Dancing with Insomnia: My Story (Pt.2) | Ep 4

Part two of my story picks up where part one left off. Join me as I share the transformative process of leaving insomnia, and how it led me to where I am now working as a sleep coach.

I talk about:

• The big A-HA that changed my entire perspective of insomnia.
• Why insomnia was never about my sleep.
• How my responses to sleep ultimately changed my sleep over time.
• How making peace with my situation led me out of my situation.
• The major milestones and defining moments in my recovery process.
• All the subtle ways my relationship with sleep started to change.
• How I eventually got free of all sleep meds.
• Why I had to trust the recovery process.
• How the the Mind. Body. Sleep. program evolved.

This story is dedicated to anyone out there struggling with insomnia. Keep an open heart because you CAN fully recover and have good sleep again.

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Full Show Notes & Transcription Here: https://www.bethkendall.com/podcast

About Beth Kendall MA, FNTP: 

For decades, Beth struggled with the relentless grip of insomnia. After finally understanding insomnia from a mind-body perspective, she changed her relationship with sleep, and completely recovered. Liberated from the constant worry of not sleeping, she’s on a mission to help others recover as well. Her transformative program Mind. Body. Sleep.™ has been a beacon of light for hundreds of others seeking solace from sleepless nights. 

© 2023 - 2026 Beth Kendall

DISCLAIMER: The podcasts available on this website have been produced for informational, educational and entertainment purposes only. The contents of this podcast do not constitute medical or professional advice. No person listening to and/or viewing any podcast from this website should act or refrain from acting on the basis of the content of a podcast without first seeking appropriate professional advice and/or counseling, nor shall the information be used as a substitute for professional advice and/or counseling. The Mind. Body. Sleep. Podcast expressly disclaims any and all liability relating to any actions taken or not taken based on any or all contents of this site as there are no assurances as to any particular outcome.

Mind. Body. Sleep.® with Beth Kendall is your trusted source for holistic insomnia recovery, blending neuroplasticity, nervous system health, and mind-body coaching to help you finally sleep again.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Hello and welcome to Mind Body Sleep, the podcast for anyone out there who wants to understand and recover from insomnia using a holistic perspective. I'm Beth Kendall, your host. Let's get started. Hello and welcome back to part two of my story. I'm a little excited about the timing of this recording because I just got back from a wonderful lunch with my friend Laura, who I mentioned in part one of my story as being the friend who encouraged me to put on my boxing gloves when I learned that the health challenges that I had been dealing with for years were due to Lyme disease. And we were at lunch today, and I was telling her about this podcast, and that I had already mentioned her in an episode, and we were reflecting on this metaphor of the boxing gloves and how sometimes in life it makes sense to put on the gloves, right? That's gonna give you the stamina and the endurance to get beyond some of the barriers that are gonna come up on the way to getting to where you want to go. And then life offers you an experience or a circumstance where it actually makes more sense to take off the boxing gloves. And that becomes the catalyst to getting you to where you want to go. So it was bittersweet today to be able to talk about this with her from a different awareness, a perspective of experiencing both of these approaches in our lives and how they can both have value. So today, in this episode, I'm gonna dive deeper into what the process of leaving insomnia looked like for me and how it led me to where I am now working as a sleep coach. In part one of this series, I talked about that aha moment I had during a tapping session where I realized that I had been running this insomnia program in my mind. What I mean when I say that I was running a bunch of programs is that I understood during my session that day that my brain had constructed a bunch of thoughts and beliefs about sleep that weren't even true. My ability to sleep was never broken, and I hadn't lost something that other people had. In a sense, I realized that insomnia wasn't something I had. It wasn't something that was happening to me, it was something I was doing within. It was a survival strategy my brain created based on a fear of not sleeping. This became a self-perpetuating loop where I was doing everything possible to fix my sleep, which only reinforced my brain's perception that being awake at night was dangerous. So it was quite a vicious cycle, but throughout all of those years, no one could properly explain this to me. So I just kept doing more and more things without ever really addressing the root cause, which was a fear and anxiety about being awake at night. Now, I do not blame myself for this in any way because my brain was just doing what brains do, which is protect us. And I must say that my brain was doing a particularly impressive job of this alerting me to the threat of not sleeping for over 40 years. So insomnia was never about my sleep, it was about the thoughts and beliefs I had about sleep. Those thoughts and beliefs were creating the never-ending cycles of hyper-arousal and sleeplessness that ruled my life. Once I understood this, something immediately changed. I no longer felt like I was stuck with this unsolvable problem that no one could figure out. Because honestly, I think almost everyone's greatest fear when you're going through insomnia is that there's no way out, that whatever's going on is just going to be your forever situation and you're just stuck with it. And that's a really heavy thing to carry. But I no longer saw it that way. I saw it as a misguided program in my mind that I could change. Okay, so let me go back into the recesses of my memory and see if I can remember how the recovery process unfolded. It wasn't like I was just magically sleeping better, not at all. But my perspective had definitely shifted because my response to sleep or not sleeping changed pretty quickly. So the very first thing I noticed was that I was less reactive to bad nights. They were still happening, that conditioned response was still firing, but I was somehow more okay with it. I was able to shrug it off and feel a lot less hopeless about the situation. You might remember in episode one where I talked about the moment of surrender I had prior to recovering from chronic illness. Well, now I was able to bring that through to the insomnia experience as well. Because prior to that, I really did deeply believe that I was dealing with some sort of serious deficiency in my own ability to sleep. But now I realized that the only thing I was ever fighting was a memorized fear in my mind. So it was just a complete paradigm shift in terms of what I was dealing with. And you know, I think just letting go of the constant struggle and resistance I had to the experience of insomnia freed up a tremendous amount of energy. Also early on, I moved the compass needle in my mind from how am I gonna maneuver the rest of my life around this sleep problem to how do I want to live my life? So it was a transition out of problem-solving mode and into living life mode, which was exactly what I had done to recover from chronic illness. It just didn't occur to me to apply it to insomnia. So basically, I started pulling the attention away from insomnia. As a result of that, I started losing interest in monitoring or paying so much attention to what was going on with my sleep. Again, I think I felt much more empowered to do this because I was confident I could get beyond a conditioned pattern in my mind. I had been studying habituated responses in relationship to things like chronic pain and phobias for years. And in my opinion, the fear of not sleeping isn't that much different. It's an exaggerated stress response based on a misperception of threat. So everything was making so much more sense to me. About two months after that tapping session with my friend, I was scheduled to go through a three-week out-of-town training that required me to get up at 5 a.m. every morning. And this felt daunting because mornings had always been tough for me. And the thought of doing that six days a week for three weeks in a row felt a little terrifying. So I decided to go for it, and I wasn't particularly attached to any specific outcome. In fact, I really thought, you know, this could go either way. I knew that what I could do was take the leap and go from there. So I got through it and I took sleep meds pretty much throughout most of that training, but I still survived. And I don't think that I have ever in my life gotten up at 5 a.m. consistently for three weeks in a row. So to me, this felt like a major accomplishment. And to be honest, my sleep wasn't great. In fact, it was really pretty bad, but I still did it. And that provided a lot of momentum and confidence in both my own ability to sleep and in my recovery process. From there, I started noticing gradual improvements in my sleep. And that's when I started blogging and was considering the idea of becoming a sleep coach. There were only a few adult sleep coaches that I was aware of at the time. And I think unconsciously, on some level, I was already starting to piece together a framework in my mind for what an insomnia recovery process could look like. But it all started with sharing my journey through blogging. And you know, looking back, I really thought that my sleep was getting so much better because it was so much better compared to what I had dealt with for most of my life. But compared to how I sleep now, it really wasn't that great. But from the perspective I held at the time, I was quite encouraged because I thought it was great. So I'm going along and I'm blogging and I'm no longer researching sleep from the vantage point of someone with insomnia, but from the curiosity of someone interested in what creates these conditioned patterns in the mind. As I'm going along, I'm continuing to experience changes in my relationship with sleep, meaning I'm not thinking about it all the time, I'm not worrying about it, I'm not forecasting how to manage my sleep around certain events. I just found myself losing interest in it in general. But I was still taking sleep meds periodically, and I did that for about a year into my recovery. And I think a lot of times this surprises people. But even that whole experience changed because the narratives I was telling myself about medication were totally different. I was no longer taking meds because I had to. This used to be such a source of major anxiety to me, but it no longer felt like such a threat. In fact, I was getting less and less sensitive to anything related to my sleep in general. It wasn't controlling my life anymore. One of the most defining moments in my recovery process happened when I sat down to write a blog one day and I couldn't tap into the emotions of what I was writing about. Like I had to try and remember what the experience felt like. It took actual effort. And this was a significant change because I realized a new story was emerging about sleep. I was definitely becoming someone who had insomnia in the past tense. And it was getting further and further away as part of my identity. I was also starting to do more one-on-one work with clients at this point, helping them through their stages of recovery. And I was able to hold space for that much easier. There wasn't that emotional commitment to the fear like there had been before. Another big milestone occurred earlier this year when I spent a week at this adorable little farmhouse in Chattanooga Valley, Georgia. I drove there from Minnesota with a dog in tow, which required staying in multiple hotels and waking up to farm animals, and it was just absolutely glorious. It wasn't until I got home from that trip that I realized that I didn't think about sleep once. It never crossed my mind. And this was nothing shy of miraculous to me because it had never happened. Insomnia started so early in my life that there had never been a time where I was able to fully enjoy a trip for what it was, because I was always so worried about sleep. So again, this was such a defining moment. Now you might be thinking, well, you know, Beth, this sounds pretty good and pretty easy. And didn't you struggle at all with this? And the answer is definitely yes. I still dealt with sleepless nights, and I still had hyper-arousal showing up pretty randomly, and I still wanted faster progress. But I also had enough evidence that I was going in the right direction to just keep going. The hopelessness that used to come with sleepless nights was now more just frustration. And that frustration eventually turned into annoyance. And that annoyance eventually turned into a blip on the radar. So I just kept making my way and trusting the process. And to be honest, it was never as bad as it was ever again. Because in my mind, there was nothing worse than having your brain on high alert all night long and having no idea why, and trying desperately to figure out what is going on while feeling so completely alone because no one has answers for you. And that had pretty much been my experience up until that realization. So not sleeping was still happening, but I didn't have all of that going on anymore. And frankly, that was the much more difficult part of it for me anyway. So, in terms of a timeline, this took place over the course of a couple of years. I wish that I could say it was weeks or even months because I know intimately that when you're in it, you just want to be out of it as fast as humanly possible. But it was actually years. And I say this because I want to be fully transparent about what my process looked like. And just because it took me this long. Doesn't mean it will take you that long because I've certainly seen it happen much faster. This is just my story. And the quality of my life got better very quickly. And that was the most important thing to me. At around the two and a half year mark, I felt completely recovered. That's when I started building my program and felt totally free to do whatever I wanted to do in my life. So insomnia for me is a thing of the past. I can work with people all day now without any of that old fear coming up. I still have disrupted sleep from time to time, like every human does, but it doesn't create any anxiety or sense of dread that I'm going to spiral back into a cycle of not sleeping. Overall, I just feel very neutral about sleep in general. I even joke with my friends sometimes that maybe I need a health coach because I basically do everything you're not supposed to do for sleep, but I sleep better than I ever have. So I think I'll just keep things as they are. I hope my story inspires anyone out there struggling with insomnia to keep an open heart because you can fully recover and have good sleep again. I'm Beth Kendall and you've been listening to the Mind Body Sleep Podcast. Thanks for being here. I'll see you next time. Thanks for being here today. If you love what you heard on today's episode, don't forget to hit the like button and subscribe to the podcast. And if you need more support with your sleep, join me in the Mind Body Sleep Mentorship. This three month one on one program will transform your relationship with sleep so you can get back to living the life that you love free from the fear of not sleeping. Head on over to bethkendle.com for more details. I'll see you next time.