Recovery Essentials Guide

The following guide walks you through the main principles and elements of insomnia recovery with helpful links for self-study.

Insomnia is often a circular problem. We have a bad night, then we begin to worry about it and try to fix the situation by adding more effort. But all our efforts tend to lead to more pressure and, as a result, more wakefulness. Which then only reinforces the worry. It becomes a vicious cycle.

To break that cycle, we need to start approaching it differently.

Main principle: acceptance

The central theme of recovery is acceptance: accepting what’s not in our control while changing what we can change.

With insomnia and sleep anxiety, there are a few things we can’t control directly, and it’s important to accept that to move forward in recovery:

We can’t control sleep itself.
We can’t control our automatic thoughts and emotions.

But there are things we can work with: what we understand, how we behave, how we relate to our experiences, and how we treat ourselves. And it turns out to be enough to break the cycle.

Four elements of recovery

Mapping out my own recovery path and observing the recovery journeys of others, I came up with four essential elements that tend to lead to change:

Understanding – changing what you know
Experience – changing how you act
Attitude – changing how you think
Self-compassion – changing how you relate to yourself

Four elements of recovery

1. Understanding

Changing what we know

The topic of insomnia and sleep anxiety is still poorly understood by the general public. Usually, a person who develops insomnia is left in the dark. Insomnia appears as a mysterious monster, a disease that seems to wreak havoc in our lives. The lack of understanding, and sometimes misunderstanding, often leads to even more fear and pressure, which reinforces the problem.

Education becomes the first key factor in recovery. Once we know how insomnia and sleep anxiety work, what maintains the cycle and what principles can break us free from it, a lot of the experience starts to feel less mysterious and more understandable.

There are a few key ideas about sleep, insomnia and anxiety that can help us see the problem differently. Three especially useful ones are:

Sleep is a passive process that can’t be controlled. No person, no matter how good their sleep is, controls their sleep. Sleep isn’t a skill; it’s a function of our body. It isn’t something that we do; it’s something that happens to us.

The ability to sleep can’t be unlearned or broken. Various things can interfere with sleep – stress, physical discomfort, fear of not sleeping, and so on – but they don’t take away our ability to sleep. The mechanism itself remains intact.

Effort to sleep makes sleep more elusive. Effort introduces pressure and awareness into a process that isn’t meant to be consciously observed.

Read the full list of 11 ideas that can make insomnia feel less frightening.

It’s not uncommon to hear that a person feels a bit of relief after understanding what’s actually going on and why they feel the way they feel.

In the beginning, spending a little bit of time studying the subject can give us a nice footing for future changes.

Here are some helpful links for self-study:

2. Experience

Changing how we act

If understanding alone was enough, then insomnia recovery wouldn’t take longer than a week. But it’s one thing to understand things intellectually and a completely different thing to understand them experientially.

We need to be willing to expose ourselves to some experiences in order to teach our anxious brain that we are safe even if we’re awake. We can’t overcome anxiety without being willing to face it. And we need to change how we behave during that time – from trying hard to sleep to making friends with the nighttime. In other words: show, don’t tell.

This is the part where people start gradually and gently reducing the effort to sleep, engaging more with life despite insomnia and embracing wakefulness in a new way. They also learn to respond differently to their own anxiety – instead of trying to get rid of it, they start to coexist with it, finding ways to live life even if the feeling is present.

Here are some helpful links for self-study:

3. Attitude

Changing how we think and relate

Understanding and experiencing are already a powerful combo. But it also matters what attitude we bring to them. I’ve seen people doing all the right things with the wrong mindset and feeling discouraged that they didn’t work. They’d bite the bullet and face the night, but as they did that, their relationship with that moment wasn’t changing: “I’m just going to tolerate this awful night and hopefully it will stop happening.”

An understandable perspective, but unfortunately, it’s not going to serve us here.

We want to genuinely start seeing that wakefulness isn’t our enemy, that anxiety isn’t here to get us, and that we can handle challenging things in life. We don’t need to love or enjoy those things, but we can recognize that while uncomfortable, they aren’t the end of the world.

This is the part where we start befriending our own emotions and building a new attitude toward them.

Here are some helpful links for self-study:

4. Self-compassion

Changing how we relate to ourselves

Treating oneself with compassion and acceptance tends to be the most overlooked element of recovery. I often see perfectionists and high achievers among people struggling with insomnia – people who are used to demanding a lot from themselves. And those same tendencies can easily show up in recovery: we beat ourselves up for every mistake we make.

We might look at residual struggles and wonder – what’s wrong with me? Why can’t I just get it? Why is it so much harder for me than for others? Maybe my insomnia is unique…

Insomnia recovery is a messy process, full of ups and downs and all kinds of twists. And even if we do everything right, sometimes things don’t turn out the way we want. We want to accept that and stop beating ourselves up for it. Sometimes self-criticism and self-rejection is what stalls us from moving forward.

Here are some helpful links for self-study:

When things get more nuanced

The information above gives you the gist of the recovery process and is often enough to start moving in a different direction.

But recovery gets messy in practice.

That’s why I created the Fearless Sleep Library – a growing collection of resources where I explore the nuances of insomnia recovery in much more depth, alongside a community where these ideas can be discussed and applied to real-life situations.

If you feel like you understand the basics but could use more depth, structure and peer support along the way, you’re welcome to join us.

Explore the Library →