Why YOU Are Causing Your Insomnia & How to Stop it
Struggling with insomnia? I explain why YOU are the cause of your own insomnia and how to stop this cycle. I go over the main things people do that create and maintain their insomnia and keep them stuck, and to break free from this to eliminate your insomnia.
I cover:
• Common insomnia myths
• Real causes of insomnia
• Poor sleep behaviors
• Why sleep hygiene and sleep gadgets don't work
• Why medication and substances makes insomnia WORSE
And the real SOLUTION to insomnia.
// SLEEP SERVICES //
https://www.drorma.com/insomnia-services
// SUBSCRIBE //
Put Insomnia to Bed channel https://www.youtube.com/c/PutInsomniaToBed
WHAT I DO:
I help people overcome insomnia and get good sleep (without medication, drugs or supplements).
To Your Sleeping Better!
-Steve
Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
0:30 Misconceptions About Insomnia
1:00 Real Causes of Insomnia
2:00 Identifying Poor Sleep Behaviors
5:00 Why Sleep Hygiene and Gadgets Don’t Work
9:00 Empowering Yourself to Overcome Insomnia
12:00 Introduction to CBTI
15:00 Conclusion and Next Steps
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
What I'm going to talk about today is why you are causing your own insomnia, and how you can stop this, and why this is actually really good news.
Common Misconceptions About Insomnia
It's very common to believe that insomnia is caused by some external thing, usually called a trigger. And that could be a lot of different things like anxiety or depression or a stressor in your life.
Anything like that. There's a whole list of things that are considered triggers. And it's true that a trigger or some external thing can be the initial trigger. Cause of poor sleep, meaning, you know, you have a few nights of poor sleep. A lot of things can cause that. But that is not insomnia. Insomnia is a pattern, a longer term pattern of poor sleep, where you have difficulty falling asleep and staying asleep.
And that is not caused by the trigger. In fact, once the trigger goes away, once the insomnia is established, it'll stay there even though the trigger is gone. It's not being caused by the trigger.
The Real Cause of Insomnia
So what actually causes insomnia is your own [00:01:00] behaviors and thoughts.
What I'm going to do in this video today is I'm going to go through a list of the things that people do that actually create and maintain their insomnia. And then, essentially, how do you overcome that, which would just be doing the opposite of these things. And then I'm going to give you a resource for how to actually overcome insomnia.
So what causes insomnia? So, as I said, many times there's a trigger. There is some event or stressor or something going on in your life that leads to poor sleep. And that could be a lot of different things. That could be travel, that could be a stressor going on in your life at work, in a relationship.
Could be a medical issue. There's a whole list of things that could interfere with sleep. But that is not insomnia. Insomnia is how you respond to the poor sleep.
Identifying Poor Sleep Behaviors
With insomnia, the way that people respond is that number one, they get really anxious about their sleep. They see that they're not sleeping very well because [00:02:00] they've had one or more nights of difficulty sleeping and they start to worry about it.
They start to think, Oh my God, what's going on here? I'm not sleeping. Is there some, is there a problem? And that creates more anxiety and focus on the sleep. Then what happens is, because there's a problem, they want to try to solve the problem. We're trained in our life that when there's a problem or something isn't going well, we need to focus on it more and we need to try to do different things to solve the problem.
And so what people try to do with Their insomnia, to try to solve it, are things that make the sleep worse. They don't help it. Now, people are doing this unknowingly, right? This is not a video about, like, blaming you and making you feel bad. I had insomnia ten years ago. I was the cause of my own insomnia.
And I didn't even know that I was the person that was causing it. I thought that something was the matter, you know, within my sleep system. And that it was this thing that was out of my control. And [00:03:00] But in fact, what I was doing was I was getting really anxious about my sleep, and then I was trying different things to try to help the sleep, which only made it worse, which then increased my anxiety and made me worry more, which made me try harder, which increased my anxiety because that made my sleep worse.
And this turns into a cycle. I call this the insomnia cycle. And those things that people try are called poor sleep behaviors. And it's poor sleep behaviors that cause Ultimately. cause and maintain insomnia. The anxiety even alone doesn't cause, uh, insomnia. Like you could be really anxious about your sleep or about something in your life.
And that doesn't cause insomnia. Um, it's how you respond to that anxiety, what you do about that anxiety and that worry. And it's the behavior shifts around your sleep that actually caused the insomnia and then keep it in place over time.
Common Poor Sleep Behaviors
So, what are poor sleep behaviors? Sleeping in is a poor sleep behavior.
If [00:04:00] you aren't sleeping well and you're really tired and you have the opportunity to sleep in, which many people do on the weekends, but sometimes people do if they're retired during the week or if you work from home, that kind of thing, you have the opportunity to sleep in. And if you had a poor night of sleep, you might hit the snooze alarm or you might just not have an alarm and sleep for an extra two hours.
That's a poor sleep behavior. What does that do? That messes up the pattern of your sleep. Your body now, body clock is starting to get pushed forward, which then is going to change when you get sleepy the next night. And that starts to feed into the pattern of insomnia and the pattern of anxiety. Another poor sleep behavior is going to bed earlier than you normally do because you're trying to get more sleep on the front end.
Well, hey, if I go to bed two hours earlier, I'll get two hours more sleep. And that might be true for that night. But ultimately, again, that's going to change your body clock and the pattern of your sleep. And that's going to start messing things up. [00:05:00] Another one is spending too much time in the bed awake.
Once you start having difficulty sleeping, you're going to start being awake longer in the bed because you're having difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep or both, or you're waking up really early in the morning. And then what most people do is they just lie in bed or they're, they lie there and they get really anxious and they worry and their mind's ruminating or you might grab your phone.
But in other words, you're spending a lot of time in bed awake. And that starts to get associated with the bed and in your brain and it starts sending mixed signals. Sometimes you're in the bed sleeping. Sometimes you're in the bed not. Your brain doesn't know what you want to do. And over time it turns that into an automatic thing that happens where you get alert when you're in the bed because you've spent a lot of time doing that.
So these are classic poor sleep behaviors and these are ultimately the root of insomnia that cause insomnia and that are maintaining [00:06:00] it. Now let me go into some other poor sleep behaviors. That really feed into the insomnia pattern. One is obsessing about sleep. So again, when your sleep gets poor because there's some kind of trigger or some reason why you're not sleeping well, then you're gonna put more focus on the sleep.
You're going to try harder to sleep better. You're going to research it on Google and YouTube. And you're going to be starting to try all kinds of things. And you could get obsessed. People get like so focused on sleep, both at night and during the day, because it sucks to not sleep. It doesn't feel good.
And yes, there is a problem. And we're taught that if there's a problem, we should focus on it more. But with insomnia, that almost always makes it worse because Thinking about it and obsessing about it makes us really conscious of it, which makes us more anxious about it. And we get in the way of our body's natural ability to sleep.
We [00:07:00] start researching it, reading books, you know, going on YouTube and Google and, you know, looking at it. And then of course you read all kinds of information that's upsetting or makes you more worried. Again, that feeds into the insomnia. Another one is trying too hard to sleep. So when you're actually in the bed and you're having difficulty falling and staying asleep, it's, it seems kind of logical to try harder to like, really, I'm going to really sleep.
I'm going to focus. I'm going to, I'm going to get to sleep. And you're very intentional about sleeping. It has the opposite of effect. I'm sure you've seen this because you're so focused on your sleep you're not letting go of your conscious mind and you're not allowing your body to naturally fall asleep, which is designed to do and you're getting in the way of it.
So another way to think about insomnia and why we're the cause is we're getting in the way of our own body's natural ability to sleep and we just don't know that we're doing that.
The Role of Sleep Hygiene and Gadgets
Another one is trying out all kinds of [00:08:00] sleep hygiene. So sleep hygiene is very commonly recommended for insomnia. If you google insomnia, or if you go to your doctor, most of the time they're going to recommend some form of sleep hygiene.
What is sleep hygiene? That is, well, I need a dark room. I need a quiet room. Um, I need a cool room. Okay, that's an environmental change. For improving sleep, but then there's also lifestyle things like I need to stop drinking alcohol I need to stop drinking coffee and caffeine need to get sunlight exposure.
I need to start meditating and it's all these lifestyle changes or Environmental changes that are supposedly going to get rid of the insomnia and they do not Get rid of the insomnia because they don't get to the root of the problem. Once you have insomnia, sleep hygiene does nothing other than frustrate you and make you more hopeless and worried about your sleep because it's not working.
So that's another thing that feeds into the cycle. Another one [00:09:00] is using a lot of sleep gadgets again. I'm not sleeping. I need to try this gadget to help me sleep. I need to put on a sound machine. I need to get a, a, a chili pad, which is something that keeps your, your bed cool. I need to get a weighted blanket.
I mean, there's so many gadgets out there now for sleep that people will just try all these different gadgets. Another one is sleep trackers. So you might have some kind of sleep tracker and there's so many sleep trackers now. Apple Watches and Fitbits and Oura Rings and all these kinds of things. And these things are great if you don't have insomnia.
They do give you, you know, some good data about your sleep and about other parts of your health. So that's fine. The problem is they can feed into that obsession about sleep and just getting a bunch of data about your sleep, especially like data that's not good. That's, it's telling you you're not sleeping well, feeds into the anxiety and the problem and it maintains the insomnia.
Medications and Psychological Dependence
And the last one, [00:10:00] is medications, supplements, drugs, like, you know, illicit drugs, or, um, any kind of, uh, herbal remedy, any, any substances you're taking for the purpose of sleep. Now, this one is, requires a little more explanation, but essentially in the short term, these things can work and they are very commonly prescribed by doctors.
When you go in and you say, I'm not sleeping or I have insomnia, they're going to prescribe a medication and there's all kinds of medications they're going to prescribe. And it might work in the short term because, Um, there's a sedative effect to these medications, meaning they kind of knock you out in a similar way that just chugging, uh, you know, a few beers or, or, or, or, or, or some Alcohol is gonna make you drowsy and, and knock you out, but it's not gonna give you very good sleep and it's also not gonna work over time.
If you've tried medications or you're trying medications, you're probably seeing, yeah, it helps somewhat, but it doesn't [00:11:00] work. for the long term, it stops working, and then you get stuck in a cycle with the medication. And also what this, what this does when you take a substance, any kind of substance, even like herbal remedies and things like that, it creates a psychological dependence, which means that you start to believe that you don't have the ability within yourself to sleep.
And which is not true. You have not lost the ability to sleep. Again, you're just getting in the way of it and you don't know it. Of course, now you know it because I'm sharing this video.
So all of these things that I have listed are very common things that people do when they have insomnia and they're trying to get rid of the insomnia. Unfortunately, they are very commonly recommended on Google, on websites, by doctors, by therapists, because they don't know anything about insomnia. Like medical doctors, for example, get very little training in sleep.
Therapists like myself, I'm a psychologist, [00:12:00] get, I got no training in sleep in school. I learned all this stuff after graduate school. So you're given the wrong advice and which, you know, so like again, you know, if you, you don't want to blame yourself for this, right? You don't want to like beat yourself up.
that you are the cause of the insomnia. But I want you to take that in and I don't want you to take it personally. And I don't want you to do it in a way where you're beating yourself up about the fact that you're causing this.
Empowering Yourself to Overcome Insomnia
I want you to think of this in an incredibly power and empowering way.
Because if you're the cause of the insomnia, you are also the, the, the cure. You are also the source of getting rid of the insomnia. So how do you do that? Well, essentially you need to reverse all these things, right? You need to change the poor sleep behaviors to healthy, Positive sleep behaviors and you need to stop obsessing about sleep.
Stop thinking about it during the day. You need to stop trying [00:13:00] to sleep and just allowing sleep to come. You need to stop all the sleep hygiene crap. Cut all that stuff out. You do not, it's not going to do anything for your insomnia. It just adds, you know, more stress and strain and things that you think you need to do.
You get rid of all that. You get rid of the sleep gadgets and with medications and things like that. You need to be careful. I'm not telling you. I'm not giving you medication advice here. If you want to come off medication, you need to do it safely and you need to do it with the consult of your doctor who's prescribing the medication.
But basically you need to unwind all these things that are feeding the insomnia, particularly the poor sleep behaviors. But all these things on the list most people are doing or they tried and you'll see that they haven't worked. And what you need to do instead is replace it with just a few key behavior shifts and that's it.
And how do you do that?
Introduction to CBTI: The Gold Standard Treatment
Well, you do it with a treatment or a [00:14:00] process which is called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia or CBTI. Some of you may have heard of this, many of you probably haven't. Even though this is the gold standard treatment, this is really the only treatment in my mind that exists for insomnia.
If you have insomnia, particularly chronic insomnia, that means you've had it for three months or longer. This is what you want to go to. You don't want to waste your time on any of this other crap that I went over because it's not going to get rid of the insomnia. It's only going to make it worse, feed the problem, make you more anxious and nervous.
Throw all that away, unwind all of that and do the CBTI. Now, I don't have time to go into the full explanation of what CBTI is in this video, but look it up.
And one caveat I will tell you about CBTI is make sure you're actually looking at real CBTI. A lot of people will, offer [00:15:00] CBTI or there's apps or there's websites that describe it and almost always they leave things out.
It's not complete CBTI the way that it was developed over decades. There's several pieces to it. They all have to be part of the process. And if you do just one piece or two pieces and you do it You know, not all together. Then generally, it still probably will help some, but it's not going to work ultimately.
And then you're going to get frustrated and conclude, Oh, this doesn't work either. It works. I, that's what I used to overcome my insomnia 10 years ago. I haven't had a relapse since. I've helped hundreds of other people go through it.
The main thing that makes people successful with CBTI or that process is two things. Number one, that they are actually following CBTI in a way that it's correctly implemented or they're being guided by someone who knows what they're doing. And secondly, you, the person with the insomnia, is committed [00:16:00] to implementing and following the process.
That's it. If you do that, I've seen people have an extremely. It's the gold standard. You can look this up and I'll have more videos where I go into more depth on this, but this is what you want to do because what CBTI is, it comes down to is three or four key behavior shifts in your sleep. It's you are changing your behavior around sleep. You're not changing your environment.
And you're not just changing things in your daily lifestyle. You are changing the way you are going about sleeping, but you're doing this in a systematic way where you are personalizing it to your own sleep in your own body and you're following a certain process. that over time starts to unwind all the things you're doing that's getting in the way of the sleep and implements the few key things that will get your sleep back to where you can be able to sleep naturally again and maintain that.[00:17:00]
Conclusion and Next Steps
All right, so I hope you found this video helpful and informative. And if you did, click the like button. You can comment below, what your thoughts about it are and if you have any questions. And I'll see you next time.