6 Reasons To NOT Worry If You Have Insomnia
There’s a lot of worries about having insomnia, which causes a lot of anxiety. Most of these worries are overblown or just not true.
I give you 6 reasons to NOT worry if you have insomnia.
I COVER:
1. It won’t destroy your health.
2. You can still function.
3. There’s nothing wrong with you
4. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve had it
5. It doesn’t matter how severe it is
6. There’s a cure
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WHAT I DO:
I help people overcome insomnia and get good sleep (without medication, drugs or supplements).
To Your Sleeping Better!
- Steve
RESOURCES
#1 Way to Cure Insomnia https://youtu.be/vP9d8FyUBfU?si=oxApXAYXf37HBvla
00:00 Introduction: Why You Shouldn't Worry About Insomnia
00:09 Understanding Sleep Anxiety
01:22 Reason 1: Insomnia Won't Destroy Your Health
05:29 Reason 2: You Can Still Function with Insomnia
08:45 Reason 3: There's Nothing Wrong with You
09:59 Reason 4: It doesn’t matter how long you’ve had it
11:06 Reason 5: Severity Doesn't Matter
11:57 Reason 6: The Cure for Insomnia
13:14 Conclusion and Recap
TRANSCRIPT
Introduction: Why You Shouldn't Worry About Insomnia
If you worry a lot about having insomnia, , then today I'm going to give you six reasons why you should NOT worry if you have insomnia.
Understanding Sleep Anxiety
Our anxiety around your sleep when you have insomnia is totally normal. Everybody has what are called negative sleep thoughts and a lot of anxiety around their sleep when they have insomnia.
And it makes sense. You're not sleeping well. You're actually not sleeping well. It's not just your imagination. And there's a lot of concern around that.
But what happens is many times that worry and that anxiety is overblown. It's what's called catastrophizing because we don't really understand what's going on in our bodies and we hear all kinds of stuff in the media or on the internet that tells us, you know, there's like alarms going off if you're not sleeping and there's all kinds of dangers.
And that just feeds into that insomnia cycle that I talk about. Uh, a lot about where you're just, all these worries are related to sleep. And then there's all this pressure for you to be able to sleep or sleep well, or get a certain number of hours. Otherwise it's going to be a disaster. And that [00:01:00] just creates a lot of anxiety.
So what I wanted to do was just to try to shift or calm that worry a little bit. This won't necessarily completely get rid of your anxiety, because to do that you really need to actually start improving your sleep and your insomnia. But this should help give you some ammunition and some reasons to start shifting your beliefs.
Reason 1: Insomnia Won't Destroy Your Health
So reason number one, it will not destroy your health. So there's a lot in the media now and there's even a recent book that was written, a very popular book that just talked about all the health effects of not sleeping well and all these diseases you could get because of lack of sleep.
So I'm going to give you a couple of pieces to think about here. First of all, sleep science, which is the study of sleep and why we sleep and things like that is a brand new science. I mean, it's been around maybe, you know, a hundred years, probably less than that as a science that like just started developing.
And that's a very new science. And there is a lot that [00:02:00] Sleep scientists don't know because there's been a good amount of research, but there's so much they don't know. And there's a lot of conflicting theories and one scientist thinks one thing and one scientist thinks something else.
So you cannot trust what one scientist says about sleep and insomnia and your health. That's number one to keep that in mind is you have to take that information with a grain of salt. There's a difference between fact and theory or even correlation. And you need to be careful about what you accept as true when you're reading stuff online or you're reading books about insomnia.
And generally it's best to stay away. from researching this online because it usually just makes your anxiety and fear go up. It doesn't really help very much.
The other thing i'll say here is a couple other things. Number one, I have seen clients with insomnia that have had it their whole life. 30 years or more they've had insomnia and they're still functioning.
And some of them have no major health problems. I mean some of them do because they're in their 60s or 70s but is that just from the [00:03:00] sleep? Because a lot of people in their sixties or seventies who don't have insomnia, have health problems that are, uh, that are not coming from just their sleep.
But I've seen people in their sixties, or younger or older, that have had insomnia for 30 years or more, and they don't have any major health issues. Now, you would think if a person wasn't sleeping well for 30 years or more. If this science was true, they would have all kinds of health issues and diseases, and maybe they wouldn't even still be alive, and yet they are.
And in fact, some of these people can be outside of their sleep, you know, fairly healthy if they have a good diet, if they're exercising, because sleep is critically important for our health, don't get me wrong, but it's not the only factor that affects health. Obviously, there's diet, there's exercise, there's stress, things like that. So, That's another piece.
So the third thing I would say is if you think about the way human beings evolved We lived and evolved in nature. We're talking in, you know, the forests or, or in raw nature for most of our existence up till maybe a couple hundred [00:04:00] years ago when, you know, we had, modern technology and houses and air conditioning and all that kind of stuff.
We were living in nature. We were foraging for food. We were in danger of wild animals and things like that attacking us. And so think about that. Do you think we were always sleeping eight hours a night, every night really well, sleeping out in nature? Definitely not because sometimes you had to hunt at night or there were predators and you, you know, you couldn't relax.
You couldn't sleep. There were noises. If you've ever gone camping, it's not always the most peaceful thing. Even when you got a nice tent, you know, or a sleeping bag, it still can be difficult to sleep because of the different sounds.
Because of that, and because we lived that way for, you know, millions of years as we evolved, we had, we were very adaptive.
Our bodies are super resilient. Human beings, the reason why we've survived, You know, as long as we have and why our, age, expectancy has gone up over the years is because we've built up resilience to things that get in the way of us having an [00:05:00] optimal, situation for our sleep or our eating and things like that.
It doesn't have to be perfect because we had to be adaptive when we had to be up at night or to hunt or whatever that is. And we did that over many, many years. And therefore we're much more resilient. We can handle a lack of sleep way more than, than you might think.
And therefore our bodies have built up, you know, uh, an ability to handle that even when we're not sleeping over a period of time with insomnia.
Reason 2: You Can Still Function with Insomnia
Reason number two, you should not worry if you have insomnia is you can still function. Now, can you function as well as when you're sleeping well? Definitely not. You're not functioning optimally. You're not going to feel great. You're going to feel out of it. But this also could be affected by if you're taking medication and other factors outside of just the lack of sleep, but you could still function.
And probably a lot of people watching this, even though you have insomnia and you may only be getting a few hours of sleep a night, You notice that during the day you can still do [00:06:00] stuff, you know, you still have energy and You can still accomplish some things. You're not completely incapacitated.
So there's a few things to keep in mind here, first of all, there's something called core sleep. Core sleep is is where you're getting around five and a half hours of sleep per night, give or take. It's not exactly because it's different for each person, but it's around five and a half hours within five and a half hours, and this can be broken up. So if you sleep and you wake up several times in the night and it takes you time to get back to sleep, but the total amount of time that you end up sleeping is around five and a half hours, you will get 100 percent of your deep sleep. Because you get that in the first half of the night and you'll get 50 percent of your REM sleep or your dream sleep plus a quite a bit of your light sleep.
So you're getting a decent amount of recovery even within that time frame where then you can function.
And that's why in many times people can function even when they have insomnia and they're averaging 50 I'm not getting five and a half hours of sleep per night. Now some of you may not be getting five and a half hours, right?
You're watching or like, well [00:07:00] I'm not getting five and a half hours. I'm getting three hours or I'm not getting any sleep at all over, over some periods of time.
Still you're getting some sleep and you're still getting some deep sleep. Even if you're only getting a couple hours of sleep, you're getting some of that.
So you're getting some recovery and that is why you could still function while you're awake. the next day and you can do stuff. But just to kind of start to shift that belief that, you know, the belief is like, well, if I don't get all my sleep, seven hours, eight hours of perfect sleep, I can't function. That is just not true. And that's going to actually affect how you feel the next day by just your belief around what you're able to do.
A couple other examples is, think about doctors at residency, They deliberately don't sleep for like three days on straight because they're on call and they're performing surgery sometimes, they're not sleeping very well and yet they can still function.
Astronauts many times don't sleep a lot because they have to, you know, run the spaceship, they can't just get eight hours of sleep every night. And this is true of transatlantic sailors and things like that as well.
[00:08:00] And then one just short story from my own experience, you know, when I had insomnia, yeah, I had some nights where I slept not at all, not zero amount of sleep.
And one night in particular, I had 12 therapy clients the next day in a physical office, where I had to drive to the office, do 12 therapy clients sessions in a row, and I had zero sleep. And yes, I did not feel my best and it was, it was challenging to get through it, but I was able to do it.
And that's a lot of clients. It's actually too many clients for a therapist to see in one day, but I was able to do it and that helped my, my confidence a lot in terms of shifting that belief and realizing, even if I don't sleep at all, I can still function. I can still get through the day. And then of course I have a lot more pressure built up for the next night where I'm much more likely to, to get better sleep.
Reason 3: There's Nothing Wrong with You
Reason number three you should not worry if you have insomnia is there's nothing wrong with you. So one of the major worries with insomnia is there's something wrong with me. I've lost my ability to sleep. There's some, thing that's off in my system.
And the fact [00:09:00] is, there's nothing wrong with you. Sure, there's something wrong with your sleep. But it's because of the way you're going about your sleep and the way you're thinking about your sleep. I've talked about this in depth in other videos on what actually creates insomnia is our own behaviors and our own thoughts not some disease or disorder that's sort of attacking you internally like a medical disease or something.
Sure, once you have insomnia, it is definitely affecting you on a physical or a physiological level because you're not sleeping and your sleep system is shifted. But it's us that causes that problem through our behaviors around our sleep and the way that we're thinking about it.
It's not like something is broken in you. You do not lose your ability to sleep just like you don't lose your ability to do other things that your body does automatically that's built into your system as a human being.
That is a really key thing to shift because sometimes people start doubting, I've lost my ability. It feels that way for sure. It feels like you can't sleep because you're trying and you're doing all these things that aren't really working. But that is just not true.
Reason 4: It Doesn’t Matter How Long You’ve Had It
[00:10:00] Reason number four is it doesn't matter how long you've had insomnia, you can still overcome it. Sometimes people think, well, I've had insomnia for 5 years or 10 years or 30 years, this is just who I am, you know, I've had this so long. There's no way I'm gonna be able to overcome it. You might even have tried a lot of different things at that point to get past it and yet you're still dealing with it.
The reason for that is not because you can't overcome it. It's not because you've had it for a long time. It doesn't matter how long you've had it actually. It's just like any habit. If we don't shift a habit and in this case, insomnia is kind of like a habit. It's a habit in terms of our behaviors around our sleep and the way we think about our sleep that is just turned into an automatic thing on our body because we've essentially trained our body to sleep in a certain way without us realizing we were doing that and that can be untrained and that can be shifted. And I'm going to get to how you do that.
But, that is not true. It doesn't really matter how long you have had insomnia, you can still overcome it. And as I've [00:11:00] said, I've seen many people that have had insomnia for decades, and they're able to get past the insomnia.
Okay, number five.
Reason 5: Severity Doesn't Matter
It doesn't matter how severe insomnia is.
So, people have different levels of severity with insomnia, meaning that you could have insomnia where maybe you're averaging, you know, six hours of sleep a night, and maybe that's been happening for a few months. That's still insomnia because six hours isn't optimal And you don't want to be having difficulty sleeping
But some people have insomnia where they're averaging three hours a night and or some nights they're not sleeping and this has been going on for years, and so it's more severe in terms of the intensity of the insomnia, so it's on a spectrum insomnia can be on a spectrum.
It could be more severe It could be more moderate. It could be more mild You But it doesn't matter how severe it is in terms of overcoming it. It doesn't matter, if you are in that more severe range, you can still overcome the insomnia and be able to get past it through the last thing that I'm going to say, which is number six.
Reason 6: The Cure for Insomnia
The reason, the sixth reason why you shouldn't [00:12:00] worry about having insomnia is there is a cure. There is a cure that will, that will get rid of the insomnia where you can keep it away for the rest of your life. And have some control over that and that is called CBTI or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia.
Okay, there's something that I talk a lot about on this channel because it's the solution. To me, it's the only long term solution that's actually going to solve the root problem of insomnia. It's the gold standard treatment for insomnia and it is highly effective.
And again it doesn't matter how long you've had insomnia, how severe it is, what kind of insomnia you have, whether you're taking medication or not, it doesn't matter.
CBTI still works and actually it was developed for chronic insomnia which is insomnia people have had for or longer.
So that is the main reason why you shouldn't worry. Just to finish on the strongest one is you can solve the problem if that's something you want to do. And I'll put a link to other videos I have that goes into CBTI, that the treatment or the process for overcoming [00:13:00] insomnia in a little more detail, so you can get an idea of what that is.
You want to make sure that if you've tried this, you're That you've actually done CBTI. But that's the main reason why you shouldn't worry is that you can solve this problem and you don't have to live with this for the rest of your life, okay?
Conclusion and Recap
So again, to go through The six again, six reasons why you shouldn't worry if you have insomnia. Number one, it won't destroy your health. Number two, you can still function. Number three, there's nothing wrong with you. Number four, it doesn't matter how long you've had it. Number five, it doesn't matter how severe it is.
And number six, You can cure it. You can overcome the insomnia through Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia.
Okay, so I hope this video was helpful. If it was, just press the like button so I know. And if you have other worries that I didn't address here, you know, people have other kinds of worries with insomnia, then post them in the comments below.
And if you have any other questions about insomnia, you can post those questions in the comments. And I do Q& A videos every once in a while where I'll answer those questions in a video just for you.
Alright, hope you have a good rest of your day and I'll see you [00:14:00] next time.