Rip up the sleep rule book to beat insomnia for good as there’s a new sleep coach in town, whose empowering mind therapy aims to retrain your brain for a peaceful slumber. Angela Kennedy gives it a whirl.
IF YOU’RE SOMEONE WHO struggles with sleep, you’re bound to have tried every tip, technique and product that promises to make you drift off peacefully. I know I have! How many times have you adjusted your room temperature, used blackout blinds, taken a sleep supplement, exercised early, meditated and avoided caffeine – yet you’re still wide awake in the small hours? As an insomniac of many years, I’ve tried every sleep trick around, from relaxation techniques, breathing exercises and supplements to doctor-prescribed pills. But I still struggled to sleep. Well, the prescription pills usually worked – but who wants to be taking pharmaceuticals every night? My insomnia was a wired-but-tired feeling that left me staring at the ceiling while the hours ticked away in a frustration of wakefulness. Until the dreaded screech of my alarm clock summoned my zombiefied brain and body out of bed. Lack of sleep left me feeling as if my mind had been put through a cheese grater, which made concentration at work decidedly tricky and my patience for absolutely everything fairly thin. Eventually, I decided there must be something horribly wrong – such as the sleep disorder, fatal familial insomnia – ausually, but not always, genetic condition in which you can’t fall asleep and, eventually, die. It was while Googling this terrifying term that I discovered Daniel Erichsen (thesleepcoachschool.com), a former hospital sleep physician turned sleep coach, who had recorded an eminently sensible video on YouTube, explaining to stressed-out insomniacs, like me, that we were highly statistically unlikely to have this incredibly rare disease. He suggested, instead, that anxiety about being awake could be a cause. This was the first time a sleep expert had said there was nothing actually wrong with me for not being able to sleep. It was a revelatory experience, so, I delved into the hundreds of YouTube sleep lessons he has online. What I discovered was that I’d been approaching insomnia the wrong way by looking at it as something that needed fixing.
AFRAID OF SLEEP
‘Insomnia isn’t a physical disorder, instead it’s anxiety that becomes a phobia. For example, if you’re scared of spiders, you avoid them. But then you become more anxious by avoiding something that isn’t actually a threat,’ says Daniel. The traditional approach to insomnia creates a phobia situation of avoiding certain things – or depending on other things – to get to sleep or to sleep well. ‘This makes you anxious, so you then try to avoid feeling anxious, which makes you even more anxious. Eventually, you develop a fear of being awake
