Insomnia Demystified

My insomnia story is just one among millions, and as it turns out, it's very similar to that of others. It's so similar that it can be predicted, with uncanny accuracy, by a fake mystic with a fake crystal ball in a pre-recorded video! Take a look.

In the video, Martin Reed, Insomnia Coach extraordinaire, tells me exactly who I am: "You're perhaps someone who's a bit more predisposed to sleep issues. You might just be a naturally light sleeper....Maybe you could be someone who's a little bit more reactive to stress, maybe a little bit more susceptible to anxiety." Right on, Insomnia Coach, right on! As you read in a past post, all of those claims are true.

In the video, my clairvoyant sleep coach continues: "Now I can see an event...something that triggered this sleep disruption and made sleep more difficult." That would be my breakup and ill-advised installation of programmable window blinds.

So far the crystal ball had a 100% success rate at predicting the course of my insomnia, and it's not about to disappoint me now! As Martin the mind reader describes it, "Even after this initial trigger was no longer an issue and not really relevant any more, your sleep issues remained....You might have maybe started thinking about sleep more than you ever had before...researching insomnia, worrying about sleep....More and more time during your day was spent thinking about sleep....You just started to modify your life in response to your insomnia."

Modifying my life in response to insomnia? Heck yeah! In addition to all the terrified researching and self-medication and desperate consultations with the doctor, there were loads of things I tried unsuccessfully to get my sleep back on track.

At this point, if Martin were a real psychic and not just playing one on YouTube, I'd be nodding eagerly and ready to hand over my life savings in order to find out what the spirits said about my prognosis. But in reality, what he does next in the video is debunk the entire magic act and explain exactly how he knew what was wrong with me, without actually knowing me!

I'm no special snowflake, he seems to imply as he shakes the snowglobe he was passing off as a crystal ball. Like that of practically every insomniac since the dawn of insomnia itself, my condition followed, as he describes it, "a well trodden and predictable path." Fortunately for fans of alliteration, that path is marked out by three easily remembered P-words: Predisposing factors, a Precipitating event, and Perpetuating factors.

For me, the predisposing factors were my natural tendencies that made sleep a little more challenging throughout my life. The precipitating event was the breakup that broke my brain. But most people survive a stressful event without becoming insomniacs. I myself have suffered many a previous breakup without permanently breaking up with my sleep! So what gives?

Here's a fun fact about sleep: Sleep deprivation can cause anxiety. Anxiety can cause sleep deprivation. In worrying so much about my breakup, I caused a major disruption to my sleep. The less I slept, the more I ramped up the anxiety, and the more the anxiety, the more likely I was to sleep poorly! And then, (because who wouldn't worry when they hadn't had a good night's sleep in 2 months!?) I began feeling anxious about that.

And thus, I introduced the third P of insomnia into my life: perpetuating factors. Perpetuating factors are the behaviors that insomniacs adopt, unwittingly, to keep their insomnia alive and kicking — and I had plenty of those. All that time I spent obsessing over my sleep, researching fatal sleep disorders, and whining to everyone who would listen about how horribly I was sleeping? Those were all actually making the problem worse! The more you worry about sleep, the harder it is to sleep. The harder you try to sleep, the more elusive it becomes!

While the predisposing and precipitating factors were basically just dealt to me by fate, the perpetuating factors were things that I actually had control over. In other words, I broke my own brain!

I discovered the YouTube video in this post after about 2 months of suffering insomnia. It was right around the time that I was beginning to worry in earnest about fatal insomnia...so this reality check was a huge relief to me. If I was just like every other person with insomnia who had ever lived, then I probably wasn't going to die of it. I might even be able to be cured! It was shortly after watching this video that I decided to take more deliberate steps towards fixing my sleep, by adopting the evidence-backed approach advocated in the video: cognitive behavioral therapy.

In a future post, I'll be telling you all about how that went!