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Martin Reed:

Welcome to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. My name is Martin Reed. I believe that by changing how we respond to insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it, we can move away from struggling with insomnia and toward living the life we want to live.

Martin Reed:

The content of this podcast is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. The statements and opinions expressed by guests are their own and are not necessarily endorsed by Insomnia Coach LLC. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied.

Martin Reed:

Hi, Adam, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to come onto the podcast.

Adam Currie:

Thank you for having me.

Martin Reed:

It’s great to have you on. Let’s start right at the beginning like I do with every single guest. Can you tell us a little bit about when your sleep problems first began and what you think triggered that initial sleep disruption?

Adam Currie:

Sure. Yeah, so I probably first experienced real problems with my sleep I would say about probably two, two and a half years ago. I think the trigger was I had an event where I had to present to some quite important people at work and the night before I found myself thinking about what I needed to do the next day. And I thought I’ve got an early start tomorrow and I need to be up at 5:00 AM and I’ve got the train to catch and I’ve got a taxi and I’ve got all these big things to do. And what if it goes wrong tomorrow? And I just had this kind of snowball of really quite intense negative thoughts about what would happen the day after. And I had a very difficult night. I actually had no sleep at all to the point where I actually unfortunately called in sick the next day.

Adam Currie:

And I felt that I couldn’t go through what I needed to go through. And that unfortunately, was then imprinted in my mind. So every time I had something like that that cropped up again in the future, I then felt the same anxiety and I was worried about whether I would sleep or not. And it was almost like the trauma of having a completely sleepless night. It had never happened to me before. And so it really made me stand up and get quite concerned, which looking back was obviously making things a lot worse for me. So yeah, probably about two years ago.

Martin Reed:

Yeah. So did you find the sleep got right back on track after once the event that seemed to have triggered that sleep disruption was over? Whether you went to it or not, did you find that your sleep then got back on track afterwards or did those sleep issues kind of linger for a bit?

Adam Currie:

They lingered for a little bit for a day or two, they did get back on track. But what I found is that the longer I had problems with sleep or rather not the longer, the longer I was not addressing the problems that I was having with sleep, the longer the impact would be and the longer it would take me to recover. So I would quite often find that one night may actually then develop into a succession of poor nights. So maybe a chain of two or three nights. Initially it did get a little bit better, but then it got worse again over time, but it always corrects itself eventually. But how quickly it corrects itself is obviously dependent on the tools that you have and how you respond to it. And my toolkit early on was just not really up to the job.

Martin Reed:

Yeah. So apart from the nights where you got no sleep whatsoever, when those difficult nights were lingering around, what were they like? Was it difficulty just first falling asleep or was it more to do with waking during the night and then finding it hard to fall back to sleep, or maybe it was a combination of both of those things?

Adam Currie:

Yeah, it was, I mean initially, and I think still predominantly the issues I have with falling to sleep, in my mind I’m just ruminating and ruminating and how that feels and how that kind of represents itself for me is lots of toting and turning, flustered, throwing the covers around. And I would be acutely aware that I wasn’t entering the first stages of sleep and then I would get frustrated and that would lead to more tossing and turning, clock watching, chronic clock watching to the point where I had to start removing the clocks in the room because I was obsessing over the time and I’d be like, well, now it’s midnight and that means I’ve only got five hours sleep and now it’s 1:00 and I’ve only got four and so on. So that’s how it manifested itself.

Adam Currie:

Very, very uncomfortable nights that would just snowball with anxiety. And I would end up by five or six in the morning just so anxious and actually sometimes quite frustrated as well. Frustrated that I wasn’t able to do something that I’d naturally done for the last 30 years of my life without even thinking about. And now all of a sudden it’s this big performance and it’s an act and I was just stuck. That’s probably the best way to describe it. I just frozen with an inability to sleep that was just fueled by anxiety and it would get worse every time.

Martin Reed:

Yeah. And I think a lot of people are going to really identify with the effects of insomnia on the nights. You know, obviously there’s not much sleep going on, but it’s also just that whole struggle with the anxiety and that can manifest itself in the clock watching and this frustration, because we feel like we should be able to control this. Why can’t I make sleep happen? It’s something that I used to be able to do okay. I used to be able to sleep pretty well. Why is this not happening now? And so it all just kind of feeds into itself. So it’s not really the only struggle now is being awake at night, which is definitely a big part of it, but it’s also everything that comes with that. Right? It’s all those thoughts and those feelings and those emotions that come with it during the night.

Adam Currie:

Absolutely. Yeah. And I completely underestimated how difficult it might be for me. It’s really funny because when I was a child, I used to play this game and I’m sure people who are listening may have played the game themselves where you try to stay awake for as long as you can and the whole goal and the aim of the game is can I stay awake all night? And I always remember failing hopelessly by about maybe 1:00 or 2:00 AM because the whole objective would stay awake. And then looking back on that now when the objective is go to sleep, it kind of has the opposite effect and I suppose I was aware of that subconsciously, but I was so fixated and focused on the idea of a perfect night’s sleep before I needed to be up early and now it’s okay to say I was failing miserably in sleeping because I was just placing such an emphasis on the ability to fall asleep. And I was lost, completely lost.

Martin Reed:

Yeah. You know, I think that what goes on during the nights is probably only about 50% of the struggle with chronic insomnia because we deal with all these struggles during the day as well, whether that’s just how we feel during the day or all the stuff that our mind wants to tell us during the day like, oh, you can’t do this because you had a difficult night or you should cancel those plans with friends, what’s tonight going to bring? So we are having insomnia. That’s not just a nighttime problem, it’s a daytime problem as well. So I’m curious to your thoughts on whether that was true for you too and what kind of effect insomnia was having on your daytime life as well?

Adam Currie:

Yeah, definitely. I mean, it definitely was having an effect on me. I feel like it wasn’t having as much of an effect on me as I was trying to lead myself to believe it was becaus