've become tired enough. It’s more likely because your mind started wandering, drifting away from the thoughts that were keeping you stressed. This allows the stress response to settle. And that’s when sleep finally has a chance to happen.

Don’t feel bad for fighting your insomnia. As adults, we were taught time and time again, that when there’s a problem, we worry about it, try all the things under the sun, and eventually we'll solve it. The issue with that logic is that it only works for things we can control. The things that happen automatically respond very little to our active efforts, wishes and prayers. In fact, that often makes the problem harder to solve.

So recovery from chronic insomnia

isn't about learning how to force sleep. It's much more about learning how to stop treating wakefulness like an emergency. Ironically, that's when sleep finally has room to appear.