My insomnia journey began In April of 2022. I was traveling, visiting friends in Texas.
Side note, I’ve used sleep meds while traveling from time to time, well before the insomnia began and had no issue with it. I had a couple with me just for the first couple nights as that is usually all that is needed. However on this trip, my friend and I were sharing a room, which we had done countless times before traveling together but for whatever reason, on this trip I wasn’t sleeping well. The third night of the trip I didn’t sleep at all, had a completely sleepless night. I don’t remember that ever happening before and I was freaked out about it.
I’ll preface this by also mentioning that I had been through a really stressful life event with my daughter prior to this trip. It is an ongoing stress but things were more stable at the time of my trip. I was able to get a short nap the day after the sleepless night and I rallied and had a good time that day and had fun with my friends. That night I took something my friend had brought, a muscle relaxer, and I did sleep. And I flew home the next day.
Things settled at home and got better. I then had another trip to NYC in May to help my daughter move out of her dorm and into an apartment. The first couple of days were fine (I had my travel sleep meds, but again just brought a couple) then the third night I didn’t sleep at all, again. We were flying home the next day and I was exhausted and getting concerned. We ended up having to stay an extra night as our flight got canceled due to weather and I slept very little that night. When we finally got home I was sure things would get back to normal but they didn’t.
This is the period where I tried everything under the sun. All the sleep hygiene we hear about, all the supplements, teas, tinctures, acupuncture, qi gong, vagal toning exercises, and finally meds. I went to my primary care Dr. first. She prescribed maybe a week’s worth of Ambien. It worked but after it was gone, I was right back where I had been. My sister recommended I see her psychiatrist, so I did. She prescribed more Ambien and Xanax for the sleep anxiety that consistently showed up earlier in the evening and also a SSRI. I used both (ambien and xanax) for about a week and then just the Ambien. And it worked great, until it didn’t. For about 6 months though, I thought I was better. I didn’t love needing Ambien to sleep but I was also willing to take it because I valued sleep over not taking Ambien. Then it stopped working and this is when things got dicey. Around October (I’d been taking it since June) it wasn’t as effective, and often did nothing. So I started taking a xanax if I’d wake up in the middle of the night. Ambien before bed, xanax 4 or 5 hrs later, which usually got me a couple more hours. This wasn’t every night but it was often enough that I felt it was beginning to be a real problem. I was afraid of the meds, and I was afraid of not sleeping. Just before Christmas, things really got bad. I wasn’t sleeping more than a few hours a night even with these drugs and I was pretty sure I was slowly getting addicted to the Xanax. I told my psychiatrist this and she took me off the Ambien and Xanax and prescribed Seroquel for sleep and a low dose valium as a way of weening off the xanax. I had tried Seroquel before and had not found it helpful so I was hesitant to try it again, but I was also desperate and listening to my drs medical instructions. That night (the day before Christmas Eve) I took the Seroquel and had an awful experience as if someone was holding me down, under water, and just my head was exposed, barely able to breathe. I was simultaneously having a panic attack. I willed myself out of bed, and told my husband “I need to go to the ER”. Unfortunately, that experience was awful and while they gave me an injection to help me sleep, I had a bad reaction to it and felt like I was crawling out of my skin, and my throat was filling with fluid and I coughed and coughed. It was horrible. We got home at 4am, slept 2 hours and then at 8am I went to the mental health crisis center. Christmas Eve day. They were incredibly kind and compassionate. They didn’t like me taking 2 benzos but they also did not think I was addicted as the dose was so low and I wasn’t taking enough of either one to be addicted. The Dr. at the clinic put me on mitrazapine and said to take it an hour or so before bed and if I still found I needed xanax or ambien to sleep I could take one OR the other but definitely NOT both. My system was completely freaked out. I really think it was on par with what is more commonly known as a nervous breakdown. My nervous system shut down. I was in a state of freeze for a period of time, and that was really quite a scary place to be. I was just barely surviving. I’d lost 13lbs and was intensely afraid, unstable , and I isolated myself most of the time. This lasted several weeks.
First week in January 2023, my daughter and I had a vacation scheduled to Mexico. It was supposed to be a wonderful thing, but I didn’t know how I was going to go. I decided come hell or high water I was going. And I did and it was good for me. I was not in a great place, very anxious and fragile, but I went and I am really glad I did.
When I got home, I found Martin Reed’s work and I tried his program for a couple weeks but it was making things worse, mainly the sleep restriction. Through him however, I found Daniel Erichsen’s work, he was interviewed on Martin’s podcast. I started watching his Sleep Coach School youtube videos and I was so validated, and knew immediately this is it, this is the missing piece. I joined his Immunity program. The concept of hyperarousal explained everything. And I thought “I’m not crazy, I’m not losing my mind. I am stuck in fight or flight mode and my system is on extreme hyper alert, hyper vigilant mode. It is overriding everything, including my sleep drive.”
I’ve learned the only “cure” for this is time, awareness/education, and an orientation towards safety. The nervous system wants to come back to a parasympathetic response. Given time, safe (enough) conditions and some awareness/education it will do so naturally. This is important to understand because it is not something we can force. Believe me, I tried! There are many tools/ resources out there and while those may be helpful in a preventative way, when we are in the thick of it all, these tools can become weapons in the war we are (unintentionally) waging against ourselves. Because peace of mind and returning to parasympathetic, is really an effortless process. The less we try, the less we force, the less we attempt to control - the easier it becomes. This is a difficult concept for the brain however, because it has evolved to be a problem solving machine. It sees insomnia as a problem (also a threat) that needs to solved and keeps us awake to protect us from this imagined danger. It is here the healing work begins. The work of accepting what we cannot change; and what we cannot control. We cannot control sleep. We cannot control our thoughts, or the emotions and sensations that are generated by them. All we can control is how we respond, react, and show up for all of it. It is difficult inner work to detach from the mind. We have identified with our thoughts probably all of our lives and may truly believe they define us. That they are us. But they are not. Our mind is like a narrator of everything we are experiencing at every moment. There is an ongoing internal dialogue narrating everything-judging it, explaining it, criticizing it, and sometimes maybe even enjoying it.
But the thing is, the mind is generally not a trustworthy narrator. Thoughts are not facts. And the mind has misinformed the brain that nighttime wakefulness is scary. We don’t like it and so the brain does what it has evolved to do as a survival machine and that is to protect us from danger, so the most primitive and instinctual part of our brain (the limbic system) is alerted that we are in danger. Whether that threat is real or imagined, does not matter, this part of the brain does not know the difference. It sounds the alarm and deploys all mechanisms to keep us safe-including hyper awareness, hyper vigilance, hyper arousal, hyper alert, heart palpatations, eyes scanning, body sweats, all feelings intensify- it is essentially all hands on deck. No way we are sleeping with all that going on. The brain also likes patterns so it is always on the look out for one and when it finds one, it becomes a conditioned response. And this is insomnia; a conditioned stress/fear response that replays automatically when we try to sleep. It’s not rocket science, it actually is pretty straight forward. And it is not our fault. Our brilliant brain is doing exactly what it has evolved to do and we just need to now show it, by how we are responding to nighttime wakefulness, that we actually are safe. It was a false alarm. This retraining of the brain takes time, but if I can do it, so can you.
I’ve come to believe healing/recovery is an ongoing process. I’m not sure there is a tangible end goal, as in “I’ve arrived, I’m done, all healed up now.” Recovery/healing is much more nuanced. It is slow and subtle. A feeling of okayness. A knowing, “I’m going to be alright.”
Difficult nights happen for everyone sometimes. It is part of being human. Recovery doesn’t mean the end to that because that is not reality. Recovery means I’m going to be ok, no matter what the night looks like. Recovery means I am going to live my one precious life as best I can, even if I don’t sleep well. Recovery means, I’m not afraid anymore. I have my preferences and, of course, I prefer to sleep well, we all do, we are human and we can’t pretend we don’t care about that. But when we are no longer afraid of experiencing a difficult night, insomnia has no power over us. And it just fades, slowly (very slowly) away.