Irina’s struggle with insomnia began when she experienced a night of no sleep. This created fear and confusion and Irina worried that something serious was going on — that something might be broken in her brain. The more she tried to make sleep happen, the more pressure she put on herself to make sleep happen, the more elusive it became.

Irina tried medication but that left her feeling unrefreshed and didn’t deal with the hyperarousal and increasing levels of anxiety she was experiencing. Turning to cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I), Irina found sleep restriction helpful in the short-term because it helped her rediscover the reassuring sensation of sleepiness rather than fatigue and exhaustion.

Unfortunately, the CBT-I technique of stimulus control which involves leaving the bed when awake at night backfired because she was someone who loved spending time in bed — so getting up felt like a punishment and something that raised the stakes at night. She ended up putting more pressure on herself to make sleep happen and that, in turn, made things more difficult.

The turning point came when Irina committed to an approach that didn’t involve actions geared toward trying to make sleep happen. Although she was originally outraged at the idea of accepting the presence of insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it, the fact that so many people who had recovered from insomnia were telling her it was the only thing that worked for them led her to commit to this new approach.

Acceptance was not easy but ongoing practice helped Irina build skill in experiencing insomnia with less struggle. She became less attached to the idea that she needed to make a certain amount or type of sleep happen. She became more comfortable experiencing difficult thoughts and feelings. The focus of her attention expanded and, as that happened, the power and influence of sleep and insomnia shrunk.

Irina let go. She allowed the full range of human thoughts and feelings to come and go as they chose. She gave sleep the opportunity to take care of itself while she took care of doing things that helped her live the life she wanted to live. And, that’s exactly what happened.

Click here for a full transcript of this episode.

Martin: Welcome to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. My name is Martin Reed. I believe that by changing how we respond to insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it, we can move away from struggling with insomnia and toward living the life we want to live.

Martin: The content of this podcast is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. The statements and opinions expressed by guests are their own and are not necessarily endorsed by Insomnia Coach LLC. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied.

Martin: Hello, Irina. Thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to come onto the podcast.

Irina: Hello, Martin. Thank you for having me here.

Martin: It’s great to have you on. I’m really excited to get going. So let’s just start right at the beginning. can you tell us when your sleep problems first began and what you think might have caused those initial issues with sleep?

Irina: Yeah, I remember the exact day, the exact date, the exact day of the week. It felt like it happened All of a sudden out of the blue, because I never struggled with insomnia before, but with the clarity of hindsight, I could actually see that there were some signs of burnout looming over me for eight months to a year before my insomnia started.

Irina: They were just not invisible, but they were not serious. I would get a little bit more snappy. I would feel more tired just before insomnia started. I felt I had tremors from time to time, but I thought, you know what? I’m just busy because I was working a lot on my computer and I thought it’s all the tension.

Irina: So I didn’t give it much attention until one night I just couldn’t sleep. I just couldn’t sleep the whole night. And it was. Bewildering. It was very, scary.

Martin: When that night of no sleep happened, I think maybe when it first happens, it can be a bit confusing, but typically when it’s that first night, we’re Oh, that sucked that night. And we have that expectation or that things will get back on track or we don’t really dig too much into it, especially if we feel like, Oh, I was under a lot of stress.

Martin: What happened next that made you feel that this might be a bigger problem, this might not be an isolated incident?

Irina: I actually, yeah, I have to say, I thought, what, maybe tomorrow I’m going to sleep, maybe tonight. So the next day, maybe tonight I’m going to sleep. Although it was very weird, even the first night, because in hindsight, I realized I was having panic attacks. I just couldn’t understand what was happening.

Irina: Cause I felt like. twitching and I felt hard palpitations, but I couldn’t put it together. So it just felt like a feeling of doom, a feeling of fear inside me, but because Mentally, I was in a good place. I was not afraid of insomnia. I was not afraid at that point of anything. I just couldn’t understand what was happening in my body because I had all these bodily sensations, but I dismissed it saying, okay, tomorrow or tonight, I’m going to sleep really early, 7 p. m. Have a nice bath, go for a run before that and retire early and sleep like a baby and, compensate for the previous night.

Irina: Of course that didn’t happen. I put it in more pressure on my sleep and the whole night I was wide awake waiting for the sleep to happen, listening to audio books, listening to meditations, listening to all kinds of mantras and sleepy songs and stories, and that didn’t happen and I was like, Oh my God, I got a problem.

Irina: I didn’t think I got insomnia to be honest. That was not on my, mind. I was like, I’ve got a serious problem. I must have some neurotransmitter dysfunction. Something broke in my brain because. I don’t have a problem with sleep, so it must be something really serious going on. So went to the doctor straight away saying, Look, I can’t sleep.

Irina: I don’t know what’s happening, but something really serious is happening. And doctor said, I don’t think it’s anything wrong. Maybe it’s a little bit of stress. Why don’t you take some Zolpidem.

Irina: Just take this pill for a couple of days and it will sort itself out in a couple of days. I came back home and I had mixed feelings about Z drugs, about sleeping pills because I was thinking in my head, like, how sustainable is this? But okay, let’s do it for a couple of days and see. So I had the pill and, I did fall asleep, but I slept very little, four hours and I woke up not at all refreshed.

Irina: I didn’t feel like I slept. I was, still pumping with adrenaline. I was hyper aroused 24 hours. So I felt like I didn’t sleep. So I was like, what’s the point of taking medicine if I’m not sleeping and I, knew that they create dependencies. So I stopped taking them and then I was just looking for solutions because I was still convinced that it’s not a sleep problem.

Irina: That’s another reason why I didn’t want to take sleeping pills because I thought, no, I really have a serious problem somewhere. One of my organs just stopped functioning properly and I need to get it checked. So the whole rabbit hole started of, going for doing all kinds of blood works, going for ECG.

Irina: At some point I thought it’s a heart problem. I was convinced it’s a brain problem, but at that point I was anxious, which I didn’t realize in the moment. So I didn’t have the courage to go into a scan machine to get a brain scan, but I did everything else and surprisingly everything came back positive.

Irina: It was all good. So that’s when I was. Thinking maybe, it is something to do with sleep.

Martin: Yes, it’s interesting how, you said that you had these different tests to try and get to the bottom of this and everything came back positive. And almost all the time when we get test results that are positive, we’re really excited, right? But sometimes when it comes to looking for the root of our sleep issues, the struggle, when they come back positive, we can almost be a little bit disappointed because we still don’t have that explanation for what’s going on.

Irina: Yeah. I so wanted something to be negative actually, because if I, if they told me Your vitamin D is your vitamin D deficient, which actually I was, I was looking for something more serious, like some B12 or something, or not that is more serious than vitamin D, but I saw I was deficient in vitamin D throughout my life.

Irina: at various points. So I was reading that B6 overdose can cause. So I was thinking maybe I’m overdosed on something. Maybe I’m really deficient on something. And I was really disappointed because I, if it’s a vitamin or supplement deficiency, you can just supplement it and you’re okay. And at least you have something to focus on.

Irina: You okay, this is the problem. I know how to fix it. But here, when everything is okay. It’s you really don’t know where to go. You really don’t know what to do.

Martin: Yeah, and I think that’s why it’s so easy to get tangled up in this struggle because it’s like we’re trying, right? no one can say that we’re not trying. We’re trying to figure out what’s causing this. We’re trying to fix it. And the tricky thing with sleep and insomnia is it’s now you can look back.

Martin: I’m sure you can realize this, but when we’re tangled up in the struggle, it’s different. But it’s like the more we try to fix it, the more we try and make sleep happen, the more we chase after sleep, The more elusive it can become, the more difficult it can become, the more exhausting and more difficult everything becomes.

Martin: as we just embark upon this completely understandable quest of trying to fix, trying to control, sleep.

Irina: Absolutely. It makes so much sense now after going through this and learning through the experience. Any pressure that you put towards that process creates only more fear and more tension and more pressure on sleep, and it just results in less sleep and more fear.

Martin: Yeah. It’s like that vicious cycle, isn’t it? It’s we try more, we put more effort in and we struggle more. So then we try more, but then we struggle more and we just caught in that loop. And it just feels like there’s no way to break out of that loop.

Irina: 100%.

Martin: How was this new relationship with sleep, this kind of more problematic relationship you’re having with sleep? How is this affecting your days?

Irina: Oh, it’s affected my entire life. It affected my days. It affected my nights, but, in a word I became dysfunctional. I was, I had to stop my masters. At the time I was in the middle of a master’s degree and I just couldn’t do it. I just didn’t feel like it’s worth it anymore because here I had a life and death situation and I just couldn’t focus on, on my studies.

Irina: I was in a panic mode constantly. My mother flew in from another country to help me with the children. I have two young children because I was, consumed by this preoccupation of finding what’s going on. And, in the beginning I was very much, so somebody, some of the GPs suggested that could be stress. I, went and I saw several doctors by that, at that point.

Irina: So I said, okay, if it’s stress, then I definitely need to relax. And the more I was trying to relax, the more stressful it was. So the whole day I was like doing baths, reading on the internet. Google is such a bad advice. when you go through insomnia or anxiety or any fear, that didn’t help at all.

Irina: I, it affected my health to the extent that. I was not able to eat, I lost a lot of weight, I was on the verge of anorexia. I was not able to focus on anything else. I was not, friends, life, social life, travels, studies, career, nothing mattered anymore. It was all about fixing this. And just at some point in the beginning, it was fear of death that was pushing me forward and I need to find a solution. And then, thanks to your program where you mentioned, meta analysis by Lovato and Lack, 2019, where a paper that says that there’s no Relationship, no association between insomnia and mortality. So I relaxed a little bit. It actually helps a lot in those circumstances because we are afraid of death.

Irina: We’re afraid of, am I, going to die because of this? It was very helpful to, to take a step back and say, ah, look, it’s not that grim. It’s not that bad. People actually can live with through this. With this, through this at that point, I didn’t know, but it was very assuring to, to have that, to, know that also because I was, doing, and I’m still doing my research.

Irina: I’m about to finish my master’s that one that I had to stop because of insomnia, because I was doing the research at my ironically, it’s a master’s in neuroscience and mental health. So this kind of things I should have known. But. When I was going through my master’s, anxiety didn’t seem like a very serious problem.

Irina: I focused all my energy on things like schizophrenia, bipolar. So it was ironic for me to go through this and not see myself as anxious. so it affected, my life on all levels.

Martin: Yeah, I think you really encapsulated how this can just end up controlling our actions, it can really consume our attention, and it can just become the focus of everything as we’re trying to We’re trying to fix it. We’re troubleshooting. Even when we don’t want to be looking into how to fix it, our brain is probably whirring around in the background, just thinking about what tonight’s going to be like or what last night was like, how we can fix this, and it just becomes.

Martin: So much harder for us to live the life we want to live, right? Because it just consumes so much of our energy, our attention, our focus. And it can, like you touched upon, it can control, end up, feel like it controls our actions as well.

Irina: Yeah. It’s something that. Especially the thoughts, the actions you do have control and you’ll learn. And we’ll speak about it. We learn, you learn that you have control over your actions. That’s one of the few things that you have control in this relationship with insomnia, with the thoughts are automatic and you can’t control them.

Irina: And the more you try, the more difficult it becomes. So defusion as part of ACT. Is it was a key component in my recovery because I learned that I’m not my thoughts and I don’t have to identify with my thoughts and even though they are present. I can let them be, you, just can’t stop them. And for some time, they will just run around your head saying, let’s leave tonight.

Irina: let’s leave tonight. And I remember I was listening. I was binging on your podcast in that, period. And you had one of the guests mentioning that at some point she was so stressed that she would think about come, evening. She would think about sleep, how she’s going to sleep three times in 10 minutes.

Irina: And I’m like, Oh my God, I feel like I was thinking about a day and night every second. I just couldn’t get away from It it was like a prison. It was the prison of, your mind. But that also goes,

Martin: Yeah, those thoughts can be very difficult and distracting. And I think there’s a kind of parallel there, right? It’s like when insomnia shows up and we don’t want it to be there, so we try and get rid of it. The same can be said for all the thoughts and the feelings that can come with insomnia when it’s happening and the next day.

Martin: We don’t want those thoughts there. We don’t want to experience the feelings that are showing up. And so we are naturally going to want to try to fight them. or trying to avoid them from showing up in the first place. And that can be another source of additional struggle, just like you touched upon.

Irina: I agree. The feelings can be very difficult when you go through this, very difficult and very and natural. So the thing with feelings in the beginning when you feel that panic, you’re obviously in fight or flight, you’re trying to find a solution, and that feeling that way seems to be justified. Like people who tell me relax, calm down, like no it doesn’t matter, you sleep, you don’t sleep, I could don’t understand.

Irina: Like I was looking around this people who are trying to reassure me. It’s they obviously don’t know what insomnia is. I, was governed by feelings of fear, but because they felt justified, I didn’t pay attention to them. I didn’t feel they were inadequate. However, later on in my experience, when I spiraled down.

Irina: Because insomnia is a very nonlinear journey. And I was listening to this message in every single podcast, but somehow I didn’t, I don’t know if I didn’t register. I knew that it was not linear, but you, when you, think that it’s not linear, something is not linear. You think that something is up and down, and this is a very important message for, anyone struggling and feeling that. The process is not linear or not even up and down. This down can be quite long. You don’t before you go up. So it doesn’t have to be one day, good one day, bad. It can be a few weeks. up and down and then you can have a really bad, right?

Irina: So when I was going through this down and I was thinking, Oh, this is not going to plan. This is not up and down. This is really becoming really, serious. I was assaulted by emotions of hopelessness, emotions of deep sadness, emotions of Despair, and sometimes bereavement, sometimes grief. Sometimes it was a feeling that somebody died.

Irina: And at that point, my, my, insomnia degenerated into generalized anxiety and agoraphobia and many other things, but it felt the feelings were. Were very real. They were not true because nothing was happening on the outside. Everything was stable, but inside there was a storm and it’s very important to accept everything.

Irina: To accept your sleeplessness, to accept your thoughts, to accept your emotions.

Martin: The more you try to relax, the harder it becomes to relax. And I think that’s related to what you were saying where we can try to maybe fight certain thoughts, but we can also chase other feelings. so the more we kind of chase relaxation or the more we try to not think, the more again, we get get tangled up in that struggle.

Irina: Yeah. any pressure on any resistance in this journey backfires. You, it’s very hard to let go. Thankfully I came across your channel fairly early in my journey and, before that, I, heard about acceptance because before that CBT-I is the gold standard.

Irina: I’m still as, somebody who experienced insomnia and as somebody who I’m doing now a research proposal on, insomnia and I’m looking at, treatments. It’s the research community and in science is full of CBT-I and I can understand that it works for some people, but I was surprised to see that acceptance is still in the shadow.

Irina: when you look on Google Scholar, for example, unless you know about it, unless somebody tells you about acceptance, it’s hard to, come by. So first thing that I did was CBT-I because that was the thing that I knew about, about, and. Thankfully, somebody that was one of the mentions, it was not also an online program and it is helpful in its own ways.

Irina: I think psychoeducation learning about sleep is, helpful. they helped me understand that my hypnic jerks were absolutely normal, which was again, reassuring, but they had a very small portion on hyper arousal. And thankfully they had something. And, So they touched on, acceptance.

Irina: And I remember I got enraged when I saw acceptance. That was the very first time I came across the word acceptance. I was in rage. I was, it was outraged. Like, how can you ask me to accept such a state? It’s just not human. it’s cruel to tell someone, accept your state. And they had a Facebook group.

Irina: And I remember I just lashed out, vented. I said, I cannot accept living without sleeping because my pattern, I was not able to fall asleep. I know that somebody struggled with sleep maintenance. For me, sleep onset was the problem. And, I was like, I was grateful if I could fall asleep even for an hour.

Irina: Like I was praying for an hour of sleep because my pattern was no sleep, And then one day I would sleep four hours, six hours, maybe sometimes eight hours, but that was not usual, but usually no sleep. A little bit of sleep, no sleep, a little bit of sleep, more or less. it’s not every day is different, but this was a sort of a pattern that I was going through.

Irina: And when they told me that I have to accept that, I just said, no, that’s not possible, but what pushed me towards acceptance was the feedback. Like it was a CBT-I group. But people who recovered and, came back and were maintaining that group were talking, acceptance is the only thing that worked for me.

Irina: And I was still in disbelief that people could accept such a thing, but yeah, you do actually, you do. And in the beginning, the advice that I got, the advice that I got in that, and then I left that forum because sleep restriction was not something I could do, was that you don’t have to accept that this is going to be your life forever, you just accept that this moment.

Irina: This moment is the way it is, and there’s nothing you can or have to do in this moment. Tomorrow, next moment could be different, but this moment is the way it is. And in time, you start with accepting a moment, and then another moment, and then you, can’t believe it, perhaps in the beginning, but you can get to a point where you can accept a life of insomnia.

Irina: And the moment you can accept living with it, Something paradoxical happens and you don’t put pressure anymore and the hypervigilance goes down. So acceptance. Yeah. It’s a big, one.

Martin: We we associate the word acceptance with giving up, but it’s not really about that. It’s about accepting that there’s some stuff that we don’t have control over. It’s about accepting that the more we struggle with the difficult stuff that we can’t control. the more difficult it can become. and like you said, it’s not about accepting this is the way things are going to be forever.

Martin: And with acceptance, If nothing else, we start to move away from adding the struggle on top, which makes it more difficult. when the insomnia, for example, shows up, we’re lying in bed, wide awake, when we want to be asleep, racing heart, feeling really anxious. That’s really difficult. Then, when we try to get rid of it, we try to fight it, we try to resist it.

Martin: That adds this whole new layer of difficulty on top. And if we start to practice acceptance, being more comfortable, being more skilled in experiencing this difficult stuff, we’re not adding more difficulty on top. We’re not consuming more energy, more attention. We’re not giving this stuff more fuel and more focus within our lives.

Irina: absolutely. When I returned to my master’s, I changed the focus to nervous system and to anxiety. I, It’s very interesting to see how biologically this happens because the moment you are stressed, like even let’s say stress can be, what is stress?

Irina: Stress is basically a demand for energy. I need more energy now. And you can be stressed when even now, when we have the discussion is the first time I do a podcast, I could feel a little bit of adrenaline. So what happens is that you feel stressed. And there is like a stress axis called the HPA axis in, our body.

Irina: And it sends the message to, to secrete a little bit of adrenaline and cortisol. and that’s okay. That gives us energy. But if this is chronic, or if, On top of this, so you’re already pumping with some hormones on top of that, you add an additional layer of stress by thinking, Oh, what can I do? Why am I not sleeping?

Irina: Why is this happening to me? As you said, all this struggle, you add an additional layer off of hormones. You’re basically asking your stress system to give you more energy. To keep you awake so that you can find a solution. And this prevents you from falling asleep because you don’t need the stress hormones pumping your body.

Irina: And when it comes to acceptance, I was, listening about acceptance and I, had to go on belief and the beginning, but it still didn’t make sense to my science mind, to my logical minds. Like, how does this work? How can acceptance bring me to a place of, Peace, a place of rest, a place of non resistance.

Irina: And I learned that all this hyper arousal, it’s stored in the brain area that it’s called the limbic system. You cannot, order yourself to be relaxed because your emotions, your fear is in the, limbic system, which contains the amygdala or the fear center. And the way acceptance works, the more you expose yourself to, I would, stay at night awake and do you see the paper in the back. That’s your AWAKE exercise. I still have it because it’s useful in so many areas of life, not only insomnia, but it reminds me to accept anything that comes my way. Anything that I don’t have control over, I don’t need to resist and to spend energy that I can use. So I would stay awake at night and I was doing AWAKE.

Irina: I was doing acceptance. Sometimes I was using the audio sometimes I would just follow the principles and I would just Go and expect, what do I feel? What kind of bodily sensations? What kind of thoughts are there? What kind of emotions? Usually emotions, they’re so present. You can’t ignore them. It’s, you don’t need to look for them.

Irina: They’re just there. And, they come in all flavors, frustration, sadness, hopelessness, fear. And the more you stay with them, because you cannot tell your brain. Or, okay, now you don’t be afraid because there’s nothing to be afraid of. It works differently. The limbic system, the fear system works through behavior.

Irina: it’s like a, it’s like a child for those who have children, young children, toddlers, and you tell them the afraid, let’s say my, children, for example, they are sometimes afraid of monsters and no matter how many times I say there’s no monster, there’s no such thing as monster. Like you cannot explain it.

Irina: You could not think. Out of fear. It’s something that you have to feel it’s a behavior. It’s something that and that takes time. So don’t expect that you can come out of this like you listened when you know about psychoeducation. That’s about 20%. The edge is off. But in order to put this fire out. It takes time.

Irina: It takes a few months, the best case and a bit longer, it depends on how much stress you’re adding on. When you stay with the emotion and with the thoughts in your mind’s eye, and you observe them, first of all, you detach, you are not the emotion. And when you observe, you become curious. So when you stay with that moment and you accept it and you say, look, I have no control.

Irina: I see you, I hear you can, you choose whatever words in the beginning, I was choosing your script. And then I just started using my own words and talking to this feeling and say, I let you be look at it. There’s nothing I can do. So just be here, be with me. So the exposure, it’s a sort of exposure therapy, but instead of a dog, you have this emotion that you expose yourself to, and this is how your amygdala and your fear center.

Irina: Learns that, okay, it’s okay to be with this emotion. It’s not that scary, but it needs a little bit of time for you to grasp the message, to, really feel it. Cause it’s not something that it can think. It’s not the logical brain.

Martin: I’m really grateful for you sharing science there, in the context of your own experience. so it makes it relatable and more understandable, more digestible. and I think something you, you, implied, I’m not sure if you explicitly mentioned it, but all these difficult thoughts and the feelings, like a child being scared that there’s a monster under the bed, for example, they come from a good place.

Martin: It’s your brain looking out for you. And I think that’s always important to emphasize because it can feel like our brain is against us. Why is my brain doing this to me? but it comes from a good place. It’s the brain firing up, doing its job that it’s hardwired to do. Number one job, is to keep us alive, keep us safe, protect

Irina: You’re so right, Martin. And I remember you saying this in your program and I was so mad at my brain. I was like, I don’t need your protection. Leave me alone for God’s sake, leave me alone. But it’s so true. the main function of your, body, of your, of our nervous system is to keep us safe. So it’s in a prediction mode, especially when it, feels in danger when it’s, hyper aroused. You start, you, the brain, it’s not, you don’t do it consciously, but the brain starts looking for So it is trying to protect us, but unfortunately this is counterproductive when it comes to insomnia, when it comes to anxiety. It’s a very paradoxical approach. Basically, you have to do the opposite of what your mind is telling you to do in those circumstances.

Martin: That’s exactly why fighting our brain never works because our brain, as far as our brain is concerned, it’s trying to protect us, it’s trying to keep us safe or it’s preparing us for a battle, for a struggle. And, We’re never going to win against that because the brain is hardwired to protect us, to look out for us.

Martin: And as soon as we try to fight the brain, that fight is never going to end until we are exhausted. And then as soon as we’ve got some energy back again, we’re going to engage in the fight. And again, it’s just going to consume so much of our energy and our attention. It’s a battle we just cannot win. And I think most of us, if we can take a step back, we might be able to recognize that our experience is confirming that to us.

Martin: The, fight and the struggle that we’ve been engaged into up to now is completely understandable, maybe even admirable. Maybe we’ve learned a lot from it, but maybe it’s time for a different approach if our experience tells us this isn’t something that’s getting us closer to where we want to be.

Irina: Although it’s very hard to follow that knowledge, like we know, like most people, especially people who go through programs through knowledge that you impart, they, know, theoretically, they know all the right things. Steps, they know the right behavior. They know what they should do, but you still feel consumed by your mind I think there’s also a study showing that people who experience anxiety and when I say anxiety insomnia, anxiety because it’s a hyper aroused state Usually it comes With the fear of not being able to sleep and all the consequences of not being able to sleep or maintain sleep.

Irina: but it’s usually people who have, so there, there’s some research showing that people who experience anxiety, they also have high IQs, they are usually very smart people and their minds are very active and this mind, they’re trying to find a solution for them. And it almost feels maybe if I think about it a bit longer, maybe I’ll come up with something. Amazing to, to get myself out of this, but no, it, just, no matter how much you think and the brain will go, there. You just have to accept that it will go there and, let go. You can’t, as we mentioned earlier, you can’t control your mind, but you’re right. with the understanding of the right steps and the right approach, it’s through experience.

Irina: It trickles in little by little, you start taking a step back. You start. Just observing what’s happening, but that is a skill you, that’s something that you learn in time. You can’t learn it overnight. I think this is where some frustration is. Coming after like I went through your program and psycho education, it’s super important.

Irina: I think many people will relate to the experience of I listened to your podcasts, I listened to, I think I went through the first two weeks of your program. I don’t know if you changed the format or not, but I was, I already understood how it works, I knew what I had to do more or less, I was jumping ahead, and that gave me Relief enough for a little honeymoon with my insomnia like I had a few weeks where I started falling asleep some nights.

Irina: I didn’t maybe I didn’t follow but I said, oh, that’s okay Let me watch something I was able to and then that logical brain was not enough to sustain me anymore. after some time, I don’t know what was the trigger, but it felt like I got out of this honeymoon. I went back into the rut. I went back into the struggle and it was hard again, but psychoeducation, it does help.

Irina: And it takes time for it to, consolidate in your brain.

Martin: knowledge can be so helpful. but what really matters is using the knowledge, applying it, taking action. And that’s the hardest part is the action. And I’m really glad that you emphasized that this whole approach of acceptance, is hard, it takes time, and I’m really glad that you categorized it as a skill because I completely agree with you.

Martin: It’s a skill like any other skill, and skills take ongoing practice. We never truly master them. We can get really good at them, but we never truly master them. It’s an ongoing practice, and Like any skill that we can reflect on in life that we feel that we’ve developed pretty good skill in. If we reflect on that journey, we can see that there will be times in that journey where it felt like we were making great progress.

Martin: We were a natural at this. This is always feels easy. And then there are times when it felt really hard and your brain starts telling you to just throw it, throw in the towel, give up on this. This isn’t working. But how did we get to where we are today with that skill? We just kept going. Even though there were really difficult periods where it felt like we weren’t making any progress, even though there were times when it felt like we were making progress, what mattered was that ongoing practice, the continued development of that skill.

Irina: it is absolutely true. It is a skill and not an easy one. Especially, I remember listening to your podcast and I love that part where people say what helped them the most. And, I, remember myself not having much trust in acceptance, Oh, you provide, lots of tools that can be used.

Irina: And I remember AWAKE, I never paid much attention to it in the beginning. I just revolted when I was confronted with acceptance in that moment. And it felt like all or nothing. It felt either I can accept it or I can’t. And it is true. It is like learning piano. It is like learning a language. You learn to accept as, as difficult as it sounds to believe it, it’s hard.

Irina: As difficult as it is to believe, you do learn. You do learn to accept, and the good thing is that acceptance is, a skill that you can transfer to other things that happen in your life because life is not only about insomnia, many other things happen

Martin: Yeah, it is so transferable, right? And I have a lot of clients tell me that not only did they find that the work they did. As we were working together, all the work they did as they went through my course to be really helpful for insomnia and all the thoughts and feelings that come with that, but it’s so helpful in many other challenging areas of life, where difficult stuff shows up.

Irina: a hundred percent. Like as hard as the journey was. I think I would go through this again, if I can, if I knew the benefits that I’m going to reap at the end of it, because it doesn’t only end with a normal state of equilibrium where you can sleep and you can come back to your life. Because sooner or later, if you follow the steps, if you follow the steps that you outline in your programs, in your channel, sooner or later, your system is going to find that peace, that place of peace. So in addition to that, you also learn a lot about yourself. You learn about not to identify with your emotions. So important because before insomnia, I, okay. I was not a big overthinker, but I, thankfully I used to have. Positive thoughts, but it’s so easy to, get hooked on the thoughts and just get lost in that reality and overthink something.

Irina: And it’s with this skill that act, teaches through defusion from your thoughts, you learn to take a step back and see, does this, and you, start questioning yourself, your, thoughts, does this. Thoughts serve me, or is this emotion true? Like it’s real, but am I maybe, a bit tired?

Irina: And I’m exaggerating it a little bit in my mind. And it also helps you to see pain in other people. You become much more compassionate, become much more patient and just your whole life and the values is this journey really, important. to face with your life values. You really have to, because there’s so little energy, there’s so little desire to live, at least in my experience, I got to a point where there was no point in life and it was the values and before.

Irina: Insomnia. Like when people were, I was doing some coaching sessions or like at work or what are your values? I was so idealistic. And I always thought that I need to have at least a certain number of values. And when you’re face to face with life and death, you realize that there are a couple of things that really matter.

Irina: If you were to die tomorrow, these are the only things that matter. And when you have those values driving you on, you normally make the right The best decisions for yourself and for, the people around you. So it reprioritize my, life. It also taught me not to take life that seriously, especially the narratives that we create.

Irina: Sometimes we have to let, them go. They’re not as, true and as urgent as they seem. They usually, they’re usually not that important.

Martin: It’s amazing how, when we change our stance from, away from resistance and opposition and more towards being a curious observer, what we can actually learn from the thoughts and feelings that are showing up, that we can identify. And like you suggested, you’re okay, is there anything important or useful here?

Martin: what is my brain trying to tell me? Maybe it’s trying to remind me of my values. Maybe it’s trying to remind me of what’s important to me. Maybe it’s trying to remind me of what my strengths are, the kind of life I want to live. And that can be just so insightful. It can really just change our whole relationship that we have with our mind and with the thoughts and the feelings that are being generated by our mind, just by taking that new approach of curious observer.

Martin: rather than, rather than strong unyielding opponent with a sword and a shield and I’m ready to go to war with this stuff.

Irina: I so agree with you, Martin. It’s. It’s so liberating not to identify with your thoughts and your emotions anymore and only and have the power, have the choice to decide, does it serve me? Does it not? And what do I do? And do I need to do? Most of the times you don’t need to do anything. We don’t need to react.

Irina: You can take a step back and you can See your situation or your life from a different perspective. And it also makes you more tolerant to, towards other people, because the moment you learn to not to identify with your mind, the mind of other people doesn’t have such a strong, especially for people who.

Irina: Maybe our people pleasers, or, like that kind of personalities where they avoid, they’re afraid of not hurting someone, or they worry about the opinions of others. What I used to be, it helps you not to take them as seriously either, because you, in that process, I had to decide what matters and what didn’t.

Irina: and I chose a few people whose opinions really matter and I would take them into account. I would take them seriously. Everything else I would. I can easily decide. Does it serve me? Does it not? And, it is a powerful skill. Like I, in the aftermath of this journey, I opened a channel in my native language, and sometimes I get insulted because some people don’t understand when, you talk certain concepts, especially people who don’t experience anxiety, it doesn’t affect me at all.

Irina: One of the concerns that my husband had was like, please don’t open any channels. don’t do any online work because there are many trolls, people, bullies. And do you know, my mind bullied me so much. In that journey, it’s very hard for somebody, unless I care, like your opinion, my husband’s opinion, like my children, that matters, everything else.

Irina: There’s a distance between me and. And other words, so it is, the life skill.

Martin: There’s a bonus side effect there, isn’t there? When we reduce that resistance, we realize that we have a choice of how to respond. because when our approach is resistance, It’s, I’m just gonna resist. that’s the only thing I’m gonna do. It just feels automatic. But when we lower that resistance, and we make a little bit more space for these thoughts and these feelings to be present, we start to realize, I think, that, okay, now I have a, I do have a choice of how I, want to respond to this.

Martin: That choice is mine. And then we can even go one step further as we start to gain skill. And we can also reflect on how our response serves us or not serves us. is, okay, so I’m having this difficult thought. Now I get to choose how to respond to it. Now is that response going to move me closer to where I want to be?

Martin: Or is that response going to pull me away from where I want to be? And that can just be so helpful, realizing that we do have that choice.

Irina: Yeah, absolutely.

Martin: I’m curious to know, as you were practicing this approach of acceptance, reducing your resistance, moving away from trying to control sleep and whatever your mind was choosing to do, were you still practicing any of those CBT-I techniques, I guess the two big ones would be, like sleep restriction or stimulus control, getting out of bed when you were awake, stuff like that.

Irina: So stimulus control really backfired because I love spending time in my bed before falling asleep. I love reading and not being able to do that made me even more Panicked, more uncomfortable being in my bedroom, relaxing, it, it redefined my relationship with my bed, with my bedroom. And it was not a nice definition. So I didn’t like that approach, because I want to be able to go into my bed whenever I want to do whatever I want and not have to be stressed about it.

Irina: So it didn’t work. I, just quit it. It was very unnatural for me to do stimulus control. Sleep restriction, however, helped me in one respect. I did it for a while because when I started, they say the minimum you can do is five hours. You start with five hours, you, do an average, you keep a sleep diary, and then you do, an average.

Irina: And then if it’s below five, then you do five. And for me, that was like plenty of time because most of the nights I was, I couldn’t fall asleep even for one hour. So I was like, yeah, no problem. I can do five hours. but then if you do it a few days in a row, one, one, It creates a lot of pressure. Like I see the, I’m sleepy, and then the time comes. And I have to get into bed and I’m just wide awake. And it was just having just this amount of time, put a lot of pressure before, before getting into bed. One thing that it did help me though, because in the beginning, I thought that I’d lost the ability to sleep and I couldn’t feel sleepy, like that feeling of when you get into this.

Irina: It’s, such a, it’s such a pleasant feeling when you fall asleep and you’re between reality and sleep. And I lost, I completely lost that feeling. I remember asking you like, Martin, how do I know that I’m sleepy? Because I forgot how to, I forgot what it means to feel sleepy. And I was like, yearning, does yearning mean that I’m sleepy?

Irina: And you said, no. And it’s so true, yawning. I learned later that yawning is actually a sign that your hyperarousal, your nervous system, sympathetic nervous system is calming down. So when you start yawning, you’re actually entering your parasympathetic nervous system. You’re starting to relax. And normally before we sleep, we relax and then we get into sleep, but it’s not necessarily a sign of sleepiness.

Irina: So when I was doing sleep restriction, I got to a point where I couldn’t keep my eyes open. And that’s what you, say in your program. this is one of the signs that this is when you’re sleepy and when it’s time to go to bed, when you just like literally can’t keep your eyes open.

Irina: And that, Instance reassured me that, okay, there’s, I could, I still know how to feel sleepy. It’s just that doesn’t happen most of the times, but the, this it’s still there. And then I stopped because it was not, it was, as I said, it was putting too much pressure on, on, on the window, especially at the starting point.

Martin: Yeah, I think you make a good point there with, let’s just talk about these two key techniques associated with CBT-I, the sleep restriction and the stimulus control. I think the. The sleep restriction, just as you said, it can be a really powerful way to remind us that we can feel sleepy rather than fatigued.

Martin: And that can be really reassuring but both of these techniques, any technique, any exercise, any action can backfire if our intent is to make a certain amount or type of sleep happen or to fight or avoid certain thoughts and feelings because our experience tells us that stuff cannot be directly or permanently controlled.

Martin: I always like to think of the sleep window as being most helpful as a way to just help us move away from chasing after sleep. So if we give ourselves, for example, an earliest possible bedtime and a reasonably consistent out of bedtime in the morning, Maybe then we’re less likely to go to bed really early before there’s any sleepiness and maybe we’re less likely to stay in bed really late in the morning.

Martin: which then makes it harder for us to live the life we want to live and do things that matter. and with the stimulus control, I think that as well has lots of potential to backfire if it’s used as an effort to get rid of wakefulness. if we’re told that we have to get out of bed because we’re awake, then we’re like you said, we’re likely to start putting a lot more pressure on ourselves to make sleep happen, to fall back to sleep. And it can almost be like an additional layer of punishment, especially if we’re someone that likes being in bed. We don’t really care that we’re awake in bed. Now we’re told that we have to get out of bed, then that can just make things even more difficult.

Martin: I’m also curious, one thing that is often associated with the CBT-I approach is the use of sleep diaries, sleep journals, logging, tracking, did you continue with that as you were exploring this new acceptance approach or is that something that you moved away from as well?

Irina: I moved away. I did it for a while. I did it for a few weeks, but. I was trying to think less about sleep and every time I had to wake up in the morning and I had to look back on my night, instead of saying, you know what, whatever happened, it’s a new day, let’s, move on from here. I had to reflect on, guess, guesstimate how long I slept and I did it for a few weeks. helped to the extent that many nights were actually better than my average. It wasn’t, we, have a tendency to I don’t want to say exaggerate or, downplay our nights, but in that state of fear, we, can feel like our nights, all of our nights are bad, like no progress is happening. And when there is something objective or approximate, it puts things a little bit into perspective and shows you, you know what?

Irina: It’s not that bad. You think you didn’t sleep, but look, it actually, something happened there because. Some sleep happened. So it’s both positive and negative in my experience. And to come back to CBT-I, stimulus control and sleep window and the sleep diary, it certainly must work for certain people because there’s so much research.

Irina: Like I saw hundreds of studies done on CBT-I. So even though my experience doesn’t align, I cannot neglect the research that, that I read. So for some people, perhaps depending on their levels of arousal, depending on their behaviors, depending on how they think, it could work. So it’s no harm trying, because what I like about CBT-I is that it’s a little bit more prescriptive.

Irina: It’s a bit, it’s a little bit more, you’re given a recipe. You just need to follow the steps. You don’t need to overthink it. You need to, you don’t need to deal with feelings that much, or you don’t need to accept anything, which in the beginning is a very vague concept. And that’s that’s easier.

Irina: It’s like level one, I would say, but then for me, that didn’t work. So I needed something on steroids and I think acceptance is like, it is, it’s what’s helped me through, the journey.

Martin: Yeah, I, think what maybe matters most is that there are options out there. It’s often said the CBT-I is the gold standard for dealing with chronic insomnia. And so if we give that a try and we find that it doesn’t work for us, then we can get really concerned that, Oh my goodness, the gold standard isn’t working for me, or I’m really struggling with the gold standard.

Martin: That means there’s nothing else left for me now, but there are still other approaches. and. an approach of acceptance, for example, is one of them. There’s probably others out there too that we haven’t really heard of or that are still being developed. But what matters is there are always options available just because something hasn’t proved to be helpful.

Martin: Doesn’t mean that you’re broken or there’s anything wrong with you. It just means that you didn’t identify with that approach and that’s perfectly fine. we are all individuals. And it’s just a case of finding an approach that resonates with us that feels workable to us. I thought it was good how you shared the kind of pros and cons with keeping a sleep diary or tracking sleep Because I think that in the short term it can really reveal some interesting insights For example, maybe it does show that we’re getting a bit more sleep than we thought Maybe it does show us some things that are going to be useful.

Martin: Like we might notice that, oh, I’m spending 10 hours in bed, but only sleeping three hours on an average night. Maybe there’s an opportunity there for me to reduce the amount of time I set aside for sleep, for example. But perhaps after a week or two, maybe there’s not really more insights to be gained.

Martin: Maybe when we keep it much longer than that, we’re still keeping that focus on sleep, it becomes the last thing we think about. When we go to bed, as we jot down the time we went to bed, and it’s the first thing we reflect on when we wake up in the morning, we’re trying to relive the night. How much time was I awake?

Martin: How much time was I asleep? So we keep that focus of attention. We reinforce to our brain that this is something we need to fix. This is an issue. This is a problem. I need you to divert resources onto this and it can even influence our actions and our behaviors that day. We might wake up feeling a I don’t know, let’s say we wake up and we feel pretty okay, and then we reflect on our sleep and we realize, oh, I only got one or two hours, or two or three hours, or I woke up a lot.

Martin: Then we might decide, oh, maybe I need to do a little bit less today. Maybe I, can’t have that meeting with friends this evening. Maybe I need to go to bed earlier or something like that. And it can just make it a little bit more difficult, I think, to, open up more to what’s in our lives other than sleep when we’re regularly tracking sleep or journaling sleep or kind of recording it and on that ongoing reflection can be a little bit of a potential pitfall I think.

Irina: It does affect your actions. it, insomnia in general affects the way you behave and you, in, in this, hyper aroused state, you tend to contract all your attention, starts revolving around yourself, around your sleep, around your problems and everything else is insignificant. And I think I even emotionally, I felt if before this, I could call myself a kind and compassionate person.

Irina: As I was going through this experience, I couldn’t feel certain emotions, like gratitude, like joy. So you do become very closed and it is important as hard as. As it sounds, but I know many people for whom going out and just living their life was a pivotal moment in their relationship with their insomnia. They didn’t give it as much importance. They, and that sends the message to your amygdala. I don’t have a problem. Everything is okay. Look, I can go out, I can have dinner, I can exercise. And I think for me, two important moments. And I say it and I feel the irony, as I said, I was studying mental health and I remember like in the program three weeks in or four weeks in, in the program and I sent you a message and I say, Martin, I think I’ve got a problem. I don’t think I’ve got insomnia. I think I have anxiety. I think I really need help. And I remember, you sent a very reassuring message saying, I don’t know anyone who has insomnia and doesn’t have anxiety. But it’s something so helpful to understand from the beginning that Insomnia is a byproduct off of this fear, but coming back to the actions, it’s, I think it’s very important as hard as it is, and the beginning is going to be super hard.

Irina: You don’t feel in that panic in that boat to go out and socialize, even like I isolated from my friends, and this is knowing. Martin, this is knowing. I did your program. I knew that I had to go. I just couldn’t. I just, I spiraled down and I isolated from my friends. I was not even texting them.

Irina: and it’s hard. And I think the moment, there was a moment when A thought came maybe because people, my, my closest friends, they were worried about me. They were texting me and I said, maybe I should, there was just a thought like very fickle, very faint thought. Maybe I should reply to my friend.

Irina: It was so elusive. It disappeared. I said, no, stay here. maybe I should reply to my friend. So I took the phone and I said, look, I’m not great, but, At least I’m calling you or I’m sending you a voice message. And then I remember one of my friends, she was, she, it was November. I was still struggling.

Irina: And she was saying, how about we go to a strudel, Austrian strudel workshop to make some pastries. I, and that was in the evening. Yeah. That’s the time when I’m preparing for sleep. And. But I knew the knowledge was there. and it was very far away. It’s much easier to commit to things that are far away in the future.

Irina: So I said, yes, let’s do it. I’ll come to that, workshop. Although I really didn’t care about strudels in that state, but I knew that I had to go out. Like I got to a point where I was not leaving my house. I was not able to take public transport and I said, I’m going to re expose myself to life slowly.

Irina: And for me, like the point was not to go and make that strudel. For me, the point was to be able to call a cab, to get into the cab by myself. Because prior to this, my husband would bring me everywhere because I was just incapable. I was too afraid of doing things. I went there and, of course the mind would say, How are you going to make a strudel?

Irina: You’ll make, you, you won’t be able to, you’re not able to focus on two sentences. you just, humiliate yourself. you, your friend is not going to feel comfortable because of you because you will feel like Your, my cognitive, I was like, my attention was never there. My memory was super bad in that period.

Irina: So there were all these thoughts telling me not to do this, not to do this. And I said, you know what, I’m just going to do that. Even if I have to feel shame to the tip of my head, I’m just going to go out just to get into that cap, get to that point. And if I don’t make a strudel, I don’t make a strudel, but at least I’ll make the first step. Into my freedom and little by little. And then at the same time I planned, no, that was in October. I planned the, birthday of my daughter, she was five and I planned the birthday party with lots of people. And I was rolling in panic attacks at that birthday party. But I did it, and even though at the moment it’s very uncomfortable, after you finish, after you do what you have to do, the things that you have to do, you take care of your kids, you go to work, you go, you, take that walk, you, do what is good for you, even though it’s not pleasant, and it’s not going to be pleasant many times.

Irina: When you finish, after you’ve done what you set yourself to do, there is a level of confidence that arises in you. There is some strength inside you that appears and tells you, I can do hard things. I can do things even if it sucks. I can do things even if I don’t want to. Opposite action.

Irina: Opposite action. It’s super important in this state, because in this state, we feel so demotivated we are, we don’t want anything. We’ve experienced a lot of anhedonia, a lot of apathy. nothing brings you pleasure. I don’t want to, it’s not for everyone is the same. many people with insomnia don’t go to this depth of experience, but it could be that for some people, life loses a bit of itself.

Irina: Luster and color and rhythm, and it’s important to know, even if your mind is telling you this is how your life is going to be, there’s no point in this life anymore. It’s important to know that your mind doesn’t know anything. In that moment, these are all lights and you don’t need to identify with these thoughts because you do emerge.

Irina: You just need to be patient and you need to move. You need to act because action creates energy. And I remember I was listening to your program where you talk about action and the values. And I think you even have a video of people hiking and there was some boulders in front of, and it does feel like crawling through mud in that state.

Irina: You don’t want to do much, but you have to crawl. If even if it means that you have to crawl, you have to crawl, but you have to move. And I remember though, I would put these things, I would set things, I would do these things, I would call my friend, I would We planned a holiday in India. We go to India every year because my husband is from there.

Irina: So December is normally when we go there, and I really wanted to go. also because I feel a lot of, It’s a place where I norm, but going, leaving the house and getting into the airplane, I don’t have a problem. I fly, we fly almost every month before and after, insomnia. So flights were never a problem for me, but in that state, I just couldn’t imagine having the capacity, having the courage to get into a plane, but there was a strength inside me doing this little action by action that says, you know what, I’m going to get on that plane. Even if they have to tie me to the luggage, I’m gonna go. And you have to, do it.

Martin: I think this is a powerful reminder of the importance of turning knowledge into action. Because like you said, we can maybe know or feel as though we do need to keep doing things that matter. But it’s so much easier said than done. what matters is taking that, converting it into action. And, So you had that knowledge that withdrawing from your friends, for example, it wasn’t really helping.

Martin: But maybe at the time it felt like, there’s, you’re not ready to go out with your friends yet, and that’s fine. But just, you’re still planting the seeds just with that awareness. That awareness itself can be very powerful. That awareness that withdrawal might not be getting you closer to where you want to be.

Martin: And look, because then you start to consider alternative options. that might be available to you. And it’s perfectly okay. And it’s just something I encourage to start really small. To start tiny. If you feel like you can’t go out with friends, for example, maybe you’re just going to start by text messaging a friend, or phoning a friend.

Martin: If it feels like you can’t go for a run, and running’s important to you, maybe you’re just going to step outside and just sit in your front yard. Or have a cup of tea or a cup of coffee in your backyard, something like that. Just small, tiny actions. That, because that’s what matters, is turning the knowledge into action.

Martin: and you learn from it. you learn from every action that you commit to. That you, everything you experience, you learn from. And you’re reminded, like you said, of your capabilities. You can be reminded that you do still have a certain level of functionality. You are still capable of doing certain things.

Martin: And you can also be reminded of your strengths. And you can be reminded of your values, and values can be so helpful because we can use them as a guide to doing more of the stuff that matters to us.

Irina: so true, Martin. So true that you need to take small steps because otherwise you feel you may feel overwhelmed and it also helps you, you build confidence with every little step. ’cause as you say, I did exactly as you say, I isolated and then I started texting, and then I would just send a voice message because I didn’t want to.

Irina: Be confronted with a life question or like to be too long in the conversation. and then I would, yeah. And then I would maybe call. So it’s little steps, but this little, steps, they, add up and you build the confidence because the mind will tell you, you can’t do this. You can’t do this.

Irina: And every time you make the step forward, you prove the opposite. And then you start questioning, what is my mind telling me? Is it always true? Maybe, it’s not always true.

Martin: Yeah, you can start to realize that these thoughts are, at the end of the day, snippets of information. That’s all they are, and that information might be true sometimes, it might not be true other times, it might be ambiguous sometimes, it might be a fact sometimes, it might be a myth sometimes, it might make you feel really good sometimes, it might make you feel really bad sometimes.

Martin: Yeah. But it’s just a kind of electrical burst. It’s just a signal is some information and it’s up to us. It’s always up to us. what we then do with that, how we choose to respond to it. And one thing that I liked that you emphasized was, when you went out to, the strudel house, I’ll call it.

Martin: You were still aware that you had, you were experiencing difficult thoughts and feelings when you made that plan on the way to the location whilst you were there, but you still acted. You realized that you were able to act in ways that mattered to you, even though there wa