The Sleep School’s Insomnia Cure

‘How do people go to sleep? I'm afraid l hove lost the knack'

If you ask a good sleeper what they do to get to sleep, chances are they will shrug and say, ‘Nothing.’ They simply put their head on the pillow; if they wake, they might turn over, have a sip of water or go to the loo, but they just sleep without thinking about It.

 If you ask an Insomniac what they do to get to sleep, they will give you a long, detailed list of what they do during the day, how they wind down before bed and what they do during the night, and yet they still don’t sleep. It doesn’t seem fair, does It? But the truth Is, most of the things insomniacs are advised to do to cure their insomnia are never going to work If they do those things alone. 

That’s because the mainstream approach Is based solely on doing - focused on how to get rid of your insomnia by changing things in your life. At first this is exactly what you want to hear as an insomniac because you want to be free from the pain and suffering that can come from not sleeping.

 However, while many of the suggested changes might sound like the right things to do - such as giving up caffeine and alcohol, avoiding late nights, slowly winding down and performing relaxation 

techniques before bed - in the end they can inadvertently put your insomnia on a pedestal. 

Sleep becomes more about doing stuff and less about actually sleeping, which for normal sleepers is effortless. If you have followed lots of insomnia advice yet still found yourself wide awake, then you probably also felt a sense of confusion, failure, frustration or anxiety, all of which doubtless kept you even more awake. 

You've probably been told that if you can block out your thoughts, get rid of the anxious feelings and control your pounding heart,you will be more relaxed and therefore more likely to sleep. While these things do make it more difficult to sleep, they're not the problem. Struggling to sleep is. Think about those times when you. have been awake all night struggling to sleep, but then fell to sleep just before the alarm went off.

When you ask an insomniac why they slept at that point, they will say that the night was ruined anyway, so there was no point in struggling anymore. While this is incredibly frustrating for you to experience, from the point of view of what causes insomnia it is illuminating. What I learnt from listening to people like yourself and from my own bout of insomnia is that if the focus of your life becomes getting rid of insomnia, you can paradoxically remain stuck in your insomnia. 

Good sleep comes about from doing nothing other than getting into bed and putting your head on the pillow, and the secret to good sleep is to relearn how to do precisely that -nothing. 

Armed with the knowledge that good sleepers do nothing, we've developed a five-week programme that can radically improve your sleep. We believe sleep needn't be a struggle.