Ep 73. What John Sarno Teaches Us About Insomnia

John Sarno made his mark in the mind-body world by challenging one powerful assumption: that chronic pain is caused by a broken body.

Instead, he proposed that the brain could generate symptoms in response to a perceived threat.

What if those exact same principles apply to insomnia?

Well, I believe they do.

In this episode, I break down how Sarno’s work applies directly to sleep—and why insomnia may have far more in common with chronic pain than a sleep disorder.

We’ll look at three key mechanisms that keep insomnia going—and once you see them, it will completely change how you understand what’s happening in your body.

This episode is my small ode of gratitude to Dr. John Sarno 🧡

I hope you enjoy it! 

Mentioned Resources:

Healing Back Pain: The MInd-Body Connection by John Sarno MD

Connect with Beth:

👉 Instagram 

Work with Beth:

👉 Start the Free Insomnia Course

👉 Learn About the Mentorship

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.

 

What If Insomnia Isn’t Really About Sleep?  

John Sarno and the Mind-Body Connection

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the podcast. Today, I want to talk about someone who really shaped the mind body world and someone who had a huge impact on my own life and my own journey out of insomnia and not just my personal journey, but also the work I do now inside the mentorship. Lately, we've had more and more people coming into the program who are already familiar with mind body work on some level.

So this is usually through chronic pain or some other kind of chronic condition that they're experiencing. And this is really exciting to me because it tells me that this approach and this way of thinking about insomnia is starting to reach out into the kinds of circles that it's actually based on. Which brings me to the amazing Dr. John Sarno.

So who was he? Who was this revolutionary man? Well, John Sarno was a medical doctor and a professor who worked primarily with patients suffering from chronic pain, especially back pain. And I know so many people who have overcome their back pain simply by reading his book, Healing Back Pain. And I'll link that up in the show notes for you.

One of my students recently mentioned on a group call that there's something called a book healing. And apparently this is a well-known phenomenon associated with that book. So Sarno was helping people who had already tried everything.

They had done everything the medical model had to offer, yet they were still in chronic pain and nothing really explained the cause of it. And that's because there was no clear structural cause. What made Sarno so different from everyone else at the time is that he challenged the entire premise of chronic pain.

So instead of asking what's wrong with my body, he was asking what if the body isn't even the problem. He proposed that pain could actually be generated by the brain. And one of the clearest examples we have of this today is phantom limb pain.

Someone can lose a limb and still feel pain in that limb, which tells us something incredibly important. The pain is real, but it's not coming from tissue damage or even the limb itself. It's being produced by the brain, which is very, very fascinating.

Sarno later coined the term TMS, and there have been many iterations of that acronym over the years, but I like the one he used later in his career, which is simply the mind-body syndrome. Because the mind and the body aren't separate, right? They're one integrated system that communicates together.

So here is the key takeaway from Sarno.

He wasn't treating the body. He was helping people change how they understood and related to their symptoms. And this is exactly what we do inside the mentorship.

Insomnia Through Sarno’s Lens

So what does all of this have to do with insomnia? Well, a lot more than you might think, because when you look at insomnia through Sarno's lens, it starts to look a lot different. Insomnia isn't a broken sleep system. It's a protective hyperarousal response generated by the brain.

The problem isn't that you can't sleep. You most certainly can. The problem is that your brain has learned to associate not sleeping with danger.

And that association usually develops because not sleeping starts to feel threatening on some level. Maybe it's a fear of how you'll function. Maybe it's a fear of losing control.

Maybe it's a fear that something is wrong with you. Over time, the brain starts to interpret not sleeping or wakefulness itself as a problem to protect you from. And when that happens, bedtime starts to feel a lot less like sleep and a lot more like a situation your brain needs to monitor.

And that's exactly how it was for me.

Hyperarousal Is Real — But It Isn’t a Broken System

So back to Sarno. I want to be really clear about something.

The symptoms that I'm talking about and the symptoms he was talking about are real. For his patients, it was pain. And for my clients, it's hyperarousal.

So the racing thoughts, the tired underneath the wired, the activation, that hypervigilant feeling, those are all very real experiences. But the cause isn't a broken sleep system. It's an unconscious protective response designed to keep you safe.

And this pattern can show up in other ways too. I did a podcast a while back about a period of chemical sensitivities I went through where even a tiny exposure to fragrance would trigger this gigantic response in my body. And the symptoms I was having were real.

But it wasn't because a dryer sheet, a block away was dangerous to my wellbeing. It was because my brain had become sensitized to those things. And it works very much the same way with insomnia.

The reason you see certain things as a threat to your sleep that other people might not even notice is because your brain has become sensitized to those things and how they might affect sleep, which is not a problem because we can absolutely work with that.

The Three Mechanisms That Keep Insomnia Alive

So what I want to do is walk you through the three key mechanisms from Sarno's model that tend to keep insomnia going. And we want to give ourselves a lot of grace as we listen because nobody in their right mind would choose insomnia.

We do these things very innocently, unintentionally, and even unconsciously.

1. Fear

So the first one is fear. And you hear me talk about that all the time.

At its core, insomnia is a fear of not sleeping and everything that means to us. So fear sounds like, what if I don't sleep? How am I going to get through? This is ruining my life.

Fear tells the brain that this is not safe. So it responds by activating hyperarousal. And this is exactly how we want our brains to work.

We don't want our safety systems just sleeping on the job. But in the case of insomnia, it's like having this overprotective fire alarm that's going off for smoke instead of fire.

So the first one is fear.

2. Attention

The second driver is attention.

Attention is the fuel for insomnia. Whatever we focus on amplifies. So attention in the context of insomnia looks like tracking sleep, researching, watching the clock, monitoring how you feel, wondering about sleep, pondering about it, trying to figure it all out.

In other words, making sleep the center of your world.

And I was very, very good at this. It's no wonder my brain thought all of this was a life or death situation.

So attention is what turns a passive process into an active one. Okay.

3. Fixing

So number three, according to Sarno, is the brilliant skill of fixing. And I think this is the sneakiest one of all because it feels so productive.

The instinct to fix is something that serves us so well in other areas of life. In fact, we often get rewarded for these kinds of skills, but with sleep, trying to fix it is what sends a message that something is wrong.

So fixing looks like managing every detail, searching for the perfect answer, looking for the perfect solution. All of that reinforces the idea that sleep is hard.

And I now see the opposite of this to be true. Sleep is an adaptable, flexible system. It's designed to handle variations throughout life.

The only reason it starts to feel fragile is because we unintentionally start treating it that way.

The Naturalness of Sleep

If you think back, there was a time when people weren't optimizing every aspect of sleep. They weren't duct taping every sliver of light. They weren't following elaborate nighttime routines.

They weren't problem solving every detail of their sleep.

I remember reading the book Lonesome Dove back when I was in the thick of it, and being struck by the conditions that these people were sleeping in. If you haven't read that book, I highly, highly recommend it.

It really is one of the best books of all time, but it follows a group of people that are crossing the country in the 1800s, and they're just sleeping on the bare ground or wherever they can find a place. And they have none of the creature comforts that we think we need today.

They weren't threatened by the moonlight. They weren't searching for the perfect pillow. They weren't analyzing what sleep stage they were in.

For them, sleep was just biology.

And that was about it.

And I think this can be a really good reminder, because over analysis is what turns a simple process into a complicated one, even when that isn't our intention at all.

The Three Drivers Recap

So to recap these three mechanisms that reinforce hyperarousal, fear tells the brain that something is dangerous.

Attention tells the brain that something is important.

And fixing tells the brain something is broken.

How Chronic Pain and Insomnia Differ

Now, chronic insomnia and chronic pain are very, very similar. But there are a few ways that I see them being different.

The biggest one is that sleep is a biological inevitability. It's going to happen eventually, no matter what we do or don't do. It's pretty much a guarantee.

Sleep also cannot be permanently lost. You cannot break this ability or lose it or anything like that. It is an innate self-regulating system.

And I think that's a huge advantage.

I also think that fear plays out a little differently for these two conditions.

With chronic pain, the fear is all about the symptom itself. So for me, with chemical sensitivities, I feared the reaction I would have to chemicals or fragrances.

But with insomnia, I see the fear being much more future oriented.

It wasn't the symptom of hyperarousal that I feared as much as what might happen if I didn't sleep. And any time we're projecting into the future, we tend to get a bit more in our heads.

There's a lot more mental activity going on because we're in this state of prediction.

Direct vs. Indirect Healing

The final difference I see is in how things begin to shift.

With chronic pain, the change tends to be more direct. And with insomnia, it's more indirect.

We're not really addressing sleep itself because we don't need to. It's already an intelligent system. And even hyperarousal is approached in a pretty indirect way.

What we're really working on is your relationship with sleep. We're looking at the beliefs, behaviors, patterns, and perceptions that are currently holding up the structure of insomnia. And as those things start to change, so does all the wiring around it.

It's like the two go hand in hand.

So pain shifts through direct experience.

Sleep is restored through indirect experience.

Closing Thoughts

I hope this episode brings a little more clarity and a little more hope to whatever you might be going through right now. If you're ready to step into a new relationship with sleep, that's what we help you do inside the mentorship. We would love to have you.

Until next time, I'm Beth Kendall, and you've been listening to the Mind Body Sleep Podcast. Bye for now.