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

Leah Werner:

I’m excited to be here. It’s nice to be on the other side of it.

Martin Reed:

Yeah, you’re not the first person to say that. Someone finds the podcast and then one day they’re a guest themselves, and I think that’s the ultimate success story. Let’s get started talking about your experience and your story. Can you tell us about when your sleep problems first began and what you think may have caused those initial issues with sleep?

Leah Werner:

I first started having insomnia issues in puberty. I was probably 12 or 13 where I would toss and turn until the wee hours of the morning and be so upset and anxious that I would wake up my dad and he would walk me back to my bedroom. His mantra always was, “Even if you’re not sleeping, your body is resting.” That was his mantra. It was pretty much a consistent issue all through my teenage years and then kind of cycling in and out of it as an adult, definitely impacted by stress and anxiety and just kind of the goings-ons in life. It’s not an everyday thing, but it’s definitely been a struggle on and off since I was about 12. What I learned from you, Martin, is that some people are just predisposed to it. I don’t think it was any one given thing when I was 12 years old or 13, but when I learned that from working with you, it really helped, like, this is just kind of how I’m wired and I’ve got to kind of learn to live with it.

Martin Reed:

Yeah. What prompted you to start working with me or to decide, “I need to take action”? Because it sounds like you experienced lots of periods of insomnia throughout your whole life. Were you going through a particularly difficult patch? What was that motivation to try something different?

Leah Werner:

I was going through what I would call an acute patch in that it wasn’t just one or two nights, but weeks of insomnia and my functionality was severely diminished. I wasn’t able to think at work, my emotional threshold was incredibly low. I was really, really struggling. I was all-consumed every day with, “Am I going to sleep, am I going to sleep?” I knew that just popping sleeping pills, and I’ve tried a million different varieties, over the counter and prescribed, didn’t necessarily guarantee a night’s sleep and I knew I needed a different approach. That is when I found your podcast and then checked out your website. It was just several weeks of just pure misery.

Martin Reed:

Yeah. What was sleep like for you at that time? Was it just every night, just kind of different, just lousy? Or was it, “I’m always having difficulty falling asleep” or “I’m always having difficulty staying asleep, waking, finding it hard to fall back to sleep”? What was the difficulty?

Leah Werner:

The difficulty was it was taking me hours and hours and hours to fall asleep, if I fell asleep at all. Sometimes I experienced the waking up in the middle of the night insomnia after falling asleep pretty easily. But it doesn’t trigger the anxiety and kind of the train of negative thinking that just tossing and turning for five, six hours and then obsessively checking the clock, which I don’t do anymore, which is really helpful. That was that acute episode, just either getting one to two hours or no sleep for weeks on end. That’s what led me to you.

Martin Reed:

Yeah. Since you had such a long history with insomnia, lots of experience with it, I’m guessing that over the years, lots of different things that you tried. You already mentioned that you tried the medication route, sometimes helpful, sometimes not, maybe over the long term wasn’t proving to have the effect that you wanted. What other kind of things had you tried in a bid to kind of fix things and to put this insomnia behind you?

Leah Werner:

I tried praying about it, no lie, straight up, and I’m not the most spiritual or religious person, but I was desperate for help. I tried making myself as exhausted as possible with working out really hard, things of that nature. Mostly my go-to was sleeping drugs that, as I said, sometime worked. More often than not, it just made me super hungover the next day, which in and of itself on top of the fatigue and the side effects from just being exhausted and then being drugged over top of it and hungover, made life even worse.

Martin Reed:

Yeah. I remember when we were working together, one of the first changes you made was connected to the amount of time you were spending in bed, or just allotting for sleep each night. I’m curious to hear in your own words more about that change and what that experience was like for you.

Leah Werner:

Well, I thought you were crazy, Martin, because people who suffer from insomnia, all you want to do is go to bed and sleep. I believe it was 11:30 , you told me to go to bed at 11:30 and wake up at 5:45 or 5:30 , and I was like, “But that’s hardly any time in bed. This isn’t going to work. This isn’t going to work.” It was a pretty significant mental lift to get on board with you with that technique specifically. But I was so desperate because obviously my other attempts at trying to alleviate this chronic problem weren’t working. So I was like, “Okay.” So my whole family would go to bed, my wife would go to bed, my kids in bed, and there I am on the couch 10:00 , 10:30 , 11:00 .

By the time I did go to bed, my eyes were so heavy and that is when it really started to change things for me because I was tossing and turning a little bit, but it was not five, six hours of it. It was much more condensed, because I had built that sleep drive, to use your term, throughout the day and kind of pushing the limits of my exhaustion so that when I did go to bed it was much more fruitful. But I thought you were crazy.

Martin Reed:

You’re not the first person to tell me that. It does sound completely illogical, doesn’t it, when we really want more sleep to h