Sleep perfectionism during insomnia

Insomnia can bring out perfectionistic tendencies around sleep. We start developing ideas about how quickly we should fall asleep, how many hours we should get, how deeply we should sleep or how we should feel the next morning. Anything less than those ideals tends to be seen as a failure.

Of course, wanting the very best for ourselves isn’t a crime. Everyone wants to feel good and sleep well. But in the chase for perfect sleep, perfectionism can ironically prevent us from getting the life we want.

During insomnia, I used to be highly demanding of myself when it came to sleep. I thought that if my nights didn’t look exactly like they did before insomnia, then they were worth nothing…and I was worth nothing. Pretty harsh!

And while I still catch myself demanding perfection in some areas of life (and I’m still working on it), when it comes to sleep, that’s no longer the case. And that’s what helped me overcome insomnia and sleep anxiety.

Perfect sleep is a moving target

Ask 10 people what their ideal sleep looks like and you will get 10 different answers.

• To one person, it might be getting 8 solid hours of sleep.
• To another, it could be waking up refreshed and positive.
• For someone else, it’s deep, quality sleep (whatever that means).

And it doesn’t stop there! Our ideal of sleep can change from one day to another. Today, perfect sleep could be defined by how fast we fall asleep; tomorrow, it could be about how refreshed we feel; the day after, it’s all about the number of hours.

But if we take an average “good” sleeper, we’ll usually find the following:

• Sometimes it takes them a bit longer to fall asleep.
• Or they wake up unrefreshed and groggy.
• Or they have very light sleep.
• Or they wake up and toss and turn for an hour in bed.

We all experience this because we are human beings and our sleep is naturally variable and easily disrupted.

So when we set a goal of consistently getting 8 hours, making sure we have enough REM, or meeting any other sleep goal we might have, not only do we tend to get frustrated because reality doesn’t match our expectations, but we also reinforce the insomnia cycle by adding pressure to sleep.

How to drop sleep perfectionism

The process of going from being a perfectionist about sleep to becoming more flexible with the night’s outcomes is gradual.

In my own experience, I went through three stages:

All-or-nothing thinking → Spectrum thinking → Normalizing

Stage 1: All-or-nothing thinking

That’s what we usually begin with. Perfectionism creates the illusion that there are good nights and bad nights and nothing in between. And naturally, we want all the good nights and none of the bad ones. All or nothing; pass or fail. But just imagine how much pressure that creates!

This type of thinking creates an emotional rollercoaster: you jump between feeling victorious and feeling miserable. When you catch a “good wave,” you feel like the problem is over and celebrate the result. But when the night doesn’t go the way you expect, you quickly spiral into a dark place.

If we want to overcome insomnia, this isn’t the stage we want to hang out in for too long.

Stage 2: “Spectrum” thinking

Instead of thinking in dualistic terms, we begin to see nights on a spectrum.

No two “good” nights are equally “good,” and no two “bad” nights are equally “bad.”

Let me give you an example.

• If you could choose between 7 hours of sleep and 6 hours of sleep, what would you prefer? Okay. How about 6 hours and 4 hours? What about 4 hours and 2 hours?
• What if you had to choose between a full night of solid sleep and waking up completely unrefreshed, or sleeping 4 hours and feeling great the next day?
• How about choosing between a night where you sleep for 1 hour while feeling anxious the whole time and 1 hour while feeling peaceful?

Whatever night you had, amazing or not, there will always be something “better” and something “worse.” The spectrum is infinite.

In some ways, spectrum thinking is about lowering the bar for the definition of “good” sleep. Suddenly, a night of 4 hours doesn’t sound quite as disastrous if you had to choose between that and, let’s say, 2 hours. (It depends on what is important to you.)

By practicing this kind of thinking, you might start recognizing that your nights aren’t as catastrophic as they once felt.

Stage 3: “Normalizing”

We can even go one step further. If spectrum thinking was about lowering the bar for what a “good” or acceptable night is, this third stage removes the bar completely.

I call it “normalizing” because at this stage, we treat any night as an allowed, normal night that can happen in anyone’s life.

Normalizing doesn’t mean we enjoy a choppy night as much as we’d enjoy a night with more sleep, but we begin to recognize that even that night has a right to exist in our experience.

It’s also not about resigning ourselves to the permanence of those nights. No, it’s simply about not treating them as problems.

You still get to keep your preferences about your nights and like some nights more than others, but fundamentally, you don’t demand that those less preferable nights shouldn’t happen.

When we normalize and allow any sort of night and any experience, we begin to feel more at peace with any outcome. The pressure and hyperarousal around sleep can start to drop, creating a much more sleep-friendly environment.

Interestingly, this third stage also means removing labels such as “good” and “bad” sleepers. We no longer rate ourselves based on individual nights. Instead of giving ourselves an attribute, we can simply say:

“I am a human being with an innate ability to produce sleep. Sometimes I sleep less, and sometimes I sleep more.”