Ep 18. Insomnia and the Perceived Danger Connection

In this episode, I not only spill the beans on my newfound passion for Peloton, but I go deeper into why our brains won’t let us sleep.

Join me to learn:

• Why insomnia is based in survival
• How insomnia becomes a fear
• The role of hyperarousal
• The difference between real and perceived danger
• The significance of mindfulness during recovery
• Why fixing sleep doesn’t work

This deep dive into perceived threat responses offers hope and unveils why the principles of neuroplasticity empowers us to go way beyond our reptilian brain.

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Full Transcription Below:

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About Beth Kendall MA, FNTP: 

For decades, Beth struggled with the relentless grip of insomnia. After finally understanding insomnia from a mind-body perspective, she changed her relationship with sleep, and completely recovered. Liberated from the constant worry of not sleeping, she’s on a mission to help others recover as well. Her transformative program Mind. Body. Sleep.™ has been a beacon of light for hundreds of others seeking solace from sleepless nights. 

© 2023 Beth Kendall

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FULL TRANSCRIPT: 

Insomnia and the Perception of Danger

Hello everyone, so glad to be here. Today, we’re talking fundamentals, or at least, one of the fundamentals of my approach to insomnia

But first, I have to tell you (because this is big news) that I have joined the Peloton revolution. If you’re not familiar with Peloton, it’s this company that sells exercise equipment and I bought their stationary bike and it’s quite nice. It big screen attached to it that you can join classes on with all of these great instructors without ever leaving your home. Which is pretty amazing when you live up here in the arctic of MN.

But this is newsworthy for a couple of reasons… the first is, I’ve never really been a biking fan - it just wasn’t my thing. After I retired from my ballet career, I took up running and that became a huge passion for me in so many ways (I used to say that running was like my exercise, coffee, Prozac, and red wine, all wrapped into one) until I crashed with Lyme disease in my early 40’s.  After I recovered from that, running wasn’t really a viable option anymore, at least long distances, so I had to find another THING, right - some sort of cardio workout that I could do.

So I ordered this Peloton bike a while back and I was pretty skeptical that I would like it but it had a good refund policy, so I was like okay, I’m going try it. And now I LOVE my Peloton. Like I’ve joined the peloton cult completely and I absolutely love it even tho it has to live in my living room because there’s nowhere else to put it and it looks pretty ugly but who cares. I wish they made it in white.

But the whole reason I’m telling you this is that not only have I become a biking person and a semi morning person, but I am also working out early as well.

Now, to most people, this would not be big news. But in my world, and in my life, this is something that I never thought would happen. Because nights were always such a struggle for me - even when I was in a good stretch of sleep, I was still just outrageously groggy and out of it and I didn’t feel particularly functional until somewhere around noon.

So the fact that I am recording his podcast at 9:30 in the morning and have already done my workout, kinda blows my mind.

And I really did not force or try to make this happen, it just naturally evolved on its own probably BECAUSE I wasn’t trying to force anything. I always secretly wanted to be more of a morning person, but once I finally accepted and even embraced that I was NOT a morning person, this is when I turned into a morning person.

So, go figure.

But if there is anyone out there feeling like I was, wondering if you’re ever NOT going to feel like a zombie in the morning, stay open to what’s possible because I still can’t believe this is my life after 42 years of insomnia.

Okay, so back to our original programming…

Intro:

Today I want to go deeper into how I view insomnia - what it is and how it happens.

In episode one, I talked about my 3 core philosophies. You can go back and listen to those but just to recap:

1. Insomnia is based in survival
2. Sleep is a passive process
3. Our brains are changeable.

 
These 3 philosophies inform everything that I do, but today, I’m going to focus on number one, which is how and why I believe insomnia is based in survival.

Now, do make sure to listen until the very end because there are some important caveats that I see my students get stuck on with this information and I want to help you avoid that if possible.

Insomnia As a Fear Response

Okay, so you’ve probably heard me talk about insomnia in a couple of different ways: sometimes I call it a fear of not sleeping, or, a fear of being awake at night, a learned fear response, a conditioned fear response, a habituated fear response, a conditioned arousal response.

All of these accurately represent my views but they don’t really get to the heart of what’s causing the conditioned hyperarousal response   which is a perceived threat. The brain is interpreting danger in the form of wakefulness, so it creates hyperarousal, which paradoxically keeps us awake. So even though wakefulness in and of itself isn’t inherently UNSAFE, the brain has linked this with danger.

Understanding the Root Cause

Now, the way this usually happens is some sort of life circumstance occurs that causes some sleep disruption. This can be from anything: an illness, coming off a medication, a stressful life event, becoming a new mom, there are so many things that can trigger that initial sleep disruption.

Maybe someone experiences a single sleepless night but they’ve never been through something like that before so it becomes a very emotionally charged event.

And during this period of disruption, something in our relationship to sleep starts to change. We suddenly become worried about it or concerned that something is wrong. A little seed of fear gets planted in the mind about our own ability to sleep and we unintentionally start engaging with it from a place of effort versus effortlessness.

Now many people assume it’s the EVENT that caused their insomnia, but it’s actually our response to the event and how we engage with it that creates the initial fear of not sleeping.

And this makes a lot of sense because what we tend to do, is problem-solve sleep like we would all of our other life problems, right? I was so good at creating insomnia BECAUSE I’m such a good problem-solver. We start researching sleep, we implement sleep hygiene, we start following biohackers, maybe we start going to doctors or other practitioners, we do acupuncture, we take some medication or supplements.

And all the while, this is confirming the brains perception that wakefulness is a threat.

Slowly wakefulness gets linked with danger.

So then anytime the potential threat of not sleeping comes on the horizon, the brain kicks into hyperarousal to alert you to that possibility.

We get stuck in a perceived danger loop where the more we don’t sleep, the more we try to sleep, and the more the brain truly believes we are in danger.

As the link between not sleeping and danger gets stronger over time, hyperarousal becomes conditioned to happen automatically. That’s why you get the super weird experience of feeling sleepy on the couch and then wide awake the minute you hit the pillow. It’s the perceived danger response kicking in on behalf of your amazing, diligent brain.

Now this is important to understand because it’s hard break out of this loop if you don’t understand why you’re in it.

Your brain will want to believe that there’s something very physically broken within you and it was that initial sleep disruption that changed everything.

And something did change, but it has nothing to do with your body’s ability to sleep, it has to do with the addition of this perceived danger response.

Of course, do always check things out with your doctor because there are very real physical causes of chronic sleep disruption, but I’m talking about chronic insomnia which I view as a fear or anxiety of not sleeping.

The idea of conditioned threat responses isn’t really new. I was first introduced to it through Annie Hopper’s book: Wired for Healing. Annie Hopper is the founder of DNRS which stands for Dynamic Neural Retraining System. I then started reading a lot of Dr. John Sarno’s work on TMS (which stands for Mind-Body Syndrome) and how it relates to chronic pain. And then I got into Dr. Joe Dispenza’s books and he talks about changing these automatic responses in a little bit different way, and then of course the main focus of my master’s was self-directed neuroplasticity.

So these ideas aren’t really novel, they just haven’t been applied to insomnia yet and I suspect they’ll gain a lot more traction in the coming decade as they’re already becoming much more accepted in the mainstream around addressing chronic pain.

Okay, so how do we break out of this loop?

Breaking the Loop

Again, in order to break out of it, you have to understand that it’s perceived danger at play — this understanding will create a whole new awareness of the problem and how you engage with it.

Most people try to address insomnia by fixing sleep directly. And this typically backfires because once we lose our faith in whatever external thing we’re using, or the external thing is eclipsed by hyperarousal, we’re back to square one dealing with the same automatic fear response.

So, I don’t focus on making sleep happen, it’s a passive process anyway, I work with the hyperarousal response that’s getting in the way of sleep happening.

The purpose of hyperarousal in the context of insomnia is to protect us from something the brain perceives as dangerous. But the key word here is perceives.

It feels dangerous because your brain is sending alarm bells, but being awake at night, or waking up at night isn’t inherently dangerous.

Mindfulness and the Magical Now Moment

Now, sometimes I see folks struggle with this word perceived because they’re dealing with the very tangible challenges associated with insomnia. It’s a tough thing to go through and I am in no way denying or diminishing those things.

But when I say perceived… I’m talking more about the brains interpretation of a moment based on the link it’s created.  

You can think of a fear of wakefulness almost like you would a fear of heights. If someone has a fear of heights and they’re on the top floor of a building, they’re brains aren’t thinking about what IS happening, their brains are going straight to what COULD happen. So they’re feeling fear based on the past or the future, not the present moment where there’s no actual danger present.

And this is normal. We want our brains to work this way.

But it’s also why it’s important to understand what your brain is doing in the here and now because the now is where have the ability to effect change and create a new experience around what the brain perceives as dangerous.

Shifting Effort

Now a lot of times my students grasp this concept really well, but then there’s this tendency for effort to shift in a new direction. So maybe there’s less effort towards fixing sleep directly, but then it becomes: “Okay, let’s hurry up and show the brain that everything is fine so I can sleep again!”

But survival responses really don’t work like that, it’s not an overnight process. We shift a fear though understanding, awareness, consistency, and small incremental shifts over time. And we wouldn’t want our safety systems to work any other way because we are literally creating new neural pathways in the brain.

Neuroplasticity and Unlearning Fears

And isn’t it just remarkable that we have the ability to do this?! We are no longer at the mercy of our reptilian brains, we have the potential to unlearn these fears.

Which never ceases to amaze me.

So, that wraps up today’s episode. Thanks a lot for being here. I’m Beth Kendall and this is the MBS podcast. Bye for now…