Does acceptance in recovery mean it doesn’t matter if we don’t sleep?
One of the most common pushbacks on insomnia recovery through acceptance and befriending wakefulness sounds something like this:
“I don’t agree at all that insomnia isn’t dangerous or that sleep isn’t important. It obviously is! How can I accept something that’s obviously harming me?”
Or:
“I don’t think my fear of not sleeping is irrational!”
I want to comment on those types of statements and hopefully resolve some of the misunderstandings that may arise.
Things that I agree with
First of all, I want to acknowledge the things that I agree with in those statements.
Being concerned about our health and well-being isn’t irrational at all. Everyone wants to feel good and avoid suffering, and it’s normal to care about that. But there’s a difference between healthy concern and wanting to get better, and the internal agony we can experience when we continuously fight with insomnia.
Sleep isn’t unimportant. Of course, sleep is a natural function of our body, just like digestion, blood circulation, breathing and whatnot. And we do need sleep, just like we need all the other functions of our body. Acceptance doesn’t dispute that.
Sleeping less can also affect how we feel physically. In the short term, we can experience consequences of less sleep – tiredness, irritability, difficulty focusing, brain fog, etc. Saying that sleep deprivation can’t bring any discomfort at all is simply not true.
Things insomnia tends to distort
But this is where insomnia can use its leverage: it takes our normal, healthy desires and preferences and turns them into an emergency and a catastrophe that has to be fixed or avoided ASAP.
Instead of a reasonable:
“I’d rather sleep because I’ll feel better tomorrow.”
We can fall into:
“I must sleep. I cannot cope if I don’t. I’m damaging myself. This cannot continue. Something terrible will happen.”
In that activated state, we often overestimate the danger we are facing – we treat probabilities and hypothetical scenarios as an inevitable destiny. This urges us to do things that reinforce the fear, keeping the insomnia cycle intact.
We are safer than we think
My personal stance on this is: we are safer than we think.
Yes, insomnia can be incredibly difficult and tormenting. It might be one of the hardest things a person can experience in life. But it doesn’t doom us to some horrible future outcome.
Of course, I’m not making an argument for staying in insomnia – my idea is the opposite. We can break the cycle and get better! But I find it very helpful to decrease the sense of urgency and pressure wherever we can.
Health concerns are valid, and I had them too when I first started struggling with insomnia. I thought this was the end of me. I thought my days were numbered and that the multiple all-nighters I had experienced would eventually kill me.
But none of that happened, despite the incredibly strong fear and sleep disruption I experienced. And many people with insomnia eventually discover something similar. Despite going through a horrendous experience, they survive it. Quite often, they are physically healthy too.
Without making any absolute statements, let’s entertain the idea that our health is more complex than we sometimes think.
We may consciously or unconsciously begin to believe that sleep is the one thing our health depends on and that once we lose it, we are doomed. But look at real-life experiences:
Could we say that everyone who experiences insomnia also has poor health?
And could we say that every person who has no sleep issues whatsoever remains in perfect health for the rest of their life?
I don’t know about you, but I’ve seen plenty of examples that contradict those assumptions.
There are people with insomnia who are in great health. There are people without insomnia who have serious medical conditions. There are also people who sleep poorly and have health issues (which aren’t always necessarily linked), and people who don’t struggle with sleep and are generally healthy.
Our health clearly rests on more than sleep alone. Understanding that insomnia isn’t a death sentence and that we can break the insomnia cycle can give us hope and motivation to start making changes.
What is (and isn’t) acceptance?
Acceptance tends to be misunderstood, and I used to misunderstand it as well. That led me to struggle with the idea for quite a while.
Now that I understand it a bit better, I want to share what acceptance is not:
- A magical tool to make sleeplessness and anxiety go away.
- A denial of the hardship of insomnia.
- An approval of insomnia.
- A resignation to lifelong suffering or the belief that things can never change.
Acceptance is surrendering the effort to control what’s beyond our control while changing what can be changed.
It can hold both perspectives at once: a desire to sleep well and feel good, while releasing the insistence that our nights must look a certain way.
In a way, acceptance “works” by subtraction. We aren’t adding more solutions – we are reducing the amount of problem-solving and fixing that goes into insomnia recovery.
That said, sometimes acceptance can become its own form of control. When that happens, it stops actually being acceptance. But that’s a topic for another time – in the Library, we talk about that nuance quite regularly.
All in all, acceptance and letting go of control don’t require you to believe that poor sleep is healthy, desirable or consequence-free. But they mean changing how we respond to and relate to sleeplessness when it happens.