Hey, it'll come through in a few parts. I'm always available for q's if you have any.

Wishing you all of the best in your recovery!

First section is a TLDR version, second section is a longer piece that goes into my
thinking and has examples etc.

TLDR version

Our insomnia is the result of a traumatised nervous system, where we’ve slowly wired
our limbic system to view sleep / anything sleep related as a threat. You can be doing
everything ‘right’, but you’re still unable to sleep.

Anything sleep related, whether it’s trying to fix it, or thinking about how much sleep
you’ll get, is perpetuating this cycle of trauma and insomnia.

Before you start applying the approach, you need to:

(1) Find an emergency handbrake that allows you to sleep, even if it’s just for a night,
as it’s too hard to do this work while you’re at the peak of sleep deprivation.

(2) Find support, preferably a trained mental health worker. Bonus points if they are
trauma-sensitive and trained in EMDR or Somatic Experiencing etc…

(3) Stop trying to sleep, and start trying to rest at night. You can control that, but you
can’t force yourself to sleep.

(4) Find a new story for your insomnia, one that is less victimizing and more
empowering. Most religions have a healthy way to contextualise suffering – I
personally liked the Buddhist approach.

(5) Be patient, it’s not going to work overnight. If it doesn’t work straight away, that’s
not a sign of failure, keep going. Be patient and make a commitment to not draw
conclusions about what’s going on.

The actual practices:

We are approaching our insomnia like we would a trauma, knowing that if we’re able
to wire ourselves to view sleep as a threat over time, we’re also able to unwind these
patterns.

(1) Nightly Decompression

Each night, work on engaging with activities that help relax your nervous system. This
may include a hot bath, Trauma Releasing Exercises (google David Berceli),
Constructive Rest, Liz Koch’s PSOAS work or anything else that works for you.

Also consider supplements and tonics, helping you further relax. This may include
Scullcap, Baicalin or Ashwagandha.

(2) Active Practice

 The stories that we tell ourselves about sleep i.e. “I have fatal familial insomnia, I’ll
never sleep again” are convincing, but totally bogus. We need a practice that cuts
through these stories as they arise.

The way that we feel about sleep i.e. gut-wrenchingly anxious before bed, is also a
result of a dysfunctional limbic system and not a reflection of reality – so we need a
practice that cuts through this and reminds us what it really is.

Here are the steps:

 Acknowledge that what you’re experiencing (anything sleep related), is the result of a
dysfunctional limbic system.

 Feel what you’re feeling, move out of your head and into your body.

 Treat the scared part of you as somebody to love and care for it, feel compassion
towards that part.

 Wiggle your toes

 Carry on with your day

It’s quite simple, the thought comes up, you cut through it, express compassion for
the part of you that’s wired incorrectly, and move on like nothing happened.

This is drastically different to the way most of us handle it – we have a thought about
being unable to sleep, believe it, freak out, post on Reddit and read 100 other stories
that make us feel worse.
Now, here's the longer version:

Background

I want to keep this brief, because it’s not as important as the actual practice that I’ll
share. I'm sorry if this is a little messy, other than a few select times, I haven't really
shared my story or approach, and I'm still trying to find the best way to lay it out
etc...

 Prided myself on my ability to sleep and always worked to find different things to
improve my sleep

 Started to obsess about my quality of sleep and developed all these boxes that I had
to tick to feel “well rested”. If I didn’t feel well rested, I would try and force myself to
nap for hours a day to feel better

 Stress from the above caused me to start waking up at 3am every morning and being
unable to fall back asleep. I was so obsessed with having good sleep that this made
me even more stressed, so I spent all my time looking for solutions on the internet
and being really frustrated that they didn’t work.
 After about 3 – 4 months of this, I started waking 1 – 2 hours after going to sleep and
then being unable to fall back asleep. I’d usually have a panic attack when I woke.

 Eventually, I stopped being able to sleep at all, I would have a panic attack even
thinking about sleep, going to bed felt like a warzone.

 This continued for a while, and then I decided that I couldn’t live like this and
considered taking my own life. At this point, family members and partner urged me to
go to doctors and get a prescription.

 Got a prescription, worked for a few months, but then insomnia returned. I was
unable to do anything because I was so obsessed about trying to sleep, each night I
was having either full blown panic attacks or at least crazy anxiety that stopped me
from being able to sleep.

 For the next 1 – 1.5 years, I was unable to sleep 4 – 5 nights of the week, and was
ruled with an obsession about trying to get enough sleep, avoiding anything that
challenged my sleeping schedule and fighting with my partner about this – almost
every night. Something as simple as my housemate having guests over on a Tuesday
would give me a panic attack, because of how I viewed this impacting my sleep.

How I figured it out?

Throughout the ordeal, I was continually searching online for solutions and trying to
implement them – but nothing had worked. One day, I was reading stories about
people suffering from conditions like ‘electro-hypersensitivity’ and ‘multiple chemical
sensitivities’ and noticed that my relationship to sleep / insomnia sounded very similar
to these issues. This is the article that I’m talking about
- http://limbicretraining.com/articles/my-recovery-from-severe-fabric-
sensitivity%E2%80%A8%E2%80%A8/.

Reading about these weird, psychosomatic conditions, made me think that my

relationship to sleep and insomnia could be a similar issue, and I approach it in a
similar way to these people who are suffering from unexplainable sensitivities to
things that aren’t a genuine threat.

I botched together a few different programs (well, at least what I could read of them
in recovery blogs) and came up with a practice that I was going to apply to my
'insomnia' and see if it made a difference.

So I went to my Psychologist and spoke about it, who mentioned that she'd heard
about these different approaches and how effective they may be - and I implemented
it, experiencing HUGE changes within the first two weeks and ever since, I have been
insomnia and anxiety free (well, 95% anxiety free, sometimes I still need to engage
in the practice, especially during transition periods i.e. moving house).
 My theory around the majority of insomnia cases

There are obviously cases of insomnia that don’t fit into this box, but the majority of
the cases I’m reading about are people who are doing everything right, but still
struggling with sleep.

Okay, so what I believe is happening is that sleeplessness is actually a natural

reaction to something in our lives, and it's usually transient - but there are particular
personality types (I'm wondering whether it's fairly bright people who may lean
toward the neurotic / OCD side) who feel like they are robbed of the trust in their
innate capacity for sleep, and worry about it, try to fix it, search for solutions,
catastrophize, post on Reddit etc. By doing this, they take something that may have
been a very brief thing, and crystallize it into 'their' problem, something that they
need to fix - it becomes real, concrete and takes root as a part of who we are.

In that process, our limbic system starts to view sleep, our bedroom, nighttime,
anything that threatens our 'security' i.e. going out, commitments or early get-ups, as
a threat. When you pair this with the vulnerability of a sleep-deprived nervous
system, you're creating fertile grounds for trauma to take hold and that's exactly
what happens, our nervous systems getting stuck in this hyper-sensitive, hyper-
vigilant state of fight or flight.

It becomes very circular as well i.e. we're stressed about going to bed -> we try to
find a solution -> it doesn't work and we get more stressed -> at 2am we make a
Reddit post about how helpless we are -> we read the responses and other stories
that fuel our sense of helplessness -> night-time rolls around again and we're
stressed about going to bed ...

So now, I’m going to share some preliminary points to the practice, they help
frame what you’re doing to do and support your recovery
 Get some sleep, even if it's emergency benzo sleep or getting prescribed
some medication - It's way too hard to do this work when you're sleep deprived and
you need at least a little sanity to get you through. You can worry about coming off
later. Sometimes, you need an 'unnatural' intervention to support the fact that our
issue is caused by very 'unnatural' circumstances. Now, I can't 'recommend' that you
do this, and I'm not a doctor, so please just use what's useful - this worked for me,
but it may not work for you and you need to be responsible for your decisions.
 Book a mental health worker / psychologist - this is pretty straight forward, you
can't do this alone. You need somebody who's trained in trauma i.e. Sensori Motor,
EMDR or Somatic Experiencing, like a clinical psychologist, to support you with this
work. I personally worked with a Clin Psych who was trained in Sensori Motor and
EMDR - helped bucketloads.
 Change your attitude – you’re going to have to change you relationship with
bedtime, from trying to sleep, to trying to rest. You can control your ability to focus
on rest, but you can’t force yourself to sleep, so you’re empowering yourself by
shifting your focus to resting rather than sleeping. Here’s an article
- https://www.shinzen.org/help-for-insomnia-yet-another-use-for-mindfulness/
 Find a healthy frame for this journey – you’re going to need to explore a new
‘story’ for your insomnia. Right now, it’s probably a story about how you’re victimised
by your insomnia and you’re broken forever. You need to find something more
empowering, that helps you see your suffering in a new light. I found this video
helpful - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeiHMFwDFGQ
 Accept that this isn’t going to work overnight – this takes the pressure of the
approach and lets you slowly work through your insomnia and make the required
changes. If something doesn’t work immediately, don’t take it as a sign that it’s not
going to work, just acknowledge that this is going to be a long process and you need
to be really patient.
The Practices

Okay, so the actual action steps in my approach are broken down into two
components.

 There's a nightly practice or ritual, something that you'll do each evening (if possible)
to help reduce stress, unwind your nervous system and make it easier to feel rested
in bed. I've based this practice on approaches to trauma that I have found useful, as I
feel like our insomnia is a result of a traumatised nervous system. It won't knock you
out, but over time, it'll start creating a more restful enviroment.

 There's a moment-to-moment, ongoing practice. The purpose of this practice is to

catch unhelpful and traumatic thought loops while they are happening, and mindfully
relax and redirect these. I have based this practice on the approaches that people
have used to cure their electro-hypersensitivity and other weird, chronic conditions.
It's founded in my very limited understanding of neuroplasticity, the key idea being
that each time we apply this practice to a thought loop, in the moment, we're slowly
rewiring neural pathways that are saying that sleep is a threat.

(1) Nightly Decompression

Okay, so first of all, you want to start bringing a little more rest into your actual
evenings because this will directly contribute to the anxiety you feel before bed. I did
this, because I knew that the benefits would compound over time. The idea isn't to
get rid of your anxiety or anything like that, but it does set the tone for the rest of the
night and gets you yawning etc. Don't expect it to fix your insomnia, instead see it as
 a way to shift the evenings from anxiety-inducing to restful, which will help in the
long-term.

 Hot bath / some form of warm, relaxing water - I would have a hot bath and do
nothing, feeling all of the sensations of the water and breathing deeply, which was
nice because I felt so bad, all the time, and a hot bath broke that for a period and
allowed me to feel good in my body.
 Trauma releasing practice - I'd engage in a practice that is used to help
traumatised people restore balance in their nervous systems and experience profound
relaxation. Even in my most anxious periods, this would make a huge difference and
actually get me yawning. Sometimes, it actually obliterated my evening anxiety
entirely - read about it https://traumaprevention.com/ because I'm probably not the
best at describing it.
 Supplements / tonics - I'd take Scullcap, Baicalin, Ashwaganda, high quality Reishi
like Dragonherbs or Primal Herb and also some melatonin before bed. These are super
helpful because they contribute to the winding down process and may actually give
you some sleep. I wouldn't bank on these putting you to sleep, but I used them as a
support and knew that over time, they'd support the relaxation.
(2) Active Practice

Okay, so you use this all of the time, day and night, whenever you have any thought
about sleep or any anxiety. When we think about sleep in any form, we're actually
engaging the obsession / anxiety. Whether that's looking for a solution, thinking
about how much we'll get, everything sleep-related is another expression of this
anxiety. We want to train ourselves to drop the sleep story whenever it arises, we
don't want to engage it at all. Our nervous system has some wires crossed and thinks
that sleep is a threat on some level, we want to rewire this because it's not true.

When you have a sleep related thought / anxiety, do this:

 1. Say to yourself, outloud, "this is just a dysfunctional nervous system" -

what this is doing is cutting through the BS. Instead of engaging with that anxiety,
you're just treating every anxious thought as if it's arising from a dysfunction and
then leaving it be, rather than thinking "What if this is why I'm not sleeping" and then
exploring it. You're stopping that dead in its tracks.
 2. Feel the anxiety, actually touch the sensation and see how it feels below
the story - this brings you out of your head and directly into your body, where you
can see what sort of texture, flavour etc the anxiety has.
 3. Express a moment of gratitude or care towards that fear - when you do this,
you're smiling at the anxiety and generating a sense of loving warmth. If you do some
 googling, you'll see that they've studied compassion now and have seen how it lowers
inflammation and has a huge physiological impact on the body.
 4. Wiggle your toes - this pulls you further out of your mind and the damaging
thought loop. You're flooding your brain with signals from the movement of your toes.
Here's more info - https://dianepooleheller.com/laurel-keyes-wiggle-your-toes-and-
keep-your-seat/
 5. Carry on with your day.
 6. Repeat this as many times as you need to, even if it's every 30 seconds.

 WHENEVER you have a sleep related thought, any sleep related thought at all, engage
in this practice.

Here's an example of this in action -

I was withdrawing from my medication and was convinced that going to dinner at
night would mean that I wouldn't get to sleep after, like I thought going out would
definitely contribute to my insomnia. Each time I had an anxious thought, I followed
those steps. Even when I got into bed, I kept following these steps, having thought
after thought telling me that I'd never get to sleep - and then, I woke up 8 hours later
and that was the first time in a LONG time that I had slept well after a dinner out.

(3) Some additional notes for those horrifying early-morning awakenings

When you wake up in a panic, focus on being as restful as possible, as relaxed as

possible. As waves of anxiety and thoughts telling you that you're never going to
sleep again course through you, practice self-soothing and generating a little
compassion for it. I like to say things like 'I'm here for you, it's okay', direct
compassion toward the part of you that is absolutely terrified, treat it like a young
child who's just arrived on your doorstep crying. You wouldn't turn them away or
demand that they stop crying, you'd comfort them. On a practical level, you're
rewiring your anxiety circuits into more restful circuits - the compassion has a very
direct physiological benefit to your body and soothes the nervous system.
The Practices

Okay, so the actual action steps in my approach are broken down into two
components.

 There's a nightly practice or ritual, something that you'll do each evening (if possible)
to help reduce stress, unwind your nervous system and make it easier to feel rested
in bed. I've based this practice on approaches to trauma that I have found useful, as I
feel like our insomnia is a result of a traumatised nervous system. It won't knock you
out, but over time, it'll start creating a more restful enviroment.
 There's a moment-to-moment, ongoing practice. The purpose of this practice is to
catch unhelpful and traumatic thought loops while they are happening, and mindfully
relax and redirect these. I have based this practice on the approaches that people
have used to cure their electro-hypersensitivity and other weird, chronic conditions.
It's founded in my very limited understanding of neuroplasticity, the key idea being
that each time we apply this practice to a thought loop, in the moment, we're slowly
rewiring neural pathways that are saying that sleep is a threat.

(1) Nightly Decompression

Okay, so first of all, you want to start bringing a little more rest into your actual
evenings because this will directly contribute to the anxiety you feel before bed. I did
this, because I knew that the benefits would compound over time. The idea isn't to
get rid of your anxiety or anything like that, but it does set the tone for the rest of the
night and gets you yawning etc. Don't expect it to fix your insomnia, instead see it as
a way to shift the evenings from anxiety-inducing to restful, which will help in the
long-term.

 Hot bath / some form of warm, relaxing water - I would have a hot bath and do
nothing, feeling all of the sensations of the water and breathing deeply, which was
nice because I felt so bad, all the time, and a hot bath broke that for a period and
allowed me to feel good in my body.
 Trauma releasing practice - I'd engage in a practice that is used to help
traumatised people restore balance in their nervous systems and experience profound
relaxation. Even in my most anxious periods, this would make a huge difference and
actually get me yawning. Sometimes, it actually obliterated my evening anxiety
entirely - read about it https://traumaprevention.com/ because I'm probably not the
best at describing it.
 Supplements / tonics - I'd take Scullcap, Baicalin, Ashwaganda, high quality Reishi
like Dragonherbs or Primal Herb and also some melatonin before bed. These are super
helpful because they contribute to the winding down process and may actually give
you some sleep. I wouldn't bank on these putting you to sleep, but I used them as a
support and knew that over time, they'd support the relaxation.
(2) Active Practice

Okay, so you use this all of the time, day and night, whenever you have any thought
about sleep or any anxiety. When we think about sleep in any form, we're actually
engaging the obsession / anxiety. Whether that's looking for a solution, thinking
about how much we'll get, everything sleep-related is another expression of this
anxiety. We want to train ourselves to drop the sleep story whenever it arises, we
 don't want to engage it at all. Our nervous system has some wires crossed and thinks
that sleep is a threat on some level, we want to rewire this because it's not true.

When you have a sleep related thought / anxiety, do this:

 1. Say to yourself, outloud, "this is just a dysfunctional nervous system" -

what this is doing is cutting through the BS. Instead of engaging with that anxiety,
you're just treating every anxious thought as if it's arising from a dysfunction and
then leaving it be, rather than thinking "What if this is why I'm not sleeping" and then
exploring it. You're stopping that dead in its tracks.
 2. Feel the anxiety, actually touch the sensation and see how it feels below
the story - this brings you out of your head and directly into your body, where you
can see what sort of texture, flavour etc the anxiety has.
 3. Express a moment of gratitude or care towards that fear - when you do this,
you're smiling at the anxiety and generating a sense of loving warmth. If you do some
googling, you'll see that they've studied compassion now and have seen how it lowers
inflammation and has a huge physiological impact on the body.
 4. Wiggle your toes - this pulls you further out of your mind and the damaging
thought loop. You're flooding your brain with signals from the movement of your toes.
Here's more info - https://dianepooleheller.com/laurel-keyes-wiggle-your-toes-and-
keep-your-seat/
 5. Carry on with your day.
 6. Repeat this as many times as you need to, even if it's every 30 seconds.

 WHENEVER you have a sleep related thought, any sleep related thought at all, engage
in this practice.

Here's an example of this in action -

I was withdrawing from my medication and was convinced that going to dinner at
night would mean that I wouldn't get to sleep after, like I thought going out would
definitely contribute to my insomnia. Each time I had an anxious thought, I followed
those steps. Even when I got into bed, I kept following these steps, having thought
after thought telling me that I'd never get to sleep - and then, I woke up 8 hours later
and that was the first time in a LONG time that I had slept well after a dinner out.

(3) Some additional notes for those horrifying early-morning awakenings

When you wake up in a panic, focus on being as restful as possible, as relaxed as

possible. As waves of anxiety and thoughts telling you that you're never going to
sleep again course through you, practice self-soothing and generating a little
compassion for it. I like to say things like 'I'm here for you, it's okay', direct
compassion toward the part of you that is absolutely terrified, treat it like a young
child who's just arrived on your doorstep crying. You wouldn't turn them away or
demand that they stop crying, you'd comfort them. On a practical level, you're
rewiring your anxiety circuits into more restful circuits - the compassion has a very
direct physiological benefit to your body and soothes the nervous system.