Ep 42. Has Sleep Become a Battle?

The wildest thing about sleep is that the more we battle it, the further we get from it.

Today's podcast episode explores why insomnia feels like a battle for so many, and why that mindset might be holding you back.

I spent most of my life wrestling with insomnia, believing that if I just tried hard enough, I could overcome it.

Imagine my surprise to learn it was the exact opposite of that.

Sleep isn't something we overcome. It’s something we allow.

In fact, seeing it as a fight makes our brain think there’s a threat, keeping us in fight-or-flight.

In this episode, I share a personal story that flipped my perspective. Here's what else I cover:

• Why insomnia doesn’t respond to force or control
• The surprising benefits of not viewing sleep as a battle
• Simple shifts that help your brain feel safe enough to sleep
• Why fighter harder makes it go slower
• When you step out of the battle and decide to become a teacher that’s when the healing begins

If you’re tired of struggling and want a different approach, this episode could be exactly what you’re looking for. It’s not about trying harder — it’s about creating a mental space where sleep feels easy and safe again.

Let me know what you think!

Cheers,
Beth

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• Start the Free Insomnia Course
• Learn About the Mentorship

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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. 
 

Are You Unknowingly Turning Sleep into a Battle? How Perception Shapes Insomnia

 

Hello everyone and welcome back to the podcast. Today's episode is all about how we perceive insomnia and how we can work with that perception in a way that brings us back towards our natural state of sleep again. But first I wanted to share a little story with you about my own state of sleep that I found pretty interesting.

 

So this past week, I had some surgery. And everything went really well, no worries, it’s all good. But I actually had to get my gallbladder out. And with my background in nutritional therapy, this is kind of considered the kiss of death. But you know, they wanted to take it out ten years ago, but I was pretty sure it still had some useful life in it, so I feel like I nurtured this organ as long as I possibly could, but it was just time, and I’m feeling pretty good.  But anyway, that is not the point of this story.
 

 

Unexpected Insights from Sleeping on My Back

The point I want to make about this story is that I had to sleep on my back for the first 6 nights after this surgery. And people who can just sleep on their backs have always perplexed me. The same way I’m perplexed by people who can sleep just sitting straight up on airplanes. Like I have no idea how they do that. So I was thinking I probably wasn’t going to be getting great sleep while sleeping on my back after this surgery since it would be the first time since probably when I was a baby, who knows.

 

But you know what you guys. After the first two nights of sleeping on my back, which really wasn’t even that bad, I was able to sleep on my back throughout the whole night. Now, for the average Joe, this would not be big news. But for someone who had insomnia, for basically their whole life, it kinda blows my mind. Because it confirms first, how amazingly adaptable we really are, and also that all of those limiting beliefs about what I could or couldn’t do with my sleep weren’t even true. They were just beliefs in my mind about what was possible. And I always say that if we’re going to give so much weight to what isn’t possible, maybe we should at least as much weight to what is possible, right?

And my experience this last week has certainly shown me that what I thought was impossible was never really that impossible. 

And you know, it’s been interesting because just when I think there’s no way I’m going to sleep under certain conditions, that’s when I actually do. Probably because there’s no expectation. And honestly, I would have been equally okay with not being able to sleep on my back after the surgery, which is probably why it was able to happen the way that it did. There wasn’t any effort or attachment to a certain outcome, I just had faith that I was going to be okay either way. 


I wanted to share that story with you to give you hope that even someone who’s had insomnia for their entire life can sleep pretty darn normally again. 

 

Okay, so let’s get back to our regularly scheduled programming which is all about our perception of insomnia.

 

Why Viewing Insomnia as a Battle Could Be Holding You Back

 

So, a lot of times when I hear people talk about chronic conditions, not just insomnia, it’s like they’re in a battle, right. We’re battling our situation, we’re fighting cancer, we’re struggling with depression. And this was certainly true for me when I was going through both chronic illness and insomnia. I was 100% in the ring duking it out with my situation. And if you want to hear more about my story, you can go back to episodes 3 and 4 which are called: Dancing with Insomnia

The Mindset Shift: Surrendering the Fight with Insomnia

 

But what I finally realized in my own journey was that this particular mindset wasn’t working very well. The kinds of problems I was dealing with like insomnia didn’t respond favorably to the kind of relentless determination that had gotten me so far in other areas of life.


And this literally took me years and hundreds of thousands of dollars, and so much suffering to figure out. And I remember when I was living in this little studio apartment trying to recover from Lyme disease thinking it was only going to take a year or so, I had one word in painted red letters above my bed and that was the word: RELENTLESS. So this really was a guiding principle in my life in terms of what I thought was required to get to where I wanted to go. And like I said, these kinds of qualities that I developed in early childhood did serve me quite well for other professional endeavors, but not so much with something like insomnia which was really taking me down and affecting my life.  

 

So, needless to say, this was a complete paradigm-shift for me to consider thinking about things differently. Because these ways of being were so deeply hardwired into who I thought I was.


So today I want to give you 3 insights into how I started to understand insomnia in a way that might be helpful for you, too.  And I’ll offer that I think the best way to use this podcast is to listen for truths versus fixes because in my view, there really is nothing broken within you.

3 Insights:

 

1. Perception Born from Survival (It's Not Your Fault)

 

The first insight I’d like to share about the perception of insomnia as a battle is that it’s not your fault if you view it this way. Most of us view it this way because we’re in survival mode both from the fear of not sleeping and because many of us had past life experiences that led to a nervous system that battles as a way to stay safe in the world.

 

And these reactions are very instinctual, so we can’t simply NOT react this way automatically. The brain has very good reasons for doing what it’s doing and it just means that you have a fully working brain. 

 

So again, this isn’t a sign of any sort of weakness, or deficiency, or something wrong within you because your body is brilliant. It’s just misguided in terms of what is actually needed for sleep which as it turns out, is really very little.

 

2. Stepping Out of Battle Mode and Embracing a Teaching Mindset

 

The second thing I want to offer in terms of viewing insomnia as a battle is that it isn’t really helpful. When I had the realization that what I was doing wasn’t helpful, I didn’t know why it wasn’t helpful, I just had to call a spade a spade and admit that the path I was on at the time was only making things worse. And there was a deep surrender in that realization. And when I say surrender, I don’t mean that I was giving up necessarily, I was just giving up the fight which are two totally different things. 

 

And in some weird way, it was giving up the fight that allowed me to step into my full potential because my body always knew how to heal, and it always knew how to sleep. I was just getting in the way of those natural, organic processes. So once I started to let go of all the resistance I had to my situation, those processes started to flow again. And then whatever interventions I reached for from there, started to work so much better.

 

And the reason viewing insomnia as a battle isn’t helpful is because nothing about a battle creates safety in the mind or body. And remember, sleep is a passive process, right? It’s an effortless process. 

 

So if you think about the premise of insomnia as a conditioned arousal response based on the perception of danger, and that’s what’s driving hyperarousal at a subconscious level, viewing insomnia as a battle isn’t going to help you OUT of that perceived danger. In fact, it just confirms what the brain already believes, which is that all of this around sleep is very, very threatening. And that’s what keeps us in the feedback loop of insomnia.

 

But as long as you’re viewing insomnia as a battle, it’s going to be hard to get your brain to turn off that alarm bell. 

 

So what can we do about this? How can we approach this situation?

 

3. The Role of Neuroplasticity in Overcoming Sleep Anxiety

 

Well, the third insight I’d like to share about conditioned responses is that they ARE changeable. So just as we can learn a fear of not sleeping, we can also unlearn it and that’s the amazing thing about neuroplasticity. 

 

So the first step out of this is just awareness, right? Cultivating a non-judemental awareness around when you might be talking and thinking about insomnia as a battle or a fight, or basically going to war with sleep. 

 

So, if you notice yourself in the battle mindset, give yourself a lot of compassion for what you’ve been through and then consider stepping out of battle mode and into teacher mode. Because through our responses, we can teach our brain what constitutes a threat, and what doesn’t. I think when you decide to become the teacher of your brain instead of the victim of it, this is when the things really start to shift. Because now we’re working within the framework of insomnia as nothing more than a habituated pattern. Kind of like we become habituated to tying our shoes one way, but that doesn’t mean we can’t learn to tie them another way. 

 

Moving from Fear-Based Reactions to Compassionate Awareness

 

So asking yourself questions like:

“How can I teach my brain that we’re okay?”

“How can I release some of the pressure around sleep?”

“How can I let go even just 1% right now?”

“How can I be  kind to myself while I’m going through this?”

And remember, none of this is done with the intention of getting rid of insomnia, right. Losing the fear of not sleeping doesn’t happen directly by making it go away. It happens as a byproduct of shifting how our brain sees sleeplessness. As long as the mind perceives not sleeping as a battlefield, the brain is going to flip into that fight-or-flight response. But by changing how we respond to insomnia, we can teach our brains how to perceive it differently.

 

Recap: Key Insights for Redefining Your Relationship with Sleep

 

So, let’s just to do a little recap:

1. It’s not your fault — If you’re viewing insomnia as a battle, it’s because there’s a survival pattern at play, and doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you—it just means your body is wired to respond to perceived threats, even if they’re misguided in the case of insomnia. 

 

1. Battling insomnia isn’t helpful— Fighting with insomnia only feeds the sense of danger your brain is already interpreting. So thinking of sleep as something to conquer (versus just a biological function) keeps us in the fear loop about not sleeping. Letting go of the battle mindset doesn’t mean surrendering to a lifetime of insomnia, it just means you’re stepping out of the ring and allowing your body to do what it was designed to do.

 

3. The brain is changeable — Just as you’ve learned some fear around sleep, you can also unlearn it. And isn’t that just the most amazing thing? The brain is plastic, meaning it’s capable of change, even at a subconscious level. 

I hope these insights were helpful. Thanks for tuning in — I’m Beth Kendall and this is the Mind. Body. sleep. Podcast, bye for now…