Something is keeping you awake. It’s worth understanding what.
Category: Sleep & Neuroscience
Author: Tonia Martin
If you’ve found your way to this page, you’re probably not sleeping well. Maybe you haven’t been for a while. Maybe you’ve tried things — the sleep hygiene advice, the apps, perhaps a proper course of CBT-I — and found that they helped for a while, or didn’t help at all, or helped and then stopped. Maybe you’ve started to wonder whether there’s something wrong with you that can’t be fixed.
There isn’t. But I do think something is worth looking at more carefully.
I’ve been working with people who can’t sleep for a long time. Before I was a psychologist I was a nurse, working night shifts, sitting with people through the small hours. What I learned then — and what my clinical work has only deepened — is that sleeplessness is rarely just about sleep. It’s a signal. And signals are worth understanding, not just managed.
Most approaches to insomnia are aimed at the pattern of the sleep problem — the behaviours, the thoughts, the habits. And those approaches work, genuinely. CBT-I is the most evidence-based treatment we have for chronic insomnia and it is the backbone of everything I do. But for many people, the improvement doesn’t last. The sleep comes back for a while and then, under stress or illness or a difficult season of life, the old pattern returns. And each time it returns, it carries a little more weight — because now there’s the history of it, the dread that’s learned, the quiet fear that this is just how things are going to be.
What I’ve come to understand — through years of clinical work and now through formal training in Compassion Focused Therapy — is that lasting change usually requires something more than interrupting the pattern. It requires understanding what the pattern is protecting against. Because the nervous system that won’t let you sleep isn’t broken. It learned something. It’s doing its job. The question is what it learned, and whether that learning can be updated.
That’s the question at the centre of the work I do at Talking Sleep Psychology. Not just: how do we get you sleeping again? But: what is actually happening here, and what does it need?
The answer is different for everyone. For some people, the sleeplessness is about dread — of the night itself, of lying awake, of what another sleepless night will cost them tomorrow. For others it’s about aloneness — the particular quality of being awake at three in the morning when the rest of the world has gone somewhere you can’t follow. For others still, it’s a kind of resignation — a quiet, flat acceptance that sleep is something that happens to other people. Each of these is a different clinical picture. Each needs something different.
What they all have in common is that they deserve more than a checklist.
This Writing page is where I think out loud about sleep — the neuroscience of what’s happening in the brain and body, the psychology of why the night feels the way it does, the human experience of losing something as fundamental as rest. Some pieces will be written for clinicians. Most will be written for anyone who has ever lain awake wondering what is wrong with them.
The short answer, almost always, is nothing. But something happened. And the body remembered.
That’s where the work begins.