It’s Not About the Bed | Ep 12

Is the association you have with your bed making it difficult to sleep?

Possibly. But I think there’s a bit more to the story.

This episode explores the role of the bed in insomnia and presents a new perspective on how the brain perceives this association.

Tune in to learn:

• Why the bed theory didn’t make sense to me
• The true driver behind sleeplessness
• Why cues don’t equal cause
• What really made the difference in my bed
• When it makes sense to change your relationship with the bed

If you’re worried that you’ve developed a negative association with your bed, this episode is a must-listen.

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Full Show Notes & Transcription HERE.

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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

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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 everyone, and welcome to the podcast. This is going to be a short, but I believe powerful episode because it's going to shine a light on what really drives the pattern of insomnia. And I'll give you a hint, it is not the bed. So when I was going through insomnia, I was being told right and left that the reason I couldn't sleep at night was because I had developed a negative association to the bed. This association was the reason I would get into bed and then struggle to fall asleep. And that made sense to me to some degree because if you're in bed and it becomes this absolute war zone of torture, of course, you're going to assume that it's the bed or some other external factor that is causing such a horrible experience, right? So the standard guideline in this scenario involved leaving the bed to do something else at night until I felt sleepy enough to return to bed. And the idea behind this was to build sleep drive up to the point where when I would go to bed, I'd actually sleep. So we were trying to establish a new association with the bed that was synonymous with sleep versus struggle. So like any good perfectionist, I followed this rule to a T. Because seriously, I would have done anything to get rid of insomnia. If someone had said to me, you know, if you just eat the tire off this car, then you can be free of insomnia. I probably would have said, pass me the salt and pepper. That is how desperate I was to not have insomnia. So I was getting out of bed when I couldn't sleep. And this ended up becoming an even more horrible experience because I live in Minnesota and it gets super cold here in the winter. So sitting somewhere in my house in the cold, waiting to feel sleepy was just really more torturous and created more layers of suffering around sleep. Plus, I just didn't really get sleepy. I would be thinking that if I did this and got out of bed, then this would help me feel more sleepy. But if anything, my brain went into even greater states of hyper-arousal, probably because I was thinking this isn't working, I'm not getting sleepy. What if this doesn't help? So this advice didn't help me in the context it was prescribed. And frankly, it led me to feel even more hopeless about my situation. And like I was just this really weak person that couldn't apply this simple rule of getting out of bed to get over insomnia. And then I started realizing: wait, I do not seem to have any trouble sleeping in my bed during the day. And I don't have trouble sleeping in my bed when I don't have to get up for work the next day. And I would have these cycles where I would be sleeping okay, and I was still sleeping in the same bed. So the bed rule in general was just not adding up. And I would ask my doctors or sleep therapists about this, and they would have no clue why this would be. And they would look at me like I had two heads and would sort of insinuate that I was just overthinking it, which I most definitely was. But a lot of that overthinking came from the feeling that what I was hearing just didn't make much sense to me. And the degree to which it didn't make sense just reinforced my already existing belief that there was something super strange going on with my brain, that I had some sort of unique problem that all of these doctors had never even heard of. And I guess I felt like if I was going to be up in the middle of the night, freezing on my couch in my 60-degree home, that I wanted to understand why it would help me, because it was just creating another layer of torture in my sleep experience. And you know, it still blows my mind because if any of these experts had just said to me, you know, nothing is wrong with your ability to sleep. You've just developed some fear about not being able to sleep at night, and that's what's creating the hyper-arousal, it would have saved me a lifetime of suffering, which is the whole reason I do this work in the world. So, my view on this is that it is not the bed that creates sleeplessness, it is the fear of not sleeping, which just happens to take place in the bed that causes sleeplessness. So I don't help my clients create a new relationship with the bed. I help them create a new relationship with sleep and around wakefulness and trusting their own bodies again. This, I think, is a much more sustainable approach to living a life free from insomnia because we're not trying to control all of these external factors that can affect sleep. The bed is an innocent bystander in the whole thing. Because where do you draw the line on that, right? You can say the brain has developed a negative association to darkness, or the brain has developed a negative association to this lamp, or brushing your teeth, or the bed spread. All of these do act as cues for the mind at bedtime, but they're not what's creating the pattern of insomnia. What's creating the pattern of insomnia is the brain's perception of wakefulness. It's a fear of being awake at night. It's the association the mind has made to not sleeping. So, does that mean that you just shouldn't get out of bed when you can't sleep? And not necessarily. I think sometimes getting out of bed actually makes perfect sense. But what matters most is the intention behind that. And I'll go more in depth about that in another episode. But for today, I wanted to talk about this role of the bed because I think it gets misrepresented. So, to add on to this idea around the bed, the reason I could sleep well in my bed during the day or on nights when I didn't have an early work commitment wasn't because I was just magically friends with my bed again. It was because there was less pressure in those situations. The threat of not sleeping seemed less significant, at least in my mind's eye, but it had nothing to do with the bed itself. I couldn't sleep when there was pressure to sleep because that perceived pressure would create performance anxiety, otherwise known as hyper-arousal. So making that key distinction between the bed and what happens in the bed, I think can be really helpful. And I don't want to write off the significance of the bed entirely, because material objects do influence our senses, and there is a neural circuitry associated with that. Making changes to the bed or the bedroom can be helpful, particularly for those who are in the later stages of leaving insomnia, because beds can represent some challenging memories. So introducing delicious things like new bedding or different sheets, I'm all about the sheets, or just anything to make the bed more lovely, can be a really nice way to update those memories a bit, but more as a means of self-care and not because any of those things create sleep, because it's always your own body that does that. So that wraps up this short and sweet episode. I hope it provided some perspective on the role of the bed. I'm Beth Kendall, and you've been listening to the Mind Body Sleep Podcast. 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 bethkendall.com for more details. I'll see you next time.