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My
Recovery From Chronic Insomnia Begins
For over
ten years, chronic insomnia had slowly and mercilessly drained
life and happiness out of me.
The anxiety that it caused often consumed me and negatively
impacted nearly every part of my life. It seemingly put a damper
on everything; it tended to mute successes I achieved in my
life and amplified my failures.
Living with insomnia was like being chained to a 200-pound dead
animal carcass and having to drag it around. (Morbid, I know,
but it was really how I felt.)
Fortunately, I never gave up hope or trying to find a way
to overcome the insomnia. And eventually this paid off.
Alone, ashamed and crazy?
Throughout my years of suffering from insomnia, I never seriously
talked to a doctor about it. I had mentioned briefly to my
doctor once that I could not sleep and he simply recommended
sleeping pills and had no interest in discussing my problem
beyond that.
Sleeping pills to me seemed to only treat the symptoms of
my problem and not my underlying anxiety related to sleep.
So I never took sleeping pills. (Sleeping pills can be appropriate,
in my opinion, as a short-term fix to get through a particularly
stressful time in one’s life. But I don’t regard
them as a long-term solution to chronic insomnia because they
don’t deal with the underlying thoughts and behaviors
which primarily cause it.)
The main reason I never aggressively sought professional help
was because I felt embarrassed and ashamed. I also feared
that chronic insomnia could be a manifestation of a deep psychological
problem. In other words, I feared that I may be crazy.
I thought this because I did a lot of research about my problem
in the early- to mid-1990s and simply could not find much
about it. There were some books on how to sleep better, but
nothing really discussed chronic insomnia. So I (very wrongly)
thought that I was probably the only person with this problem.
It turns out that it’s the medical establishment that
should feel embarrassed and ashamed. For some strange reason,
it has a long history of ignoring insomnia. According to Dr.
Gregg Jacobs, author of the 1998 book Say
Good Night to Insomnia: “Doctors are not
trained to treat or diagnose insomnia. Even though it is one
of the most frequent health complaints today, doctors receive
less than one hour of training on sleep problems during their
entire medical education.”
Fortunately, however, this has begun to change recently. Nevertheless,
the medical establishment’s general ignorance of insomnia
for so long has caused the millions of people, such as myself,
to needlessly suffer with it and try to identify solutions on
their own the best they can.
Nothing more (or less) than
a phobia
After a few years, I had a breakthrough of sorts for myself
when I realized something important: Chronic insomnia is a
phobia. Specifically, it is a phobia of being unable to sleep
or sleep well.
A phobia is a persistent irrational fear of an object or a
situation that's generally considered harmless. In other words,
a phobia is fear that does not conform to the facts of reality.
Chronic insomnia does not conform to reality because there
is nothing inherent about attaining sleep that should cause
fear.
The source of the phobia can usually be traced back to one or
more specific triggering event, usually something traumatic
that happened, often but not always at an early age. Sound familiar?
In addition, a phobia is characterized by the following:
- An
immediate response of uncontrollable anxiety when exposed
to the object, activity or situation that causes fear
- A
forceful desire to avoid what you fear and taking atypical
measures to stay away from what you fear
- An
impaired capability to function at ordinary tasks because
of the fear
- The
fear is out of proportion with the stimulus (that which
is causing the fear)
- Alarmed
feelings, such as sweating, rapid heartbeat, avoidance behavior,
trouble breathing and intense anxiety when confronted with
the source of the fear
- Anxiety
when simply anticipating an encounter with the source of
the fear
As you
can see, chronic insomnia has many if not all of the characteristics
of a phobia. If you suffer from chronic insomnia, why should
this matter to you?
It should matter because it means that you are anything but
alone. At least one billion people in the world and, at minimum,
30 million Americans have at least one phobia. People can
and do have phobias of just about anything you can think of.
For example, people have irrational fears of flying, dentists,
spiders, social gatherings, heights, germs, dogs, failure,
cemeteries, tall men, the moon, etc.
Further, by knowing that chronic insomnia is a phobia and
nothing more, you can rest easy that you are almost certainly
are not insane.
What’s more, people with a phobia should not be ashamed
for having it since they did not consciously choose it. Rather,
the phobia chose them. (However, people with a phobia should
feel guilt if they do not seek to conquer the phobia if it
interferes with their lives, since overcoming or at least
lessening the phobia is usually something in a person’s
ultimate control.)
In truth, people with chronic insomnia are different from
people with most other phobias in one respect: They have it
much worse. That’s because people with most other phobias,
such as a fear of flying, can fairly easily avoid what they
irrationally fear and, therefore, can live a life largely
free of anxiety. But people with chronic insomnia cannot avoid
the need for sleep and, therefore, cannot avoid having at
least some anxiety as a daily part of their lives. In this
sense, chronic insomnia is one of the most serious and debilitating
phobias.
Once I realized that, at least in my educated opinion, chronic
insomnia is a mere phobia, albeit a serious one, I no longer
felt alone, ashamed or crazy. This lifted a great burden off
of my shoulders. Most importantly, however, it allowed me
to approach treating my insomnia in much the same way other
phobias have often been successfully treated for decades,
namely by using cognitive-behavior methods.
Next:
Cognitive Techniques
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