How to Overcome Insomnia with Joseph Pannell

Tati: If your mind starts racing the moment your head hits the pillow, or you find yourself stuck in an endless loop of overthinking at night, then this episode is for you. I’m joined by Joseph Panel, a sleep expert who overcame 20 years of chronic insomnia after hitting rock bottom, and who now helps others do the same Using the gold standard science-backed methods, he’s worked with major UK organizations like NHS and the Ministry of Defense.

And in this conversation we will share practical insights to help you finally get the rest you deserve. Let’s get started. Welcome to Calmly Coping, the podcast for high achievers who want to feel calm, balanced, and confident from within. I’m Tati a therapist and coach a. I’m here to help you stop overthinking, stop overworking and crush self-doubt.

Every other week I share actionable tips and strategies you can implement right away to create more balance and ease in your life. Thanks so much for tuning in. Let’s get started.

Joseph: Hi everyone. So we’ve got a fantastic episode today. I’m here with TTI and she works with individuals with high functioning anxiety, so people doing well on the outside, achieving well on the outside, but very much struggling on the inside.

And what I found is there’s a huge crossover between people who have insomnia, perfectionists. Type A personalities and the desire to achieve and to control and perfect. And we are going to share our expertise on how to help deal with these thought patterns. Because if you’ve got these obsessive anxious fault patterns that bubble up in the middle of the night, that’s certainly going to impact your sleep.

And so that is gonna help you deal with these fault patterns. In a really holistic, kind way. And I think it’s gonna be absolutely fantastic talk because I’ve been on Ty’s channel. It’s wonderful. And yeah, so please do stick around to the end of this interview as you into this some absolutely amazing stuff.

I’m sure. And just as a little introduction on me for people on Ty’s channel, I work with people who have insomnia and I came to this work after suffering with it for 20 years myself, uh, very deep down the rabbit hole, anxiety from it, depression from it, um, lost my house from it. And after it, I overcame it with CBTI, uh, which is what we know as the gold standard treatment within the NHS and the uk and then trained in sleep medicine.

And now I help people day to day with you, suffer from insomnia. So Tati, welcome to the channel. I’m really happy to have you here. Can you introduce yourself please? In no favor. We’re probably a little bit better than I did it.

Tati: Yeah. Thank you so much, Joe. And, and you know, I think that you have an excellent channel, and I’m glad to be having this conversation with you because it’s something that is, I think, much needed.

And like you’re saying, there can be this, this overlap between the two of being like high achieving and, you know, perfectionistic and then also struggling with sleep and, and potentially to the degree of having insomnia. And so a little bit about myself. So I specialize in high functioning anxiety and I am a licensed therapist and coach.

And I basically came to this work because I’ve personally experienced high functioning anxiety myself, and I reached a point of burnout and realized that something needed to change and, and a lot of that it wasn’t. Necessarily about changing things externally, although that was the path for me. But it was more about like internally how I, how I spoke to myself, how I thought about things and how I managed my time and set boundaries and, and all of those things that helped me to get to where I am and, and helping other people with, uh, similar struggles.

Joseph: And I think, yeah, I’m having the background to exactly what you suffer from in the past probably makes, um, well, I like to think it helps me in my work, and I’m sure it massively helps you as well, um, to Yeah. Resonate with what your clients are saying and the type of people they are. And we’ve, we’ve got a fantastic, um, topic that, uh, you came up with actually.

It was the actual really delving deep into the specifics of how to cope with when you spiral and catastrophize. In the middle of the night. And do you Yeah. If you just say a little bit more on that, that’d be fantastic.

Tati: Yeah. Ab absolutely. So I think you, you put it well that like catastrophizing, that spiral, that overthinking and I mean, you can tell us, Joe, if there’s a difference in how you address it, when it’s difficulty with falling asleep mm-hmm.

Or in waking up in the middle of the night. But I, I think both of those tend to be common and kind of just like the never ending stream of, whether it’s things on the to-do list or, you know, worried about a, a meeting the next day or, you know, thinking about the worst case scenario, fearing that you’re gonna drop the ball or that you forgot something or, you know, just all of the, the things that can go through our minds when we’re really just trying to let go and, and rest.

Mm-hmm.

Joseph: Yeah. And so. What I I for, for Ty’s viewers. So I, I’ll work on the behavioral side of this because insomnia. It is very behavioral. And before the camera roll, Ty and I were speaking about this earlier, how when people have insomnia, they start changing the behaviors when it comes to their sleep.

They start expending spending more, longer, longer in bed, which then turns the bed not into a place of calm and happiness, which. Most people associate the bed as being to a place where you problem solve, you ruminate. And when you really get deep down into the rabbit hole of insomnia, people start associating their bed as a really scary, horrible place that they don’t like to be in.

And I’ve had people describe it as a torture chamber around, you know, bed at males. And it’s, and it is really from your behaviors and how you choose to manage these sports and that causes you to start associating the bed, that’s this really horrible, negative place you don’t want to be in. And then that leads you down to a nightly battle with your sleep.

And so insomnia is very behavioral and it’s very thought pattern and led and we’re going to, yeah. Help deal with your fault patterns when you’re in bed. And I’m gonna provide some really helpful behavioral changes that you can start doing to prevent the nighttime awakenings and hopefully help you fall asleep quicker.

And Kathy’s gonna work on Yeah, what to actually work, what to, how to approach your fault patterns when you do actually wake up in the middle of the night or it’s taking you ages to fall asleep. So yeah, I think a fantastic topic because something everyone will resonate. Even good sleepers will have these occasions where they are in bed and they are really fighting, forcing and pleading with their sleep.

And if we can help people manage that, I think it’s gonna help a lot of suffering because if you can sleep well at nighttime, then everything else in life will fall into place. Because I don’t wanna overemphasize how important sleep is because people who are not sleeping already know that because they know how it feels and they’re not sleep.

And, but yeah, if we can get your sleep back on track is going to make everything. Helps in your life fall into place. So yeah, let’s have your expertise on this. Um, so you’re in bed, middle of the night, you’ve just woken up. And what kind of comment would the clients you work with or what kind of thought patterns might start to spiral and spin?

Tati: Yeah, and I wanna get to that. Can I actually ask you to back up a little and maybe for people who don’t know, ’cause you know, maybe people that are coming from my audience might not like, I’m sure everybody probably knows the term insomnia, but like what, what actually, can you just define what insomnia is versus like you’re saying somebody who’s maybe like waking up in the middle of the night here and there?

Joseph: So there’s a huge difference between someone with insomnia and someone who occasionally has a short term sleep problem, or someone who struggles with sleep occasionally. So someone who struggles with sleep is someone who might wake up in the middle of the night. Once or twice a week, and perhaps it takes an hour to fall back to sleep or someone occasionally, a couple of times a week, maybe it takes ’em a little while to fall asleep and they might lie in bed a bit anxious and stressed for a time.

That’s normal sleep. That is a normal sleep, but so even good sleepers only sleep probably only about 80% of the time. So there’s no such thing as a perfect sleeper because nobody sleeps perfectly. That’s just a normal sleeper. This is what everyone experiences. Insomnia is very different from sleep disturbance or poor quality sleep.

So actual. Chronic insomnia is a 24 hour condition. It’s obsession, it’s control, it’s fear of the bed and the bedroom. It is changing and rearranging your entire life because of your sleep. So it’s 1,001 ritualistic, obsessive behaviors that you have to do in order to try and make yourself sleep. So you’ve probably seen all the little tips, tricks, hacks online that I’m not sleeping more, so I need to start eating kiwi fruits before bed.

I need to. Have herbal tears before bed. I need to take these supplements. I, I need to spin around the circle three times down my head in order to sleep. And so I need to do thousands of things in order to try and sleep. And because I can’t sleep, I need to do a thousand of one thing to protect my sleep.

So I can’t now watch any blue light before bed. So I can’t watch tv. I’ve heard that I can’t eat late in a restaurant, uh, or I can’t eat late. So that’s all my eating out in a restaurant that is now off the table. I can’t exercise too soon before bed. So that’s my exercise group. But I used to enjoy where I would meet up with friends, like a normal person, a normal sleep would do, that’s now at the table, so I can’t do that anymore.

So that is your entire life controlled and dictated by your sleep. You spend longer and longer in bed because. Everything else in life, the hardy try tip long you spend it, but greater likelihood there is achieved in your aims of peak insomnia. We generally start spending longer in bed, sleep even worse, and then the daytime becomes this whole battle with trying to sleep at nighttime with every waking fault becomes something, how am I going to sleep tonight?

Your nighttime becomes a battle where you are lying in bed, fighting for asleep, plead them asleep, and it’s something that controls, dictates and, uh, takes over your entire life. It’s very, uh, similar to OCD obsessive, uh, behaviors that people who have OCD will start doing. People with insomnia will, will follow down that same path where sleep, sleep, sleep becomes something that is just in their face 24 hours a day.

And so that’s insomnia. It, it’s so much more than not. Sleeping. It is not sleeping’s a part of it, of course, but I’d say that’s 20%. It’s a 24 hour condition. And it is really, yeah, it, it, it is something that strips your entire life when you’ve really caught it badly. And so that is insomnia and this is why it can never be overcome with sleep hygiene or supplements or warm baths because if you’ve got this fear of the bed in the bedroom, if feel cool, their words like a torture chamber, which people have insomnia, do, it doesn’t matter how many hot baths or how cool your bedroom is, you’re never gonna fix it through any tips or tricks or high and insomnia.

So that’s the, that’s the psychological side of insomnia. Insomnia is also path driven. Um, so the body clock, the sleep trap, which we will talk, um, more on is, uh, call your body clock. Your sleep driver are two things which govern your sleep. When people have insomnia, um, their brain takes on a very unhelpful pattern of sleep in order to try and help them, which makes it even harder to sleep.

And that is due to essentially your brain trying to help you. Yeah. So in the same way you can train and condition your brain, do you have anxiety? You can also train and condition your brain to have a very poor sleep pattern. So yeah, if I boil it down into two things, insomnia is a poor pattern of sleep and it’s the anxiety obsession, but control, fear or worry around sleep as well.

So yeah, that is insomnia. Yeah. No, thank you. So way more than poor sleep.

Tati: Yeah. Uhhuh, no, thank you for, for sharing that. ’cause it’s, it definitely sounds like it’s something that’s really all, all encompassing. Mm-hmm. And, um, you know, to go back to what you were saying about Okay, how would you address those anxious thoughts that that do come up?

At night or at any moment could to come off of what you’re saying when it comes to, to sleep. Mm-hmm. You know, I think that it can help to first have some distancing from the thoughts. Like when, when we are having anxious thoughts, we can start to believe them. We don’t even question them, right. We just kind of feed into them and then continue to go down the spiral of, okay, I forgot to do this thing that I was supposed to do yesterday, and well, what if this happens?

Or, you know, what if I lose my job or, you know, what if um, my partner leaves me or whatever. You know, it kind of goes into all of these worst case scenario and I think it can help to, when I talked about the distancing, to just identify that your thoughts are not facts and so we don’t need to. Believe them as though they are factual, um, and, and kind of, uh, addressing and challenging those thoughts.

Now, sometimes when we’re in a spiral, like challenging those thoughts can sometimes create more overthinking. Um, so I think it, I, I find that it can be helpful, especially with difficulty with sleeping. Uh, I’ll tell people to keep like a, a notepad or something nearby and like write down those thoughts or do a brain dump of what’s worrying you before you go to bed at night.

Uh, because that can give you kind of like a container to distance yourself from those thoughts or those to-dos and communicate a boundary in a sense of, okay, I’m gonna set these thoughts aside and then return to them in the morning when I can actually address ’em. Um, if it is something that’s valid or if it’s something that is, uh, kind of a worst case scenario thought than.

Seeing if you can have some perspective when it comes to this and, and looking at the evidence in the situation. You know, is it true if you forgot to check one thing off of your to-do list yesterday, that means that your whole world was gonna fall apart? Um, or is there some middle ground between, you know, that before that worst case scenario occurs?

Um, and, and these are like you’re saying, the same way you can train yourself into anxiety. So these are skills that you can learn to train your brain to think differently. I like to give this. Metaphor of imagining that your brain is like a field of grass. And I learned this in a mindfulness training before, and the way that you’re thinking about things right now, so maybe it’s the anxious thoughts, is like a well tread path that’s been, you know, walked many times.

And so it’s going to be easier to go down that pathway and think those same anxious thoughts because that pathway’s already been well tread. And the process of thinking differently, questioning these anxious thoughts, challenging them, and focusing more on, even if it’s not like we can’t always think positively, even if it’s just having a neutral thought of accepting what has happened.

Um, that is a process of you’re basically creating a new pathway. You’re kind of like bush whacking and, um. Having to pat down the, the grass in this metaphor, and it’s going to be something that’s gonna feel more difficult and challenging, and you’re gonna have to put more effort into in the beginning.

Uh, but the more and more that you build that skill, the more the old way of thinking becomes overgrown. And then the new way of thinking becomes the more automatic way. And of course, there’s always gonna be anxious thoughts that we have because that’s our brain’s way of trying to protect us. Uh, but it’s about kind of the way that we respond to them, the way we interact with those thoughts that can make the difference between, okay, I am having an anxious thought.

Can I try and say this is just a thought and, and not feed into it more? Or are you going to kind of continue to feed it to it?

Joseph: And I love that analogy and I’m, I’m gonna borrow that if Im, may I, I will reference you. Yeah, absolutely. It’s, um. That is incredibly helpful for, for sleep to not only write down these four patterns before you go to bed, but to actually challenge them and reframe them.

Because the brain is, like you said, if you’re always walking down that same path, it’s just going to get tread and that’s the only path you’re going to the walk down. But certainly I found that the brain, it loves habits because habits are easier to put it in. Yeah. So whenever I’m driving and I need to go off at a different junction, the amount of times that I will then miss that junction, because I’m so used to always driving down that same road and always driving down that same path.

Probably half the time I would have to then go, you know, or even my a minute before reminding myself I had to go off of that different junction because the brain is so habit driven, because it’s. But the habits and the fault patterns aren’t always the best ones that serve us, but just the easiest ones.

And the brain is hardwired for anxiety and catastrophizing the negativity because, you know, we’re, that’s, we’re not the top predators. We human beings generally, you know, do tend to be quite anxious people. And it just to have something quite practical in place, like you said about writing things down before bed and then challenging and reframing these four absence is incredibly helpful.

Um, analogy I like to use is, um, imagine you’ve got a friend of yours in the road and then a car’s coming towards them and you can see the car coming towards them and they haven’t seen it. You’re gonna shout at them until they take action and do what you want ’em to do. You’re gonna shout loud, you’re gonna shout loud, you’re gonna keep shouting, but your friend is still in the road and isn’t taking any action.

And that’s kind of what’s happening with your brain in the middle of the night or just before bed, you, you’re screaming, you’re shouting, and you are not taking any action due to resolve this problem. And so actually by physically sitting down before bed, putting your thoughts onto paper and going through every single one, and challenging and reframing them, like you said, I think with repetition and consistency, it is going to stop these four patterns from.

Bob been up in the middle of the night and it does take time. It does take practice. Uh, like you said, with the well trod path, it’s not something that happens immediately ’cause you have to get out the bush whacker and the mower to, to, to trail a different path because the brain is always going to want to return to the easiest, uh, path that it, that it has, uh, laid out already.

But if you can train and condition your brain to, to think in this way, eventually with time of consistency, you’ll find that default patterns will stop, um, bubbling up in the middle of the night. Or if they do, um, the brain will remember that you’ve put it down on a piece of paper and dealt with these fault patterns already.

And so, yeah, it’s, um, it sounds a very simple thing to do, but when it comes to sleep, it is about doing the simple fault patterns of behavioral changes over a long, consistent. Amount of time. And this is where a lot of times when it comes to sleep advice, insomnia, bites, preps people up. ’cause people think they need to do thousands of things in order to sleep well at nighttime.

Often it’s just about doing a few things with repetition and consistency to get your sleep back on track. And yet certainly dealing with your fault, absence in that really proactive way, incredibly helpful to people. So, yeah. Fantastic. Yeah, I think, and I like that analogy, but, um, yeah, I’m gonna, I’m gonna use that if I may.

Tati: Yeah, it’s a good one. I can, I can’t take credit for, um, but I can’t take credit for my

Joseph: analogy. Se

Tati: um, one, one other thing to add and, and that I find to be helpful is even asking yourself when thoughts are coming up, is, is this helpful? Right. Like, and I think that connects to what you’re saying of not taking action, right?

Like. Thinking about your to-do list or your worries in the middle of the night isn’t helping anything, right? It’s not, um, it’s only making you feel worse. You’re not accomplishing anything or, uh, addressing these concerns. And so even though we might logically know that it’s not helping, we’re not bringing conscious awareness to that.

So I think that can sometimes be a helpful mindset shift to kind of assess, okay, is this helping me right now or is this just making me awa more awake? And you know, if we just look at the way that anxious thoughts, it becomes a feedback loop, essentially, right? So the anxious thoughts that we have then create more physical anxiety in the body.

And then that. Activates our nervous system more and gets us more like emotionally agitated potentially. And that makes it harder to relax. And so it’s oftentimes accomplishing the opposite of, of what we’re intending to do.

Joseph: Yeah. And um, it’s, sports are so automatic, but it’s very rare. The thoughts you are having are helpful thoughts.

So just having that and with repetition of doing that, the brain will start to ask itself that question and that help stop that physiological response. And that’s a really imp that ties very importantly into sleep. So when we’re looking at the mechanism of sleep, I talked about sleep drive and the body clock earlier, but this physiological response to stress, uh, so hyper arousal or the fight or flight stress response, this is something that can I.

Interfere with your sleep at nighttime. So really nice way of thinking about it. And my viewers would’ve heard this analogy before when new ones won’t. But, um, people, so bear with me on this channel, but this will all be new for, uh, for your viewers. Imagine a wolf were to walk into your bedroom, heart rate, body temperature, adrenaline, cortisol, sweaty palms.

It doesn’t matter how sleepy you are, if you’ve got that drive to sleep, you’re going to be wide awake. ’cause there’s a physical, tangible threat to your safety. And obviously we’ve got houses with locked doors and everything is fine and lovely, but we’re still running the same brains essentially in this old software from caveman time.

So with these anxious thought patterns, the brain will respond in exactly the same way as if there was a physical, tangible threat to your safety. It doesn’t matter how. Sleep you are. If you’ve got that drive to sleep. If the anxiety starts to creep, then you will get that same response that you would if it was a physical, tangible threat.

And the brain is going to do everything it can in order to keep you awake at night time. If we go into the actual practical side of helping people sleep, it’s about strengthening the first mechanism of sleep, which is what I talked about, the sleep drive, and it’s dealing with these anxious, obsessive thoughts as well.

And if I was to really boil down how to overcome insomnia, in a nutshell, getting your body clock in your sleep drive work in well for you. Wanna talk about that for your viewers, uh, in a bit. And dealing with this anxiety, these anxious thoughts to tell the brain that there is no wolf, uh, walking into your bedroom.

Uh, got your sleepy feeling, your sleep drive. The wolf is nowhere near your house and say, essentially boil sleep down. If you’ve gotta drive to sleep, you’re feeling sleepy and you’re not hyper aroused in this, um, hyper alert state that you talked about. I that’s not your words. Uh, what, how did you describe it?

Your,

Tati: yeah. Um, I don’t remember. Maybe like activated nervous system. I think I said

Joseph: activated nervous system.

Tati: Yeah.

Joseph: Then you sleep. Um, and that is boiling sleep down into a nutshell. You don’t need to do things to sleep. It is a natural physiological process. We’re always told that you’ve got to do a thousand things in order to sleep, but actually good sleepers don’t do all the things we’re told in order to sleep.

And they still sleep is when you start trying to do thousands of things in order to try and make sleep happen. That’s when sleep becomes very tricky. ’cause it’s like sitting at a dinner table. Trying to feel hungry and again, angry and stress annoyed that you cannot feel hungry even though it is a natural physiological process, but no one knows about about sleep because all the messaging when it comes to sleep insomnia is do more, try more, fix more, force more.

And it just leads to more of that fight and alertness and activation of the nervous system because of the wrong message and when it comes to actually how to, to deal with sleep and insomnia. So, yeah. Yeah. That’s a great, great. No, I like that

Tati: comparison with the, with the hunger. ’cause I, I never thought about it in that way.

And I’m curious to, to hear from you what, what you were sharing, what you’re gonna talk about before, like the behavioral shifts or like you mentioned the sleep drive.

Joseph: Yes. To really boil leap down. So why do we sleep it? It’s really, it So touch the physiological side, it’s driven by, well, it’s only driven by one thing, which is the sleep drive.

In the same way, the longer it is since you last drunk, the first year you feel, the longer it is since you last slept. The sleepier you feel. So the only thing that makes you sleep is your sleep driver. Give it its actual title, the Homeostatic Sleep Drive. A real simple way of thinking about it. Imagine you wake up at 7:00 AM and you need to be awake for 17 hours in order to reduce your seven hours of sleep.

That means you wake up at 7:00 AM you’ll feel sleepy the next night at around about midnight, uh, after being awake for 17 hours. If instead you were to wake up at say, 10 o’clock in the morning, you still need to be awake for 17 hours in order to produce your seven hours of sleep. That means you’re not going to feel sleep even next night until around about three in the morning.

So if you can really think about, there’s nothing you can do to manufacture and create sleep except for being awake. And the better quality daytime you have, the better quality sleep you have at nighttime. And so this is where a lot of the, the current messaging around sleep is so unhelpful because it’s Rob Magnesium onto your feet or, or do this or do that before bed and.

Relax in order to try and sleep. And obviously if you’re trying to relax in order to try and achieve something that’s not relaxing. And then it has the opposite effects like trying to relax to turn your hair blue and then getting across and angry and stress that you can’t turn your hair blue through relaxation.

And so if you can, yeah, that key message that the only thing that makes you sleep is your sleep drive is going to hugely help people ’cause it, help ’em let go of all the rituals around sleep. So that’s what makes you sleep, your sleep drive and your body clock is a key mechanism for sleep. And most people know about the body clock, but probably don’t know how it works.

Essentially the body clock is designed to keep you awake during the daytime by releasing wake furnace, hormones, adrenaline, cortisol, and it’s designed to, uh, help you sleep at nighttime by switching off and then releasing melatonin. Melatonin will combine with your natural drive to sleep, your sleep drive.

Then you will, as long as you don’t have hyper arousal, the activated nervous system, you’ve got your melatonin from your body clock, got the drive to sleep from your sleep drive, and then your drift off to sleep. Like these two things combined. And the thing that can interfere with that is what we talked about earlier, the activated nervous system, the wolf walking into your bedroom because sleep is inherently designed to be imperfect because it’s the most dangerous thing we could have done, um, when before our locked hours and doors and lovely things that we’ve got now.

And so if we didn’t have that mechanism where if we’re anxious, stressed, and alert we were still sleepy and unable to, you know, break out of that, then we wouldn’t, we wouldn’t where it last very long. But unfortunately, because we live such stressful lives and because of certainly the people that you are helping, anxious stress, you know.

Worrying about, uh, day to day life. Mm-hmm. They’re telling the brain always wolf in your bedroom, wolf in your bedroom, wolf in your bedroom. So even if you have that drive to sleep, the body clock will then start witching into essentially awake mode and keep you awake at nighttime. So that’s the, um, what creates sleep.

I will get onto behavioral changes, but I’ll hand back to you first to keep the balance on the conversation. And, um, but yeah, I, I’ll get into the actual how to change your behaviors in order to help sleep, um, uh, work well for you and get your body clock, sleep, drive, rebuild, rebuilt. But, um, if we work more on the, sort of the wolf side of things, delve specifically into the fault patterns people might have at nighttime catastrophize that they might have, so that when.

Better, challenging and reframing their thoughts before they go to bed at night. Um, with the people you help, what would you say are the, the real fears that people have in know, high functioning people have, and a lot of high functioning people have insomnia because they want to fix things, they want to perfect things.

And perfectionism mm-hmm. Is very, um, linked to sleep because when people want to get perfect sleep and they see the messaging about, uh, they need to get eight hours of sleep, obviously things are going to happen to them. They try more, they force more, they do more, and they sleep even worse because it trains the brain that sleep isn’t this natural, passive, um, process.

But yeah. What, what, what are these thoughts that people would you say with amongst the people you help that will spiral either before bed or in the middle of the night?

Tati: Yeah. And I think kind of the, the general themes, if I had to identify what, what are the root fears, you know, a lot of times there can be this fear of failure, uh, you know, and that like you’re sharing with perfectionism can happen, or fear of making mistakes.

I think I talked about the fear of dropping the ball or mm-hmm. And that can be connected to other people, so maybe there’s a fear of disappointing others or judgment from others. And so a lot of it can be connected to performance and, uh, it can be connected to wanting to do the best that they can. And like I think you mentioned before, which was a great way to, to think about kind of the, how these two things are analogous, like the desire for control and.

Many times with high achievers, with high functioning anxiety, there can be this strong desire for things to go a certain way or, you know, there can be a rigidity that then makes it harder to handle when things don’t go according to plan. Or you maybe are just focused on moving from one thing to the next.

So like not being able to really enjoy your life or be present, but more focusing on, okay, how can I just check off the next box or accomplish the next thing? And so all of this combines to kind of create these anxious thoughts and worries of, am I not doing enough? Or, you know, sometimes there can be the opposite of.

Maybe feeling overwhelmed because you’ve overextended yourself, uh, because there’s such a strong fear of failure. And so then maybe there’s anxiety about, well, I have way too much on my plate and I will be able to handle it. Um, yeah. So tho I think those are kind of the general themes that I, I tend to notice in my audience and in the clients that I work with.

And this then results in this never ending kind of tape going through their mind of all of the things that they could be doing or should be doing, or, you know, all of that pressure and, and worry just kind of building up.

Joseph: Yeah. It’s amazing how much crossover there is between people you work with and people with insomnia because Yeah, like I said, that affection is and type A personalities and high achievers.

These are the people that I, I tend to work with because you really want to fix things and when you go about fixing things in an unhelpful way, then it act, it just feeds more into the condition and it’s so frustrating and confusing for people who are used to the mindset of, if I do more and try more and fix more and spend a longer time at something, the greater likelihood there is of achieving my aim, which I.

People with high achievers. Mm-hmm. That is the sort of the mindset that they have. And this is why so many high achievers will suffer from insomnia because you apply that same, same logic. And I think what you said about we actual really going specific into the bolt patterns people will have that might bubble up in the middle of the night is incredibly helpful because that exercise you talked about, which is fantastic, uh, exercise for people to do, to write down their, their thoughts and then challenge them before bed.

If you can really delve deep into the specifics of the things that are likely do, bubble up in the middle of the nighttime, and I’ve delved deep into challenging them before you go to bed and with repetition, three weeks, a month, two months, you’ll find that the brain will naturally be dark. Moving towards these positive thought patterns so that they don’t spiral in the middle of the night.

Like when you first put a match to something, if the brain can go, oh no, I’ve dealt with that, that’s on the piece of paper, and I’ve been dealing with that same thought pattern over and over again for the last six weeks, then it will stop that, uh, taking light in the middle of a night and yeah, really delving deep into the specifics of what people are anxious about and stressed about.

Tati: Mm-hmm.

Joseph: Um, is incredibly helpful. And it tends to be, if you’ve got some anxious, worried thoughts, it tends to be the same for a lot of people. Just a handful of the same worries.

Tati: Yeah.

Joseph: But, um, never get put to bed. And then maybe one of ’em you just overthink and then obsess about or, but then another one comes to a list and then it just keeps spiraling unturn and so yeah.

Huge, I think huge crossover between staying people that we work with and yeah. So. If I were to help your people on your channel, the actual behavioral changes in order to do, to reduce the amount of nighttime awakening and prevent them from happening or reduce the amount of time it takes you to fall asleep or prevent morning awakening or help you fall back, sleep earlier in the morning.

So I said earlier about the body clock and the the sleep drive. So these are the two things that govern your sleep. So we want to be helping to rebuild your body clock and your sleep drive and get them working well for you. And I also said about how it’s common with people insomnia to want to try and fix things so they, but they go about it in the wrong way, which can make the worse.

And this is come from a desire to control things and then. Because you’re controlling this, this actually makes your sleep worse because it, it does the opposite of what you should be doing. So a very common, when people start struggling with their sleep is they will, because they want, they’re so desperate to control things and fix things.

They say, oh well okay, so I need to get myself my eight hours of sleep or my seven hours of sleep, which is actually, by the way, ble non, so sleep is like shoe size. Some people wear a size nine shoe, some people wear a size seven shoe. It, it’s, you need the amount of sleep you need to wake up feeling refreshed.

So burst of all letting go of that idea that you need to get seven or eight hours of sleep. ’cause that’s, that’s complete nonsense Sam. And some people with a short sleep gene, for example, who function absolutely fine five hours. So letting go of the idea that you need to get a certain amount of sleep in order to the feel good is incredibly helpful.

So letting go of that essentially is very helpful. But also the brain, when you start sleeping poorly, it wants to do more to try and fix it. And a very common thing that people I see over and over again with people who are struggling with their sleep is I say, okay, well I used to sleep well and I would spend seven hours in bed, and now I’m really struggling with my sleep.

Now I need to spend eight hours in bed in order to try and get my six and a half hours sleep. That’s not working. In fact, I’m sleeping even worse now. I need to spend nine hours in bed, 10 hours in bed, 11 hours in bed. And this is no exaggeration. When I had my own insomnia, some days I was spending 14 hours in bed trying to get, well, any sleeper took, but five, six hours.

And a good analogy to think about. Imagine you had a seven inch pastry dish. You’ve got six and a half inches worth of pastry. So someone sleeping six and a half inch, uh, six and a half hours. And if you were to spread this six and a half inches onto this seven inch pastry dish, it’s gonna fit pretty well.

Now imagine you’ve got a short term sleep problem and you want to fix it. So you are now spending nine hours at bed. You’ve still got the same amount of pastry, but you’ve got now a nine inch pastry dish. If you were to spread this six and a half inches worth of pastry onto this nine inch dish, it’s not gonna reach the end.

So it’s be someone waking up that before where alarm sounds, it’s not gonna start start. So somebody taking ages to fall asleep, tons of holes and gaps in the middle. Somebody waking up multiple times throughout the night, a big gap in the middle of somebody waking up, let’s say, you know, 3:00 AM and then taking them two and a half hours to fall back to sleep just before the alarm and or.

Maybe that pastry will fit onto the dish, but it would be really thin and fragmented. You know, just, and this is people that, that sleep, but they kind of feel that their sleep is very active and alert. They get strange dreams. They never feel they get, uh, the beach sleep. But simply with that awareness of, okay, so when I was a good sleeper, I only used to spend seven hours in bed.

Now I’m spending nine hours in bed, I’m sleeping even worse. They’re often yet a huge problem when people from someone are spending too long in bed, more time in bed, given them more sleep opportunity than they actually need. So. Go back to the pastry dish, shrink that nine inch pastry dish back down to the seven inches.

But it used to be, again, that pastry after a time, it doesn’t happen immediately will fit onto that dish almost perfectly again. And so a very intuitive, natural thing when you, you’re struggling with your sleep, I need to do more. I need to try more. I need to fix more. I’m gonna spend longer and longer in bed.

And it sends people down the wrong path when it comes, do best sleep. And often this stem from the messaging of you need to be getting X hours amount of sleep, otherwise you’re not going to, or these bad, terrible things are going to happen to you has complete nonsense correlation. It’s not causation.

They’ve never done a study, but somnia causes long-term health problems because it’s impossible to run because you can’t separate insomnia and of concerns. It, it’s. I could go more into that, but as a fantastic article. But if it’s a concern of what insomnia is doing to your health by a guy called Alexi Guzzi, A-L-E-X-E-Y-G-U-Z-E-Y, people can Google that and that will, that will hopefully put your mind, that at ease about, actually no.

Yeah. Poor sleep doesn’t cause long, it makes it feel awful. It can ramp up anxiety cause short term health concerns, but long term health concerns never been proven. And so yeah, that’s a huge behavioral change that is going to help those people. Just having that awareness of what did I used to spend, how long did I used to spend in bed when I was sleeping well and reducing your time in bed to a similar amount to that.

This ties into what I would do with, um, CBTI, where you would actively to help rebuild people’s pattern of sleep. You’d start them off. Reducing their time in bed, say six hours when their sleep becomes predictable again, when it, when they get the confidence back that they can actually sleep. When the quality improves, you then gradually start increasing the amount of time people spend in bed.

But yes, but firstly, if we are helping to deal with the anxious fault patterns in the middle of the night, you’re going to have them less. If you’re not giving yourself such a huge opportunity in order to have these anxious fault patterns, because the longer you spend in bed trying to sleep, that’s more than the body needs, then you are, you are going to essentially spend ages in bed, fight thoughts and plead and with sleep.

And if you’re not spending that amount of time in bed, if you haven’t given the brain back, and it’s not that you sleep less, you sleep. Longer or exactly the same amount of time that you used to spend. It’s just the majority of your time in bed is spent actually sleeping. And if the bed then becomes a place, oh, it’s not a place where I lie in bed, frustrated, angry, stressed, worried is a place where I do actually sleep, then the brain starts seeing the bed again as a place for sleep rather than rumination, anxiety, stress.

And so then it helps also deal with the, the fault patterns people have around sleeps. It’s incredibly important to know what to do, um, how to deal with the fault patterns and change your fault patterns with what you were talking about earlier. But by simply this one behavioral change. This is literally, if I give one piece of advice for sleep, well only give two piece of advice for sleep.

Well, let me give a handful, Keith, uh, wake up at the same time every single day to get your body clock in your sleep drive. And good. And we talked about that earlier, why it’s so important to anchor your. Sleep drive and body clock. ’cause if you can keep that consistent and regular, the body clock will know what time to switch up.

At nighttime. The uh, the sleep drive will help you feel sleepy at the same time each night. Give yourself enough sleep opportunity but not too much. Um, I deal with number three. We talk about in a little bit how to respond if you do have these anxious thought aside from writing them down before bed. Uh, what was I on?

Leslie? Wait, you just finished? Three Less sleep opportunity. What to do in the middle of the night and essentially do things in the day, but a normal sleep would do. A good sleeper would do when people start sleeping poorly. I may start doing rituals and obsessions during the day in order to try and sleep well at nighttime and their entire awake in existence.

Cut becomes about sleep. And if you spent the whole day thinking and obsessing about sleep and on Reddit and Facebook forums and looking at all the really unhelpful YouTubers telling you about supplements and scaring you about the health concerns about sleep, you’re going to bring that anxiety and that fear about sleep into the bed and the bedroom at nighttime.

So doing the behaviors of the good sleeper, and that includes going out to restaurants, exercising before bed, watch TV before bed. It doesn’t include, you know, 20 coffees before bed because normal sleepers aren’t doing that. It’s normal behaviors of a normal sleep, but it’s not really controlling an extreme that people with insomnia have obsessive controlling say.

How about it’s not? No good behaviors around sleep. You know, where you get up whenever you want and you have Red Bulls before bed and that’s not it. It’s that middle half, which essentially helps people sleep, um, of reasonably good behaviors. And yeah, people want to be obsessive and controlling their arm of sleep when they sleep poorly, but essentially just doing those real basics and even getting up at the same time.

You don’t have to do it perfectly and all the time. It’s just having that awareness of why it’s quite important to do that. And if you are it, you’ve got insomnia in your sleeping problem, uh uh, orally. It’s good to get your sleep working for you initially. Well, and then you can have lions, like a normal sleep would do.

It’s just an hour. Lion is normal sleep. But dev an hour lion because you spent all night fighting for freedom sleep and it’s now a weekend is someone. Insomnia. So essentially that is getting your behaviors back to what a good sleep would do. And that is, that’s the key to sleep. Is this something a good sleep would do?

Is this something I would’ve done when I was a good sleeper And reverting back to that is, oh, you get your sleep back on track. Or if you’re really deep down the rabbit hole already, then need a bit more than that. But for most people, that’s pretty much all they need. So, yeah. Yeah,

Tati: yeah. No, I, I, I think that’s interesting ’cause you know, first what you were saying about the, the pan and reducing the amount of time you’re spending in bed, and I think that’s really counterintuitive on, on the surface to you would think you would want to, like you’re saying, try harder or do more.

Um, and, and so I, I think though, like what I’m hearing from what you’re saying is that you’re actually letting go of that control and trying to fix the problem and, and trusting that your body. Knows what to do, essentially. As long as you just allow yourself to, like you’re saying, do what a, a normal person would do when it comes to sleeping habits.

Joseph: Yeah. It’s, um, you can train the brain to have whatever pattern of sleep you want or not what you want, what it thinks it needs in those given circumstances. A great way of thinking about it. I had a client who was a solo round the world boat trip as they were ones that did the, the races, the, you can’t sleep for say, seven hours, because if you did pretty bad news boat’s going to go off course at the best scenario, it’s gonna be at the bottom of the ocean at the worst case, uh, scenario.

So what they do is they set a timer to wake itself up every 20 minutes throughout the nighttime, but they give themselves say, a 12 hour. Deep opportunity. So their sleep opportunity is 12 hours, but they wake up every 20 minutes. But my client, I had, he said that literally within a week of, of setting that alarm, he would wake up second before the alarm throughout the nighttime.

And so the brain had learned to wake him up every single 20 minutes throughout the nighttime because that was what the brain thought it needed. And you can train your brain to give you whatever pattern of sleep it thinks it needs at a time. And when people having so many, the brain thinks you want a poor, fragmented pattern of sleep.

If we think back to how sleep was before we had our locked doors and lovely houses, the most dangerous thing we could have done as humans would be to go fully unconscious. During the nighttime though, if the brain thinks that you are sleeping in this really. Dangerous environment, which it will think if you are got a lot of anxiety.

If you worry stress, you’re anxious in the middle of the night, it will think that you are sleeping in a really dangerous environment. It will give you the pattern of sleep of someone sleeping in a, you know, scary, physically scary environment. So it’ll be very light, it’d be very fragmented. There’d be a lot of wake from the storm in the nighttime.

And so essentially it’s about retraining a healthy pattern of sleep into your brain when you start struggling with insomnia. And you can do that through simple. And I say simple, not easy. ’cause with your, um, grass analogy, change in any habits is very hard to do, especially if you’ve always had that mindset that got you into insomnia and, and poor sleep in the first place.

Or try more, fix more, spend longer in bed. But go against that is a hard thing for people to do initially. But you know, living with poor sleeper insomnia is incredibly hard. So it’s about actively choosing to do the opposite of what your brain is telling you to do when you’ve got insomnia. But actually it’s not ’cause it’s the behaviors of good sleepers and the thought patterns are good sleepers, or what you used to have before you had insomnias.

It’s only really going back towards everything you used to do. And 99% of my work is getting people to eject everything else. Fa being online, you know, all the other nonsense, the, when it comes to sleep, the hacks, the tips, the tricks. Just get really back to the core basics of how you sleep. And four year olds know how to sleep.

They just haven’t, you know, they become with people insomnia or poor sleepers when they learn the other behaviors. But aren’t unhelpful, but everyone intuitively knows how to sleep. We don’t teach the dog how to sleep. They just, everyone knows. It’s just that people forget and, um,

Tati: mm-hmm.

Joseph: Yeah. That’s insomnia.

That’s, um, what it is. Yeah. Yeah.

Tati: Well, a lot of helpful information. I, I learned a lot today. Mm-hmm.

Joseph: Yeah. I think, yeah, that’s, um, in terms of actually the thought patterns, have you got any closing help for people, would you say, or any other strategies that they can do? Or, or even just, uh, messaging, but everyone who thinks and feels the same way and actually, ’cause I think you, you touched on it earlier, guilt about not functioning well or shame from that and

Tati: mm-hmm.

Joseph: This is something that people with insomnia feel. With guilt, but they cannot because of their sleep problem that they step back from their life and they’re not person, but they want to be. It’s something that I, yeah, comes up all the time with my, my clients guilt and shame. And because they’re not achieving or because of poor sleep.

What would you say to, well, the same people. I think you’ve, you have this very similar, um, people that I work with. What, how would you help people deal with that side of things, would you say?

Tati: Yeah. No, I, I, I think that’s, that’s a great question and I would say that there’s nothing wrong with you, you know, like you were sharing.

It’s, it’s something that you’ve learned and it’s just about learning a different way. And I, I like to also pair that. I think what can be. Helpful in general is the practice of self-compassion. You know, a lot of times people who are high achieving tend to be very hard on themselves, very critical, very mean to themselves because they have a view of how things should be, or, you know, uh, wanting to do things.

The, the, the idea that they’re doing things the wrong way and being hard on yourself. Oftentimes it can feel motivating in the moment, but then it also makes you feel worse. And so the practice of self-compassion, and I think this can help when it comes to even having anxious thoughts in the middle of the night, is the idea of just being kind to yourself, being supportive, being understanding.

And one example of this with like anxious thoughts is if you’re having worries about your job or your family or, or whatever else in the middle of the night, you know, what would, how would you support. Somebody that you care about that’s having worries about that, you know, you would say like, I know this is tough and I know this feels scary, you know, but I’m here for you, or it’s gonna be okay.

Or whatever. Kind of the same way that you would support others, turning that support in words towards yourself. And that can also have the effect of calming down that fight or flight response so that you’re then not in this activated state, but in your, in a state where you’re feeling more safe and calm.

Joseph: Yeah. And that’s, that’s what a lot of people struggle with. Uh, people are much kinder to others when they are to themselves, uh, and this mm-hmm. I think that’s a important thing. And then they get s. Anger and cross for themselves. They’re kind of Thomas and they are to themselves. When that adds another layer of stuff, it’s a, it’s a really hard thing to cultivate.

But I think, yeah, just that general acceptance that it’s just a part of being human. One of my favorite quotes is suffering, is asking from the world what it can never give you. And you just create more suffering. If you are suffering about the fact that you are suffering or that you are, have these thoughts about yourself or these guilts and this shame, and then it just adds another layer.

And, and I just, I think the understanding that’s how humans are, are wired and that’s how we are. And just that it’s normal. And I think that was a really lovely thing to say, to normalize it because when you can save everyone, but most people I know are like that. I was like that with my insomnia and still am, you know, very much still today.

You know, I can be very hard on myself. Um. I like to say that with people. I, I never present myself as having it all sorted and fixed. I know about sleep, but this, it’s still something that I still, still do struggle with the perfectionist thinking. That’s what got me into, in som in the first place and being too hard on myself and well not, but yeah, I think just normalizing that is incredibly helpful.

Mm-hmm. Good message. Uh, thank you very much. I think this will help loads of people. Thank you. I think it was great. Um, but for my viewers, I’ll let you, uh, ’cause like I said, a huge crossover between it’s hype for people who have insomnia. People on my channel and people on your channel. I’ve, I’ve looked through loads of your videos and they, yeah, they’re really good.

And I think in terms of helping people. Their suffering and their full patterns and the guilt, and, and you really go deep into that. You know, there’s no surface stuff. It’s, yeah, I think ’cause it’s so, it’s not, insomnia isn’t just sleep, it’s, it’s everything. It is the guilt, it is the shame. It is the anxiety, it is the fear.

And yeah, your channel’s amazing for that. So do you want to Yeah. Say, you’re gonna say way better than I can, so give people a little

Tati: Yeah, no, thank you. I, I really appreciate it. And so my channel is calmly coping. I have the videos I put out on YouTube, but I also put it out in podcast form, so you can also listen to it wherever you find pod uh, podcasts and like Joe just shared and like I mentioned before, so it’s really just focus on helping high achievers who are struggling with high functioning anxiety.

And, you know, I think it’s, it’s more. Specific than just like general tips and more focused on that mindset of being hard on yourself and having difficulty relaxing and, and everything that goes along with that. And I have a lot of, I think I’m more than 200 episodes at this point, so there’s a lot to, to go back on.

Uh, so yeah. Uh, but I, I love to hear from you, Jos, for my viewers and listeners. ’cause I know that you have a lot of great videos and resources on insomnia and, you know, I know what you shared today was just kind of a taste of that, so. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Can you share more about that?

Joseph: Yeah. And so my, my channel is essentially more of what you’ve heard today, so no tips, tricks, or hacks or all the, the usual things that people hear about sleep.

Hi is, or CVTI essentially. Um, but CVTI is a cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia. Done in a much softer, more gentle, more holistic way, which doesn’t reinforce the obsession and the control around insomnia. So CBTI is wonderful. CBTI done in a very restrictive way isn’t so wonderful. So essentially I’ve taken everything that I know from suffering with insomnia for 20 years.

A deep understanding of the mindset behind insomnia, taken the core principles of CBTI and taking what helps, what doesn’t, and discarded what doesn’t change, and adaptive what works. And then, yeah, I provide everything. But you’re going to the, on that channel, and again, it’s not surface level stuff. We, we deal.

We’ve got videos delving into topics like guilt people have around insomnia. The, the thought patterns people have, how to cope after Paul night of sleep. It’s, yeah, I, I, I hope I provide something that people with insomnia feel understood for the first time in my life. And that’s a real issue with insomnia, that they never feel understood with this condition because they’re always told, have you tried really sad snow sleep hygiene stuff, which I’m never going, you know, if you are terrified of being in bed at night, it, that’s not going to do it.

And so, yeah, it goes deep into thought patterns and provides practical things that you can start doing from tonight to get your sleep back on track And yeah, you know, people, people have just from my channel, overcome their insomnia and it’s, that’s awesome. If you need it. Um. And I’ll, I’ll provide a link to your channel in the, I’ll put it in the comment section.

I’ll put it in the description box as well and say it’ll be there for people. And I really, do everyone have a look, uh, um, at these channel ’cause Yeah, it’s lovely. It’s really, it’s good. And I know that a lot of you will be over triers and overachievers. Um, and so my favorite is, is just be good enough.

You know? Uh, if you can be good enough, good enough is good enough. And yeah, stop trying to be perfectionist and stop trying to get upset if you’re not perfectionist, because, anyway, I’m rambling at the end of this.

Tati: No, it’s all good. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you very much. I’ll leave a link to, to you as well, and Perfect.

Uh, yeah, I, I think that you have an excellent approach when it comes to helping people feel understood and giving them practical things without, like you’re saying all of like the myths and like extra stuff that. Doesn’t always help. Uh, but yeah. Thank you so much for, for this conversation.

Joseph: Thank you. I really enjoyed it.

Uh, I’ll see you on my next episode, everyone. Satta.

Tati: Thanks so much for listening. If you like what you heard, please share this episode with a friend and please subscribe and leave me a review on iTunes. Also, remember to check me out online @calmlycoping.com and connect with me on Instagram at Tatiana GL pc.

All content here is for informational purposes only. This content does not replace the professional judgment of your own mental health provider. Please consult a licensed mental health professional for all individual questions and issues. Till next time, I’m Tati and this has been calmly coping.