I was so exhausted last night that I didn’t wake up in the middle of the night! Not even once.
I needed the sleep, I’m sure. But missing insomnia time made me sad.
Insomnia time is the best time of the day. You’re awake, at night, with nobody expecting anything from you. It’s quiet, it’s calm, there’s nothing going on. You can listen to the tiny little sounds of the night. If you’re lucky, maybe there’s a kitty smooshed up against you somewhere, alive, quiet, breathing … maybe even ready to stretch out toward you for a scritch or two.
There’s time to do nothing but feel the sensations in your body. To work through just a tiny bit more of that web of unhappiness you’ve been weaving your entire life.
When I fall into my web of sensations, it’s sometimes scary at first. How’s it going to be tonight? Is it going to be frightening? Painful? Am I going to get angry? Worried? Sad? Will I have to relive the most embarrasing moments of my life yet again?
And then I fall into it. And it’s … well, it’s something! Every night is different these days. Some days it’s awful! But mostly it’s quite enjoyable. There is pain, unhappiness, embarrassment, sadness, worry. But there’s also the knowledge that in experiencing those things, I am moving past them. The whole experience has a tinge of quiet happiness about it. It’s hard to describe, and maybe hard to imagine. But it’s beautiful.
It wasn’t always so nice.
I first started to notice the importance of insomnia a few years ago. This would have been about a year after the panic attack that sent me into my anxiety disorder. The book that was then serving as my personal bible of recovery told me that I needed to pay attention to my anxiety and try to accept it. The path of acceptance is the path of healing. So every night, as I lay awake in bed, I was trying to do that.
But all I could feel, night after night, was the same thing: fear fear fear fear fear. So much fear! Fear of what? Unclear. Fear of the future? Fear of the past? Fear of specific sensations in the body? I remember that at one point I spent at least two weeks, maybe more, every night, just feeling my heartbeat and being afraid. Was I afraid of the heartbeat itself? (What kind of moron is afraid of their own heartbeat?) Was the heartbeat a signal of the fear? Was the heartbeat itself the fear itself? Would I feel better, if only I could stop feeling the heartbeat? Or was feeling the heartbeat, over and over, the path back to feeling better, to not feeling so much fear? I had no idea! I hadn’t done any of this before.
Maybe you can imagine what it was like. You’re a sensible person. A modern person. You are at least minimally rational. You can look things up on the internet, and maybe even be able to distinguish the good internet stuff from the bad internet stuff. You live in an age of science, intelligence. Medicine is making strides. We’re centuries past the dark ages.
And yet here you are, lying in the dark, petrified of your own heartbeat, unable to stop feeling the fear, unable to do anything but think about the heartbeat and the fear and what it might mean. Ba-bum, ba-bum, ba-bum. Is it coming to get me? What is “it”? What is “getting”? What am I scared of? It seems like there is no “of” — just fear itself. But what is fear? Why is it so scary? It’s just a feeling in my body. But it doesn’t feel like that! It feels like the whole world is dangerous. But why? Is it just that I’m frightened? Why am I scared? Am I, as FDR once said, afraid only of fear itself? But fear itself is pretty scary! (Pain hurts, and fear is scary.) Can I run away from the fear? But the fear chases, hot on my heels. No escape that way. If I can’t run away from it, can I turn around and walk right into it? Wait, where did it go? Why won’t it hold still and let me look at it? What’s below all this fear? How deep does it go? What’s driving it? Why is it here? Can I stop my mind from thinking all these questions, just for a few minutes? Please? Just let me be, mind: let me be here with my fear, not thinking, not theorizing, just being. Quietly being.
And yet it was never quiet! It was loud loud loud! Oh so loud. A voice shouting at me to run away from the fear. Shouting that there was nowhere to run. Yelling at myself, or being yelled at by myself, or both? “I should be better than this! This is stupid! I’m stupid! This can’t be happening! How is this happening? How is it that I can’t stop feeling this way? OK let’s try to accept this. Let’s allow this feeling to be what it is. Nope, that’s not working. I can’t stop wanting to stop feeling this way! Why not? What’s so bad about it? It feels like the feeling itself is badness. It’s wrong, everything’s wrong. I can’t see anything, anywhere, that looks like acceptance. Is there a path to acceptance? A path to peace? Where? What’s wrong with me that I can’t find it?”
Time to be rational. OK. So: I’m afraid of the fear itself. Got it. Let’s focus on that sentence and try to understand it, parse it. What I can understand I can control, right? But whoops, now I’m afraid of the content of the sentence! I’m suddenly afraid of the fact that I’m afraid of the fear itself! I mean, that’s a scary thought. How scary is it to think that you might just be afraid forever … and afraid of nothing other than your own fear? Then I’m afraid that I will never not be afraid of the fact that I’m afraid of the fear itself! And then I start to be afraid of that thought … and suddenly I realize just how meta this is becoming. For a moment I take refuge in the fact that it can’t get much worse! I remember that humans have an inbuilt inability to go through too many levels of recursion without getting confused. So I think, hopefully: this will all get better as soon as I run out of levels of fear that I can keep track of. But then the next thought: even if I run out of levels, what if I don’t feel any better? And now I’m afraid that I will run out of levels of meta and yet the fear won’t decrease. And now I’m afraid that thinking these thoughts will never end.
So much for trying to be rational! So now it’s back to trying not to think at all. “Just feel! Stop thinking!” I tell myself. The feelings are bad enough, but the thinking makes it worse. All the thinking does is give me new things to be afraid of. And now it’s time to be afraid that I will never be able to stop thinking. And now it’s time to worry that I’ll never be able to stop thinking about how I might never be able to stop thinking. And around and around she goes.
There is no top to this. There’s no bottom. There’s no way out. There is only fear, and pain, and fear, and fear, and fear. And then there’s the realization that I crave the pain. The pain is familiar and makes sense! I’ve lived my whole life with unexplained pain that comes out of nowhere — I’m used to that! More pain, please! (Who am I talking to? Is there anyone there to hear?) Less fear, please! Whoever you are, please listen: I’m willing to take any amount of pain, if you’ll just take the fear away! But no, now that I want the pain, it’s gone. All that is left is the fear.
I run from the fear, there in the dark, and find nothing but more fear. And run away, and find it again. And again. Over, and over, and over. For hours, and hours, and hours.
Weeks of this! Weeks! Every night! Upon going to bed, upon waking up in the middle of the night, and then again upon waking up in the morning! Every night!
But then! But then!!! I finally get used to the round-and-round. I find myself, one night, actually excited to be crawling into bed to fight with my fear. (All I can think at this point is … “!!???!!?”)
I’m becoming an expert in my own fear. I’ve felt so much fear from so many places, for so many reasons that aren’t even reasons. So I very much expect to find that this new thing, this excitement, will do nothing but generate more fear. And it doesn’t take long to find reasons to be afraid of my own excitement. What kind of moron gets excited about his own fear? What would a sensible psychologist say about this? Imagine trying to explain it to your friends! No, this is definitely not good. What new depths of insanity am I about to reach? How can I not be afraid of where this is going?
But no! It goes the other way. The excitement builds on itself, and suddenly the fear just … alternates with happiness! I am afraid of my fear, but also happy to be fighting it. There comes to be something reassuring in the fight itself. Something familiar, even calm, about the complete and total lack of calm in my body. And these moments of happiness are every bit as real as the moments of fear have ever been. And I love those moments, and I cling to them. But then of course I become afraid that the happiness won’t last, and the fear returns with a vengeance. But then … I’m happy to have felt the fear! So now I get to dwell in the happiness for a few seconds. Oops, but the happiness is fearful. Uh oh! Wait, but the fear is happy! And back and forth, and back and forth. And now that is the hourslong pattern, hour after hour, night after night, for weeks on end.
And that … was progress!
Eventually that phase ended as well. And then it was time for the next phase of recovery. The next recurrent feelings in the body. The next loops. And then the next, and the next.
But every new loop was a little less painful than the one before. A little more confidence seeped in to the whole process. A little bit of knowledge that I’m going to be OK. All of the suffering is real, but it’s not permanent. It will change. I know the path through it.
As you’re reading this, maybe you’re saying: this Kent fella is insane! That whole ordeal makes no sense at all! He would have been so much better off just … not doing any of that. He should have just gotten up and acted normal. And he wants me to follow that path? No thank you!
The thing is, you’re right. I was, in fact, insane. Like, legitimately fucked up beyond anything that I had ever believed possible. For probably two full years, every moment of my life was full of legitimate delusions, and terror, and pain beyond anything I had ever felt.
I really, truly, deeply hope that you’re better off than I was. If you’re not, though, you know how desperate things can feel.
What I learned, deep in my feelings, deep within the terror and the pain and the fear and the worry, is that there is a way back from it. From any depth of mental health hell, no matter how awful.
Feel your feelings.
Will it suck? It will. Will you feel better? You will. Will the process of feeling better be slow? so slow that you aren’t sure it’s happening? so painful that you’re not sure you can do it? Probably so, I’m afraid.
But keep going! Climb out of your own personal hell. Feel your feelings.
About … a year ago? maybe more? … I finally convinced my wife that she should try feeling her feelings. She was never insane like I was, but she was very unhappy in her own way.
So in the early evenings, she would lie in bed with the intent of doing nothing but feeling her feelings. She started out using a timer, going for 20 minutes per evening, or maybe it was 30, I’m not sure. The first few times, she wanted me to lie in bed next to her, quietly, while she tried it out. She did it for several evenings — not every night, but semi-regularly — over the course of a week or two.
The very first thing she said was that she felt like she was doing it wrong. I told her no, there’s no way to do it wrong.
Every single time, for those first two weeks or so, she started crying after a few minutes. And then she said again that she felt like she was doing it wrong. Now I basically never cry when I feel my feelings … and so, if I’m honest, I had my suspicions that maybe she was doing it wrong! But no. I was the one who was wrong. Her sadness was something she needed to feel. The tears needed to be cried. She would cry for a while, and eventually stop. And then a few days later, she did it again: feel her feelings, cry for a while, and then stop. And then again a few days later. But then, within a couple of weeks, feeling her feelings no longer meant bursting into tears.
Which is not to say that she was all better! There were more layers of unhappiness to work through! (Still are, both for her and for me.) But she no longer needed to cry. She had moved through that phase, and on to other things. Progress.
The progress that’s made in feeling your feelings at night … is reflected in how you feel during the day. Growth is growth, and it sticks. Feeling better feels better! I don’t know how else to put it.
Pain hurts! When the pain goes away, you hurt less.
On at least a dozen occasions over the past year or two — probably more — I’ve had this very strange experience. A thought goes through my mind, or something happens to me, or I read about something, or whatever the trigger might be — and I brace for the pain, the fear, the sadness, the embarrassment, whatever the hated sensation might be, the thing that always always always follows that specific trigger. And then … somehow … the hated sensation doesn’t happen. It’s just not there. I’m fine. I’ve felt that sensation often enough, I’ve fought with it enough, that now it’s gone. It’s said its piece and just left. Disappeared. No longer part of my life.
It’s a little like putting your foot down, expecting to find the ground, and there’s just no ground there. Except instead of no ground, it’s … no pain! There’s always a moment of double-take, a WTF. It’s just about the best feeling in the world!
Psychologists talk about
stimulus → response
This experience is something like
stimulus → expected response → response isn’t there!! → “wtf is going on!?” → joy
Pure, unadulterated joy. There’s something deep, deep inside me that is so happy to be rid of that specific sensation. That pain is gone, and it’s not coming back. It’s an absolutely amazing moment.
And the moment lives on in the future. The promise is realized. The sensation does not come back, and life, from then on, is a bit better than it was before.
Mostly, life gets just a tiny bit better. But occasionally, the jump in happiness is pretty enormous. It feels like night and day.
Enough about me. Let’s talk about you.
If you’re waking up in the middle of the night, unable to go back to sleep, that’s your body telling you that there is nothing more important than feeling your feelings.
What feelings? What will they feel like? What will it be like, if you really decide to do this?
I don’t know! It’s your life, not mine. The process is different for everybody. Your feelings are your feelings. Whatever they are, they’re yours and they’re important.
Do you have to dig down deep to find the feelings? No! Absolutely not. This is the simplest thing in the world. You’re lying there, in the dark, quietly — or not so quietly. You start to pay attention to your sensations. The first thing you notice when you start to pay attention — that big one, that painful one, that awful one right front and center! — that’s the one you need to pay attention to. Don’t try to dig down below that one, to something you think is more important, “underneath it.” Nothing like that. Just feel the thing that you hate. Feel that sensation. The one you can’t miss because it’s screaming at you.
The path is incredibly, incredibly obvious. How much it’s going to hurt to follow it: that’s also obvious!
Most people who have insomnia also suffer from insomnia. The insomnia itself feels like a curse, something to be resisted and hated. They hate the insomnia so much, they fight against it so much, that they don’t take the time to feel what their body is asking them to feel.
And so … they don’t learn. They don’t grow.
I know that in my own experience, for the first 49 years of my life, I failed to make any progress at all during my hours (and hours and hours) of insomnia. I suffered from insomnia, and fought every moment of it. I hated it and tried to stop it. I did everything except learn from it.
There’s an old idea about personal growth. If you don’t learn from your experience, you repeat it. You get to take the same test over and over again until you pass it. That applies to insomnia. If every time you wake up in the middle of the night, the sensations of insomnia feel the same as last time, the way they’ve felt for years and years … that means you’re failing the test.
How do you start to pass the test instead? How do you start to make progress? Decide, starting tonight, that from now on you will be excited about your insomnia. Decide that when you wake up, you will pay attention to the sensations going through your body. You will focus on them, let them be what they are, and listen to what they are trying to tell you. You will decide to believe — try to believe! — that your body wouldn’t be waking you up if it didn’t have something important to say. And so you will listen to it. You will be quiet — as quiet as you can — and do nothing but listen.
I’m not saying that listening will make the experience pleasant! That’s not how it works. It’s extremely unpleasant! But keep going. Through the unpleasantness. Through the pain, the sadness, the fear, the worry, whatever it is that comes up. The unhappiness itself is the message. Pay attention to it.
Your felt unhappiness is your body’s message to you — and, since you are your body — it’s your own message to yourself. You need to hear what you have to say!
If you listen, carefully, for long enough, you will make progress!
What kind of progress? Progress in the sense of working through the layers of your own unhappiness. There will be more layers under the one you’re currently working on! But after you are through working on this one, you will be done with it! You will feel a little bit better, every day, for the rest of your life.
I can hear you saying that you don’t have time for this! Insomnia is awful because it means you’re not going to get enough sleep! You don’t have the time or the energy to live like that, so there’s no way you can ever just relax and enjoy your insomnia.
I agree, 100%. It sucks to try to live without enough sleep. If you have constant insomnia, and you’re exhausted all the time, then your body is telling you that feeling your feelings is even more important than having had enough sleep! You should really, really be listening to what your body has to say. This is emergency level shit.
So what’s the plan?
When you wake up in the middle of the night, don’t try to go back to sleep! (What does “trying” even mean, in this context? Whatever it means, stop doing it.) Just lie back and intentionally pay attention to your body. Try to feel what’s going on in there. There are sensations; pay attention to them. The important sensations are the obvious ones, the ones that are right in your face, the ones you can’t not feel. So feel them.
If you start to worry about things — that you’re not going to get enough sleep, or that there’s something that’s going to happen tomorrow that you need to worry about, or whatever thoughts come up — ignore them. Tell your thoughts that you’re not interested! Most likely, your mind will continue to insist on firing thoughts at you. Let it do that. There’s not much you can do about it. But keep telling your mind that you’re not interested in its theories, its musings, its obsessions. You’re only interested in listening to your body. (You listen to your mind all fucking day, every day! It’s time to listen to your body for a while.)
When I do this, sometimes I lie awake for hours at a time. Very often it feels like something important is happening. I don’t always know what, or why. Sometimes it feels like nothing important is happening, that it’s just annoying or painful or sad. I usually don’t know what that means either. Doesn’t matter. Progress is being made, no matter what it feels like!
And then sometimes it feels like I just one second ago made the resolution to lie back and feel my feelings, and then suddenly it’s morning. And that’s fine too. (Occasionally, I have had some extremely interesting dreams in the meantime! I think the dreams can be very important. What to do about dreams, how to get meaning out of them and make them work for you … well, there’s a whole literature on that. I don’t have anything to add to it.)
One last thing.
Maybe you feel like you can’t just relax and enjoy your insomnia because you really don’t have enough hours in the day. Maybe your life is so busy that you really can’t ever make up the lost sleep, and so every moment of insomnia can only mean more pain in your life, due to inadequate sleep.
If that’s the case, then it’s time to make your life less busy. Find at least one hour, every day, of stuff that you have been doing, and just stop doing it. And then dedicate that extra time to lying in bed! Start going to bed earlier, or getting up later, or both. Block out more time in your life in which you intend to do nothing but lie in bed. You probably need the sleep anyway! And when insomnia comes, you can treat it as the gift that it truly is.
Good luck.
Comments, questions, complaints, arguments, telling me I’m full of shit: all responses are welcome!
Thanks for reading.
I've been making my way through your posts. Love this one!