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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:

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

Eddie Vaisman:

Oh, you’re welcome. Yeah, it’s good to be here.

Martin Reed:

It’s great to have you on. Let’s get started right away and start at the beginning. If you can just tell us a little bit more about when your sleep issues first began, and if you are able to recollect what caused those initial issues with sleep?

Eddie Vaisman:

Yeah, of course. They began, God many years ago, and it was at a time, it’s interesting, it was at a time when I didn’t really have that much going on in my life. I had made some pretty good money and I was pretty financially secure. And I was able to, this was a weird angle on the thing, but I was able to take a lot of time off and I didn’t have to really work really regularly. And that gave me the freedom to develop bad habits, and that’s where it started. It was for me having the freedom to do whatever I wanted with my day and then actually misusing that freedom in a way that led to sleep problems and stuff like that.

I started napping at odd hours, having a really irregular schedule all over the place, and then started having trouble every once in a while. Then started having trouble regularly with it, and then you could say it kind of spiraled from there into becoming a factor in my life that actually started to undermine me and make things a lot more difficult and challenging, so yeah.

Martin Reed:

It is really interesting you say that you feel it all began when there was probably the least amount of pressure you’ve ever had on yourself to sleep because you didn’t really have that set schedule anymore. And I think that’s really interesting, because I’ve worked with a lot of people that have told me that they slept fine until they actually retired, and it was when they didn’t have that set structure around their day anymore that they tended to find all these sleep issues occurred. I think it’s really interesting, and I’m keen to explore this further with you because I think a lot of people might think that sleep issues come, because we put all this pressure on ourselves to sleep because of that structure that we’ve got in our lives. “I’ve got to be up at a certain time for work, or I’ve got this plan to meet up with someone, or I’ve got to get this done.”

But I think it can just as easily happen when we have a complete lack of structure, whether that’s like a self-imposed, we no longer have that structure because either we’ve retired or we’re not working, or we’re on vacation or something like that, or whether it’s something like we are struggling and so we withdraw from all that stuff that would otherwise give structure to our lives. And so it is really interesting once that influence between sleep and our day is our daily structure and the things we have to do, the things we want to do and the things we actually do. There really is that two-way relationship between daytime activity and nighttime sleep.

Eddie Vaisman:

That was definitely the case for me. As soon as I noticed that that was happening, I started to make efforts to put structure back in my day and started noticing how that was actually helping me. And so now I work as a school teacher, obviously. Well, I mean, not obviously, and I sleep worse when I’m on vacation, oddly enough, because-

Martin Reed:

Wow.

Eddie Vaisman:

I have that, because we have a lot of vacation as school teachers, and that can be some of the most challenging sleep time when I don’t really have any pressure, when it’s like I can do whatever I want with my day. I don’t have a lot going on and stuff like that. And then the mind starts to play little tricks on me here and there, you know what I mean? Starts to, I don’t know, obsess about stuff that normally you wouldn’t think about. So yeah, it can definitely work that way. And that was the way that it worked with me. It wasn’t because of stress, or because of a health issue or things going on in my life. It was just the time to think about things that maybe shouldn’t be thought about that much.

Martin Reed:

Back when you were really tangled up in that struggle, what were the nights like for you? Was there an average night? In what way were you finding sleep to be difficult? For example, was it just first falling asleep, or waking and then finding it hard to fall back to sleep, or a bit of both? Just curious to hear what those nights were like.

Eddie Vaisman:

Okay. Yeah. Well, I mean, through the years you can experience any … I mean, really one of those types of things. Sometimes difficulty falling asleep, sometimes difficulty staying asleep, sometimes a combination. But initially it was difficulty staying asleep. I would always fall asleep really quickly, like within five or 10 minutes, and that had never been a problem for me. But then staying asleep, and I think it was partially because I wasn’t super tired and I had napped three times that day, so my body wasn’t really like, “Oh, I need a ton of sleep anymore.” So, if I’m only sleeping three hours at night, well, you already took three naps today, so it kind of made sense when you really looked at it. But back then I thought, “Oh wait, there’s something wrong here. Why am I not making it through the night?”

And I think it was because I was just rested, I just didn’t really need. Although, it didn’t feel like that, it felt uncomfortable during the day, so there was a lot of bad aspects to it. But overall it’s like I was training my body to sleep in little bits, instead of sleep in a big block. And I didn’t know I was training myself to do that, but that’s what I was doing unconsciously and through these habits and then through ways to correct them. And then you’ll try to correct them with the normal stuff, like sleeping pills and stuff like that and doesn’t work, might work for a little while, then stops working and stuff like that. You kind of go through all of those things. You go to the doctor, the doctor tells you there’s nothing wrong with you. I guess it’s probably, I don’t know, the normal protocol a lot of the times.

I was really struggling with it and I was really fighting with the whole thing because it felt like something had switched, something had broken that wasn’t broken before, and it was just, again, it’s like your mind plays tricks on you. You keep thinking that there’s something wrong with you, but there really isn’t. Your focus is not a supportive one of you and is not an empowering one, it’s … So, that’s really what was happening to me. But once I learned tools to turn that around and stuff like that with your help and with a bunch of things that I’ve done, I finally figured it out, so yeah.

Martin Reed:

What were your days like? I think that’s a great description which a lot of people are going to really identify with, that nighttime struggle, waking, and then finding it hard to fall back to sleep and everything that goes on in the