How I came through chronic insomnia myself — and what I would say to myself back then

I have written a great deal about insomnia on this blog: what it does to the nervous system, why the mind turns black at night, which therapy works. All of that is knowledge. This piece is something else — it is a story. Mine. Because I know that for someone staring at the ceiling at three in the morning, it sometimes helps more than another mechanism to know: someone has been where I am, and they got out.

I’m going to tell you how my insomnia began, all the things I did wrong for years, where the bottom was, what the turning point was — and then, step by step, what I actually changed. Without embellishment and without a heroic arc: relapses included.

If you are looking for what insomnia taught me about life — about boundaries, control and the body — that is in a separate piece. This one is the chronology: what happened and what I did.

Where it began: the stage, adrenaline and nights with no landing

I was an actress. And an actor’s life is an almost laboratory-grade bad experiment for sleep: performances end in the evening, when the body is full of adrenaline, followed by conversation, a late dinner, a slow coming down — and bed only deep into the night. The next day rehearsals, a different schedule, and a week later a different one again. My circadian rhythm was like an orchestra without a conductor.

It worked for a long time. A young body absorbs a lot. My insomnia didn’t happen overnight — it crept up. At first it was only the nights after opening nights, when I relived every scene until morning. Then the nights before important auditions. Then nights with no reason at all — and those were the ones that started to worry me. I remember the first evening I went to bed with fear. Not worry about a performance — fear of the bed itself. Today I know that this was the decisive switch: insomnia stopped being a consequence of my schedule and became a creature of its own, feeding on my fear of it.

Years of trying: I tested everything that doesn’t work, on your behalf

What followed was the period I describe with such certainty in my pieces about the maintainers of insomnia — because I practised every single one of them personally and devotedly.

I went to bed early, “to build up a reserve” — and lay awake for three hours. On free days I slept until noon, “to catch up” — and then lay awake until four on Sunday night. I drank teas that promised sleep, took melatonin, listened to recordings of rain, bought a new mattress, a weighted blanket and two books about sleep, which I read — of course — in bed, in the middle of the night. I had an evening ritual as long as a coronation, and when it failed I added another stage to it. I counted the hours until the alarm and calculated every evening how much I “could still salvage”.

My notebook was the most telling of all. At one point I started recording my nights: when I lay down, how many times I looked at the clock, how much “net” sleep I got. I thought I was collecting data; in truth I was collecting evidence against myself. Every morning I opened the notebook and confirmed with numbers what I already believed — that there was something wrong with me. Today, when I use a sleep diary in treatment, I know exactly what the difference is: a diary in the service of curiosity helps, while a diary in the service of fear is just another form of night watch.

None of it was stupid. All of it was logical — and all of it made the same mistake: it put sleep at the centre of my life. Sleep became a project, an exam, an opponent. And as I later learned, there is even a scientific name for this: attention, intention and effort, a trio that reliably drives sleep away (Espie et al., 2006). The harder I tried, the further away it was. But I didn’t know that then — all I knew was that I fought every evening and lost every morning.

The bottom: when life shrinks to the question of whether I’ll sleep

The bottom wasn’t dramatic. The bottom was grey. A period when I cancelled dinners because “I have to start my ritual in the evening”. When I looked at coffee with friends as a risk and at every plan as a threat. When the first thought on waking was “how much did I sleep” and the last thought of the day was “what if I don’t again”. Insomnia was no longer taking only my nights — it was taking my days, my work, my relationships, my joy. My life had shrunk to a single question, and that question was always about sleep.

My body was sending the bills: irritability, less focus on stage, a constant humming under the skin, as though somewhere inside me an engine was running that I didn’t know how to switch off. Today I would call it a classic picture of hyperarousal. Back then I put it differently: there is something badly wrong with me.

The turning point: a question I wasn’t expecting

I didn’t go into therapy because of sleep. I went because I was exhausted and because it felt as though I was losing myself. I mentioned sleep in passing, like a spell of bad weather. And my therapist didn’t ask when I go to bed, how much coffee I drink or whether my bedroom is dark. She asked: “What is your body standing guard against at night?”

I remember being almost offended. I was looking for a technique and got a question instead. But the question was working. In the weeks that followed, everything I write about in other pieces today emerged from beneath the insomnia: the inability to say no, a profession that demanded constant readiness to be judged by others, the belief that I was allowed to rest only when everything was done and everyone was satisfied. My body was not broken. My body was the only part of me telling the truth: this can’t go on. Insomnia was not a fault — it was a guard who didn’t believe it was safe to go to sleep, because during the day nobody was watching over my boundaries.

That realisation on its own did not yet bring sleep. But it changed direction: I stopped repairing sleep and started putting in order the life that sleep was reflecting. And alongside it — because with insomnia insight without behavioural change isn’t enough — I got a structured plan for the first time, essentially the ingredients of what we now know as CBT-I.

The steps, in the order I took them

This is the part I would have needed most back then: not philosophy, but a sequence.

• 1. A fixed rising time. The first and hardest step: out of bed at the same time every day, whatever the night was like, even after three hours’ sleep, even on Sunday. No naps. The first weeks were awful — but for the first time in years my shattered rhythm had an anchor, and the tiredness that built up properly across the day started working for me in the evening rather than against me.
• 2. The bed for sleep only. Out of the bedroom went the phone, the books about sleep and the ruminating. When I wasn’t sleeping, I got up and sat in the living room under a blanket — no screen, no drama. Slowly the bed stopped meaning an arena.
• 3. An evening with an ending. Instead of an endless ritual, a short, clear transition: work ends at a set hour, a calm routine, and whatever wasn’t finished went onto paper for tomorrow. I learned that a day needs a conclusion, otherwise the night carries it on.
• 4. Working on boundaries — during the day. Alongside therapy I began refusing what was overwhelming me and saying out loud what I used to swallow. That may not sound like a “sleep technique”, but it was my most powerful one: the guard rests at night only once someone is watching the door during the day. (I’ve written about how we learn this in my piece on setting boundaries.)
• 5. Accepting wakefulness. The last and most paradoxical step: I stopped fighting. When a wakeful night came, I said to myself: all right, tonight the two of us are awake. I lie here, I breathe, I rest — and that is enough. Only when wakefulness lost its status as a catastrophe did it also lose its power.

Alongside these steps I have to mention something without which the story would be dishonest: I couldn’t do them alone. I needed a therapist who held the direction when, after three bad nights, I wanted to throw the whole thing away, and people close to me who understood why I disappeared from company at nine in the evening and why I didn’t sleep until noon on Sunday. I hid my insomnia for years because it felt shameful — something so basic, and I couldn’t manage it. Only when I began to talk about it did it lose part of its weight. If you are on this road: don’t walk it alone.

Sleep didn’t come back in a week. It came back over months — first as isolated good nights I didn’t dare trust, then as runs of them, then as a new normal. I’ve described the precise mechanism of why these steps work in my piece on insomnia and the nervous system — but back then I knew none of it. All I knew was that, for the first time in years, I was going to bed without fear.

Relapses: because a story is not a straight line

I have to tell you this as well, because nobody says it in stories about recovery: the insomnia came back. With a big life change, with a loss, in periods when I started swallowing my no’s again — the wakeful nights returned too. The first time, it broke me: I thought I was “cured”, and I experienced the return as a defeat.

Today I understand relapses differently. My body has its own language, and a wakeful night is a word in it. When it appears, it doesn’t mean all the work has been undone — it means that somewhere in my life something is again demanding too much and giving back too little. The difference is in my response: I used to reach for rituals and panic after a wakeful night, and now I reach for a question. Where have I lost myself again? A night or two, sometimes a week — and when I sort out the day, the night sorts itself out. That is perhaps the biggest difference between “then” and “now”: insomnia hasn’t disappeared from my vocabulary, but it has disappeared from my fears.

And what do my nights look like now? Ordinary. And the ordinariness is exactly the victory. I go to bed when I’m sleepy, get up at roughly the same time, and the bedroom is a boring room without screens — not because I’m following rules, but because it has become as obvious as brushing my teeth. Now and then a wakeful night comes, and with it a faint echo of the old fear; then I know I mustn’t feed it. I get up, sit in the dark, breathe — and marvel at how short wakefulness can be when nobody is afraid of it.

And yes, my work grew out of this story too. Insomnia brought me to therapy, therapy brought me to questions bigger than sleep, and those questions brought me to the decision to leave the stage and train for the work I do today. The whole road is described on the My Approach page — but in short: I am not a therapist who learned about insomnia from books. The books came later.

A letter to myself, the one at three in the morning

If I could send one message back through the years, to myself in that bedroom, this is what I would write.

Dear me. I know you’re staring at the ceiling right now, counting hours. Stop counting; the number won’t tell you anything the fear isn’t already shouting. I know you think you’re broken. You aren’t. Your body is working perfectly — it is guarding you, because during the day you won’t let anyone else. Sleep is not an exam you fail every evening; it is a guest who will arrive once you stop standing at the door. One day you will write about these nights — and people will send you messages saying they recognised themselves in your story. Nothing you feel you are losing now is lost for good. But tonight you don’t have to believe any of that. Tonight just lie back, put a hand on your chest and breathe — the two of us, one awake, one safe. That is enough. Everything else will come.

I shared part of this letter on Instagram too — it was among the posts that brought me the most private messages, and if you find yourself in it, you can send me one as well.

Pismo sebi, tisti ob treh zjutraj: spanec ni izpit — je gost.

And if you are the one at three in the morning right now: your story won’t necessarily unfold like mine — the causes, the steps and the pace are different for everyone. But one thing I can say with the certainty of both experience and profession: there is a way out of this. If you would like someone to talk to who knows both sides of that night, write to me.