How Bryan recovered from insomnia by putting less effort into sleep and more effort into living his life (#61)

Insomnia Coach® Podcast

Listen to the podcast episode (audio only)

When Bryan got sick he experienced an entire night of no sleep for the first time in his life. He didn’t sleep the next night, either. When his sleep didn’t get back on track, Bryan started to believe that he had lost the ability to sleep and that belief generated a lot of anxiety.

As sleep consumed more and more of his energy and attention, Bryan started to withdraw from life. His relationships suffered as sleep became the center of his universe.

Bryan found that the more he tried to make sleep happen, the more difficult sleep became, the more anxiety he experienced, the more likely he was to engage in actions that didn’t reflect who he was or who he wanted to be, and the more difficult everything became.

And yet, as a driven problem-solver, he continued to try.

Things began to change for Bryan when he accidentally fell asleep. When he fell asleep even though he didn’t do anything to make sleep happen. There was no trying. No effort. No rules. No rituals. No medication. No supplements.

Bryan realized that he hadn’t lost the ability to sleep after all — and that he didn’t need to do anything to make sleep happen.

This insight didn’t get rid of Bryan’s struggles overnight but it prompted him to change his approach.

He started acting in ways that served him and the life he wanted to live, rather than sleep. When difficult nights showed up, he would remind himself of the better nights (and how they required no effort or intervention). Then, he would refocus his attention on what he could control by doing things that mattered to him — actions that kept him moving toward the life he wanted to live, independently of sleep.

With this approach, sleep started to lose the power and influence it once had over his life. In Bryan’s own words, as he started getting his life back to normal, his sleep started getting back to normal, too.

Click here for a full transcript of this episode.

Transcript

Martin: Welcome to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. My name is Martin Reed. I believe that by changing how we respond to insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it, we can move away from struggling with insomnia and toward living the life we want to live.

Martin: The content of this podcast is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. The statements and opinions expressed by guests are their own and are not necessarily endorsed by Insomnia Coach LLC. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied.

Martin: Okay, Brian, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to come on to the podcast.

Bryan: Yeah, thank you.

Martin: Let’s start right at the beginning. Can you tell us a little bit more about when your sleep problems first began and what you think caused those initial issues with sleep?

Bryan: I pinpointed back to a time where I got sick and I got sick and that evening my body broke out in hives.

Bryan: And I ended up taking myself to the urgent care and they gave me a steroid. They gave me a steroid plus some other medication to to curtail the hives and the breakout. And I don’t know if it was an allergic reaction that I had to the medication, the steroid injection or the medication that gave me, I’m not sure.

Bryan: But that night. My, my hives persisted and I didn’t sleep at all. So it was, I went my first time in my life going an entire night without sleep. And that was the beginning of this era of me not sleeping for a couple years. And so that, so I thought, okay, fine. I didn’t sleep that one night.

Bryan: Nothing will happen the next night. We’ll be fine. It happened again the next night I didn’t sleep. And so I continued to have these. What I thought was the inability to sleep persisted and so for a couple of weeks and after that I went to the doctor. He gave me some antihistamines to make me drowsy but they didn’t work either.

Bryan: And then time goes on, then they end up putting me on actual sleep medications like Lunesta, Ambien, things of that sort.

Martin: So it sounds as though you can like really pinpoint an original trigger for that sleep disruption.

Bryan: Yeah, the original

Bryan: trigger was that one night of not, but as I think I mentioned to you in our previous email conversation was that it began it began a season of sleep anxiety where I thought I really lost the ability to sleep and so that was the, that was the beginning point and not exactly sure what the exact reason was, but it persisted for about two years.

Bryan: And it made my life miserable.

Martin: So I think many of us can recognize that sometimes stuff shows up in life that can disrupt our sleep just as you mentioned, and typically we just attribute that sleep disruption to whatever’s going on tend not to think too much of it and then takes care of itself once that trigger disappears or is no longer as relevant.

Martin: When did that. Maybe that understanding or relationship change for you where it went from, okay, sleep is being disrupted because of what’s going on to, Oh, now it’s like sleep is the issue itself. What’s going on here? There’s something going on with my sleep. Sleep is the problem.

Bryan: Yeah. It took a while, it took a while.

Bryan: It took I want to say a good several months, maybe, up to a year to figure that out. I was trying to do everything On the exterior, I was doing I was trying to do the behavioral therapy listen to green noise, white noise whatever you want to call it, sleep stories anything to kind of, deal with the the the secondary symptoms And it, it finally realized that it was just my, it was my anxiety.

Bryan: It finally realized that I had anxiety that I can’t sleep. Like it, I was tired. I was really tired. I, my, my head would hit the pillow. Then all of a sudden I’d be wide awake, thinking about sleeping over and over again am I going to sleep tonight? Can I sleep tonight? Is it going to be the same night, like last night?

Bryan: Then I’d be up to two, three in the morning just. dozing off for what seemed like five minutes and waking up and doing that persistently throughout the night. And so it came, it was about a year ago I realized that it was actually sleep was the core issue. And my, just my whole thought process behind what the sleep function was.

Martin: So the longer it went on, it was as if sleep itself was just consuming more of your focus, more of your attention, more of your energies, more of your concerns.

Bryan: It was 100 percent of my life for for two years where I, I think about, I go to the office without any sleep thinking, am I going to be able to sleep tonight?

Bryan: And that was just the center of my universe, and I did things that were contrary to even my belief systems and to my, to things that just out of frustration, just out of desperation of trying to sleep, like drinking, like I started drinking I hadn’t drank in a very long time.

Bryan: And so then I started popping open bottles of wine in my, that I had stored in my house. For years and I started drinking, and I started doing things that like I never thought I would do just to try to, um, try to relieve quite candidly, the pain.

Martin: And I think that’s where we can so easily get stuck because we want to fix this issue of sleep and it gets to a point where we just will do anything.

Martin: to try and fix the situation. And just like you touched upon, that’s when it can become even more difficult because it can draw us into behaviors and actions that aren’t aligned with who we are or who we want to be. So we feel uncomfortable and things can get difficult because we’re doing those things.

Martin: And then it’s like a double whammy because on top of that, we might not even be noticing an improvement in our sleep on top. And there wasn’t.

Bryan: Even after I started drinking, I wouldn’t say that I, I drank it, I was drinking dangerously, but it didn’t improve my sleep at all.

Martin: And it sounds like that was an action or a behavior that you didn’t really want to be engaged in.

Bryan: That’s not something, yeah, that, yeah, exactly, that’s not something I wanted to do. But, like I mentioned, it was out of desperation.

Martin: And it’s all completely understandable. Yeah. And the reason I just like to dig a little bit deeper there is just because I think everyone listening to this will be able to identify with that to some degree in the, we just become so understandably focused or intent and determined to address our sleep issues.

Martin: We can so easily go down that path of doing things that we’d rather not be doing in an attempt to fix the problem. So now And then when that doesn’t work or if that doesn’t work, we’ve still got the sleep issues and then piled on top, we’ve got all these new actions or behaviors that can make us feel bad or make things feel more difficult because they’re not aligned with the person we want to be.

Martin: We don’t really want to be doing those things. And that’s why it’s so easy to just end up feeling stuck.

Bryan: It changed me quite a bit. Now, during that era I was reclusive. I, I went to the office, but I was absent and I it was hard to get a hold of. There were just a lot of things about my behavior that changed and about who I became for that period of time that I just hated.

Bryan: But I’d stay at home, try to sleep just for a couple hours and it just didn’t work. It just Yeah, relationship suffered my kid suffered, it just was not a good, it was not a good time.

Martin: Correct me if I’m wrong, but it sounds as though there was a little bit of hint, a little hint in there that maybe you were being quite hard on yourself too.

Bryan: I’m always hard on myself, so that’s who I am. I’m a very driven of a person and I’m very goal and achievement driven And I’m often, I’ve been told that I’m my biggest critic but that’s who I am. I can’t that’s one thing I can’t separate from myself.

Martin: Yeah. Did you find that when you were being hard on yourself, specifically in connection to sleep, did that make things easier?

Martin: Did it make them more difficult? Or do you feel like it just didn’t really have much of an influence, it was neutral?

Bryan: I was determined like one way or another. I think my trying to drive like myself being very driven as a person it drove me to not just settle for what was happening to try to find a solution.

Bryan: And so I went to sleep doctors, I did apnea tests. I did all these things to try to figure out what was the core root of my solution. So I was going this way, that way, not only trying to deal with the symptoms, but trying to figure out what the core. issue was. And I remember that one night where I was, I was hooked up to all these gadgets for a night and to do a sleep study.

Bryan: And obviously, I didn’t have sleep apnea, but but I was driven to find a solution to it. And it just so happens my solution didn’t even come from where I was looking but nonetheless, like it, it really was. I was really determined because again, my relationship relationships were suffering and things were happening.

Bryan: My work was suffering. And I just I needed to find a solution one way or another, and I was going to find it somehow.

Martin: That’s a really good point that you raised there. I think that we can use our inner critic in helpful ways, for example, to drive us to become better advocates for ourselves to explore solutions.

Martin: And at the same time, maybe there’s like a shadowy side of the inner critic where we can just be really mean to ourselves after difficult nights. Like you shouldn’t have had a night like that. Why is everyone else able to sleep better than you? Why haven’t you fixed it yet? And it’s that side of things that can easily draw us into that route where things become more difficult because we’re just being, we’re adding that harsh self talk and, lack of self compassion on top.

Bryan: Yeah. Yeah that’s very true. I was I was being, I would beat myself up every night for why didn’t I have a good night’s sleep and why can’t you do this? What’s wrong with you? What’s wrong with you? Even, I even wanted to go and get blood tests to see if there’s anything biologically wrong with myself.

Bryan: Obviously, no, no avail there, but but yeah, I was doing everything I can And there’s something wrong with you but yeah.

Martin: What was an average night like for you when things were really difficult? Was it more to do with difficulty just first falling asleep at the start of the night?

Bryan: Most nights it was I couldn’t fall asleep. For a number of hours. And maybe around two o’clock and I just use that generally, but by two o’clock I fall asleep. But it’d be for a very brief moment where my head was still racing and I would wake up almost immediately.

Bryan: So even from the point of time where I actually did fall asleep after three hours of laying in bed or, getting up, trying to go to sleep, going here, going there It would about, it would be almost immediately wake, I’d wake up almost immediately and I would, that would continue throughout the night till where I had to wake up like at six o’clock or six thirty, whatever it was.

Bryan: So I had brief moments of sleep but there was never anything that was elongated to actually allow me to go through a single sleep cycle.

Martin: When you found that your head was racing what kind of, what was going on at that time?

Bryan: Like how, just how do I get my head to stop racing?

Bryan: And why am I thinking so much? Why am I thinking about this so much? And so I would do anything I can. I put in my earbuds. I tried to listen on YouTube to sleep stories music, something soothing I think I mentioned like green noise or brown noise or white noise whatever they call it.

Bryan: And just to ground out my thoughts. And they would help a little bit, but not necessarily. Um, none, it wasn’t, it was definitely not a solution. I tried to do everything that I was, I read about, I try to get up, read a book to make myself, go to sleep and, and dim light, or, if you don’t, if you’re not, if you’re not sleepy, get out of bed.

Bryan: I do everything like don’t watch TV. Don’t use your phone. A couple hours before bed, everything as far as behavioral therapy that I was told to do, I did. And none of it worked.

Martin: There’s so much there that I just know that a lot of people listening are going to really identify with. The first thing was, that dealing with that racing mind.

Martin: I think everyone struggling with sleep can identify with that. And when we see that racing mind as an obstacle to sleep, it makes sense that we want to address that and tackle it. So then we end up going down the route of, okay, how can I stop my mind racing? How can I clear my mind? How can I stop?

Martin: Thoughts, or what was the word you used? Drown them out quell those thoughts how can I promote calmness? How can I create all of those good conditions for sleep? And it’s interesting because I think, first and foremost, it’s completely understandable why we do this. And secondly, I think if we’re able to, I think there are some insights there because I think if we can reflect on a time in our past when sleep wasn’t an issue or a concern, did we go to similar levels of effort to eliminate certain thoughts from our mind, to promote calmness to slow down our thoughts or any of that stuff?

Martin: And if we didn’t, maybe there is. That’s an insight there that maybe this stuff isn’t needed. Maybe we can still sleep regardless of what our mind is doing and maybe it’s all the understandable effort we’re putting into kind of wrestling with our mind, getting it to do what we want that might be making things more difficult.

Bryan: That’s a good point. I almost think that I almost think that the behavioral therapy and everything I was doing, it was counterproductive because it kept my mind on the issue, it kept my mind on sleep. Yeah. And I would go back, we’d go back to when we were kids. We’d have a long day of school, playing sports, whatever it is, and then we’d hit the pillow.

Bryan: And within minutes we’re asleep. That was just naturally what we did and that’s the way God made us. We’re naturally able to fall asleep, but in, in all of these behavioral therapies, I’m not saying they don’t work. I’m not saying they’re not good for some people, but for, in my experience, it was counterproductive because it kept my mind on the issue.

Bryan: It kept my mind focused on my inability to sleep. And so it just it and I’m going to probably just going to assume that, My experience is going to be the same, similar to other people as well.

Martin: I think everyone listening to this will probably be able to reflect on, it seems that the more effort I put into this.

Martin: The more stuck I feel it’s almost like being in the quicksand, like the more you’re struggling, the more you’re trying to get out of it, the more you feel as though you’re either not moving or maybe you’re sinking even further down. And I think that’s sometimes where any approach towards addressing this can sometimes trip us up, because if we’re engaging in a certain behavior, For example listening to certain sound frequencies, or not watching TV in the evening.

Martin: In an effort to control something that happens inside us, to control our thoughts and feelings, or to control sleep, we might be setting ourselves up for some struggle there, because typically those things are out of our direct control. If we can reframe our actions or have a different intention or a different goal, maybe the goal is to explore how we can move away from the control agenda, from trying to create perfect conditions for sleep, for trying to eliminate certain thoughts and feelings, for trying to make sleepiness or calm or relaxation happen.

Martin: Maybe if we can Use our problem solving strengths with that intention. That might be more helpful than using them with the intent of trying to control stuff that our experience might be telling us can’t be controlled through effort.

Bryan: Yeah. Now, I don’t try to control my sleep. I’ll be candid.

Bryan: I don’t I’ve never been a good sleeper and so six hours for me is perfectly fine. Like I function on six hours. I’m good. I’m very active person. And I know some people that they need eight, nine hours and that’s fine. But for me, my body functions very well in six hours and sometimes less.

Bryan: But I don’t try to control my sleep anymore. And so once I lock, once I Once I let go of that control aspect of my sleep where I just go to sleep when I’m tired. If I have a crappy night of sleep, I’m like, okay, fine. I forget about it. Like whatever, no big deal. I’ve stopped trying to control my sleep.

Bryan: I’m not going to come and control it. I just know that I have the ability to sleep.

Martin: Yeah, just know, knowing that you’ve got that natural ability to sleep can be really helpful.

Bryan: It’s actually very powerful.

Martin: So maybe this is connected, but I’m curious, so you have this issue with sleep. You want to fix it. As you said, you’re quite a driven person, a problem solver. You want to get to the solution. So you’re trying all these different things. They seem not to be working.

Martin: Maybe every now and then they seem to. temporarily work or, some improvement but over the longer term, they don’t seem to be getting you to that place that you want to be. How do you change direction? So how do you move away from just continuing to try, continuing to attempt to control and take this different approach of, I’m going to let go of trying.

Martin: I’m going to let go of trying to control sleep. How do you do that?

Bryan: Yeah, that was a tough thing because I wasn’t able to. And I didn’t mention it in my email to you is that it came by accident. I did everything I can, like I said, behavioral therapy, drinking. I was, my doctor didn’t seem to care either as far as his prescription of sleeping pills.

Bryan: I, I told him, I said, Hey, listen, any I prescribed Lunesta to me and I was going back every month for two milligrams or whatever it was. And I went back to him and said, Hey I’d like to cut this out of my life, and, I don’t think, I don’t want to be on this the rest of my life.

Bryan: And his reaction was like, Oh, what’s the big deal? Everybody’s, a lot of people are on sleep pills, for the rest of their life. He seemed to have no concern of my desire to get off these things. So I’m like, okay, thanks doc. And he literally gave me a year supply of prescription because, they’re controlled substances.

Bryan: You gotta, take your ID to the pharmacy and show it. And so he gave me like a year supply of this stuff. And so anyways, like I had no help from him, but as I mentioned is the, in my email to you the, when I fell asleep on accident and I say by accident, because I just put my head on my pillow watching and I just.

Bryan: fell asleep for the entire night. I woke up not only refreshed, but with a new understanding of my relationship with sleep is like, Oh my gosh, I have the ability to sleep. I just did it on my own without any prescriptions, without any trying. And that was it. Like I didn’t try, I didn’t try to sleep.

Bryan: I didn’t try to force myself to go to bed. I didn’t try to force myself. I did it without any effort at all. I could do this again. I can replicate this. And so that’s when it started to build on it. Yeah. I had some relapses and I had to take some pills here and there, but that was now the, that was now the kind of the apex of the road where I’m like, you know what?

Bryan: I’m going to change directions. I’m not going to try anymore. I’m just going to let myself naturally go to sleep. We’re going to let myself, my, my head just naturally wander. Because I know I have the ability to do it. And so I just built upon that, night after night, and after, several months, it took several months, where I’m like, you know what, I don’t need melatonin, I don’t need any of this stuff, I’m done with it.

Martin: It sounds like that was just a huge light bulb moment for you, that really helped drive you toward this different approach.

Bryan: And I think that’s where I wanted to share my story with you. Because I don’t think it’s unique. I think there’s a lot of people that are struggling in the same sense where they feel a loss of ability and that beginning to try.

Bryan: And I’m like, no, just stop trying. Once you stop trying and allow your body to naturally go through its sleep cycle and just do what it naturally does, the way God made us, let’s, that, honestly that’s my experience. It’s just letting sleep take over.

Martin: Was that the first night that you’d not taken medication before going to bed or had you tried that approach before in the past and still struggled?

Bryan: I, I tried without any success. But that was not my intention. My intention that night was to watch, watch a little TV, because it was still early, but I was obviously exhausted because, lack of sleep. And my intention was to get up and probably take a pill.

Bryan: And so I didn’t have any intention of not taking the pill that night. I had no intention of, not doing the things I was previously doing to try to sleep. It just happened. And that’s when I’m like, Oh my gosh, that was like, you said the ah-ha moment that light bulb work. My goodness, I could do this.

Bryan: I was successful one night. I could be successful a second night too. And then the second night I was successful. I was able to sleep. I was actually giddy to go to sleep. I’m like, I can do this now. Such a simple thing that we take for granted.

Martin: Yeah, absolutely. And I’m going to guess that it wasn’t like, so you had the first night where this first happened, second night, you sounded like you had a good night again.

Martin: And then it was just all plain sailing from then on third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, up until today, every single night was just fantastic.

Bryan: Not at all. Not at all. There was a lot of struggle. I call them relapses, but I did have to go back to take a half a, half a pill of Lunesta. I did have crappy nights.

Bryan: But I always went back to that success of the first night. I, it’s a side story, but I coach competitive baseball and softball. And so I have pitchers, and I actually use, I actually, this was a lesson that I learned that I was able to give to my pitchers that struggle in the circle in softball.

Bryan: When they’re struggling, I take them back, I’ll call time out, I’ll go talk to them. I take them back to the success that they had in previous moments. I said, Hey, someone’s, Dakota or hey, Alexa, whoever I’ll take them back to success that I had in the past.

Bryan: And remember when you did this, remember when you achieved this in this game or, whatever it is, you can do that again. Today, like right now what’s happening, this is just for a moment. You can, you can go back to those moments of success, and that’s what I had to do. I had to go back to that moment of success for continue to remind myself that I can sleep, that I do have the ability that this right now that’s happening right now, this really crappy night.

Bryan: This is just a moment in time that’s going to pass. Tomorrow will be better.

Martin: That is, It’s so helpful and so important, I believe, because in that, just that practice of consciously drawing on your previous successes or reminding yourself of your previous successes and maybe even identifying and drawing upon your strengths.

Martin: What strengths did you use to get through to these difficult periods in the past? And how can you draw upon them again? Because the mind will always want to focus on the most difficult thing going on right now, where you’re really struggling. It has that real negativity bias on all the difficult stuff because It’s doing its job, it’s trying to look out for us.

Martin: So it doesn’t care about the good stuff. It’s just going to focus on all the difficult stuff. So we do, I think, need to make that conscious effort to practice reminding ourselves of our successes, reminding ourselves of our strengths, and refocusing our attention in ways that help us draw upon all of that good stuff rather than just being Or the difficult situation we’re in at that time, just overwhelming all of our attention.

Bryan: No, absolutely. Absolutely.

Martin: I think that’s what you were really sharing, like when you used that example of coaching, because when someone is struggling, that’s it, the mind is just focused on that struggling with the pitching, right?

Bryan: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, you see it in their face. You see it in their demeanor.

Bryan: Yeah, you see it in their demeanor, and you’re like, hey, You are really good. You just did this. Yeah, today’s right now you’re struggling a little bit, have the ability because you did it.

Martin: I think someone listening to this could maybe take that kind of approach and even just use it on themselves, almost like being our own coach in a way.

Martin: So when things do feel difficult is Maybe see if there’s a way we can detach ourselves from that inner critic or from just that automatic behavior of focusing on, I’m really struggling now, so this is going to be 100 percent of my focus, to maybe talking to ourselves like a coach would talk to us, or Maybe talking to ourselves like we would talk to someone that we loved who was dealing with this right now.

Martin: What would we say to them? Would we tell them, ah, forget about it, you’re broken, you’re a failure this struggle that you’re in is never going to change? Or are we more likely to say remember that time when This happened when you were successful. Remember, what strengths can you draw upon? You’re a strong person.

Martin: Just, all of that stuff can just be so helpful to, to get our brain out of that negativity bias that it’s always gonna, that’s always the path it’s gonna take. That’s like the clearest path forward for the mind to take. No,

Bryan: you’re right. Obviously, like if someone’s struggling with sleep we’re not going to tell them you’re a failure or anything.

Bryan: I know that was tongue in cheek but I also think it’s somewhat not productive to, give them all these things to do as well. Hey, do this, do that, and give them a checklist to check off because again we’re trying to do, we’re trying to do something that we naturally should be doing and we all do like we all have the ability to sleep.

Bryan: And so it’s like putting too much effort into something that naturally comes like breathing, you know I’m like do we put a lot of effort into breathing? No, do we put a lot of effort into our blood flowing through our body or heart pumping? No, absolutely not it’s involuntary and sleep should be Considered, we shouldn’t see sleep as involuntary is where it’s just something our body naturally does and we you know We’ve open put too much effort to it that it just you know, we I think we lose focus on You know what part of our life it really is

Martin: I really that analogy with breathing is one that I use quite a lot because with breathing We can also temporarily control or influence it, right?

Martin: We can hold our breaths, for example but eventually the body will take over and make breathing happen. And I relate that to all of our efforts to sleep, like we put all of these efforts into sleep, and they can in turn make sleep more difficult a lot of the time. But no matter how little sleep we get on one night or two nights, three nights, four nights, five nights, Sooner or later, some amount of sleep is going to happen because the body will take over and just as it always generates the minimum number of breaths we need, it’s always going to generate the minimum amount of sleep we need.

Martin: That might not happen on one specific night, but as we average it out over a week or a couple of weeks or a month, it’s always going to generate the minimum that we need. So you’ve got this big light bulb moment of Oh, I accidentally had no intention to sleep and I found myself sleeping, so I realize now that I don’t need to exert so much control into sleep and that I can sleep by myself.

Martin: How did you use that to help you get through the return of difficult nights in the future?

Bryan: Yeah, I started to do the things I did before I, I stopped sleeping. And for that period of time, I was not doing the things that I love to do, like running, riding my bike, going to the gym, things like that.

Bryan: And I, I ride mountain bikes, and so my I had friends that would call me on, Hey, let’s go ride on Saturday morning, and I’d say, no, I can’t, I feel sick. Which the truth was, I didn’t sleep that night. And so it was constant of that. And so what I did is I started returning to the things that I love to do and which is mostly athletics, as far as, um, like my, my, my hobbies and stuff.

Bryan: It’s athletically driven. And so whether it’s running, lifting weights or riding my bike or now it’s coaching, my, my kids I started to do those things that I used to love to do. And so it was getting my life back to normal and that helped me like getting my life back to normal, help my sleep, get back to normal as well.

Bryan: Because again, like I mentioned before, my sleep deprivation had absolutely affected my entire life where I was not doing the things that I should be doing or I love to do or, or anything like that. And once that sleep returned and it’s, in some shape or form that I started to return to my normal life and things became normal again.

Bryan: It started to become more and more normal every single day, every single week. And so it was not putting sleep as a focus where I’d stay at home, I’d be in the office just thinking about sleep. I’m going to sleep during that. And I’d literally have a yoga mat in my office to just lay down, pull my head and turn off the lights.

Bryan: Just to see if I could sleep at all in my office in the middle of the day. And that’s how much I was focused on sleep. My, 24 7. But then I just started returning to normal life, doing the things I had to do, or wanted to do.

Martin: So it sounds like your focus really shifted from nighttime actions to daytime actions.

Martin: So instead of focusing really on creating the best possible conditions for sleep or putting effort into sleep, trying to control your mind, your focus was on each day doing things that mattered to you.

Bryan: And not thinking about sleep throughout the day, like I used to. And so thinking and caring about things that I actually cared about or people that I care about and stuff like that.

Bryan: It was just one of those things where my sleep, the focus, I just took my focus off sleep and focus on life.

Martin: If someone’s listening to this and they think, I would love to be able to stop thinking about sleep, but it’s all I can think about. And no matter how much I try to stop thinking about it, my mind just wants to think about it.

Martin: How do you get to that place where you’re just not thinking?

Bryan: Oh man. I, that’s a million dollar question because it came different. Honestly, it’s, I don’t have the answer for that person. But the answer, but what I do. What I will share is that you do have the ability to sleep. You have not lost it.

Bryan: It’s in, it’s an errand in our, how we’re created. And so we have the ability to sleep, how you get there. I would suggest that you start doing the things that you love to do before sleep took over. If it’s, if it’s reading, if it’s crocheting, whatever it is, start doing those things, those relationships that perhaps you neglected for that time, because they do like relationships suffer.

Bryan: When you’re sleep deprived and when you’re dealing with insomnia that all happens start re engaging with those people and just do the things that you used to love to do and Just watch how you’re behaving Your brain and your whole mindset starts to refocus on things that matter rather than things that shouldn’t matter.

Martin: Yeah, I think the reason it’s a million dollar question is maybe because there’s no way to consciously stop our mind from thinking certain thoughts. No, there’s not. And maybe that is what makes us struggle more, that makes things more difficult because we realize that we don’t want to be thinking about sleep all day long, all night long.

Martin: So we try not to. But then we’re really focused more on the thought of sleep because we have to focus on the thought of sleep in order to try not to think about sleep, which is like really confusing, but I think what can happen when we take this approach that you talked about of doing more of the stuff that matters or bringing that back into our lives again, the stuff that we might’ve moved away from, things that are important, things that matter is.

Martin: That’s not going to immediately and permanently delete thoughts about sleep or anything else. But what it does do is it gives our minds other things to focus attention on. It opens up and broadens, expands our focus because there’s more stuff available for the mind to calculate, think about, figure out.

Martin: And the more we’re doing things that matter to us independently of sleep. The less power and influence sleep is having over our lives because it’s not having the same level of influence over our actions. So I think a natural, maybe a natural byproduct of this is the mind is less concerned with sleep now because we’re doing more of the stuff that matters independently of how we sleep.

Martin: So the mind’s less bothered about it, the mind’s less focused about it, so it tends to think about it less. Not because we’re trying not to think about it, but because we’re proving to our minds that. Sleep doesn’t have this high, intense degree of power and influence, so the brain’s Okay, this is something that I don’t need to really think about so much anymore.

Bryan: Precisely. Absolutely. And sleep, when I tell people don’t really understand When I explained to them that I suffered from insomnia, anybody that has dealt with chronic insomnia knows that it’s absolutely suffering.

Bryan: And there’s a lot of things that are going on, but mentally it is depressed. It just, it’s just, it’s draining. And so we do suffer from insomnia. And the vast majority of that is the. The 24 seven thinking about it where everything else is neglected. And so the more that we shift our mind and our focus to things we love and people we love and.

Bryan: And things we want to do, the less time sleep has, the less time that we have to think about sleep, and the less power it has over our lives.

Martin: That’s really powerful. When we’re suffering with insomnia, we see the only solution to reducing that suffering as to get a certain amount or type of sleep.

Martin: But what you’re saying is there are other ways of reducing our suffering, and one of those ways of reducing our suffering might be to get back into doing more of the things that matter to us. More of the things that enrich our lives, that make us feel good, that are important to us. And so we’re not trying to directly control sleep right now.

Martin: But we’re just trying to do more of what’s important to us. We’re trying to take actions that move us towards the life we want to live. And that, in turn, is one way that we can reduce our level of suffering. Am I hearing you right there?

Bryan: Absolutely. We’re like, we’re a cup. We only be filled so high.

Bryan: We only be consumed so high. And when we’re suffering from insomnia, we’re pretty much at the top of our, at the fill level. When we start filling it with other things, That, like I said, matter to us that we have less time to be consumed or less time to be filled with the aspect of sleep.

Martin: That’s, it’s almost like you had that prop prepared there. Did you have that rehearse? That one?

Bryan: It’s because I love coffee.

Martin: I think it’s a great analogy. The idea of, I, I use. I use something similar by talking about concentration and dilution. So when our entire focus, when we’ve got nothing else to concentrate on or to do, that car There’s just our life is a bubble and inside that bubble it’s just sleep.

Martin: Because we’ve removed everything else that makes us who we are. And so it’s really concentrated. And what if we can add stuff back in? Going for a bike ride, if we like bike riding. Going for a walk around the block if we like walking, maybe meeting up with some friends if we like to socialize with friends.

Martin: And so sleep or insomnia might still be in that bubble, but now there’s other things in that bubble too. So we’re starting to dilute it down a little bit, and so we reduce its level of power and influence, and we might also reduce the level of suffering that brings us.

Bryan: For even those that are, that are listening to this, that think that, my life is perfect now and my life is, like sleep is perfect. I get eight hours of sleep. That’s not the case. Because again, I have so many things going on in my life. There’s so many things like I’m being tugged and pulled all these different directions. So I’m not going to say that I have eight hours of sleep, and I don’t wake up.

Bryan: That’s just not the case. I still drink a lot of caffeine throughout the day. And because, again, because I love coffee, that’s just one of my things. And if I get six hours of sleep, I’m fine with that. Everybody, every person is different. I do wake up through the night. And as I get older, I’m getting older, that’s going to happen more, getting closer to 50, which is, , things happen when you get older.

Bryan: And so don’t expect to have like perfect night from here on out or every night or whatever it is because I don’t have that. But what I do know is that I can’t sleep now naturally. I don’t need to take pills. I don’t need to drink. I don’t need to, take anything, any substance to make myself fall asleep.

Bryan: It’s a natural ability that I have now. Or I’ve always had, I just had to re-realize it.

Martin: You make a good point there, because no one has the perfect night of sleep every night. Just like nobody has the perfect day every day. We have really difficult days, we have great days, and sleep is the same. We have great nights, we have really difficult nights.

Martin: I think what matters is, how we respond. So do we respond to a difficult day, for example, by just being, that was a difficult day. I’m never leaving the house again, because I never want to experience a day like that ever again. Over the long term, barricading ourselves into our house might give us a little bit of comfort, but it’s probably not going to give us a very rich, meaningful life.

Martin: And it’s a similar thing about sleep. So if a difficult night happens, how do we respond? That’s really what matters. We can’t go back in time and change what’s already happened. So do we respond by what’s often the easiest response of getting drawn back into the struggle again? Or do we respond by maybe just being honest with ourselves, acknowledging we had a difficult night, being kind to ourselves in return, and then continuing to do things that matter to us, no matter how small they might be.

Bryan: Yeah. Yeah. I, every time I have a, when I have a bad night of sleep, I, it’s very, I’m very nonchalant about it. I’ll wake up and man, that night sucked, but I’m good. I’m good. Like I know next, did when, The next night will more than likely be a lot better than the previous night.

Bryan: That’s just the way it is. Like I have that attitude now where, all right, this night sucked or I didn’t sleep well, no big deal, going to go through life and I’m going to do what I need to do and, take care of all the commitments I need to take care of and then go to sleep at night. And if this all happens to not work out again, oh I will sleep again.

Bryan: It’s not a big deal. Like sleep has not become a core focus of my life. Whatsoever. It’s actually taking a backseat where it just is, it is what it is.

Martin: When you first started to reintroduce things that mattered to your life like I think you mentioned that mountain biking, was that one of the things?

Martin: Like the more of the kind of physical stuff. Yeah. Did you find that was always easy to do that?

Martin: Did you find that it always gave you the same kind of feelings that it gave you compared to when sleep wasn’t an issue?

Bryan: So when I was out there, yeah because I find doing things physically I, when I do something to the extreme and so I exert myself to the extreme.

Bryan: And so I’m talking about like elevated heart rate. I’m just. And that’s just the way I am, like if I’m walking for an hour, that’s not exercise to me, but heart sprints, intervals, stuff like that’s exercise to me. So I’m very much to the extreme on a lot of things.

Bryan: So it was hard for me knowing that the way my, my mind works, as far as I need to go to the extreme, it was hard for me to push myself out that door to get there. To do it because I know okay, my body may not be up to it because I don’t take things easy. But once I got out there, I was like, okay, I can do this again.

Bryan: I feel that euphoria again. I feel that sense of bliss and serenity out here in the, on the trails with my friends, even if I was by myself, it didn’t matter, but yeah, it just felt good to be out there. And it took me back to where I just wanted it again. I wanted that sense. I wanted those sensations again, even the smell.

Bryan: I miss the smell, I live right by trail system and I’ll leave my garage and I’ll go up the trail system and I have that, there’s that, that, a floral smell in the trails that I just missed, that I now crave, so it’s just like all that sensation yeah, I just, it, yeah, I just need it again.

Bryan: So it just drove me, it drove me to do it over and over again and just build on that.

Martin: Yeah, you’re just expanding that focus again, like we were talking about, you got that coffee cup and now you’re adding mountain biking into that coffee cup, you’re adding the smells that you experience the physical sensations that you experience, there’s so much more stuff just from that one action, even though it can be really hard to motivate yourself to get yourself out of the door in the first place, once you’re actually out there and doing it, or once you’ve finished, you found that was more beneficial compared to not doing anything at all.

Martin: How long would you say that it took for you to get to a point where you felt that you just weren’t engaged in any kind of struggle with sleep anymore when it just didn’t have any level of power or influence over your life?

Bryan: I don’t know the answer because I put it so past, far behind me.

Bryan: It’s been years. It was pre, pre COVID pandemic. So it was, it’s been a good five, six years where I’ve been, I don’t want to say cured, but I’m not suffering from insomnia anymore. But if I had to recall it probably a good six to eight months of consistent reassuring myself that I can sleep because I did, there, there is those times where I actually just recently found a old bottle of my Lunesta.

Bryan: In my cup or my, my cabinet where I actually like, Oh crap, like these and throwing them out and old pills to like antihistamines and the other things that they tried to give me, like I found some of those things were actually do not need anymore. My pill cutter to like I had a pill cutter to try to cut down on doses.

Bryan: It takes a while. It’s not like just a, it’s not just something that happens overnight. Yeah. That incident that, that. Night of sleep happened overnight. Retraining your brain to, to understand the normality of sleep, that doesn’t come.

Bryan: You have to continue to reassure yourself. And I want to say about a good six to eight months where I’m like, you know what, I don’t think about this anymore. I can throw everything away. Don’t need any sort of crutches. I’m good.

Martin: Just as you said, it’s a process. It’s not a quick fix.

Martin: And there are usually ups and downs on the way, just as you described, it wasn’t, you had that light bulb moment and then everything was magically transformed. There were still difficult nights. There were still times when you were drawn into the struggle. There were still times when you were aware that you were engaging in some different kinds of sleep efforts.

Martin: You hadn’t fully been able to let that control philosophy or control agenda go just yet, which is fine, but it was a process, right? It was a series of steps, sometimes forward, maybe sometimes backwards, sometimes not moving. But it was all part of the process. And. It sounds as though your process involved a period of identifying efforts to control sleep and starting to eliminate them from your life and reintroducing all the stuff that maybe got lost.

Martin: Pushed aside, always held back until you were sleeping, getting a certain amount or type of sleep again. You just were like, no, I’m going to do it the other way around. I’m going to put this stuff back into my life now, rather than waiting. If that was a summary of the approach you took, do I have that reasonably accurate?

Bryan: I think you’ve summarized it quite well. Once I realized I had the ability to sleep, I started filling my life up with things that mattered. And didn’t wait for that full recovery to start doing those things again. That would have just taken too long.

Martin: I can just tell that, all those character strengths of yours that we spoke about earlier, like this determination, this very solution focused approach come out just in that one sentence.

Martin: If I’d have just waited. Before doing all this stuff that mattered to me, that would have taken too long.

I’m very impatient with things. And like I want it done here and now obviously that’s not always a good thing, but but yeah, if I would have waited, it just I would have suffered even more.

Martin: There’s often a question that I ask when I’m working with clients, is if a client tells me about something that’s really important to them, that has dropped out of their life because of their struggles with sleep first of all, we explore why that’s important. And then I’ll ask them if that’s important to you, why wait?

Bryan: Because everybody that suffers from insomnia they are, they are removing things from their life that are important to them and it’s going to be people, it’s going to be. events. It’s going to be the arm. They’re substituting those things with their consumption of sleep.

Bryan: Absolutely. There’s not one person out there that suffers from signing. And I said, I still do all these things. Yet I still suffer from signing. No they’re replacing all those important things with sleep, and so absolutely this focus more, let’s get back to focusing on what’s important and replacing the sleep with it.

Bryan: the people and the things that are important to you.

Martin: What if someone is listening to this and they say sleep is important to me.

Bryan: Sleep is important to everybody, but I think the analogy we used before, so it’s, so is breathing. And so is blood flowing through our bodies. And, so is certain other things that are involuntary.

Bryan: Yes, it is important . But you have to realize that it is an absolute natural. We have the natural ability to sleep, it’s, it should be considered involuntary and can, think about sleep as involuntary and just allow your body to just let it happen.

Bryan: Focus on the doing the things you’re gonna, don’t ever think about sleep as I’m going to go do sleep. I’m going to go, I’m going to work to get to sleep when you have to go to sleep, just say, I’m going to go to sleep because that’s what’s going to happen.

Bryan: I’m not going to work towards it. I’m not going to focus on it. I’m not going to, spend any inordinate amount of time on sleep. It’s just going to happen. So yes, it’s important for other day functions, but yeah, it’s just focus on the things that really do matter.

Martin: I suspect that you might’ve covered a lot of this just in our discussion, but there’s a question that I like to ask all my guests at the end.

Martin: And so I’m going to ask it to you as well. Maybe you could just summarize it. And it’s this, if someone with chronic insomnia is listening and they feel as though they’ve tried everything, that they are beyond help, that they’ll never be able to stop struggling with insomnia. What would you say to them?

Bryan: I’m going to tell them that I hope and pray that this podcast does help you a little bit or other, the other podcasts that, that you want and have to share. But I’m not certain that it will, and I’m not certain that, anything that I tell you is going to help you because my experience is going to be vastly different than somebody else’s.

Bryan: All I want to tell you is that is. It’s unquestionable that you do have the ability to sleep. It is natural. It is God given. It’s involuntary and don’t try to do it. But you do have the ability to sleep. You’re thinking to yourself, I don’t know. I’m not sure, but I promise that you do. I thought I lost the ability.

Bryan: My recovery is going to be different than everybody or different than a lot of different people. Yeah, try to, hopefully my, my experience helps you, but if it doesn’t you will recover, and you do have the ability to sleep. Please just understand that you were a child once and there was a time in your life that you did not even have to think about it.

Bryan: You went to sleep. You can get back to that past success. You can do that again. You didn’t lose the ability.

Martin: Brian, I really appreciate the time you’ve taken out of your day to come on the podcast. I’ve got no doubt that this discussion is going to resonate with a lot of people help a lot of people and maybe just tease out some insights that will help people to maybe think about their insomnia or sleep and the role it plays in their lives in a slightly different way.

Martin: So again, thank you for coming on.

Bryan: Thank you. Thank you, Martin, for having me. It’s it’s been

Bryan: fun.

Martin: Yeah, and I really hope this helps somebody.

Martin: Thanks for listening to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. If you’re ready to get your life back from insomnia, I would love to help. You can learn more about the sleep coaching programs I offer at Insomnia Coach — and, if you have any questions, you can email me.

Martin: I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Insomnia Coach Podcast. I’m Martin Reed, and as always, I’d like to leave you with this important reminder — you are not alone and you can sleep.

I want you to be the next insomnia success story I share! If you're ready to move away from the insomnia struggle so you can start living the life you want to live, click here to get my online insomnia coaching course.

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