How Cindy tackled her postpartum insomnia by accepting wakefulness & erasing safety behaviors (#31)

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Cindy developed postpartum depression shortly after her daughter was born and was prescribed medication to help her sleep. The medication seemed to work at first but Cindy soon found that it wasn’t helping and this led to more anxiety and more sleep difficulties.

Cindy thought that her brain was broken and started to implement lots of different safety behaviors in a bid to get her sleep back on track. After trying to eliminate all the possible causes of her insomnia, Cindy was continuing to find sleep difficult.

Fortunately, Cindy realized that it was all the effort she was putting into sleep and all the behaviors she was implementing in a bid to protect her sleep and create perfect conditions for sleep that were keeping her insomnia alive.

Cindy started to accept the possibility of nighttime wakefulness and the reality of nighttime wakefulness when it occurred. She took steps to make nighttime wakefulness more pleasant and took comfort in the fact that nights of less sleep build sleep drive and increase the likelihood of sleep on subsequent nights.

Ultimately, Cindy stopped putting pressure on herself to sleep. She stopped striving for sleep, she stopped putting effort into sleep, she stopped trying to fight or avoid sleep-related anxiety, and she started to recognize that all the anxious thoughts produced by her brain were just that — thoughts. Nothing more and nothing less.

Today, Cindy doesn’t take any sleep medication and she is sleeping well. Perhaps one of the biggest insights she shared is that she no longer uses sleep itself as a measure of her success. In Cindy’s words, it’s our relationship with sleep that is the true measure of success.

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My name is Martin Reed and I am the founder of Insomnia Coach®. I offer sleep coaching services that give people with insomnia all the skills and support they need to enjoy better sleep for the rest of their lives. I also offer a free two-week sleep training course for people with insomnia at https://insomniacoach.com/sleep-train...

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