How I Cured My “Two Hours’ Sleep A Night” Insomnia
Spoiler: It didn’t involve lavender, long baths, or eye masks…
I was going insane. Actually insane.
I don’t think there are many greater tortures than that of endless nights of next to zero sleep. I always remember thinking on days when I was working and had a rough night’s sleep that it would be preferable to have a hangover.
This, though, was much worse.
I wasn’t struggling with my sleep and heading to work; I was dragging my carcass along, day after day, on two hours’ sleep as a single mum of a beautiful newborn baby.
A single mum who had lost both of her parents to alcohol abuse, then been abandoned by the remaining family she had while battling postpartum depression.
It wasn’t the standard lack of sleep you face when your new arrival comes along. No. My little Ruby was the dream sleeper from seven weeks old. As she slept soundly, I’d lie awake in such all-consuming emotional pain that I was trapped in a cycle of unforgiving lack of sleep that seemed to get worse and worse.
I’d lie awake night after night, tormenting myself with the questions of why I was alone doing this. Was I a bad person? Did I deserve it like they said I did?
I didn’t.
Despite unforgiving insomnia, I dug deep and applied everything I knew from my career in fitness, nutrition, and all the mentality coaching surrounding it; in order to have a life in spite of a blurry state of amnesia, fogginess, and irritability.
I ate in such a way that I could buffer my immune system because I knew I’d be more susceptible to bugs, but also to increase my energy; with that little sleep, energy wouldn’t be in great supply.
I’d exercise to give me a boost of endorphins and a pocket of energy I wouldn’t have had otherwise, which ended giving me much needed little zaps of confidence back too.
It’s also where I started the work on my mindset and made some of the revelations which would set me onto a path of healing that would change my life for the better, forever.
A trusted friend coached me through.
Not one to lean on anyone going through my twenties, I was majorly humbled as I entered the world of motherhood, where if I simply wanted to do the best job I could, I had to start accepting help instead of trying to do it all.
On those days that really just weighed me down, it was having the support of that key one or two people that made the real difference. Cheerleaders of sorts, if you like, that would help me to get my overthinking brain reigned in.
This meant it was much easier to head to bed with my mind at peace rather than spinning a negative dialogue like I was some kind of sadistic sleep-thief DJ running an all-nighter.
Hypnotherapy
At the point I was really desperate for sleep, I went to a hypnotherapist.
If you suck at guided meditation, hypnotherapy is a wonderful way to get some help into the groove of it, that’s for sure. What I found most helpful and enjoyable about the sessions was the little coaching session before each hypnotherapy.
This is where we would talk about my week gone by, how it went and if I was managing to tick the positive action, positive interaction and positive action boxes (if I was doing all of these my mood should be light enough for me to relax into sleep).
He also explained how the brain worked, giving me a takeaway I have held ever since…
Take sleep off a pedestal.
This simply meant that the more focus that was shifted onto sleep (or the lack thereof), the less sleep there was likely to come. I had started to shrink my life around my inability to sleep, canceling plans, not doing the things I enjoyed.
My hypnotherapist, Graham, explained that by making my life smaller and smaller to give my insomnia more space was growing my focus on it and making me more miserable as I went.
So I started to live in spite of my severe, punishing lack of sleep and I started to get my life back; enjoyment back, and the sleep hinted it returns too.
Sometimes, you just have to fake it until you make it, and where insomnia is concerned this is very true.
Use affirmations and meditations.
Negative thoughts and emotions powered my all-nighters, I’d finally pass out around 5 or 6 in the morning just as my daughter was wanting to surface from her oh-so-sweet slumbers.
I didn’t introduce affirmations and meditations until I’d actually always done the curing bit of my insomnia, had I done them before I might not have had quite such a big job of it. Shoulda, woulda, coulda.
Affirmations are what helped me to stop relapsing my sleep, which is easily done. Our brains remember insomnia periods so practicing the efforts that keep insomnia at bay is important, including mindset training.
Being able to catch a negative thought and replace it with a positive affirmation can derail the negative thought train and let you get to that sleepy destination.
There were some nights where I woke up around 2 a.m. and could feel that my mind was ready to pick a fight with me. The anxiety was rising along with my heart rate, so I would breathe deeply and repeat “I am safe and all will be well,” or “I am good enough; I am more than good enough,” not leaving space for the negative thoughts to creep in and grab a hold of me.
I wouldn’t notice, I would drift off. That’s exactly how I stopped insomnia coming back when it was threatening to make its return.
Exercise and eat well.
I’m not saying my diet was perfect or that my exercise routine was on fire; they were passable. With a background and career in fitness in nutrition, I was more than armed and equipped to come up with a game plan to support my wellbeing in my sleep drought.
There was no room for performance or perfection here; no room for ego lifting and meticulous dieting.
When you’re not sleeping, your probability of injuring yourself increases and the time it takes to recover does too. I fought my self-competitive side and went for light maintenance training. Enough to get the blood pumping and get me back into shape, but nothing that would have me walking in a C shape for a week.
Redirect your focus and power.
I learned just how powerful the mind is when I battled sleeping two hours a night. I was mentally powerful enough to get to that point where I could worry that hard to keep me awake for 22 hours a day, even though I had a new baby on my own.
I had to find a way to redirect that power and focus into a positive force in my life, my parenting, and building us a life that would keep us well.
Same as the negative thoughts and affirmations, it was catching that focus slipping into something unhelpful — like lack of sleep and redirecting it back into what I was going to do with my little girl the next day, week, month, or lifetime, and how blessed I was.
Set goals.
Though things felt pretty bleak, I wasn’t sleeping, felt lonely and overwhelmed by new motherhood; I also had the best thing I could have ever hoped to have: my daughter. I didn’t bring her into the world for things to be tough forever, so I made plans of all the things I would want us to do as she grew.
I’d left my career in London, so I would be faced with setting up from the ground up on the other side of the UK. I made plans, crafting how I was going to make it work. This was where those special people in my life were really important as well, to help me to remember, even when tiredness was nailing my ass, that I could absolutely do this.
It was kind of like the rope someone throws you down into a well. It’s one fucker of a climb and your hands are going to be red-raw from the climb; not to mention the rest of you, but it’s the way up; it’s the way out.
Practice mental agility games.
I mentioned amnesia a little earlier. The feelings of amnesia and the loss of sharp reflexes hit me on a very deep level. As a mother, it was my job to protect my baby yet here I was feeling vulnerable and not on top of my game.
It‘s one of the most heartbreaking feelings I look back on, how broken and weak I felt; when, in reality, I was an example of incredible levels of resilience and courage.
When you’re a bit tired you can lose your focus enough that they tell you not to drive, so imagine running consistently on two hours of sleep a night raising a small baby and fighting the effects of trauma… damn.
Like everything in life, I had a strategy.
In my fitness career, I would dissect people's goals, looking at everything about their lifestyle: food intake, sleep, stress, injuries, and so on, finding ways to make it happen as smoothly, easily, and as sleek as I could get it. To get better results than were hoped for.
I understand that to refine a skill, no matter the level or ability, practice and repetition are key.
I would set about playing mental agility games on my phone every day as I fed — just 10 minutes or so, sometimes more. Just enough to see me slowly get sharper and quicker, allowing me to hold on to more memory and reflexive skill.
You may think, why is this relevant to curing insomnia?
My insomnia was linked to trauma and subsequent depression. Anything that helped me to improve my self-confidence was gold in terms of healing my sleep deficiency. It’s something to think about.
Try Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT.
This one’s a biggie. Its place at the bottom of the list certainly doesn’t reflect its importance in success, that’s for sure. If anything, it should almost be at the top. However, I believe that if you don’t master some of the skills and points above it may be lost on you.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, for insomnia, was a game-changer for me. It went against everything else I had read (desperately) about in my search for answers.
A lot of advice out there tells you to get up if you’re lying awake and do something in another room, or cites activities completely separate from actual sleep time, like baths and stuff.
I had tried all of these things and thus far, no sleep.
I read a book called The Sleep Book by Dr. Guy Meadows and followed his advice. I went to bed at the same time, got up at the same time, and did my best not to get up, not to toss and turn, and started to learn to acknowledge and feel the anxiety that consumed me each night.
The first two nights it got worse, but I trusted the process, followed Dr. Meadows’ advice and within two weeks I was boasting around seven hours' sleep.
What?!
It’s not easy to apply without support. I fully recommend a therapist or specialist psychotherapist for this kind of work. Any experimentation I did with applied therapies I always did under the peripheral supervision of a counselor.
I’m an aggressive self-experimenter, but I also like to know I’m staying safe.
You don’t see these people who do mad world record attempts doing them without huge teams of experts and support; we should be no different.
Ditch the sleep aids.
Part of Dr. Guy Meadows’ program was getting rid of sleep aids: sleep masks, earplugs, and the like.
I kept my blackout blinds. Aberdeen can be so full of light at night and early morning through spring and summer, there was no sense making it harder for myself, but the eye masks and earplugs — out.
For many years, I battled with pretty sketchy sleep and I admit that when the earplugs and eye mask didn’t do the job it added a layer of panic.
What do I do now?! I’m doomed!
Dr. Meadows writes about how if we want to get our sleep back on track we have to trust our body's natural ability to sleep. By using aids like masks and earplugs we’re saying to ourselves that we don’t think we’re capable of sleep without support.
It’s worth learning to trust yourself more if sleep is something that has escaped your life.
You can check out my mini course on how I manage my sleep here.
Amanda Jayne is single mummy to Ruby, aged 2, Personal Trainer and Nutrition Advisor of over a sdecade; and a C-PTSD warrior passionate about sharing all she’s learned about personal growth, self-development, fitness hacks, and her own healing and wellbeing journey.
