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Daniel Erichsen

Oct 23
Love0

What should I do when insomnia strikes?

By effortless sleep, insomnia, insomnia treatment

Did you know that this is one of the most common wordings we use when we ask what to do when we have trouble sleeping? 

It’s not difficult to see why, because when we suddenly find ourselves anxiously awake at night, we can feel as if we have been struck. 

Now the answer to what to do in this situation, paradoxically, lies in taking a close look at the very question we are posing. 

When we use the word strike, we are implying that something has hit us. Someone or something has landed a blow that kept us awake rather than knocked us out. 

And naturally, when we feel attacked, we want to defend ourselves. We want to strike back. 

But before we do something drastic, it truly helps to look at where exactly the first blow came from?

The first blow

Here’s the thing, when our brain senses that we are in some form of danger, it activates our safety system, our fight and flight system. As part of this system being activated, we become more perceptive, more vigilant and more awake. 

This of course is really helpful when we are facing a real danger like having to drive when it’s snowing. But sometimes this system can be confused. 

Insomnia is a struggle we experience when we have become afraid of not sleeping, which is another way of saying we are afraid of being vigilant. 

And remember, that vigilance was part of our safety system. Insomnia happens when we are literally afraid of our body’s own safety system. 

The first blow does not come from an opponent or adversary that means to hurt us. Rather, we are struck by alertness and anxiety, both part of how our brain keeps us safe. 

If we attempt to strike back, all we will do is reinforce the idea that we are in danger, the very idea that created insomnia in the first place. 

On the other hand, when we make no attempt to fight, to escape or to strike at anything, then we are reinforcing the truth: there’s been a misunderstanding, nothing else. 

The last blow

As counterintuitive as it may sound, it’s when we make no attempts to fight back that our brain understands that there’s nothing out there to get us. 

We are safe. 

When this has been seen, there are no more blows or strikes. Only peace of mind and peaceful sleep.

Oct 16
Love0

What deficiency causes insomnia?

By insomnia treatment, sleep science

Have you wondered what vitamin or neurotransmitter or hormone deficiency can cause insomnia? 

If you said yes, you may be surprised to finally find the answer that is so hard to come by:

The one deficiency that can cause insomnia is being deficient in education. 

If that came as a surprise and doesn’t make much sense right away, no sweat! It will be made very clear in a second. 

What we need to understand before anything else is that insomnia isn’t a bodily state of insufficiency. It is not something that happens when our body is lacking a chemical substance. 

Insomnia is a way we experience the mind state of anxiousness. 

It’s true of course that for example hormonal changes during menopause can make us have choppy sleep because we wake up with hot flashes, but that’s not insomnia. That’s sleep disruption. 

The self perpetuating and ongoing struggle that we call insomnia happens when our brain starts to treat wakefulness, aka not sleeping, as a threat, releasing adrenaline and cortisol as the night falls and it thinks we may face what we have feared: being awake. 

It is a case of a misunderstanding, a lack of education. 

And how can we remedy a deficiency in education? 

Yes, that’s right, by learning.

Case in point: simply by learning that you don’t need to supplement your diet and that there’s nothing wrong with you, you feel some relief. Simply by seeing that being awake isn’t a threat but an expected consequence of being frazzled (we all are more alert when we’ve been frightened), your stress hormones will come down.

You’ll find that without any effort or struggle, sleep will start to happen by itself again. 

All thanks to your willingness to address the one deficiency that can cause insomnia.

Oct 12
Love0

Can insomnia be cured?

By effortless sleep, insomnia

If you’ve asked yourself whether insomnia can be cured, you’ve probably been quite worried. Before we even answer the question, a virtual hug is in order. 

Everything will be fine.

Regardless of how long you’ve struggled, how intense the troubles have been or any other circumstances, every human can have peaceful sleep. 

We will see how in a second, but to answer the question of whether insomnia can be cured, the short answer is no. Because here lies the rub: insomnia is not a disorder or a disease. 

Insomnia is a misunderstanding.

Insomnia is a learned mindset where one restless night at some point made us anxious, and made us try to prevent it from happening again. 

And this is the thing, sleep is a passive process. It happens all by itself when we aren’t trying to make it happen. 

By trying to prevent a second restless night, the passivity, the effortlessness goes away and we have a second restless night. 

We try more and more things to sleep, inadvertently teaching ourselves that this is how one should respond. With time, our new normal becomes one of rituals, supplements, avoidance, medication and ongoing sleep struggles.

Months or years of struggle can come from our attempts at preventing that first night when we didn’t sleep well. 

But we are not ill. 

There’s no condition or illness or malady to cure. There’s simply been a misunderstanding.

Knowing this, it’s easy to see that the way we return to sleeping well is through education. 

You could say that education is the cure, but then again the “disorder” would be confusion, nothing else. 

And fortunately, you’ve come to a place full of education about sleep and insomnia. 

Education which will not only lead to you no longer asking whether insomnia can be cured, but to that place we all want to be in: peaceful sleep and peace of mind.

May 20
Love0

Become a sleep detective

By cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, effortless sleep, insomnia, insomnia treatment

Have you ever dreamed of becoming a private investigator? Someone looking to uncover clues and find evidence revealing that indeed, it was the butler! If so, know that when you struggle with sleep, the type of work that you dreamed of can serve you really well. 

 

When you experience insomnia, you know that this is not a struggle that is isolated to the night. It is a 24 hour problem because how you feel during the day is always completely dependent on how many hours and minutes you slept the preceding night. 

 

Or is it?

 

Time for detective work! And remember, the most valuable clues may be the most difficult to find. Before you start, ponder for a minute what you are looking for and how this work will help you. 

 

Consider first if you would sleep better if you were very pressured to sleep, let’s say someone had offered you a big sum of money if you could sleep for 7 hours starting now (!), or if there was no such pressure.



You would probably agree that the more imperative it becomes to sleep, the more elusive those zzz’s become. In fact, studies have shown that when incentivized with money, we sleep less.



Now there are other things than money that can be used for pressure or incentive, like work performance. Or mental clarity. And how about just overall wellness?



Imagine the pressure to sleep that comes from thinking every aspect of your day depends on you getting the maximal amount of shuteye. It can become pretty intense!

 

This is why your detective work is so important.

You are looking for pieces of evidence that contradicts the thought that your days are entirely dependent on your night.


That time you slept very little and you still did well on your exam, hold on to it. That time you slept fine but still felt groggy all day, take that down in your notepad. 

 

When you look at all the clues you have unearthed, a new picture emerges. Yes, when you sleep better, you do feel better in general, but sleep is not all that matters!


And now you can take your investigative work a step further.


Look for what else makes you have a good day. What are things you have more control over than sleep that makes you feel energized and happy?

 

The sum of all your hard work becomes exactly what you need, less pressure.


When you know that sleep is far from the only thing that determines how well you feel or perform the next day, you have less of an incentive to sleep. When there’s less incentive, there is less pressure and when there’s less pressure – refreshing and peaceful sleep will soon happen. 

 

May 12
Love0

3 reasons why you get your best sleep when the sun rises

By cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, healthy sleep, insomnia treatment

Do you toss and turn all night only to finally fall asleep at the most inconvenient time: when the birds start chirping and the sun rises? If so, know that you are not alone. This phenomenon is called surrender sleep. Let’s take a look at why it happens and how you get to a place where sleep happens much earlier and without struggle.

To understand surrender sleep, we need to quickly review how sleep is regulated. There’s a gas pedal in our sleep system called sleep drive. Sleep drive is how much our body needs to sleep at any given time and increases with wakefulness. The longer you’ve been awake, the stronger your sleep drive. But we also have a brake pedal in the sleep system called hyperarousal. This is a heightened state of alertness from anxiety or excitement or frustration (or any other strong emotion). The brake pedal is there to make sure we don’t sleep when it’s unsafe to do so. Finally we have the circadian drive. This is a counterweight to sleep drive. Starting in the morning, the body produces alerting hormones that keep us functioning even as our sleep drive increases. This is why you can function well even at 10 pm after many hours of wakefulness.

So, why is it that you sleep the best at 5 am? Here are our three reasons.

1. Sleep drive is stronger. You’ve been awake for a longer period of time at 5 am compared to 11 pm. A stronger sleep drive means the likelihood of you falling asleep is higher.

2. Circadian alerting signals are absent at 5 am. At this time, the body sees no reason to keep you alert and functioning and therefore produces little alerting hormones.

Before we go over number three, know that this is the big one. Here’s the thing, insomnia is driven by anxiety and your behavior of chasing sleep, trying to get more by any means. And even with a strong sleep drive, like at 5 am, sleep doesn’t happen if you’re trying really hard to get sleep. Similarly, if that brake in the sleep system is pressed down, it doesn’t matter if circadian alerting signals are absent, sleep still won’t happen.

So what’s number three then? Here it comes!

3. You’ve given up on sleep. When you went to bed at 11 pm, you were aiming for 8 hours. At 1 am you start to feel desperate, but if you manage to sleep no you’ll still get 6 hours. At 4 am, you’re praying for at least a wink. All this trying, all this struggling and all this effort makes it impossible for sleep to happen. Finally at 5 am you give up. You no longer care if you sleep or not. And the moment you do, the foot is off the brake pedal. You are no longer trying to achieve sleep, your efforts have evaporated, and sleep comes to you easily.

As you may have guessed, we say surrender sleep because those zzzs come to you when you’re no longer trying to get them, when you have surrendered.

Here’s the thing, you don’t have to wait until 5 am to surrender! You can go to bed in the evening without any goal or intention, you can give up right from the start.

When you do, that sound of chirping birds and the sight of the rising sun will signal something very different to you. Not that it’s the time you finally sleep, but that it’s time to wake up and start your day.

Are you ready to learn more about sleep and insomnia? Try out BedTyme, FREE for the first 7 days. If you’re an iPhone user, click here. Got Android? Don’t worry, we got you, click here instead.

Are you ready to learn more about sleep and insomnia? Check out Daniel’s YouTube Channel.

Aug 13
Love0

I love you, bed

By Uncategorized

Have you gotten to a place where your bed triggers anxiety? Does just thinking about your bed cause some palpitations and dizziness?

If so, it is time for change. 

Firstly, know that you’re not alone. As isolating and lonely as it may feel, there are countless others who feel like you do. More importantly, there are also countless others who don’t anymore. And just like them, you can rekindle the love between yourself and what used to be your favorite place for rest and rejuvenation. 

Let’s start at the beginning. For some reason, whatever it was, it isn’t actually important, you started having trouble sleeping. Perhaps that alone turned your bed into a battlefield and trigger for anxiety or perhaps you were served some unhelpful advice – only use the bed for sleep and sex. 

That advice came from a good place, no judgment. The thinking was that as you’ve started to associate the bed with stress, you need to change that and re-associate it with sleep. Pavlov’s dogs. Get it. The problem is, we humans are a bit more complex than canines. Most of us anyway. 

When you are told you should not be awake in your bed, that you should get out of it lest it becomes even more anxiety triggering.

The pressure to sleep fast increases which is the exact opposite of what you need. You need as little pressure as possible for sleep to happen. 

So how can you get back to a place where you were longing to snuggle under those comfy blankets? Do exactly what you’re told not to – do things you enjoy in bed!

If you feel like watching TV, perfect! A Netflix show, great! Wanna read a book or play with your phone, go ahead!

Make the bed a place where you can do anything that brings you joy. 

If the thought of doing this at night makes you feel butterflies in your stomach, you can start during the day. Spend some time in the morning or afternoon chilling and relaxing in your bed and learn that it can be a very desirable place to hang out.

Keep one thing in mind however, you can’t force any associations. Just as you can’t force an association between sleep and your bed, you can’t force yourself to enjoy time spent there. It has to feel right.

Also, the intent with spending time in bed is not to make yourself sleep more, it is just to teach yourself that the bed does not have to be a trigger for wakefulness. And strange as it sounds, spending time awake in bed doing things that bring you pleasure does just that. It teaches your brain that it’s not bad to hang out in bed and when that happens, it doesn’t get triggered by the mere thought of your bed. 

Because your flirting has taken you a big step towards where you want to be, in love again.

Aug 10
Love0

How to turn a speed bump into amazing sleep

By Uncategorized

When you start your journey towards sleeping well, you will hit a speed bump. In fact you’ll most likely hit quite a few of them. It may seem little ones, far and few between, is the ideal way to reach your destination of peaceful slumber for the rest of your life. Nothing wrong with cruising there for sure. But, strange as it may seem, it is the bumpy road that takes you there the fastest and with most confidence. 

A speed bump is what most refer to as a setback.

It is a night of sleeping little after several good ones. Or it is that stretch of sleepless nights after a few weeks of not struggling. To understand the benefits of the bumpy road, let’s start talking about the purpose of the journey. 

Insomnia happens when you are trying to produce or control something that only happens when there’s no effort. The longer you’ve had trouble sleeping, the more things you have come to think are necessary for you to sleep. Your goal is to learn that sleep comes to you when you’re not trying, and that’s where speed bumps come in. 

When things are going well, you’re sleeping well and you’re not feeling a need to do anything to make yourself sleep, you’re cruising.

You are building sleep confidence in a slow but steady pace. That’s great! If that is your path, good for you.

However, it is when you hit a speed bump you can truly make a leap forward and learn the most important of all sleep lessons. If you have a night or a stretch of nights where you sleep little, and go on to not respond, not change anything, resist the urge to DO SOMETHING, then when sleep returns, magic has happened.

You have seen that without trying, you sleep well even after some very bumpy nights. You have gotten a lesson in the art of letting go that you will never forget.

You may totally get it after the first speed bump. Or you may need a few more for this insight to sink in. But when it has, you’ll be cruising too. 

The speed bumps will be smaller and less frequent. Not because you’re avoiding them but precisely the opposite – you’re willing to have speed bumps and you know you’ll get to the other side fine.

It’s not easy but try to look at a speed bump coming your way as an opportunity. Because when you do, magic will happen. 

Aug 05
Love0

Why you’re hitting the sleep safety stop

By cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, healthy sleep, insomnia

Based on all you’ve heard about sleep, how you should have the temperature in your room set at a very specific number, how you should avoid certain spices and have more of others, how the amount of blue wavelength needs to be regulated at night, it may seem as though sleep is complicated. Factor in your own experiences where some things seem to have worked and others not, and that thought seems to have been confirmed. 

If you’ve felt this way, you’re in good company. For pretty much everyone with trouble sleeping, sleep seems complicated. And that, thinking of sleep as complicated and complex can make you feel things are hopeless and become a real speed bump on your path towards sleeping better. 

So here’s something important to know – sleep isn’t complicated.

When you start learning what makes your body sleep or stay awake, you’ll see that things aren’t at all as confusing as they may have seemed. And that will truly help you to get those zzzs you’ve been missing out on. So let’s get started!

The gas and the brake

There are only two factors that determine how well you sleep: your gas pedal and your brake pedal. That’s it, the gas and the brake. Depending on which of them is pushed down you either sleep or stay awake. 

The gas pedal is another way of describing sleepiness. The sleepier you are, the more gas you have. And the only thing that can make you sleepy is…

…wakefulness! In a yin-yang type of way, wakefulness is the one and only thing that can make you sleep, and without sleep there can be no wakefulness.

Most who have trouble sleeping have enough gas. Insomnia rarely is a gas problem. But it can be. 

If you for example sleep in after nights of little sleep, take naps or tend to fall asleep on the couch in the evening. You have a gas problem. You don’t have enough for sleep to happen at night. But for most with trouble sleeping, it is the braking that is the issue. This said, you have a brake pedal for a very important reason. 

There are times when you are not supposed to sleep even if you’re sleepy. And these are the times your brake pedal saves you. In fact, it could literally save your life. 

Imagine if the smoke detector went off at night and you had no brake pedal. Or imagine if you were about to go to sleep only to realize that you forgot you were supposed to pick up your friend at the airport. 

The gas pedal is there to make sure we don’t sleep when it is not an appropriate time to be unconscious. It’s a super important part of our sleep system. The only problem – sometimes we hit the brake because of a misunderstanding. 

Sometimes our brain has gotten the idea that being sleepless is a threat and ironically, it hits the brake pedal to save us from sleeplessness and produces a whole bunch more of it in the process!

Education is key in getting past insomnia.

So how do you teach your brain that it doesn’t need to push the brake pedal at night? The answer is just as simple as the sleep system itself – education.

When you understand for example this gas and brake model, you spend less time trying to figure out if cumin or glutamine is what’s keeping you awake. And the less mystery, the more you understand sleep, the less worried you become – the more you’ll ease up on the brake pedal.  

When you’ve understood completely why you had trouble sleeping and you’re not the least anxious, well then you’ve done it. Then you’ll never again press that brake pedal because of a misunderstanding. Rather, it will be all gas, no brake and amazing sleep for the rest of your life!

 

Jul 31
Love0

Make wakefulness your friend

By effortless sleep, insomnia, insomnia treatment

There are many ways to think of insomnia that help you understand what’s really going on. You can think of it as trying to control something (sleep) that like a bar of soap gets more and more slippery the harder you try to hold on. You can think of it as a problem that is made worse by problem solving. Or, you can think of it as a series of botched jailbreaks, where every time you tried busting out, you ended up where you started. 

This last way of looking at insomnia, as an attempt to escape, is very helpful because it teaches you in a very practical way how to get back to sleeping well. But to do that, you have to understand what it is you are trying to run away from. 

Insomnia is defined as “habitual sleeplessness”. In other words, sleep isn’t happening and this has been going on for a while. And it is this, sleeplessness that you are trying to escape. 

When you make sure you’re avoiding spicy food at night – you’re trying to get away from sleeplessness. When you turn your electronics off early in the evening – you’re attempting to dodge a sleepless night. The thing you’re running from is sleeplessness.

Now this is all very understandable, we all want to have less of something we don’t like. The problem though is that there has been a bit of a misunderstanding. A bit of a mix-up in that ancient alarm system we call the amygdala.

The amygdala is there to keep us safe from tangible physical threats, and a great way to do that is to run and hide. It’s very important to have a functioning amygdala when we are about to cross a railroad track or the fire alarm goes off. Because you really can escape being hit by a train or hurt by fire. But when sleeplessness pops up on the amygdala radar, things get prickly.

As you can’t actually run away from sleeplessness, it appears as if sleeplessness is a really big problem and the amygdala tries even more to run away. Making the problem seem even larger. And suddenly you have “habitual sleeplessness”.

Now, having explained how insomnia happens, here’s the insight that will help you get past it without effort: Sleeplessness is just another word for being awake. 

Think about it for a minute. Being sleepless really just means not sleeping which is the same thing as being awake. In other words, here’s the big one: What you are trying to do is escaping wakefulness!

All this time, everything you’ve done is to try to avoid, resist and run away from being awake. And ironically, by trying to be awake, that’s exactly what has happened. You’ve been “habitually awake” if you will.

So, what to do? Make wakefulness your friend. 

It may sound like too simple of a fix to a problem that has had you all up in arms, but it really isn’t much more to it. Teach your amygdala that being awake is not a threat or a problem and surprising as this may sound, beautiful sleep will start coming your way. 

Now you may wonder, how do I make wakefulness a friend? Same way you treat any other one, show them a good time!

When it is bedtime or even in the middle of the night, do something you enjoy. Read a great book, binge on that Hulu show, play some banjo or write a novel.

Wait a minute, you may say, isn’t that going to make me wake up even more? If that thought popped into your head, you’re in good company! Almost everyone that has had trouble sleeping reacts with some variation of this question. But if you think about it, you already know the answer.

It is your trying to escape wakefulness, the mix-up in your amygdala where being awake was being identified as a problem, that got you into a fix the first time. So even if yes, you may be more awake for a night or two, you’ve started to make wakefulness your friend. 

And when a foe becomes a friend, when you truly look forward to being awake, even at an inconvenient time, you will sleep better than you ever imagined possible. 

 

Jul 23
Love0

Where did my sleepiness go?!?

By cognitive behavioral therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, healthy sleep, insomnia

Have you ever wondered how something that was right there, something that felt so tangible and strong, could simply vanish into thin air?

You were literally forcing yourself to stay awake just another hour, head bobbing, eyelids heavy but the second you decided to turn the lights off, your sleepiness went poof. 

This is one of the most common phenomena that seem weird when you have trouble sleeping.

In reality, there’s no mystery as to what happens.

Let’s start with another example of when a feeling disappears very suddenly.

Imagine that you’re out camping with your friends. It’s been a long day and you feel tired. You’re just hanging out around the campfire waiting to have one more hot dog before calling it a day. Suddenly, a Grizzly bear charges hops out from behind a tree and charges at you. At that very moment, your fatigue is no more. It has vanished.

The reason you don’t find this the least surprising is that you expect the experience of a charging Grizzly bear to have a very alerting effect on you. Going to bed, well that’s an entirely different matter. Isn’t it?

Not really it turns out. 

Our brains have one core mission – to keep us safe and alive. Identifying threats is one way it does just that. And when a threat is identified, it deploys a fight or flight response to make sure nothing happens to us. The only problem is that it can get confused.

When it comes to insomnia, the misunderstanding that has occurred is that sleeplessness has been incorrectly tagged as a threat. Something that can harm you and should be avoided. And the brain treats all threats with the same approach: the fight or flight response. 

When you’ve had trouble sleeping, the mere act of going to bed, turning the lights off or even thinking about sleep makes the brain go into the mode of self preservation. It’s gearing up for an anticipated struggle and that, that’s the reason why your sleepiness disappears the moment you want to sleep. 

This is an important illustration of the most basic truth when it comes to sleep – the more you want it the less you get. When you want to stay awake on the other hand, in the evening some hours before bedtime, sleep comes easy. 

So what to do?

Education is the key.

When you understand how sleep works the mystery starts to unravel. When you see that sleeplessness is a perceived threat that cannot actually harm you, you stop worrying. When you have no doubts whatsoever, when it’s completely clear to you why you’ve had trouble sleeping, sleep will come your way. 

And a great start is understanding why sleepiness seems to vanish at night!