In my 30+ years of insomnia and chronic fatigue, I felt there was no one who could shine a light upon what I was going through. Even with the best intentions, no one knew how to be there for me.

The reason I do this work is to be there for you, with all my heart, like I'd wished on my journey someone was there for me.

The Reason I do This Work

About Rested and Free

Rested and Free is the name I gave to the insights and wisdom that changed my life and helped me recover from CFS, insomnia, and chronic pain. For so long, I was looking in the wrong direction, looping in my exhausting struggle.
Finally understanding how to apply this wisdom to my situation changed everything.

My 30+ Year Journey with CFS and Insomnia

My insomnia and CFS 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. 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 6 years of my 30+ year-long journey with sleep and fatigue, I couldn't sleep at home either. Edibles masked the issue for some of that time, though I still never felt refreshed. Then, 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 contemplated visiting the ER again. Not only did I envision all the illnesses 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.

The single most important factor in my recovery was realizing that what I had was an issue of anxiety and fear, not sleep. By constantly attempting to fix it, I didn't realize I was actually feeding it. I had to learn to respond to it differently, to break the interference. We cannot lose our 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've 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 safe.

The fact is that the body does not have an issue with sleep drive. While there is so much miseducation regarding sleep, the truth is that our bodies know how to sleep and how much, without our help. It's the mind that, through anxiety-inducing thinking, interferes.

Improvement in my journey began to occur when I started relating differently to the anxiety and discomfort. Simultaneously, I felt great relief upon hearing recovery stories of other insomniacs. That alone made a significant difference, because I never knew that there were others who suffered like me. After all, no one in my proximity could ever understand or relate to what I was going through for more than 30 years. Hearing those recovery stories melted away decades-long loneliness 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.

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. (When you're struggling for 30 years with no one who seems to relate or understand, you feel like your struggle is extremely unique.) It was a simple willingness to entertain the idea "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 faith in recovery rose. However, the journey was not linear, nor quick; it was filled with bumps, ups, and downs. The only way out is through, as they say, and that is very true for insomnia and CFS. They taught me to befriend my discomfort, no matter how odd and intense it felt. I eventually stopped fighting wakefulness and fatigue. We think recovery lies in getting sleep or no longer feeling tired, and to some degree, that's true. But it's a byproduct of a deeper shift that occurs both in our minds and in our nervous system. A better measure for recovery is whether there is fear around sleep and fatigue, and whether there is a struggle against them. As long as we live in avoidance and as long as the struggle persists, we are not truly free.

During my years with chronic fatigue and insomnia, I kept my life small as I believed that I had no energy to cope and build a life I love, only to barely survive. As difficult as those decades were, when I finally received the right education regarding these 3 things, recovery was only a matter of time:

1) The role of my thinking in maintaining the issue and never allowing it to pass.

2) The role of the brain and nervous system in insomnia and CFS.

3) Miseducation regarding sleep when it came to insomnia, and regarding the source of my fatigue when it came to CFS.

Going through recovery was not easy, but it transformed me in ways that nothing else has. Not even being a lifelong spiritual student.

I know that if you're reading this, you're likely suffering quite a bit, but please know you're not alone, and that someone who has been through it - yours truly - is eager to support you.

If you want to hear my story more in depth check out this hour-long interview about my journey and recovery