Close
Fighting insomnia keeps it alive and kicking. Your struggle, focus and effort only make it grow. To fight insomnia is to confirm that it exists. You will not win by battling with it. You need to simply walk away. Instead do things that you enjoy that relax you, but don’t do them for the purpose of sleeping. And do them during the day. Just before you go to bed is often not the best time because we tend to put extra pressure on ourselves to relax in order to facilitate sleep.
We’ll address this further later in the book, but when we suffer from insomnia, the best thing we can do is make friends with wakefulness. Often we are afraid of being awake and not being able to fall asleep, and also of awakening in the middle of the night and staying awake.
The more you try to escape from what you perceive as a threat, the more real that threat seems. It is essential to reach the stage where being awake becomes acceptable. If you wake up in the middle of the night and stay awake, fine, use that time to do something other than stay in bed. Plan in advance what you would like to do. A crossword, ironing, reading… it’s up to you. As long as it’s not challenging and doesn’t require too much light, the choice is yours. Also resist looking at that clock.
When you realise that it is the struggle itself, that it is the attempts to make yourself sleep that cause insomnia, then the path towards sleeping well again is clearly lit.
