Ep 52. What Traditional Advice Gets Wrong About Insomnia

In this foundational episode, Richard Wills and I explore why conventional advice often misses the mark, and how we see insomnia at its core.

Tune in to hear:

   • The two key factors that truly affect sleep

   • Why CBT-I can backfire for some people despite being the gold standard

   • How rigid, rule-based systems can ramp up anxiety

   • Why more effort just keeps you on the hamster wheel of insomnia

   • How simple education becomes life-changing when it targets the real issue

This conversation is warm, honest, and deeply validating.

If you’ve ever felt like a “special case” or that you’ve “tried everything,” this episode will help you feel seen, and offer a new, hopeful path forward.

Enjoy! 🧡

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👉 Start the Free Insomnia Course Here

Full transcription below:

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.

DISCLAIMER: The podcasts available on this website have been produced for informational, educational and entertainment purposes only. The contents of this podcast do not constitute medical or professional advice. No person listening to and/or viewing any podcast from this website should act or refrain from acting on the basis of the content of a podcast without first seeking appropriate professional advice and/or counseling, nor shall the information be used as a substitute for professional advice and/or counseling. The Mind. Body. Sleep. Podcast expressly disclaims any and all liability relating to any actions taken or not taken based on any or all contents of this site as there are no assurance as to any particular outcome.

The Problem with Conventional Sleep Advice w/ Richard Wills

Beth:

Hello everyone, and welcome back to the MINDBODY Sleep Podcast. I am so pleased to be joined by a very special guest this week, and I say that because I've had the tremendous opportunity of working alongside this wonderful person over the last couple of years in the MINDBODY Sleep mentorship. I am talking about my co-coach, Richard Wills. Welcome, Richard!

Richard:

Thanks so much, Beth. It really is a pleasure to be doing this podcast with you. I've so enjoyed working with you over the past couple of years, and now we're doing another podcast together, so thank you.

Beth:

Yeah. It's been a while since your original podcast. Now that I think back, it's probably, it's been probably over a year. Where did the time go? So you and I have been talking about doing an episode together, and you came up with this idea of doing a very foundational episode based on what conventional advice gets wrong about insomnia. And I love this because the folks listening to this podcast have most likely been down many of the roads that we're going to talk about today. And the thing is, a lot of this traditional advice just doesn't always help. And if it did help, we wouldn't have so many people still struggling with insomnia. So our goal today is to explain why it doesn't help and give you an introduction into a new way of thinking about sleep. So Richard, where should we start today?

Where Conventional Goes Wrong

Richard:

Well, Beth, I think a good place to start would be to look at the mainstream definition of insomnia, because that's where things start to go wrong right at the beginning.

So in mainstream thinking, insomnia is trouble falling asleep or staying asleep, and then they specify, well, more than three nights a week for at least three months. So trouble falling asleep, trouble sleeping. Well, that doesn't really tell us very much. It doesn't tell us, well, why do you have trouble sleeping? And our approach to insomnia is very different for us. Insomnia is a learned fear of not sleeping. And we can kind of expand that to say, well, an ongoing struggle with sleep rooted in the fear of wakefulness, but just basically looking at sleep as a fear-driven issue.

I think that's really so important. And fear, we can think about fear, we can call it by different names. We can call it hyper arousal or anxiety or stress, and roughly they're all grouped together. They have subtle differences. But I think just identifying the role of fear or hyper arousal is so important to understanding what insomnia is.

Understanding Insomnia as Learned Fear About Not Sleeping

Beth:

Well said. That's a great place to start. And I think when we say learned fear of not sleeping or learned anxiety around not sleeping, what we're referring to is that just means conditioned, right? It means it's sort of happening on automatic, and you're so right. I think what kind of sets us apart is most advice does tend to treat the symptom versus the problem, right? Exactly. So they're going at it from treating sleep sleeplessness, and we're going at it from what is creating the sleeplessness in the first place. So we're going much more upstream.

Richard:

Exactly. Right.

Beth:

Yeah. You did mention the word hyper arousal, and I know that when I heard that word, I don't even remember the context that I heard the word. All I knew is that that word felt like what I was experiencing. So what can we share with the people listening? Because I am guessing, I've heard this from many people, we've heard many people come through and they say it's really about the hyper arousal. So, how could we segue into breaking down the true mechanisms of sleep?

The Two Key Factors Behind Sleep

Richard:

Right. Well, Beth, I think it's really important to look at the two things that make sleep possible or that make it more difficult. Okay. Number one, we have to have sleep drive, and that's largely determined by how long we've been awake that day. So if we get up at six o'clock in the morning, then by maybe nine o'clock at night, we're going to be tired because of sleep drive, how we slept, maybe the couple of days before that would also perhaps have some influence, but roughly how much sleep we've gotten that day determine sleep drive. And then the other thing is the hyper arousal or fear. And if we have plenty of sleep drive, but we have a lot of fear or hyper arousal or increased vigilance, then that's going to get in the way of the sleep drive. So we need to have both, and meaning that we need to have good, healthy sleep drive, but minimal fear or anxiety or hyper arousal. And those are kind of the two key things. And again, this is something that mainstream thinking about insomnia just doesn't get right. Talk about all kinds of things that influence sleep, but they don't break it down to these two really key factors that we have to understand.

Beth:

Yeah. So well said. And I think I like that. It just breaks it. It's simple. There's just these two things that are how sleep works. And just like you said, the mainstream approach or the traditional approach is focusing on sleep, and we're focusing on hyper arousal, which is what is getting in the way of sleep. And I think it's also worth mentioning to our listeners that here's the thing, for people with insomnia, they almost always have plenty of sleep drive. This is not something that you need to worry about that you have enough of, unless you're really spending giant quantities of time in bed at night. Most people with insomnia have plenty of sleep drive.

Richard:

Exactly. And to try to ramp up sleep drive is really very counterproductive when you already have really plenty and all you have to do is get out of the way. You have to get that fear, that hyper arousal out of the way, and then that sleep drive can manifest and put you to sleep.

Beth:

Exactly. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. So we talked a little bit about in the traditional model, usually what this looks like, and of course we have been through this, is you might see you're starting to have trouble with your sleep. You might go to your primary care doctor, maybe you get started on some medications. You start, this is really when the shift in orientation starts and insomnia starts to evolve, but we're paying more attention to sleep. And then maybe you see another, a sleep specialist, maybe you have a sleep study done. And somewhere along the way people end up usually in some sort of CBTI program. And we've both been through CBT. I know I've went through a couple of times,

Richard:

Three times for me, Beth.

Beth:

And many, many of our students and clients have come from CBTI, and we're not about dissing CBTI at all. It can be helpful or parts of it can be helpful, but it can also really miss the mark. What would help our listeners keep in mind with regards to CBTI?

The CBTI Route

Richard:

Okay. So first of all, CBTI is cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, and this is considered the gold standard for treating insomnia. As I just said, I did it three times and if anything, it made my insomnia worse. So now CBTI, it does have some positive things. It has some educational aspects with it, which I think can be helpful. But one of the big things that CBTI uses is called sleep restriction, and the idea is to spend less time in bed. So let's say I think my CBTI therapist said, okay, you should go to bed at midnight and get up at 5:00 AM So that I wasn't spending too much time in bed. Now, I had not been spending inordinate amounts of time in bed. I wasn't in bed for 12 hours or even 10 hours. So I was kind of skeptical, but I did it. And the idea behind this is that you have to increase your sleep drive. Well, naturally, if you're only in bed for five hours, you're only going to have a maximum amount of sleep of five hours. So you're going to be sleepier when you go to bed the following night.

And this will increase sleep drive. But as we said earlier, sleep drive isn't the problem. For the vast majority of people with insomnia, we have plenty of sleep drive because we're not sleeping enough or good enough quality. They really harp on the sleep restriction thing when it's like you already have plenty of sleep drive. The other thing, and the thing about sleep restriction is that for me, and for many of the students in our program that I've talked to, it just increases anxiety. It just makes me feel, oh my God, I am already worried enough about my sleep now. I can't even stay in bed longer than five hours. That's terrible. And so this just ramped up my hyper arousal, my anxiety, and if anything, it made my sleep worse. So I think what mainstream sleep specialists fail to see, because they fail to identify hyper arousal or anxiety as the main cause of insomnia, they fail to see that this focus on sleep restriction increases the main cause of insomnia, which is anxiety. So sleep restriction makes, I mean, the vast majority of people I've talked to who've tried CBTI have described the same issue.

The Impact of Sleep Restriction

Beth:

Yes.

Richard:

Sleep restriction just made them more anxious and made their sleep worse. Yep. So yeah, maybe you feel a little friendlier towards CBTI than I do, but I just am not a fan

Beth:

Of it. Yeah. I think if you've had, I've opened my mind to it because we're still in such early days of this new paradigm of, I call it insomnia discovery almost. But I had a very torturous experience with CBTI. And to me, the thought of taking a sleep away from somebody who's already not sleeping is just about the worst thing you can go through. And it sent my nervous system just over the edge, and I'm all about working with your nervous system, not against it. So treating a condition, a very stressful condition with a stressful approach

Just now, it just doesn't make sense. At the time, I really did think, well, geez, this is what I have to do to get beyond this problem. And I was willing to do whatever it took, but it truly was torturous. And we're not about any, I say all the time that suffering is not required to recover, to recover from insomnia. So if you're someone out there that is struggling with it, don't worry. You're not alone. It does sound like the way this gold standard, and it's sort of where people land and end up that it should work for everyone. And if it doesn't work for you, then you really feel like you're just this really special case that can't be helped, but it's much more common than you might think. So you're not alone if you're someone that this is not working for. And then you talked a lot, you mentioned basically how sleep efforts feed the problem and just keep us on this hamster wheel. Because sometimes for some people and some brains, they welcome the structure of sleep restriction. They're kind of like, okay, maybe it's, they're not as anxiety prone, and it's like, tell me what to do. They have a clear cut path, and then it does help them sleep, drive increases, and they sleep better. And they then attribute their better sleep to this external behavioral tactic.

The Hamster Wheel of External Fixes

And then we're still in the same problem. We're still in the externalization of sleep. We're still looking that we need this outside thing, and maybe that works for a while, but there's not a guarantee. So we're all about bringing it back to you and fixing this at the root level and getting to the heart of the problem, which really is the conditioned arousal, which is driven by our thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors. So it's much more of an enduring, we take a much more enduring approach than constantly having to seek a fix sleep restriction.

Richard:

Right, right. Yeah. And I'm glad you mentioned sleep efforts, Beth, because they really do feed the problem for so many people with insomnia. So there are so many things you can do. We talked about sleep restriction as a sleep effort to make sleep happen. Another thing in CBTI is stimulus control, which is the rule that if you're awake at night for more than 20 minutes, you should get up and do something and then go back to bed.

And again, this is an approach that can trigger a lot of anxiety. It certainly did in me, I'd wake up, but maybe it was three o'clock in the morning. I try not to look at the clock. And then I said, okay, well, has it been 20 minutes? Let me see. I'm not sure. Well, okay. Well, I think it's been 20 minutes. Okay, I'll get up. And then when I've been up for a while, okay, well, I guess I should go back to bed now. And so just for me brought up a lot of anxiety about having to do all these special things, and I didn't do them. And I think it's hard to do them right. At least hard to do them without having a lot of stress and anxiety around them.

Beth:

Oh, so much so that's such a good point. We always say that you really can't do any of this wrong. And we really see how when people come in from CBTI, how rule oriented they are, there's just almost a fear of doing it wrong. And you really can't do it wrong. There's nothing you can really do wrong in our mentorship and the way we approach it. And most programs do focus on what you do, and we are focusing much more on how you relate to sleep and what you're going

Richard:

Through. Exactly.

Moving Out of Effort and Problem-Solving

Beth:

So again, it's bringing it back to you versus the external and the doing. It's really much more about you really don't have to do much at all. We're helping you undo doing the doership. And that could be a tricky one to untangle because we're so used to doing,

Richard:

And Beth, that works great in most areas of life, whether you're looking for a better job, your finances, your relationships, having kids, whatever it is, well, you think about it and you solutions to problems. But the thing with sleep is sleep is, and I know it's hard for a lot of our listeners to believe, but sleep is an effortless process, and we get in the way of it by ramping up all these efforts, whether it's this sleep restriction or a stimulus control that CBTI advocates or it's blackout curtains or it's melatonin or sleepy time tea, or having an elaborate wind down every evening, or even meditation. I mean, some of these things can have some value, but it really depends on your attitude toward it, your intent toward it. I find that these sleep people who use CBTI just are so focused on these sleep efforts, and it just sends the wrong message that sleep is hard.

Beth:

And our message is that sleep is effortless,

Right? Yes, exactly. Exactly. And we're saying all the time, the more we pay attention to sleep, the more the brain learns sleep is something to pay attention to, which there's the direct route to the hyperarousal. And again, it's sort of like it's very normal for people to come in, and you do need to hear these things several times over and over and over, and that's normal. And we are reminding people over and over that they're really, and we come at it with the understanding that there is absolutely nothing wrong with you, and the ability to sleep and the capacity to sleep, all of that is still fully intact. It's more of working with that hyper arousal response, and that's the only thing that's getting in the way of that natural process happening. So that's really where we put our focus, but I think it is very common, very normal to need to hear that several times.

Richard:

Absolutely. When we've had insomnia for a period of time, we just have these habits, these ways of thinking about things, and to break these habits and form healthier habits, we need to be reminded over and over, really.

Identity-Level Transformation

Beth:

Yeah, totally. And I think it's really because the mentorship is longer. It's three months, and not everybody needs the full three months, but it's much more of an identity level transformation. It really is a very subtle shift in orientation, moving out of that fixing and sleep as something you do, and back into that orientation of effortlessness and sleep as just something that happens that we really don't think too much about. And it's little micro shifts over the span of time in the mentorship.

Richard:

Absolutely. Yeah.

Beth:

So I know that you've been through this whole road of insomnia as I have, both of us for more than 40 years. So I really do think that if we can recover from this, anybody can.

Richard:

Absolutely. Yeah. When people say, oh, I've had insomnia for two months, will I ever run? I say, oh, well try 40 years.

Richard's Turning Points in Recovery

Beth:

Yeah, exactly. So in your journey, Richard, what were the things that really did liberate you from the rabbit hole of conventional advice? What were some of the turning points for you?

Richard:

Okay. Well, number one, Beth was education.

Just understanding the whole issue with fear or hyper arousal and the interplay between sleep drive and hyper arousal or fear was so enlightening for me. I had never heard this before, and that made such a difference. Another thing I did was I just started dropping my sleep efforts and all the analysis I did, Beth, I would get up in the morning and I would grab my phone and sometimes spend an hour analyzing my sleep from the night before,

I had a sleep tracker and so forth. And what I did the day before, how much exercise I did. So I started dropping the analysis and then dropping the efforts. I had these blackout curtains in my room. I ended up getting rid of those. I was taking several medications for sleep prescription, and over the counter, I weaned off those with time. My doctor helped me wean off the prescription ones. So then I discovered this concept of befriending wakefulness, and that was just so helpful. So instead of when I couldn't sleep saying, oh, no, I can't sleep, it was, oh, well, that happens.

I remember when I realized that several years ago, and that was so enlightening instead of having this adversarial relationship to wakefulness, having a friendly attitude. And it was hard to do at first because it seemed like a crazy idea, like a charging grizzly bear. You don't want to give him a hug. But at first it was more making wakefulness, less intolerable.

Beth:

Yes.

Richard:

Another thing I did was I wasn't thinking about sleep as much, and I was cultivating more equanimity, more indifference. This was kind of a shrug to the whole universe rather than sleep being the center of my life. What else helped? Self-kindness certainly helped. I was so hard on myself. I thought, oh, there's something wrong with me. I'm weak or I'm bad because I'm not able to sleep well. No, sleep becomes difficult just because kind of a quirk in our nervous system, we evolved thousands of years ago to have this fight or flight mechanism, which is basically the fear or hyper arousal, and it's just a quirk that it gets attached to sleep sometimes. So I think those were the things that really helped me, and just focusing more on life and less on sleep really helped.

Beth:

Oh, thank you so much for sharing that. I love that word equanimity. I just love that word. Me too. Yeah. I kind of think of you as the resident thought expert because a lot about how to guide people with their thinking. And I remember you've said many times, you used to think about sleep for six hours a day and how you recognize that, and you even would set a bit of a deadline for yourself, right? Like, oh, I'm only going to think about this for X amount of time, and then I'm done, and then I'm putting it away. Yeah,

Richard:

Right.

Beth:

Yeah. It's so great. Wonderful. Well, I think that we've covered a lot of great ground today, Richard. Is there anything else that you would like to add or share or that you think we should talk about?

Parallels Between Insomnia and Anorexia

Richard:

Well, one last thing I just wanted to bring up, and that is the kind of parallel with eating and sleeping.

Beth:

Oh, yes.

Richard:

We talked about the mainstream definition of insomnia as just having trouble sleeping. Well, what about the mainstream definition of anorexia? These people who withhold food, they don't eat because they're afraid of gaining weight. Well, in that case, they get the definition. They put fear or anxiety in the center. They're afraid of gaining weight. Now with insomnia, they don't use a parallel definition, identifying fear as being at the root of insomnia. So there are a lot of parallels between eating and sleeping, something we need in both cases, and we need to have, I guess what we could call food drive. It's been a long time since we've eaten, so we have a good appetite, and then we have to have absence of anxiety around it. Most of us don't have a problem with anxiety around food, but this subpopulation of people with anorexia do. So it's really fortunate that mainstream approaches have identified fear with anorexia, and if only they'd identify fear as being at the root of insomnia, we'd be in much better shape.

Beth:

Oh, yes, that's, that's such a relatable example. And I think for a lot of these things, first of all, I think it's fun to be on the leading edge of this. I do think we're heading in this direction where this will be more recognized in the mainstream eventually, but that it does come back to fear. And I think fear stems from a separation of trust. There's some sort of loss of trust or loss of separation of self in that experience, but that is really an excellent example.

Richard:

Yeah. Yeah.

Beth:

Okay. Well, anything else that comes to mind after that?

Richard:

I think that's it, Beth. I just really wanted this to be kind of a foundational discussion about how to approach sleep and insomnia and how to understand where mainstream people are coming from when they try to help with insomnia and how this often goes south.

Beth:

Yeah. I think when I was in it, I really felt like it was more of a sleep management system. It was more like, how can I manage this problem? And we're really about getting underneath the root of the problem, so you don't have to manage it anymore, and you can just live your life.

Richard:

Exactly.

Final Wrap-Up

Beth:

Well, it has been absolutely wonderful having you on the show. I hope you come back again.

Richard:

I've thoroughly enjoyed this, Beth, and I look forward to coming back again for another podcast.

Beth:

Sounds good to me. I will see you inside the mentorship. And this wraps up another episode of Mind Body Sleep. If you need some help getting free from Insomnia, join us in the mentorship and we'll help you get your life back. But for now, thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.