Redefining Insomnia: My 3 Core Philosophies | Ep 1

In this groundbreaking episode, we challenge the conventional view of insomnia and dive deep into the three core philosophies that not only shape everything in my business, but will also revolutionize the way you perceive insomnia.

• Discover what it means to embrace a holistic approach to sleep coaching.
• Explore the profound connection between insomnia and survival. 
• Unravel the mystery behind sleepless nights.
• Gain a greater understanding of the mind-body factors that contribute to hyperarousal.

But that's not all…

I'll also be sharing five tips to keep you firmly on the recovery path.

As we delve deeper into understanding insomnia, you'll find that it becomes less of a mystery. By shedding the mystery, fear comes down and we pave the way for natural sleep to reclaim its rightful place in your life.

Get ready for a shift in your perspective on sleep.

Are you coming?

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 Full Show Notes & Transcription Here:   https://www.bethkendall.com/blog/episode%201

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. I am so excited because I've been wanting to do this podcast for a very long time, and the day has finally come where I'm sitting down to record my very first episode. So, being new to podcasting, I had no idea where to even begin because there are about a million things that I could talk about with regards to sleep and specifically insomnia. So I thought the best place to start would be to talk about my unique philosophies, the foundational concepts that inform everything in my business, what I teach in my program, my coaching, and what I'll talk about on this podcast. There are three big philosophies that fit into this category. But before we even go there, I want to talk a little bit about what it means to be a holistic sleep coach and what the name of this podcast, Mind Body Sleep, means to me. For most of my life, I always just liked the word holistic. It always really resonated with me. And if something had the word holistic in front of it, I just naturally gravitated towards it. But I don't think I thought that critically about what the word truly represents. The term holism refers to the theory that all parts of a whole are interconnected. So just looking at a part or even multiple parts separately isn't conducive to treating the whole person. Well, this makes sense. And it was pretty much how I interpreted the word holistic. Until I started my master's in holistic health, this is when the word holistic started taking on a much deeper dimension in my life because I was introduced to all of these super cool classes and ideas around what holism represents in an even broader context beyond just health. And this program was seriously one of the best experiences of my life. I just soaked it up. And someday I'll talk more about how I even ended up in that program. But it was during that education that I took a particular interest in the concept of neuroplasticity. I don't even know what it was, you guys. It just sparked something in me. And my thesis research ended up being around self-directed neuroplasticity, which was even more exciting because self-directed just means that you can use the mind to change the brain. And I just can't even tell you how much I loved this idea. I was like, wait, what? We can actually do this? That's amazing. So this led me down so many interesting rabbit holes of learning in the field of neuroscience, like psychoneuroimmunology, the nervous system and polyvagal theory, a greater understanding of the unconscious mind, the quantum field, and just all of the things. Now, I had no idea what I was going to do with this knowledge, and I had never heard of something called a sleep coach, even though I had struggled with insomnia for almost 40 years at this point. I just knew that I was incredibly passionate about what I was learning in a way that doesn't just fall from trees for me. So the context with which I use my social media moniker, which is the holistic sleep coach, and the name of this podcast comes from the perspective that the mind and body are bi-directional and reciprocal. So when the brain changes, the mind changes. And when the mind changes, the brain changes. It's a constant unified system, like a two-way street. Now, down the road, I'll be going deep in this podcast about how to apply a mind-body lens to insomnia. But for now, I'd like to share the three main philosophies that inform my work. Now, these philosophies are pretty much the why behind everything that I do in my business, from my program to this podcast. Now, I suspect that the tools or techniques of my approach will continue to evolve and change over time. In fact, I hope they do, but my philosophies will likely remain pretty much the same. So let's dig in. My first philosophy is that insomnia is based in survival. So, what do I mean by that? I don't view insomnia as a sleep problem as much as I do a conditioned fear problem. It's a surface expression of fear, a protective pattern. Essentially, we develop a fear of not being able to sleep. Now, the way this usually happens is typically we go through some sort of life circumstance that causes some sleep disruption. And during this period of disruption, our relationship with sleep starts to change. Maybe we have the thought that there's something wrong with our sleep, or maybe we start doubting our ability to sleep. Our brain somehow determines that not sleeping or the consequences of not sleeping are a threat to our safety and survival. So at this point in time, we start interacting with sleep differently. Something shifts. Our orientation changes. It's almost like there's a heightened state of alertness around anything having to do with our sleep. This turns on the fight or flight response, which leads to hyperarousal, which is what keeps sleep from happening. Over time, hyper-arousal can become a conditioned response, something that happens on automatic, even after the circumstance that caused the disruption has resolved or passed. But you know, there's even a little bit more to it, which leads me to my second philosophy, which is sleep is a passive process. It's an effortless process, right? It can't be forced or controlled. In my opinion, this is probably the most important thing to understand about sleep. When we go through the initial event that tips us into some fear about not sleeping, we respond the way any human would, which is to freak out and start doing everything imaginable to fix our sleep. This is totally normal. It's how we do most of life's problems. Now, here's the thing: not only is sleep a passive process, but it responds paradoxically to effort, meaning the harder we try, the harder it is. Problem solving our way into sleep is really the beginning of insomnia and the quest to control sleep. But when you think about it, the effortless nature of sleep as a biological function like breathing or pumping blood makes total sense. Because can you imagine if we had to force or earn this ability, we'd all have insomnia because the pressure and performance anxiety of that would be out of this world. It would kick us right into that fight or flight response. Yet the path of insomnia is pretty much just this. It's a change in our relationship to sleep from one of effortlessness, where we never really thought that much about it at all, to one of achievement. Something that is our birthright into something we must do right. Suddenly, the incredibly simple act of sleep becomes complicated. And as we continue to problem solve our way back to what used to come effortlessly, we unintentionally reinforce the brain's newly hardwired perception that being awake at night is a threat. Which brings me right into my third philosophy, which is our brains are changeable. I mentioned earlier how integral the concept of neuroplasticity is to me and what I do because it's the basis of all learning. Our brains learn through association. So in the case of insomnia, the brain creates a link between not sleeping and danger. It begins to associate being awake at night as a threat in the same way it would if there was a gun pointed at you or you were about to get hit by a car. Now, being awake at night can be deeply uncomfortable, usually not our first choice, but it's still a safe thing to experience. All humans wake up multiple times a night. The act of being awake poses no immediate threat. You can think of it like a fear of heights or a fear of water. Being in a tall building or in a pool of water poses no immediate threat unless you have a fear of those things, in which case your brain is going to kick into fight or flight at the mere mention of the top floor or jumping in the ocean. With the fear of not sleeping, hyper-arousal gets triggered just by going to bed. The brain starts sending out alarm bells, it's trying to alert us to the potential threat of not sleeping based on its perception of danger. Now, I know from personal experience that this is one of the most perplexing things you can ever go through because we know we're safe and we don't always feel outwardly anxious or fearful, but our brain is just doing something totally different. It's like it just won't let you fall asleep, which is why it's so common to feel like you have a broken brain when you're going through insomnia. It truly feels like your brain just won't sleep like other people. But here's what I really want you to know because it's so hopeful. Nothing changes with your ability to sleep. You haven't lost this capacity in any way. There's simply this habituated arousal response that keeps getting in the way of that happening. All right. Just to go a little deeper on this thread, our brains don't create these associations all on their own. They're always looking to us too. Remember how I talked about the mind and brain as a bi-directional highway, one is always informing the other. Well, this is where we have a lot of influence. And it's the reason I get these goosebumps every time I talk about neuroplasticity, especially the self-directed kind. The way we respond to fear ultimately shapes the future expression of that fear. So we are in no way powerless over insomnia because our brains are malleable and changing all of the time. Anytime we learn a fear, we can also unlearn it. I'll be talking so much more about all of this down the road, but these are the three overarching philosophies that inspire everything that I create. Now, a lot of times people will reach out and ask me about what approaches I use. Do I use CBTI, which is cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia? Do I use ACTI, which is acceptance and commitment therapy for insomnia? Do I take a behavioral approach? Do I do this method or that method? And really, I use all of them to some degree. And I think that it's really quite individual. I consider where someone is on their journey and how their nervous systems tend to operate. And while I think that the sleep education that I provide around what insomnia is and why it happens is pretty much across the board. Here are five additional ideas I'd like to share based on my own experience with insomnia as well as helping others. Number one, you are not your brain, okay? We are not just victims of our automatic programming. We have a lot of agency over how we want to wire our own circuitry. Number two, when it comes to sleep and insomnia, acceptance will be your friend. Because when we're in a state of resistance or we're doing everything possible to force or make ourselves sleep, we're unconsciously activating the hyper-arousal that keeps insomnia alive. Number three, insomnia is not your fault. You did nothing wrong to cause it. Learning fears and unlearning fears is a normal part of the human experience. Your brain just happened to connect fear to not sleeping. Number four, self-kindness is everything. You literally cannot overdo this. I've learned so much more about self-compassion in the last few years and how to apply it during the recovery process. I encourage and remind my students of this often because it's so key in terms of wiring safety into the nervous system. Number five, sleep always wins in the end. Your body will always give you enough core sleep to survive. And while I know that's not always ideal, there is something comforting in knowing we have this mechanism built right into our biology. All right, that wraps up episode one. Thank you so much for being here. My big bold goal for this podcast is to change the way the world thinks about sleep and provide hope for people going through insomnia. When I was going through it myself, I couldn't find anything out there that actually made sense to me. I felt very alone and trapped and powerless. And eventually I even got to the point where I doubted that I could ever get beyond this problem. And now I'm completely recovered. I don't think about sleep at all anymore. Kind of like those people that used to really annoy me. So I'll be here every week recording. I hope you join me. Bye for now. 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 betkendall.com for more details. I'll see you next time.