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!
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!
Out of all the questions about sleep, perhaps the single most common one is this – What should I do when I wake up at night? And this is no surprise. You could argue that insomnia at its core is about being awake when you should be asleep. And you typically want to be asleep a night.
So what are these three things you should do when this ain’t happening? Before we go there, we need to spend a few moments on sleep physiology to make sure the answer makes sense.
Think about that person you know who sleeps fantastic. Your friend/spouse/family member who’s asleep before their head hits the pillow. The one you’re envious of. Imagine asking them what they do to sleep so well. Most likely they’d simply reply with a shrug and a confused look. And that response is super important.
Sleep is a passive process. Sleep only happens when there’s no effort. The more you try/want/hope to sleep, the less you get.
That covered, let’s get to it!
1. Accept reality
When you wake up and become aware of being awake at night, yet again, your instinct is naturally to do something to make yourself fall back asleep. Perhaps listen to a soothing podcast, close your eyes and still your mind or count down from 100 in steps of 7.
This may seem like a sensible thing to do. Your brain is awake and active, and you want it to become relaxed and sleep. The only problem with this approach is that you’re trying to make yourself sleep. And the more you try, the more awake you become.
The first thing to do when you are awake at night is in fact a what not to do. And a very important one too – do not do anything that you hope will make you fall asleep.
This includes obvious ones like closing your eyes hard and trying to force your brain to shut down but also more camouflaged attempts like reading a boring book. You can’t fool your brain. If you’re picking up the most boring book you know, you’re trying to make yourself fall asleep.
2. Take an inner journey
If you’re awake in bed, but feel comfortable under those warm blankets and don’t want to be anywhere else, then go somewhere nice using your imagination.
Think of a pleasant memory or a tropical beach or anything else that makes you feel good.
If this comes easy to you, then just stay in bed and enjoy the imagery you’re creating. If your thoughts easily drift off, so will you soon enough.
3. Do something fun!
If taking that inner journey isn’t actually taking you anywhere, if you keep thinking of how you’re awake when you should be asleep, then you have to do something else to redirect your thoughts. What is most important when you decide what to do is this – you have to do something enjoyable!
Read a page turner. Listen to a podcast you’ve been dying to catch up on. See what happens in the next episode of that Netflix show.
You think that this would wake you up even more. But it will do the opposite. Because when you’re not afraid of waking up, your brain stops treating awakenings as something to get excited about.
In fact, when you get to a point where you genuinely look forward to waking up – you no longer do!
There you have it. This is your playbook. Now you no longer have to wonder what to do when you’re awake at night, which is in itself super important. Because the deliberation and ponder of whether to do this or that in itself produces so much anxiety and insomnia.
So go ahead and pick that activity you’ll get to enjoy when you’re awake. Customize your playbook. Start using it today and sleep better in no time!
Most with trouble sleeping feel that their situation is different, often strange and even bizarre. And it’s not hard to see why this is the case. We shall explore this in a second because it is very important. Believing that your insomnia is unique takes to down a path of looking for a unique underlying reason and treatment. A journey that only leads to more confusion and frustration. Believing that your insomnia is ordinary on the other hand, leads you to see how the approach described here, that works for so many others, will also work for you.
Let’s start at the very beginning – someone going through a series of sleepless nights. From the inside perspective, not sleeping for a stretch of time can seem very strange. Sleeping being something very natural, like eating or thinking, it can seem bizarre that it just isn’t happening.
But as mentioned, this is just the beginning.
Next, having become a bit worried and perplexed, one may want to try to do something about the fact that sleep isn’t happening. Surely taking some melatonin and keeping the bedroom dark should take care of it.
When nothing changes, perplexed becomes confused. When even more efforts make no difference. Confused becomes clueless. And the insomnia at this point starts seeming strange and unique. One may conclude that it is in fact an unusual form because it didn’t respond to anything or because of other circumstances including:
- You have not trouble falling asleep, just staying asleep
- You don’t feel sleepy during the day
- Your insomnia started after menopause
- You have not trouble staying asleep, just falling asleep
- Everyone in your family has it
- You’ve had trouble sleeping all your life
Here’s the thing, we are all unique human beings. Our experiences are unique and many circumstances surrounding our troubles sleeping are unique – but the insomnia isn’t.
Either there’s too little gas or too much braking going on. You’re not sleepy enough and hyperarousal is keeping you from sleeping.
That’s it.
Although it may not seem like it, nothing else matters when it comes to insomnia. Not the coffee, not light exposure, not the neighbor’s cat. Sure, many things can cause some disturbed sleep, but staying up for hours struggling – that’s different. That’s a gas and/or brake problem.
There are many reasons why you may feel that your trouble sleeping is different, strange and unique. It’s not. Neither is the belief that it is different, strange or unique. It is a very common and ordinary belief.
This is not to belittle what you’re going through. Saying that the insomnia is not unique is not saying that it hasn’t had a big impact on your life. But the belief that you have a different kind of insomnia can keep you in a sleepless loop.
You are a unique and special person, but know that your insomnia is ordinary, everyday, uninteresting, regular insomnia. This can make you see how you, just like anyone else with regular insomnia, can go on see progress using the insights and habit changes here.
And that is the path to a place of sleeping well indefinitely.
When we have a problem – we want to solve it. Nothing surprising about that. A strategy that almost always is the right one.
Got a leaky faucet – call the plumber. Annoying headache – take some ibuprofen. Can’t find the car keys – figure out where you most likely put them and look there.
For most problems, the solution likes in taking action and/or figuring out what caused it so that can be addressed.
With insomnia, things are different. It is the process of trying to fix the problem that maintains the problem. To solve it, you have to use a strategy that may go against all your emotions and instincts…
….go whale watching.
When you do something enjoyable like taking in the spectacle of huge water living mammals migrating up the coast, you step away from trying to sleep, wanting to sleep and trying to figure out why you’re not sleeping.
Behavioral activation is the technical term for doing stuff you enjoy. If not whale watching then perhaps baking, synchronized diving or yoga. It really doesn’t matter as long as your attention shifts away from sleep.
Attention is oxygen for insomnia. It cannot survive without us thinking about it, trying to do things to sleep and studying our sleeplessness.
Get that behavioral activation going, leave the insomnia without oxygen, and sleep better forever!
One of the most common questions I get from people is what to do after having started to use the “sleep tight” technique or bedtime restriction and still not getting more ZZZs – what do I do now?
This could be someone that did better initially but then had a night of sleeping almost nothing. It can be someone that has limited time in bed for 3 weeks and hasn’t noticed any changes. Or someone that feels they’ve hit a plateau after some improvement.
Here’s the thing – people with trouble sleeping want to solve that problem. But the attempts at trying to solve it ends up being what keeps sleeplessness going. The instinct when nothing is happening or you’ve had a setback is to tweak things , change direction or try something different. But the best thing do to is the opposite – stay the path.
A really good way to think about this is to imagine yourself hiking up to a mountain top. At the summit is a place of really good sleep.
As you are making your way up, you are very likely to stumble on a root or a rock. That’s expected. If you stop and examine the root that made you trip, if you wonder why it happened, why it is sitting there and how you can avoid this happening again, you’ll never reach the top.
Not reacting, just keep moving forward is the best thing to do.
The less you react when you have a setback or when it feels like progress is slow, the sooner you’ll reach that place of amazing sleep.
Did you know that ash trays are associated with COPD? If not, do know that there is a strong link between the two. There is even a dose-response relationships: the more ash trays someone has, the more likely they are to have COPD.
Does this mean that ash trays cause COPD? That has never been proven. In fact it is believed that it is smoking cigarettes that is the culprit and not those ash trays.
Now what does this have to do with sleep? Quite a bit it turns out.
Sleep is like the ash trays in this example. Many health issues have been associated with sleep duration, but a causal relationship has never been found. And here’s whats really important to know – it is impossible to prove that how much you sleep causes health problems and long sleep is much more strongly linked to mortality than short sleep.
Let’s look at feasibility of proving that short sleep causes Alzheimer’s disease. To prove that one thing causes another you will need a randomized study with two imposed conditions. You would need thousands of people and make half of them sleep deprived and make sure the other half slept a lot. After decades of maintaining both groups short and long sleepers respectively you could look at whether Alzheimer’s happened more in the sleep deprived or non sleep deprived group.
Needless to say – a study like this will never happen. Therefore it is not possible to prove that short sleep causes any disease or health issue.
Looking at the existing link between all cause mortality (dying early for any reason) and sleep duration you find the following – having an estimated sleep duration of more than 7 hours and less than 6 hours are linked to an increased risk. Someone who feels they sleep 8 hours has an equally increased risk as someone estimating 5 hours of sleep.
If the belief is that there is a causal relationship between sleep duration, well then we should be warned not to sleep more than 7 hours. Conveniently for an industry that wants to sell products to make you sleep more, the link between long sleep and premature death is consistently overlooked.
So why is there a link between short and long sleep and premature death?
Probably because health issues can affect how much you estimate sleeping in both directions. Having arthritis and pain can disrupt your sleep and lower your estimated sleep time. Heart failure can make you tired, spend more time in bed and increase the amount of time you feel that you sleep.
Knowing that short sleep has not been shown to cause any health issues can be really reassuring to someone with insomnia.
Because as you know, worrying less is the first step towards sleeping amazing!
