Insomnia & Chronic Fatigue Recovery Coaching
My Story
About Me
My insomnia began at the age of 11, during a stressful time in my childhood. One night, the pressure I'd felt to achieve a high grade in an exam at school brought about poor sleep the night prior. You can read my full story below to better understand the context and the psychological and spiritual elements involved.
Normally an extremely life-loving child, I'd felt so foggy and bad during the day of the exam that I began to dread bad sleep. This, of course, made it more difficult to sleep. But my focus was more on the fear of feeling so tired and unable to show up like I wanted. Beneath this fear was, really, a fear of inadequacy.
They say what you focus on grows, and though I couldn't name it at the time, I was chronically fatigued. For the next 30 years, no matter how much I'd slept I was never refreshed and could hardly function.
On trips and travels throughout my life I struggled to get any sleep at all: Camping, sleeping at other people's homes, hotels, AirBnBs, airplanes, and vacation resorts. In the last three years of my 30+ year-long journey with sleep and fatigue, I couldn't sleep at home either. Edibles masked the issue for almost two years, though I still never felt refreshed. They stopped working, and the journey of trying different sleeping pills began.
None worked; not in any reliable sort of way. I kept changing medication, to the point that my doctor said he could no more for me.
I was scared by how little sleep I was getting. The sensations I was feeling in my body brought me to panic. I'd already had a visit to the ER during a trip abroad, and later at home, lying awake at night and feeling as odd as I did, I had contemplated visiting the ER again. Not only did I envision all the illness that my lack of sleep would cause me in the future, but soon I began to wonder if I had a future at all. I didn't believe the body could go on much longer with as little sleep as I was getting. After over 30 years of hoping to get better and then getting worse, I was losing interest in fighting. But what not fighting meant was something I had never understood before.
At this point, it's important that we frame insomnia as what it really is: an anxiety and fear that we keep reacting to with more anxiety and fear, which interferes with our body's natural built-in ability to sleep. We cannot lose this ability or sleep drive - but we can interfere with it. This is why my approach to sleep recovery deals primarily with ending this loop of anxiety. It's a tricky path at times, but those of us who'd gone through it can shed light on the way for others. But back to my story: That I was losing interest in fighting may sound like I was about to give up on life, but what really was happening was that I was letting go of struggle. Giving up the fight meant giving up the effort to control a natural process that doesn't benefit from control. Becoming aware of where that anxiety-inducing control lies is a big part of recovery. Another big part is retraining our nervous system to feel safety.
Insomnia was like an overwhelmingly intense spiritual trip in the way it brought me to face myself. I'd begun to receive clarity regarding my entire journey with fatigue and insomnia, from the moment they began at age 11, the triggers and childhood traumas, and even (for the spirital audience), my soul's blueprint. I was moving through the fog, despite the intense discomfort. But the single most important factor in my recovery was realizing that this was an issue of anxiety and fear, not sleep.
I began relating differently to the anxiety and discomfort. Simultaneously, I'd heard recovery stories of others insomniacs, and that alone made all the difference. I never knew there were others who suffered like me. After all, no one in my close proximity could ever understand or relate to what I was going through for more than 30 years. Hearing those recovery stories melted away the loneiness and instilled hope in me when I needed it most. A huge thank you is owed to Daniel Erichsen for his pioneering work in the field of insomnia, meeting the actual needs of insomniacs where the medical field fails to (check him out on YouTube). In retrospect, I was able to find others because there was a tiny crack in my story regarding how special and mysterious my struggle was. It was a simple "what if I'm not alone in this" that allowed me to be guided to the truth that I wasn't.
With my issue now in correct framing, and boosted with hope having seen that the struggle did indeed end for others, my "sleep confidence" (as we call it in the sleep coaching world) rose. There was a lot of healing in my newfound optimism, but the main healing was in no longer reacting to my fear. I befriended my discomfort, no matter how odd and intense it felt, but stopped making it a problem that needs solving. The more I did that, the less of a problem I had -- not because I was solving it, but because the belief I had a problem was fading. The fact is no body has an issue with sleep drive. While there is so much miseducation in regards to sleep, the truth is that our bodies know how to sleep, and how much.It's the mind that, through anxiety-inducing thinking, interferes.
Having understood this fully led to healing not only in regards to fatigue and insomnia, but anxious and fearful thinking in general. My spiritual seeking dropped away, as I saw that it too was a self-perpetuating phantom issue. But it wasn't just that: I finally dared to live. Fear was not the ruler of me anymore. Of course, none of this means that it doesn't arise, only that it is not dwelled upon or made into a problem when it does, i.e. I don't react to it the same way. Similarly, I am quite comfortable with discomfort (at least relatively to my past), and thus don't avoid life like I used to. During my years with chronic fatigue and insomnia I kept my life small as I believed that I had no energy to cope and advance, only barely survive. Chronic fatigue and insomnia transformed me completely and gave me gifts and freedom that I wouldn't have otherwise acquired in this life.
Why I struggled with chronic fatigue and insomnia and why decades? My answer may not be for everyone suffering from these, but for me it came down to two things. I consider one the branches and the other the root.
The root is not immediately detectable, but I found it came down to a performance anxiety, which traces back to a fear of inadequacy. In my own story, there was such a pressure that built up from childhood to avoid failure because it came with painful consequences. Performing well meant avoiding negative outcomes. It became a survival identity. In my case, the pressure was such that at age 11 I couldn’t sleep one night before an exam. I was foggy and couldn’t concentrate the following day, and got a bad grade. I was terrified to learn that without sleep, the failure I was trying so hard avoid, could occur.
Naturally, a lot of pressure was placed on sleep. Indirectly, not sleeping was linked to the outcomes of failure, namely punishment, mockery, disapproval and rejection - things that meant in my mind that something was wrong with me. That was the beginning of both my insomnia, as fear of not sleeping became central, and my chronic fatigue, as I was terrified of being tired and not performing well. When we fear something intensely we live in its shadow - the fear of not sleeping keeps us not sleeping, and the fear of exhaustion keeps us in exhaustion. These fears are the branch level.
Of course, I didn’t realize or understand any of this as a child, nor did I know how to explain what was going on with me and, frankly, was deeply ashamed.
As time went on I unconsciously avoided life to avoid pressure. I believed my body was hindering me from living fully and, understandably - given how real and dominating my fatigue felt - couldn’t see beyond that. It took me decades to realize the mind-body unity and how my fearful reactions to what I was experiencing were perpetuating it.
When I began to face life more, the underlying performance pressure kept surfacing and forced me to face it. The more I did, the less tired I felt.
When we change the way we respond to our experience, our experience changes. But it took time, courage, important re-education regarding how to cope with anxiety and fatigue, and no longer avoiding life and things that brought up pressure. The healing is a real shift out of survival - or battle - mode. It takes learning that one is fighting perceived, not real, threats. The journey goes deep into acceptance and letting go of control.