What is insomnia?

This must be a physical problem, right? It isn’t!

For most of us, chronic insomnia isn’t about blue light, lack of exercise, chemical imbalance, or a lack of sleep hygiene. It’s also not about your circadian rhythm or a lack of sleep drive – you have lots of sleep drive! 

The underlying cause of your insomnia is anxiety and fear. If you’re like most people who suffer with insomnia, you may describe it as being stuck in a vicious cycle of poor sleep which triggers fear, which causes more poor sleep. It makes sense to feel anxious and scared from not sleeping, but this isn’t just a symptom of what’s happening. It’s the fuel that keeps insomnia alive. 

Insomnia is all about anxiety. This anxiety typically sparks after not being able to sleep, which can happen for a variety of reasons. Anxiety generates hyper-arousal, which keeps us awake. The longer we’re awake, the more fearful we feel, and the cycle continues. Being awake at night often starts to shift from being inconvenient to feeling unsafe. 

Over time, this anxiety contributes to a conditioned fear response in our brains. This means that your brain has learned fear around sleep, and this learned fear is being triggered night after night regardless of what you try to do to stop it. In fact, you’ve probably noticed that trying to stop it only makes it worse.

Conditioned fear responses are like alarms that go off to protect us from repeating dangerous behaviours. They’re meant to keep us safe. But in this case, your brain has learned some bad information about sleep and is sounding a false alarm night after night.