There is 1 big mistake I see people doing when they can’t sleep that is ruining their sleep even more. It may seem obvious once you hear what it is but almost everyone who’s struggling to sleep is doing it and they don’t realize that they can change it now, even though it may seem impossible. 


If you want to sleep well again, this is the first thing you can start doing today to improve your sleep and it’s the first thing I work on with most of my clients.


In this episode I’m going to share with you one critical mindset shift that will change your experience of not being able to sleep so that you’re in a better place to solve your sleep problems once and for all.


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Resource: 


00:00 The Big Sleep Mistake

00:30 Introduction to the Sleep Detective Podcast

01:08 A Life-Changing Journey

02:09 The Buddhist Meditation Retreat

04:43 The Onset of Insomnia

06:07 Changing Your Experience of Not Sleeping

09:18 The Thought Model and Its Impact

12:06 Combining Body and Mind Approaches

14:48 Support and Encouragement for Better Sleep

16:43 Conclusion and Call to Action


Episode Transcript


There is one big mistake I see people doing when they can't sleep that is ruining their sleep even more. It may seem obvious once you hear it, but almost everyone who's struggling to sleep is doing this and they don't realize that they can change it now, even though it may seem impossible. If you wanna sleep well again, this is the first thing you can start doing today to improve your sleep, and it's the first thing I work on with most of my clients.


This is a Sleep Detective podcast where you'll learn why you can't sleep and how to fix it naturally. I'm Martha Lewis. I've been a functional health and life coach for the past five years, and I've helped over 200 clients find and fix the root causes of their health issues so they can consistently sleep seven to nine hours without drugs.


Today, I'm going to share with you one critical mindset shift that will change your experience of not being able to sleep, so that then you're in a better place to solve your sleep problems once and for all. Now I have been working on this myself, and I realized that I first actually started learning about this concept a long time ago.


So I recently participated in a local story slam where I. Told a story. I had five minutes and the theme was fast. And what immediately came to my mind when I heard the topic was I traveled years ago to Nepal and India, and my story involved, how I learned how to paraglide there.


And the last day I was there in my last flight, I almost crashed into a barbed wire fence and somehow popped up and landed on the roof of a house in the middle of this huge field in the middle of nowhere, in this tiny town in India. And I was perfectly fine. So I've been thinking about this trip a lot, and another thing that happened during this trip that's relevant to what I'm talking about today.


I ended up doing a 10 day Buddhist meditation silent retreat, so it was a little different than maybe you've heard of silent retreats where you literally don't talk for 10 days and you meditate all day long. This was a little different in that we were learning about Buddhism, and so we did have, I think one hour a day where we could discuss what we were learning, and so it wasn't all meditation.


It was also. Learning, but when I did this trip, I left Jackson for six months, so I skipped the winter and went traveling and you know, it was partly because I had just gotten out of a three year relationship that ended really. Badly, and it was very devastating to me. And this was back in 2007 and my mom had also died a couple years before, and I kind of, hadn't really dealt with that enough.


And so I just went on this. I was calling it my Eat Pray Love tour because I was inspired by that book. But I ended up meeting up with a friend there from Jackson and she recommended this Buddhism retreat. And I'm up for anything at this point, so I'm like, I'm gonna go to Dham Sala India, which is a Tibetan community primarily, and learn about Buddhism.


And it was life changing. And the first thing I learned there was that things. Change. Nothing stays the same. The only thing permanent in life is death. And we might say taxes. And that really struck me because I was really, at the time feeling sorry for myself. Everyone leaves me, nothing stays the same.


My mom died, my boyfriend broke up with me. All these woe is me. All these things were happening to me. And so learning that, oh, that's how life is. Life is all about change. It's so obvious, right? But. At age 30, I had no idea. And so this was life changing to me. And so that's really when I started on this like learning about how we can change our perspective of things and the Buddhists.


Principle, one of them is that we create our own suffering. So life happens. Everything that happens is neutral. Even the worst things, even the best things. But how we interpret that and think about it is what causes suffering. And then. As I, I actually think I got a parasite on that trip that affected me 13 years later when I developed insomnia in late pregnancy.


That didn't go away after my son was born. And I remember, we had just moved to a new place. My son was 14 months old and I could not sleep. I say that, that sounds very negative. I was getting some sleep, but these are the thoughts we tell ourself, right? I can't sleep and I was awake in the middle of the night for hours, and I just remember being in this living room of this new house and it was so hot upstairs, my bedroom.


That's probably partly why I couldn't sleep. And I just remember, being among all these boxes as we're unpacking. And lying on the couch and just sobbing because I was so desperate for sleep and I didn't understand why this was happening to me, why I was trying to do all the right things to be able to sleep, all the sleep hygiene, all the diet stuff, exercising, not watching screens before bed, having a bedtime routine, and nothing was helping.


And I just felt so desperate. And one of the first things I learned before I even learned about functional lab testing was. How to change my experience of not sleeping. And so that's what I want to share with you today because what I learned is that in the moment when we can't sleep, getting upset, being frustrated, feeling desperate is only making things worse.


And so if you think about it, if you can't sleep and say, I found out later that my body was releasing cortisol in the middle of the night, and so that cortisol was making me wired, making my mind race, giving me energy. It was why I couldn't sleep, but being anxious about it, being frustrated.


It only added to that stress. It actually made my body release more cortisol, which then made me stay awake even longer. So my response to not being able to sleep was making it worse. And I find so many of my clients are doing this as well, and maybe some people. Some people are more resilient to being sleep deprived than others.


I am definitely sensitive to it. I have some clients who are like, it's not a big deal and I don't get upset, but I find that they do get upset from time to time and get frustrated. And whether that's happening at night or during the day, it's not helping solve the problem. Because think about it when we are.


Stressed, worried, anxious. We are in that stress part of our brain or the sympathetic part of our brain. We can't think rationally and make good decisions and problem solve when we are in that stress state. When we are in our relaxed state, what's called the parasympathetic part of our brain, that when we are calm, that is when we can see the bigger picture, see a different perspective.


Take information in, make good decisions based on that information, and that's when we're actually going to solve a problem. So that's another way that getting upset about not sleeping isn't helping. It's actually hurting because then we can't problem solve and figure it out as well when we are in a panicked state.


And accepting in the moment. It does take practice, I'm not gonna lie. And it's funny how, to me, how everything is stemmed from this trip years ago, one of my first business coaches is also a life coach. And so I started learning about life coaching and one of the main principles of life coaching, at least how Brooke Castillo, the Life coach school teaches it, is that there are circumstances that happen and they are neutral.

It is our thoughts about that circumstances.


That determine whether we think it's good or bad, and then how we think about it determines how we feel. Like our thoughts literally determine our feelings and then how we feel about it determines our actions or what we do about it, and then what we do about it, or our actions determine our result or what happens.


And I actually walk through this, it's called the Thought Model, and I have a different podcast episode where I. Explain this in detail, so I'll link to that in the show notes if you're interested. But it's this idea that, okay, let's say the circumstance was, I'm awake in the middle of the night. If my thoughts are, this is horrible, I don't know what's wrong with me, I'm not gonna be able to function tomorrow.


Like then I'm feeling so anxious and frustrated and desperate, and then what do I do? I like, my mind is racing even more. I'm worried and what's gonna happen? Even in that moment it's making my sleep worse. Whereas now I have learned, and this applies now because I have nights where I don't sleep well.


Like it happens every now and then. It's just part of life. My husband, who's a great sleeper also has them, right? So no one sleeps perfectly a hundred percent of the time. So sometimes a weird night still happens. And if I think, okay, I am awake in the middle of the night, if I think. My favorite thought is it's no big deal.


It doesn't have to be the opposite of this is great. I'm awake. I, I get to read no. For me, it's okay, no big deal. And then that creates a feeling of calm. And then I just read and distract myself until I'm tired and then I go fall back asleep and it's a lot faster than if I was anxious and worried and causing even more stress in cortisol.


So this is really what is key, is learning how to accept in the moment. Whether it's at bedtime, whether it's in the middle of the night, whether it's, early in the morning that this is what's happening right now and staying calm about it. And you can do that with how you're thinking about it.


And then of course, you still want to be determined to fix it. It's not like this means that you have to accept that this is how it's gonna be forever. But again, when you are in this calmer place, then you can. Make better decisions and problem solve about what's gonna be best to fix it. And so this takes practice and.


Oh yeah. What I wanted to say about how it's come full circle is that my business coach, being a life coach and learning this principle of, okay, our thoughts is what determine our feelings and our actions and results. That follows the Buddhist teachings as well, where it's like. We create our own suffering with how we think about things, with how we interpret it, with the perspective that we bring to it.


And so we can have far less suffering. And the experience of not sleeping doesn't have to be as bad when we can change our thoughts about it, when we can stay calm about it, when we can accept in the moment that this is happening. So I know I talk a lot about the physical imbalances in the body that affect sleep, but the mental part is important too.


And that's why in my programs I use a body and mind approach, and that's why I help my clients with both, with the body and the mind because they're both affecting sleep. And so we can't just look at hormones and gut health and ignore. Our negative thinking or anxiety about sleep, or even just stress in our life in general.


This thought model also applies to everything in your life, not just sleep. We can't just ignore, the mental part and expect to get better, and we can't just work on the mental part and ignore the physical part. That's why CBTI doesn't help so many people. That's why counseling doesn't help so many people because if you have a parasite and depleted hormones and depleted neurotransmitters, all the acceptance in the world isn't enough to help.


It is really important to look at both, but by working on the mindset piece from the beginning, that can start making a huge difference because that is going to create less stress in your body instead of more stress, which is also going to set your body up to be better able to get back in balance with the imbalances that we find in the lab test.


And again, because this, this takes time. If you think about it like this negative thinking or like highways in your brain. And so when we start trying to think new thoughts, it's like building a road from scratch. So it's going to be slow in the beginning, but the more you practice it, the more you practice these helpful thoughts instead of the negative thoughts, the more those become highways and become your default thinking.


And so that's what I mean, it is a practice. It takes time, but anyone can do it and you can start this right away. And, listening to the episode about the model can really help as well. 'cause then you will have a tool there to use. And it something that I would work on every single day, like every morning.


I would write what my default thinking was, the negative thoughts, and then I would write out how that was affecting me. And then I would think of how I wanted to feel and write a different thought that helped me feel that way. And then whenever my mind went to the negative, I would just redirect it to the positive and start, building that road of positive thinking instead.


So while my clients are working on this. I am here for support and encouragement, and I say, my clients can borrow my belief. So what I mean is that I truly believe that everyone is meant to sleep well and everyone can get better. Even the sickest people. Most sensitive people dealing with mold toxicity, everyone can get better.


And that's because there are stories of lots, so many people getting better. And part of the support that I offer is that if someone's had a really bad night and they're having a really hard next day, they message me and they say, Hey, this happened last night. I had a horrible night. And I'm like, okay.


Am I ever gonna get better? And so I give them that encouragement that they're looking for while they also work on creating their own belief, but in the meantime, they can totally borrow my belief. And I was talking about this with one of my clients in our session yesterday, and she had reached out a few days before, like she's dealing with mold toxicity, she's super sensitive, she's having a hard time tolerating supplements, so we're working really slowly.


And so she reached out, panicked. And am I gonna get better? Have you ever seen anyone get better? All of this. And so I sent her a message reassuring her, and we had a little back and forth. And then when we met yesterday, she was like, I know these tools, I talk myself out of it. I realize no one has ever panicked themselves to healing.


And sometimes we're always going, the negative's always gonna come in. We're after a hard night's sleep. Like it's normal to be upset about it, but there are tools you can use to change that. And because it is true, we cannot panic ourselves, we cannot worry ourselves, we cannot be anxious and expect to get better.


The only way to get better is when you are in a calm, relaxed state. So I hope that this helps. If this helped you, please rate and review the show. I would so appreciate it. It helps more people find it, who can use this help with their sleep as well. And thanks so much for listening. I will talk to you next time.

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