Show Notes
Getting the Sleep You Need Insomnia is when you can't fall asleep ("nighttime insomnia") or you can't stay asleep ("morning insomnia"). Acute insomnia is when you're having trouble sleeping due to a recent traumatic shock experience (stress). Chronic insomnia is when you have trouble sleeping more than twice a week for more than 3 months Insomnia isn't when you can't sleep because you keep getting woken up. It's when you can't sleep even if you get rid of all distractions, like light, noise, stimulants and sedatives, heavy meals, uncomfortable bed, poor routine/schedule/habits, discomfort from pain or restless leg syndrome or apnea, and all the other things we blame for our sleeplessness. So insomnia is when you can't fall asleep or stay asleep during the time when you should be sleeping. The result of not getting the sleep you need is fatigue, low energy, difficulty concentrating, mood disturbances, and decreased performance in work or at school. You might start to feel anxiousness, dread, or panic at just the prospect of not sleeping. Your anxiety and insomnia can feed each other and become a cycle as you lay awake at night freaking out about how little sleep you're getting and how tired you're going to be at your important event tomorrow. Not getting the sleep you need will produce physical health problems within days. Psychologically, you can last up to a week without sleep ...but then you're going to have a complete mental breakdown. Why Conventional and Most Alternative Health Approaches Don't Work The current health paradigm doesn't understand how sleep works. Sleep isn't the absence of wakefulness, and wakefulness isn't the absence of sleep. Nor are wakefulness and sleep a matter of turning your brain on or off. Sleep is a complex process of resolving and healing the stresses you experienced during the waking part of your day. Insomnia occurs when you're working through a big traumatic stress experience. It also occurs when you're recovering and repairing your body after you've worked through a big traumatic stress experience. These are emergency biological response mechanisms, and trying to interfere with them can easily make insomnia worse. We live in a time dominated by a mechanistic understanding of the natural world. So the research and treatment remain focused on trying to turn your brain on and off according to a "normal" schedule, regardless of your current biological needs. Medications for insomnia try to disrupt brain chemicals and turn your brain off, in the belief that sleep is the absence of wakefulness. Some newer medical approaches try to disrupt your sleep urges during the day in the belief that being awake is the absence of sleepiness. Either way, these kinds of brain-chemistry-disrupting treatments can be helpful if you're suffering acute insomnia due to a recent traumatic stress ...but they should never be used for chronic insomnia because they are addictive, have unhealthy side effects, and it's difficult to come off these meds. Is There Any True Cure? The best treatments for insomnia focus on lifestyle changes, self-discipline, and even cognitive behavioural therapy. However, these treatments don't work by forcing your body into a "normal" rhythm. In fact, trying to force yourself to be normal is actually the CAUSE of insomnia! The real reason that conventional and most alternative treatments for insomnia "work" - if they work - is because they can give you a burst of self-confidence that empowers you to take control of your time for your own personal, selfish reasons ...instead of trying to be normal. Listen to "Mind Over Insomnia: Stop Counting Sheep and Get the Z's You Need" to discover how to build a schedule around YOUR "normal sleep system," so you can feel great and love your life. Standard beliefs about cause of insomnia: https://sleepfoundation.org/insomnia/content/what-causes-insomnia Medical treatment of insomnia: http://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/tc/insomnia-
More from Mind Over Symptom
Is a good life something you get by avoiding disease for as long as possible? That's the undercurrent of conventional and alternative health alike: eat this, don't eat that, test this marker, and you get to postpone the bad thing a while longer. Avoidance, as a lifestyle. The Greeks had a word for what a good life really is: eudaimonia. Flourishing. The highest human good. But it comes with a paradox that I think undermines 21st-century civilization: the good life depends on getting your physical needs met, and focusing on getting your physical needs met pushes the good life away. Every advertisement you've ever seen runs on this paradox. So does most of religion, most self-improvement, and nearly all of the wellness industry. In this episode I show you the way out, which isn't a question of "how do I stop doing this," but, instead, "what am I getting out of this?" I tell you how my cigarette addiction fell away without willpower once the special biological program had nothing left to do. Then I give you the four questions, in the right order, so that you can get the good life, too. Listen now: https://mindtreehealth.co/blog/the-good-life-eudaimonia New here? Start at mindtreehealth.co/start for the free training on how this all works — how you author your own symptoms, and how to find the conflict underneath them. And if you want to practice the four questions with people who are doing the same thing, Quintessence Tribe is where we talk about this live: mindtreehealth.co/quintessence-tribe
A woman wrote to me with a question that's more common than she thinks: "I don't feel sexual desire for my husband — how do I get it back?" The pop-psychology answer blames him, her hormones, or her technique. It's none of those. In this episode I walk through why desire runs on polarity — the masculine attracted to the feminine, the feminine attracted by the masculine — and what happens when a woman starts managing her husband instead of trusting him: she masculinizes, he emasculates, and without either of them doing anything wrong, he turns into her teenage son. I get into the biology (temporal-lobe conflicts, hormone status), tell you about the worst backseat driver I ever rode with, and lay out exactly how to hand the territory back so desire returns on its own. New here? Start at mindtreehealth.co/start for the free training on how this all works. And if you want to keep working this material in real community, Quintessence Tribe is where I teach it live: mindtreehealth.co/quintessence-tribe.
There's an old move in logic: reductio ad absurdum. You don't attack an idea. You agree with it, let it be completely true, and follow it all the way to its final destination. If the destination is monstrous, the idea was rotten from the start.
A conversation I had on Here for the Truth with Joel Rafidi and Yerasimos that turned out to be a clear articulation of my whole framework. The root of every "problem" - every symptom, every pattern, every fear - is just one fracture: existential isolation, the severance from the source of your own being. From there: the identity conflict I call the feminine wound (and why most modern men carry it too), the era of "weak men" created by good times, the way the GNM and truth-seeker community smuggled the victim-rescuer drama into the very framework meant to free it, the cancer-screening industry that turns one in three of us into patients (and more than half of cancer patients terminal), and my twenty-two years raising a son with Down syndrome. Underneath it all is the one question: who do I want to be? Start where I point you at the end — Joel and Yerasimos's Self-Esteem Reset, a free seven-day mini course, under ten minutes a day → selfesteemreset.com Go deeper with them → riseabovetheherd.co The show → hereforthetruth.com Read + listen → mindtreehealth.co/blog/here-for-the-truth The what-you-are side (my free training) → mindtreehealth.co/start
A talk about the meaning of life, delivered through your toilet bowl — and Lishui means that completely. Every gut has been running the same four-step routine for half a billion years: take it in, move it along, break it down, extract the change. Every tissue you have, including the brain doing your relationships and self-worth, is a specialized version of that one original organ.