YOU are the Cure for Your Insomnia
A couple weeks ago I posted a video: YOU Are Causing Your Insomnia.
This is the most empowering thing in the world, because it means YOU have the power within you to also CURE your insomnia.
Today I cover the 3 key things you must do to cure your insomnia:
1. Changing Your Thoughts About Insomnia/Sleep
2. Changing Your Sleep Behaviors
3. Total Commitment
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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
CBT-I Playlist
00:00 Introduction: You Are the Cure for Your Insomnia
00:38 Understanding the Causes of Insomnia
01:20 The Insomnia Cycle Explained
02:06 Three Requirements to Cure Your Insomnia
02:11 Changing Your Thoughts
03:45 Changing Your Behaviors
08:32 The Role of Commitment
10:55 Conclusion: Empower Yourself to Overcome Insomnia
12:37 Final Tips and Encouragement
TRANSCRIPT
Introduction: You Are the Cure for Your Insomnia
Couple of weeks ago, I posted a video entitled You Are Causing Your Insomnia. And what that video talked about is basically that insomnia is not caused by some external thing or even some internal medical condition, but it's caused by you. And that is actually the most empowering thing that you can learn because that means you also have the ability to overcome it. If you're causing it, you can overcome it.
So, what I'm going to talk about in today's video is how you are also the cure for your insomnia. My name is Dr. Steve Orma. I'm a clinical psychologist and I help people overcome insomnia, get their sleep back, and do that without having to take any medication or supplements or any of that kind of stuff.
Understanding the Causes of Insomnia
So first, let's briefly go over what causes insomnia. So, insomnia is caused by two things. Your thoughts and your behaviors. And specifically, the types of thoughts are called negative sleep thoughts. These are worries, concerns about your sleep, because some kind of trigger usually causes you to have some poor sleep. And then in response to that, you got really anxious and [00:01:00] worried about your sleep.
And then the second thing is you engaged in behaviors. You changed your behaviors around your sleep to try to improve your sleep because you're worried about it. And those behaviors made the sleep worse. And then that made you more anxious, which led to you trying even harder, with more behaviors and more different things. And then that feeds the anxiety.
The Insomnia Cycle Explained
And this is what I call the insomnia cycle. And once you have that cycle going of negative sleep thoughts, worry, anxiety, frustration, and all these different things that you're trying to do to fix the insomnia, which is just making it worse, you get stuck in a cycle and that becomes a pattern and that turns into insomnia.
So these are all caused by you, meaning the way that you're thinking about your sleep or the impacts of not sleeping or what the problem might be. And also the behavior changes that you've made to try to fix the sleep, which in turn actually make the sleep worse unknowingly to you.
So the great thing about this is because you control your thoughts and you control your behaviors. You can cure [00:02:00] the insomnia by changing, essentially reversing the process that created the insomnia to get rid of the insomnia.
Three Requirements to Cure Your Insomnia
So what I'm going to do is go over three ways in which you are the cure for your insomnia.
Changing Your Thoughts
Number one is your thoughts. And when I say thoughts, I mean your beliefs, your assumptions, your expectations, your worries, your concerns about your sleep or the insomnia or the effects of the insomnia.
So people worry about both the insomnia and the sleep, but they also worry about the effects of not sleeping, such as their health. How is this going to impact your health and your well being, your mood, your ability to function? Hmm. All of these things become concerns and worries that fuel anxiety that then fuel the behaviors.
So, the first thing that you have to get control over and shift in order to cure the insomnia is your thoughts. Is the way you're thinking about the sleep.
Another part of the thoughts that feeds insomnia is when you take medication or supplements or both, it creates what I call [00:03:00] psychological dependence.
So we all know about physical dependence. That's when your body, you know, builds up a tolerance to the, the drug or the supplement that you're taking. And then when you try to come off it you start having withdrawal symptoms or there are side effects to the medication, so there's a physical effect.
But really the most insidious thing about taking a medication or a supplement for insomnia is the psychological dependence, which means you start to form the belief that in order for you to be able to sleep or sleep well, you have to take a pill or you have to take a supplement or a combination of things because you have lost the ability within yourself to sleep.
So that feeds into the thought part, the negative sleep thoughts that feeds the cycle of insomnia. And this is the first thing that has to shift.
Changing Your Behaviors
The second thing that has to shift is your behaviors. And specifically, I'm talking about your sleep behaviors. So this is the time you go to bed, the time you wake up in the morning, the amount of time that you're staying in the bed during the night.
These things, when someone [00:04:00] develops start to become more erratic and inconsistent. Because the bedtime and the wake up time you were doing before isn't working, and so you might sleep in more. You might go to bed earlier to try to catch up on your sleep. And this schedule can vary day to day so your, your bedtimes and your wake up times and how much time you're spending in the bed is varying and it's confusing to your brain and your sleep system and this feeds into the insomnia cycle. So that's one thing, one behavior that needs to change.
A second one is how you respond to when you're not sleeping. Meaning, once you start to develop insomnia or once you even start having some poor sleep, how you respond to that will determine which way things go. Do you continue moving toward insomnia and maintaining it and worsening it?
Or do you get past the insomnia or this poor sleep? It's a short term thing and then you get past it and you're back to your normal routine.
Well, what will determine that is how you respond to the poor sleep. And the way most people respond is what are called poor sleep behaviors.
So, I mentioned a few of them already. [00:05:00] That might be, well, I had a really difficult night of sleep and I have the ability to sleep in. So I'm going to sleep an extra two hours this morning. Okay. That is one thing that starts to mess up your sleep pattern.
Another one is going to bed early. You know, let's say the previous night you didn't sleep well, you're exhausted. And so you want to go to bed two, three hours earlier that day or that night because you want to kind of make up for lost sleep. Okay, that's another thing that will feed into the insomnia cycle.
And then the third thing is just spending too much time in the bed awake. So let's say you get in the bed to go to sleep and you're having difficulty falling asleep. Or you wake up in the middle of the night and you're having difficulty going back to sleep. Okay, this is what insomnia is. Difficulty falling asleep, staying asleep, or both. And how you respond to that when you're not sleeping in the bed is key to creating insomnia. And it's also key to overcoming insomnia.
And what most people do is they stay in the bed. And not only that, they start getting really anxious or frustrated. You're tossing and turning, you try even harder, like you get more determined to sleep, which then just makes you more [00:06:00] tense and makes it harder to sleep.
A lot of people will grab their phone at this point and they'll go on and they'll, you know, they'll scroll through social media, they'll watch videos, they'll, you know, get engaged with things online, which then wakes them up, not just because of the light from the phone, but because phones and social media are very stimulating. So, that tends to wake them up and feed into the, into the pattern of insomnia.
You also might get out of bed and take something. So this is when some people might take a medication. They don't take it when they go to bed because they want to see if they can sleep. And then when they're not sleeping, you know, after two hours or in the middle of the night, they'll go and they'll take some Ambien or Tylenol PM or something like that to get them through the night.
Now, all of these responses, although they seem like they could help you fall back to sleep, And they might actually that night will end up feeding the cycle of insomnia and they will worsen the sleep and they will get you more and deeper into that pattern of insomnia. So those are not the ways to respond.
Instead, at a certain point, and I've talked about this in other videos, you need to get out of the [00:07:00] bed. If you're not asleep within a certain amount of time and you're getting into that wakefulness state or hyper aroused state in the bed, you need to get out of the bed. And that's what most people don't do.
Or if they do get out of the bed. They don't do the right things. They'll go and exercise. They'll go take something. They'll go eat. They'll go watch a movie and those things are just stimulating and they'll, you know, keep still keep you awake and still maintain the problem. So that's the second thing changing your sleep behaviors.
Once you know how to shift your thoughts. Once you know how to change your thoughts from negative sleep thoughts to more positive or realistic sleep thoughts, and once you know which behaviors to change, and how do you know that? Well, you do the gold standard treatment for insomnia, which is called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia, or CBTI.
What CBTI is, essentially, is any teaches you these two things. How to change your thoughts around your sleep, how to get rid of or reduce or, you know, less intensify the negative sleep thoughts around your sleep, which includes the anxiety and the frustration. And how to manage all those expectations and [00:08:00] assumptions that are feeding into that anxiety.
And it teaches you exactly what to do in terms of your behavior. When to go to bed, when to wake up, how much time to spend in the bed at any given point.
And also, how to respond to when you're not sleeping. How to respond to when you're having difficulty going to sleep or falling back to sleep. In an effective way, in a way that doesn't feed the insomnia and in fact starts to break that pattern.
Okay, so that's what the core of CBTI is and that's why it's so effective is it targets the root causes of insomnia. The negative sleep thoughts and the poor sleep behaviors.
The Role of Commitment
But, the third thing that you need to overcome insomnia, even once you know this, and even once you know about CBTI, and you have the whole process laid out in front of you, you need commitment. And what that means is you need to be able to apply and take action on what you've learned to be able to change things.
You can't just know about, Oh, I need to do this or I need to do that. You actually have to do it because it was your behaviors, your thinking, and the actual things you did around your sleep. Like when you got into bed, when you [00:09:00] got out of bed, your behaviors around your sleep. Those have to change. And to do that, you have to reverse it by doing the opposite, essentially. To break the pattern and get back to your normal sleep pattern.
So, the people that I've seen overcome insomnia, and I've seen hundreds of people do this now that have come through my program, and these are people from every walk of life, from every level of severity of insomnia, whether they've had it for 30 years, whether they've had it for just a month, whether it's very severe or not, they're taking medication, they're not. Really there's two things that got them past the insomnia.
Number one, they had a process, which is the CBTI. And they had a way of going about like, how do, what do I actually do to solve the problem step by step, so I know exactly what I need to do.
And then the second thing is they had the commitment. They had the commitment to actually go through the process and apply the skills and take the action and do it over a period of time until the insomnia was gone.
And that took effort and that took 100 percent commitment do it.
And you really have to get to a point where you're just done with the insomnia. And I don't mean just [00:10:00] emotionally. I know a lot of you are just, I'm sick of this, it's frustrating, I'm in pain. I get that. That's not enough. It's got to be to the point where you're willing to take action and where this is a priority in your life.
And that's the way everything goes, right? It doesn't matter if you want to lose weight, if you want to get into good shape, if you want to get a college degree, if you want to get a good job, if you want to find a romantic partner. You have to make that a priority. And then you have to take action, and you have to have a certain mindset to do it.
And then you have to go and actually do it. And to do that, it has to be a priority, it has to be really important to you, and then you have to commit to doing it.
Really, once it's that important to you, and you're just done with it, and you're unwilling to settle for anything less, that is when you will have the commitment.
You, you will be willing to do whatever it takes to do it. And in fact, when you get to that point, it's almost easier. It's a lot easier to overcome any problem because your commitment and your drive to want to solve the problem and get rid of it forever will kind of drive you to do what's necessary to solve the problem.
Conclusion: Empower Yourself to Overcome Insomnia
So really these are the three key things to overcome insomnia and for [00:11:00] you to cure your own insomnia.
And the reason why you are curing your insomnia ultimately is you are the one who's changing your thoughts, your behavior, and your commitment. No one can do that for you.
I can't act for my clients, I can't think for my clients, and I can't give them the commitment. What I can do is give them the exact process in an expert way, because I've done this with so many people, that I can tell them, this is exactly what you need to do, this is how you shift those thoughts, and this is what's required in order for you to overcome the insomnia.
And then help them when they hit roadblocks or obstacles or difficulties along the way to help them pass that. But they have to actually take it and apply it. And ultimately they cure their insomnia. I don't cure their insomnia. CBTI doesn't cure their insomnia. And it's because they take what they learn and they apply it.
And this is true of any kind of behavioral or mental change. This is the case with depression. Depression is essentially a problem in the way you're thinking about things, which then also turns into a certain cycle that also affects you [00:12:00] physiologically. You could go to a great therapist and the therapist can give you the greatest tools and skills and knowledge in the world. But if you don't apply it, The depression isn't going to go away. This is the same thing with losing weight. This is the same thing with any kind of behavior thing, meaning that it's you're required to actually get the thing that you want. Ultimately, you have to do it.
And this to me is the most empowering thing in the world. Okay, even though it's like, yeah, you have to be responsible, you have to take the action, but that means your life is in your control. That means ultimately the insomnia is Is in your control or whether you have the insomnia or you're not once you know what to do and you have the commitment.
And what to do is the CBTI. I've talked about that all the time on this channel.
Final Tips and Encouragement
I'll put a link in the show notes to the CBT-I videos that I have, as well as the video, the previous video where I talk about how you are the cause of the insomnia, because that's a good thing to listen to as well to get the other kind of perspective on this video.
But ultimately, this is the most empowering thing in the world to know that you have the ability to solve the insomnia now or to start going down that path and [00:13:00] that the power is in your hands. It's just a matter of doing these three things.
Okay. So number one again, it's changing those negative sleep thoughts. Number two, it's changing specific sleep behaviors. And number three, it's having the commitment. Those are the three things that are going to allow you to be able to cure your insomnia.
If you found this video helpful, just press the like button. You can subscribe to the channel, I do two of these videos every week. And if you have any questions about this video, you can post them in the comments below. And I hope you have a good rest of your day and your week, and I'll see you next time.