What insomnia can teach you about your life

I know insomnia from the inside. Not from textbooks, not from lectures — from my own bed, at three in the morning, when the world was silent and my head was at its loudest. Before I became a therapist, I was an actress. And somewhere among the stages, the shoots and the insecurity of that profession, sleep became my greatest adversary.

Today, with some distance, I can say something odd: insomnia taught me more than many a good experience did. Not because it was a gift — it was exhausting, lonely and long. But because it was a message I did not know how to read for far too long. This piece is about what that message said. Perhaps you will recognise something of your own in it.

How it began

Acting looks exciting from the outside — and it is. But it also brings constant uncertainty: auditions, waiting, being judged, projects that end, and the question of what comes next. The body does not distinguish between stage fright and fear of the future — both register as an alarm. My days were full of adrenaline, and my evenings had no off switch. The performance ends at ten, but at midnight the body is still on stage.

At first there were just occasional bad nights. Then came what happens to almost everyone whom insomnia really takes hold of: I began to dread the evening. Already in the afternoon I would be calculating how many hours of sleep I might manage to catch, and it was precisely that calculating that stole them from me. Sleep was no longer something that happens — it became a project I failed at every single day.

If you are curious about what was going on in my nervous system back then — hyperarousal, cortisol, the vicious circle of worry — I have explained the mechanisms in detail in my piece on insomnia and the nervous system. Here, though, I want to tell a different story: what insomnia meant, and what it taught me.

Insomnia was a message, not a malfunction

For a long time I thought there was something wrong with me — that my body was broken and needed fixing. I tried everything there is to try: teas, drops, rituals, apps, advice. Something would work for a while, then nothing did. Again and again I ended up in the same place: awake, angry at myself and increasingly convinced that I was the exception beyond help.

Only later did I understand that my body was working perfectly correctly. In a life that was too fast, too uncertain and not enough my own, it stood guard at night. The body cannot say “this can’t go on” in words. It says it with a symptom.

That was my Copernican turn: I stopped asking “how do I fix my sleep” and started asking “what is my body guarding me against”. The answers did not come overnight and they were not pleasant — they touched my profession, my boundaries, my relationship with myself. But they were the right ones. And that very question was one of the paths that led me first into my own therapy, and then to the decision to change careers and become a therapist. I have described the whole story on the page my approach.

Today, sitting on the other side, I hear it constantly: insomnia is exceedingly rarely “just” a sleep disorder. It is almost always the messenger of something — of overload, of an unresolved loss, of a relationship that suffocates, of a life that has slipped past us. A symptom is post. You can ignore it, but the sender will write again.

It taught me that the body always counts

You can fool your thoughts, but not your body. You can tell yourself a hundred times that everything is fine — if the body does not believe it is safe, it will not let you into sleep. I learned that lesson slowly and stubbornly, because I was used to living “from the neck up”: thinking everything through, planning everything, managing everything with my head.

But sleep is not a mental operation. It is a bodily state of surrender — and surrender requires a sense of safety that arises in the body, not in arguments. That is why rational persuasion (“there’s nothing to worry about, just go to sleep”) fails so miserably: it is addressed to the wrong recipient.

That experience went on to shape my professional path profoundly: I completed a year-long training in body-oriented psychotherapy, and today I continually bring the body into my work — the breath, the tension in the shoulders, the clenched jaw, the sensations beneath the story. Research supports this: slow breathing with a prolonged exhalation measurably increases parasympathetic activity, and regular relaxation techniques are one of the standard components in the treatment of insomnia. But more important than any technique is the principle: if you want to change the night, you have to listen to what the body is saying during the day.

It taught me to set boundaries

My nights were a mirror of my days. As long as I said “yes” to everything during the day — to every role, every call, every expectation — everything I had left unsaid stayed behind for the night. An unspoken “no” does not disappear. It waits for the silence.

Insomnia forced me to ask myself: what in my life needs a no, so that the night can say yes? Answering that question was harder than all the sleep techniques put together. It meant disappointing people. It meant turning down projects I feared might be my last. It meant no longer being the woman who always copes.

Here too my experience is nothing unusual. Research on work stress consistently shows that one of the strongest predictors of poor sleep is the inability to detach psychologically from obligations (psychological detachment) — that is, carrying work and worries in our minds into the evening, long after the working day is over. Pre-sleep rumination, that endless turning things over, is one of the central mechanisms by which daytime stress becomes night-time wakefulness. Boundaries are not a luxury. They are hygiene for the nervous system — as important as darkness and quiet in the bedroom.

If you recognise yourself in this, write down a simple exercise I often suggest: every evening at the same time (not in bed!) take ten minutes and put on paper what you are worried about and what tomorrow’s first step is for each of those things. Then shut the paper in a drawer. This is not magic — but it is a way of giving your worries an appointment during the day, instead of letting them take one at night.

It taught me to let go of control

The hardest lesson last: sleep cannot be forced. It is like a bird that only lands once you stop chasing it. The harder I tried — counting the hours, working out how much I “had to” sleep, reading about techniques, grading every night as a success or a defeat — the further away it went.

Psychology has a name for this: sleep effort. Researchers have even developed a scale for it, and the findings are unambiguous — more effort means worse sleep, because effort is a form of arousal, and arousal is the opposite of falling asleep. What works is precisely the opposite stance: accepting wakefulness when it comes. “I’m awake. This is unpleasant, but it isn’t dangerous. The body rests even when I’m just lying here and breathing.” It sounds simple; for me it was the hardest sentence I have ever learned to say and truly mean.

Insomnia was thus my first teacher of acceptance — a stance that psychotherapy today uses far beyond sleep. Some things in life you cannot control: other people’s feelings, the past, the future, the moment when sleep or peace arrives. But you can arrange the conditions, do your part and trust the process. I carry that principle into the therapy room too — and I admit that I am still practising it.

It taught me self-compassion

I speak about this lesson less often, but it may be the deepest one. In my years of insomnia I was merciless towards myself. Every bad night was proof that I was broken; every tired day a defeat; every morning a fresh reckoning. The inner voice that greeted me on waking was not the voice of an ally — it was the voice of a judge.

Today I know that this very voice was part of the problem. To the nervous system, self-criticism is a threat like any other: it sets off the same alarm, the same cortisol, the same tension. Research on self-compassion (Kristin Neff and others) shows that a kinder relationship with oneself is associated with less rumination, less anxiety and — no surprise — better sleep. When I stopped berating myself at night and began saying to myself what I would say to a good friend (“you’re having a hard night; it isn’t your fault; hold on, it will pass”), it was not only my sleep that changed. My relationship with myself changed — and that stayed, even after the nights had grown quiet.

What actually helped me in practice

Because you often ask me, when you hear this story, “yes, but what did you actually do?”, let me list it honestly — with the caveat that for me the key was the combination, not any single trick:

• My own therapy. Not because of sleep — because of the life that sleep was mirroring. Insomnia was the ticket in, but the work went on at deeper themes: boundaries, uncertainty, my relationship with myself. Sleep improved as a side effect.
• A fixed wake-up time. The same hour every day, even after a dreadful night, even on Sundays. At first this felt cruel, but it gave my internal clock its rhythm back — and research confirms that a stable morning is the strongest anchor of the circadian rhythm.
• Morning light and movement. Ten minutes of walking in the morning does more for your night-time melatonin than all the evening drops put together.
• An evening with an ending. I set an hour after which there is no more work, no more replying and no more deciding. A day that never ends spills over into the night.
• The bed for sleep only. When I could not sleep, I got up, sat in another room with a book or my knitting, and went back only once I was sleepy. Slowly the bed became a place of rest again, not a battlefield.

And what did not help? Everything bought in a panic: apps that turned the night into a report card with a grade; long afternoon naps that stole the evening’s sleep pressure; alcohol, which sent me off quickly and woke me at two; and every piece of advice that began with “just relax”.

What I would say to myself ten years ago

If I could sit down beside that woman staring at the ceiling at three in the morning, this is what I would tell her:

• You are not broken. Your body is doing exactly what it is meant to do — protecting you. It is only the address of the danger that is wrong.
• Stop fixing the night and start listening to the day. The answer is not in a new technique, but in the question of how you are living.
• Tell someone. Insomnia grows in solitude and shame. The first honest conversation about it was, for me, the beginning of the end.
• Seek help sooner. For years I believed I had to manage on my own. I did not have to manage on my own — and neither do you.

What you can take from this for yourself

Your story is not my story — your insomnia has its own message and its own path. But if you are struggling with sleep too, I invite you to sit with the three questions that opened the door for me:

• What is waiting for me at night, when the world falls quiet? Which thought, feeling or theme only speaks up in the silence?
• What would I need to say no to during the day, so that the night does not have to carry the whole load?
• Where am I still trying to control something that needs, at most, conditions and time?

I have also spoken about my experience on Instagram — this post was shared by the most people who know these nights from the inside:

This is what insomnia taught me. What has it taught you?

And if your answer to any of the questions above is heavier than you are ready to carry alone — that is what therapy is for. Not because there is something wrong with you, but because messages like insomnia do not have to be read in solitude.