You Are NOT An "Insomniac" or a “Bad Sleeper”
Do you call yourself an "insomniac" or a "bad sleeper?"
I cover:
Why people do this’
Why it’s NOT true you're an "insomniac"
Why you shouldn’t label yourself an “insomniac”or “bad sleeper”
What you should say instead
The SOLUTION to insomnia no matter how long you've had it
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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
00:00 Introduction: Understanding Insomnia
00:28 Why People Identify as Insomniacs
01:40 Debunking the Insomniac Myth
04:47 The Impact of Self-Labeling
07:33 Changing Your Mindset
09:28 Overcoming Insomnia with CBTI
12:08 Conclusion and Next Steps
RESOURCES
How to cure insomnia playlist
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Do you call yourself an insomniac or a bad sleeper? This is very common with insomnia. And in today's video, I'm going to talk about why people do this. Why this is not true. Why you shouldn't call yourself an insomniac or a bad sleeper, like how that is damaging to you and what you should say to yourself instead. And also, if you've struggled with insomnia for many years or decades even, how do you overcome it? Is it possible for you to still overcome it when you've had it that long?
Why People Identify as Insomniacs
So let's just start with why do people do this? Why do people call themselves insomniacs or bad sleepers, things like that? Well, people do this with all kinds of things.
Essentially, if you've had a problem or something in your personality or experience for a long time, you might start to identify with it. You might start to believe this is just who I am because I've had this so long, I haven't been able to get rid of it and therefore this is just part of who I am. I was born with this, it's a genetic thing. For whatever reason, I'm just not [00:01:00] a good sleeper.
And it becomes a part of your identity, and then you might start referring to yourself as an insomniac or a bad sleeper. And people do this with all kinds of things. They do it with anxiety, I'm an anxious person. They do it with, if they're overweight, yeah, I've always just been overweight, that's just who I am.
And it starts to become a part of the person's identity. That's why people embrace this. And this is one thing that could cause them to kind of hold on to that problem, which seems counterintuitive. Like, why would someone want to hold on to insomnia? But sometimes if it becomes a part of a person's identity, then they may resist giving it up because they feel like they're giving up a part of themselves, even though it's a painful part of themself.
Debunking the Insomniac Identity
So why is this not true? Why is the idea of an insomniac? And when I say insomniac, I mean, that's just who I am. I am not, I do not have the ability to sleep or sleep well. And that is just the way I've always been.
Now, why is this not true? Why is it not [00:02:00] true that people are insomniacs or bad sleepers? Well, the main reason is sleep. is something that everybody is born with. The ability to sleep, the ability to sleep well is part of our system. It's part of, um, you know, our genetics when we're born. It's part of, it's part of our biology when we're born.
The Role of Sleep Behaviors and Habits
And what happens is we learn certain types of behaviors around sleep. We adopt certain patterns or habits with our sleep. And it's those things that determine the quality of our sleep. Not our genetics or things like that. It's, it's more about the behaviors and the habits that we develop. And if you at a young age had trouble sleeping for whatever reason, you might've adopted poor sleep behaviors or habits that you weren't aware of.
And that continued to perpetuate the poor sleep. Now there might have been external factors going on that contributed to it, but as I talked about in a recent video, [00:03:00] Insomnia is not caused by some external thing. It's caused by ourselves in terms of our behaviors around our sleep.
And then that just becomes a habit. And then that then just becomes kind of automatic that we have difficulty sleeping because we get into this cycle of poor sleep. And then you could misinterpret that as being, Well, I'm just a bad sleeper.
Overcoming Long-Term Insomnia
Another thing here that proves this is just not true is that I've worked with many people who have had insomnia for 30 plus years. I mean, essentially their whole life as far back as they can remember, they've had insomnia, they've been a poor sleeper and they've tried all the different usual kinds of things. You can think of medication and sleep hygiene and whatever, there's a whole list of things and they still have the insomnia.
So what's going on there? Well, the main thing that's going on there is they didn't find the right thing that actually solved the problem. And when they finally found that thing, they were able to overcome it.
So [00:04:00] what actually gets rid of insomnia is something I'll talk about at the end.
It's the gold standard treatment. And that is what you want to do. If you've had insomnia, whether it's been three months or 30 plus years, This is the treatment or the process that you want to use. But what I've seen is many people that have had insomnia for 30 plus years, they're taking medications.
It's, it's severe insomnia and they are able to overcome it. They are able to significantly improve their sleep or completely get past the insomnia, even though they've had it for that long. What changed?
The Power of Changing Your Mindset
What changed was their thinking around it. They stopped calling themselves an insomniac or a bad sleeper and they started changing their. This is the way they think and go about actually sleeping, they change their behaviors and their habits around sleep.
Now, what is the problem with calling yourself an insomniac or a bad sleeper? I mean, sometimes people do this in kind of a joking way. Yeah, you know, I'm insomniac.
I've never been a good sleeper. You know, there's like Facebook groups and, and things [00:05:00] like that where, where people just talk about how crappy their sleep is. And yeah, that can relieve and enlighten people. The problem, but the problem is it's still a problem and it's a painful problem. And most people don't want to have poor sleep.
They want to be able to sleep because you feel way better when you're sleeping. And obviously in terms of health, it's way, way better to get a sleep rather than not get sleep or good sleep rather than not good sleep.
Separating Identity from the Problem
Why you shouldn't call yourself an insomniac or a bad sleeper is you don't want to make a problem part of your identity and who you are. The reason is, if you do that, you're not going to be able to get past the problem. Because implied in that belief is, if I'm saying I'm an insomniac or a bad sleeper, it means that that's just who I am. And that's just who I am. I can't change it. Right? I was born that way. It's my genetics. My mom or my dad were insomniacs.
Therefore, I'm kind of [00:06:00] helpless to this. This is just, you know, something I inherited. If you hold a belief like that, you're never going to get over the insomnia because your belief is going to keep getting in the way. Emotionally, it's going to get in the way of you putting in the efforts or putting in the search to find the way to get rid of it.
And, as I said earlier, you're going to resist giving it up because it's part of your identity and therefore you're going to resist solving that problem. And this happens with any kind of identity belief. If someone believes I'm not good at math, guess what? They're not going to be good at math. Not because they're actually not good at math or can't become good at math and can't learn to improve their ability to do math, but because they have that belief, it becomes a feedback loop.
It leads to certain behaviors that then make it harder for them to learn how to do math and then that just confirms the belief they're not good at math and then that cycle feeds on itself.
The same thing happens with [00:07:00] insomnia. The belief leads to the behaviors, which perpetuates the belief because it makes the sleep poor and it just feeds into that cycle.
And to change that cycle, one of the things you need to start changing is the way you think about sleep and yourself in relation to sleep. You have to do that. Otherwise, you'll stay stuck in that cycle because there's a conflict between this is who I am versus I want to become a better sleeper, right?
You can't become a better sleeper if you think who you are is an insomniac or a bad sleeper.
Now, what could you say instead of this? Well, don't make it an identity thing. Make it a problem. So you might say something like, yes, I have had difficulty sleeping or I've struggled with sleep or insomnia.
for years or decades or my whole life, but it's because I haven't learned the right behaviors and ways of thinking about sleeping, going about sleep, that would actually get me to be a good sleeper. So you can say [00:08:00] something like that. You could say, yes, I've had this problem for a long time, but the problem is not me.
The problem is separate from me. It's a problem I'm experiencing, but it's not who I am as a person. And this is true of anxiety and depression. If you've been overweight your own, your, your whole life, you don't want to say, I'm just an overweight person, or I'm just, that's just who I am. No, you want to say, I've had a weight problem for a long time.
Because I haven't learned how to go about, you know, eating or behaving in a certain way that will lead me to lose the weight and be able to keep it off. And this is true with most problems, is that we perpetuate the problem by identifying with it and labeling ourselves. So this is actually what's called a cognitive distortion of labeling. We're putting a label on ourself of our who we are as a person as a whole instead of it just being a problem that we're dealing with right now or that we've dealt with for a long [00:09:00] time. And so you don't want to label yourself in that way. You instead want to label it as a problem that you're dealing with but that is a solvable problem.
It's a problem that you can improve on. Even if you don't believe that you can like completely get rid of the insomnia and be like a great sleeper like You Other people that you may know in your life. You can definitely improve it. You could probably improve it significantly If you find the right tool to do it, okay, so that leads me to the end
Introducing CBTI: The Gold Standard Treatment
How do you overcome insomnia if you've had it for decades or your whole life or even if you've had it for just a few months and you're starting to develop that belief of like, maybe I've lost my ability to sleep. There's something wrong here.
The solution to this is a treatment or a process that's called CBTI, which stands for cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia.
And I've talked about this in more depth in other videos, and I'm going to actually start a series starting next week where I just talk about different aspects of what [00:10:00] CBTI is, what it isn't, and how you can, how you can be able to go through it yourself. Like where are the best resources to be able to go through this?
But this is the gold standard treatment and it's the most effective, really the only effective treatment in my view and in my experience. And I've seen, as I said earlier, many people who have had insomnia for years or decades and they were able to overcome that insomnia and get to a normal healthy pattern of sleep by going through this process.
It doesn't really matter how long you've had a problem. Like sometimes people think the longer they've had a problem, the harder it is to overcome. And in one sense, it's true because psychologically, if you hold that belief, that labeling belief, or that this is who I am, then that resistance, or the belief that you could not be that person, that you could actually be a good sleeper, gets in the way of the process.
But if you can shift that belief quicker, then you will then [00:11:00] the behavior changes don't take any longer no matter how long you've had the problem because you're just shifting from an old behavior to a new behavior. It's breaking any kind of habit and habits can be broken no matter how long you've had them if there are certain things in place to help shift the the habit and the beliefs around it.
Okay. So what I recommend is CBTI. Now, if you want CBTI, I have a series already within my YouTube channel and that series is called how to cure insomnia. And I go week by week through each of the different weeks of CBTI because it's, it's a weekly layered process. that you go through and I explain in pretty good detail about what CVTI is involved. Like what, what that process looks like. So I'll put a link to that in the description below. You can check that out.
And then, as I said, I'm going to be starting a series next week where I go into all different kinds of aspects of [00:12:00] CVTI so you can learn more about it and learn why it's so effective for insomnia and especially chronic long term insomnia.
Conclusion and Next Steps
So I hope you found that video helpful today. If you did, just press the like button and subscribe to the channel if you haven't, because then you can get these videos, which I do every week. You'll know exactly when they come out and then leave any comments below, any questions you have in terms of this issue, that I could answer in future videos.