For some people, insomnia feels all-consuming – it pervades through every inch of their lives and they feel helpless to stop their sleep struggles. They lie at night wide awake, counting down the minutes until they have to wake up wishing for sleep to take them away even for a moment. But sleep never seems within reach.
Insomnia is an incredibly difficult disorder to handle. Nights are frustrating and days are exhausting. However, insomnia doesn’t have to ruin your life. In this post, I provide some insights on dealing with insomnia differently to reduce insomnia symptoms and change your relationship with sleep.
Understanding the effects of insomnia on performance
People often worry a lot about how insomnia affects their day-to-day functioning. Surprisingly, the research suggests that people with insomnia tend to perform reasonably well in most conditions. In fact, when there are monetary incentives, people with insomnia do just as well as people without insomnia. This suggests that people with insomnia are very exhausted, so they typically don’t have the motivation to do extra work, but they can absolutely get the important work done.
If I had to choose between two people to drive me for an hour: somebody who was sleep deprived and somebody who had insomnia, I’d actually choose the person with insomnia. This is because people with insomnia are experts at being tired and their arousal levels are high, which means that they are unlikely to fall asleep at the wheel. The sleep deprived person on the other hand – that’s a different story. I would encourage you to think about your performance since you have been struggling with insomnia. My guess is that you get the most important things done – likely pretty well. I would also imagine it’s much tougher, and you don’t have a lot of bandwidth to add much else on your plate. However, it’s important to know that your life is not going to go sideways because of insomnia. You’re likely an expert on dealing with insomnia.
Sleep state misperception: Why you might be sleeping more than you think
As discussed, people with insomnia are wracked with anxiety about sleep and are in a hyperaroused state. Because of high arousal, sleep becomes lighter and sometimes it can feel like you didn’t sleep at all throughout the night. This is called sleep state misperception.
People with insomnia tend to have more awakenings in the middle of the night. Because of high arousal, the brain readily encodes these awakenings as memory. However, the brain doesn’t remember what happens in between awakenings and fills in the gap. The result is a feeling that we were awake the entire time.
Sleep state misperception is also shown in research. Studies show that people with insomnia tend to code lighter stages of sleep as being awake more than good sleepers. Therefore, they often underestimate how much sleep they are getting.
One strategy I use to emphasize this point is through a hypothetical situation: Imagine you are at a doctor’s appointment. Your doctor tells you that they need to go a meeting before seeing you. They ask you to sit on a chair without a phone for the next 4 hours before they come back. What would that experience be like for you? I would imagine it would be pretty hard to bear.
This silly hypothetical situation shows how unlikely it is that we are truly lying in bed for 8 hours without sleeping a wink. Is it really possible that you were awake the whole time? Possibly – but it’s also possible that there was a little bit of sleep state misperception.
Okay, so how do I improve sleep?
Okay so it’s great to know that you are sleeping. But the sleep is still not particularly refreshing. So how do we deal with this and get the deep sleep that we need? Below are three strategies to get better sleep:
1. Increase your sleep appetite. People with insomnia will often spend extra time in bed to catch up on sleep. Counterproductively, this reduces our appetite for sleep and leads to less refreshing sleep. It’s like having only 6 inches of sleep dough and stretching it out into a 9-inch pan. Similarly, your body might only be able to sleep 6 hours but you are spending 9 hours in bed. The result is light sleep with lots of awakenings. Try your best to stay active throughout the day, avoid naps, and spend less time in bed. This will make our appetite for sleep very large before you get into bed for sleep.
2. Keep to a consistent schedule. Each person has a circadian rhythm that tells us when we are sleepy and when we are awake. It’s important to keep our circadian rhythm aligned with the clock on the wall. The best way to do that is keep to a regular wake time (with an alarm if necessary) and then get some sunlight. If we are constantly getting up at different times and staying in bed, we end up with symptoms similar to when we travel to different time zones (like jet lag).
3. Reduce hyperarousal: There are many ways to reduce our arousal levels during the day and at night, and I have written a number of posts on these strategies. For example, you can use relaxation exercises, worry logs, planning a winddown, and other cognitive strategies. A particularly effective strategy is stimulus control, which is a way to break the association between the bed and wakefulness by only using the bed for sleep.
Enjoying the night a little more
When it feels like insomnia is ruining our life, it is hard to let go. However, the paradox of insomnia is that the more we try to wrestle with it, the harder sleep comes. It’s like the Chinese finger trap where we get anxious and pull as hard as we can (which only makes us more stuck). The use of acceptance to allow yourself to be awake can be helpful. Take the wakefulness as a place of opportunity rather than of distress. With that different framing, you might be surprised that sleep will come for you a little more easily.
If this post has been helpful, and you’re still looking for a solution, take another step to ridding your insomnia by purchasing the book The Insomnia Paradox.
Best wishes,
P
Simply mental health 