Understanding Hyperarousal w/ Richard Wills | Ep 63

In this foundational episode, Beth is joined by Mind. Body. Sleep.® co-coach Richard Wills to explore one of the most important — and least understood — aspects of insomnia recovery: hyperarousal.

Together, they unpack what hyperarousal really is, how it shows up in the body and mind, and why it’s the true obstacle standing between you and effortless sleep.

You’ll learn the four types of hyperarousal and how each one can subtly (or not so subtly) keep the brain on high alert. 

Beth and Richard share personal insights, relatable stories, and practical ways to help your brain stand down from perceived threats so sleep can re-emerge on its own.

If you’ve ever wondered why your body feels wired when you feel tired, this conversation will bring clarity, relief, and a renewed sense of hope.

Key topics:

• What hyperarousal is and how it develops
• The difference between appropriate arousal and overactivation
• Emotional, physical, mental, and silent hyperarousal explained
• How fear of wakefulness reinforces insomnia
• Practical ways to calm the system and teach the brain safety again

Connect with Beth:

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Work with Beth:

👉   Learn About the Mind. Body. Sleep. Mentorship
👉   Start the Free Insomnia Course Here

Show Notes HERE.


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 - 2025 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_01: 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 back to the podcast. I am so very delighted today to be joined by someone who is very important, a part of the mind-body sleep world, and that is Richard Wills. Hi, Richard.

SPEAKER_00: 0:35

Hey Beth. How are you doing today?

SPEAKER_01: 0:37

I am doing great. And for anyone out there not familiar with Richard, he is my co-coach in the program. And we alternate weeks in the community and we answer questions and do support calls. And honestly, it has been such a wonderful few years together because I learn so much from you, Richard, as well as I do from all the students. But it has been just so very easy to work together.

SPEAKER_00: 1:03

It's been great, Beth. And I've really thoroughly enjoyed working with you. And uh again, I learned a ton from you.

SPEAKER_01: 1:10

Absolutely. So today we are talking more about hyper arousal. We're going to talk about what it is, how it tends to show up, and how we can work with it. And Richard, you have in the past created such an excellent breakdown of hyperarousal. So I really wanted you to come on and share that with the audience so they could have a better understanding of it as well. Because I think anytime we can shine a light on, you know, why something is happening, then it all feels a little less scary and threatening. And Lord knows I surely wish I had even heard the word hyperarousal before I turned 50. So I'm very happy to be doing the whole podcast around this topic.

SPEAKER_00: 1:59

Yeah, it's really an important topic, uh, Beth, and I'm really eager to dive into it.

SPEAKER_01: 2:04

Yeah. Okay. So let's get going. Why don't you, Richard, if you don't mind, lay a bit of uh a foundation for us and tell us what hyperarousal is and what role it plays in the experience of insomnia?

SPEAKER_00: 2:23

Yeah, so great question, Beth. Well, hyperarousal happens when our mind and body too are just more activated than the situation calls for. So, you know, sometimes it's referred to as being extra vigilant, but that's not really quite the same thing. You can be alert without being, you know, wound up. For example, let's say you're looking up in the night sky because they're supposed to be shooting stars. You're looking for shooting stars, and you're very vigilant, but you're not wound up. You're not really aroused in that sense. So, yeah, so hyper-arousal really happens when the body's arousal system goes too far. So let's say, you know, God forbid your house catches on fire, and what what would you do? Well, your heart would be racing, you'd be breathing heavily, you'd be running and so forth. Well, this is not hyper-arousal. This is an appropriate level of arousal for the situation. Okay. So you want to be activated in that case. Now, if you have the same rush of fear and pounding heart and so forth on a first date or on a presentation, now that's more of an overreaction because the situation doesn't require that. And that's what we'd call hyperarousal. So your body is kind of acting as if there's a bear in the room when there isn't. That's what gets us into trouble with sleep. So, you know, most of the time we do associate hyperarousal with anxiety, and and most of the time that's pretty accurate. But it doesn't always come from fear or or anxiety. For example, if you won the lottery, your heart might race too. And so excitement can do it. A child on Christmas, for example, could be excited, and that could be kind of more arousal than you need for the situation, but it doesn't have to be fear to be hyper-arousal. So all of this is kind of built on this fight or flight mechanism that we have. And this is this wonderful thing that protected us from danger from way back, and of course, goes back before humans to other animals also. This is something that when there was a real threat, there's a grizzly bear, for example, we needed to have all these things happen in order for us to survive. We needed to have a racing heart and tense muscles and fast breathing. So that's appropriate arousal. But when the same reaction kicks in without the real threat, that's that's hyperarousal. So fight or flight and hyperarousal are connected, but they're not exactly the same thing. So just appropriate fight or flight, that really keeps us alive if there's a real threat. But hyperarousal, I mean, that doesn't really so much keep us alive, it just keeps us awake. That's the problem. Yeah, and that's where insomnia comes in, Beth. So yeah, I mean, it's helpful to look at sleep as requiring kind of two things. On the one hand, there's the sleep drive, and that's basically how long you've been awake that day, or actually maybe going back a day or two more than that. And so when you're awake long enough, you're gonna be sleepy and you're gonna be able to sleep as long as you don't have too much arousal. Now, the arousal can be real if there's a real threat there, and that will keep you awake. But most people with insomnia, of course, don't have real threats, and most people with insomnia have plenty of sleep drive. So the thing that gets in the way of sleep is this hyper-arousal. So if we don't have the real predators that we had, you know, 10,000 years ago, the predators we have are kind of internal. These these worries we have, it might be work or relationships or taxes. And that's what what keeps us awake. Now, what usually happens on top of this, not only do we have the anxiety about these different things going on in our life, but then on top of that, we kind of have the fear kind of gets doubled up because in most cases we become afraid of being awake itself. So there's the fear of the problem, you know, taxes, relationships, and then fear of the wakefulness itself. It's kind of a compound fear.

SPEAKER_01: 6:51

Yeah. Yes. You know, it's interesting. As you were talking, it's really the first time I've separated hyper and arousal, right? Because arousal, I mean, it's it's crazy. How long have I been in this work? And I it's like, oh, there's arousal, but this is hyper-arousal. And you did such a good job of explaining, you know, in the mentorship, we define it as a heightened state of alertness, but you're going a bit deeper to explain that it's actually an exaggerated state of activation, you know, beyond what a situation calls for. And, you know, that's that's where the hyper part of arousal can come in. And of course, this is based on our, you know, past experiences and programming around sleep. You know, I think anyone dealing with insomnia can relate to this because when you're when you're going through it, you know, you start to notice that your brain, like your brain seems to interpret anything around sleep in a much bigger way than people that don't have insomnia, right? Right. So there's like this sensitization there. And of course, that's why we we go to such lengths to protect our sleep so much, because that that's essentially what our brain is telling us to do. But, you know, just having the understanding that there is some heightened sensitivity that, you know, maybe other people that don't have insomnia aren't dealing with. And that's and that's why the brain can interpret things in a threatening way, even when they might not be dangerous at all.

SPEAKER_00: 8:30

Yeah, for sure. That that's you you said it so well, Beth. And I think people with insomnia tend to have a background of just being more anxious than the average person, also. And so when when we have this tendency for anxiety, we we basically have kind of a sensitized nervous system from all the stresses we've experienced in our lives, and we just overreact to a lot of things. So, not just for sleep, but for kind of life generally.

SPEAKER_01: 9:00

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, there's definitely some temperament traits that, you know, we all share. You know, at least a few of them in there. And that's that's not uncommon at at all. So, okay, I think that really covered, you know, what hyperarousal is. What are some of the ways that it tends to present itself, Richard?

SPEAKER_00: 9:23

Yeah, well, this is really interesting part of it, uh, Beth, because we can just kind of talk about hyperarousal generally, but when we look at it, we can really kind of divide it up into four different types. And they usually aren't presenting, you know, purely like this. Usually there's a mixture. But the first kind I call emotional hyperarousal. And that's just kind of the more pure anxiety or fear aspect of it. And then on top of that, there can be physical hyperarousal. So that's more of the bodily reaction, the physiological reaction, the racing heart, the tight muscles, the heavy breathing. So that's the physical part of it. And then there's the mental part of it, which isn't exactly the same as the emotional part. The mental part of it is when our thoughts are going round and round, we're overthinking. So we can have emotional hyperarousal with the anxiety, the physical hyperarousal with the racing heart, for example, the mental hyper-arousal with the racing thoughts. But then sometimes, you know, I've had a lot of clients that I've coached say, Well, you know, I just woke up and I'm I'm not feeling scared. I'm not, my heart isn't racing, my mind isn't racing, but I'm just awake. And what I call that is silent hyper-arousal. So there's no obvious fear or racing heart and so forth, but you're just awake. And I think what happens there is that you have enough of this kind of activation to keep you awake, but not enough to keep you scared. So the way I think of it is it's always helpful to think back what our primitive ancestors had to deal with. So if there was a grizzly bear that's sleeping in the cave, there's a grizzly bear 10,000 years ago, and it's roaring right at the cave, and obviously you've got to be awake. You're probably gonna have all three kinds the emotional, physical, and mental. But let's say on another night, lion's roars can be really loud. I actually went camping once in Florida, and there was this wildlife preserve like a mile away, and I could hear the lions roaring at night. Oh, wow. Yeah. And hopefully they they were well caged. But anyway, so a primitive person hearing a lion's roar a mile away, well, you know, you just, okay, well, I gotta be awake for this, but I'm not really scared. Okay. And I'll listen to make sure it doesn't get closer. So I think that's kind of the basis for silent hyperarousal, enough to keep us awake. Yeah. And I think, you know, a lot of people with insomnia kind of have this quiet, low-grade alertness that keeps the brain from just totally letting go and relaxing and falling back to sleep.

SPEAKER_01: 12:07

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right. So just to break this down, you mentioned that there's the the four possible expressions of hyperarousal: the emotional, physical, mental, and silent. And these can shape shift for all of us, you know, especially throughout the course of the recovery process. We've seen this happen, you know, where it can kind of shift into something different than maybe you've ever experienced. But I especially love, you know, how you named it silent hyperarousal, because this was definitely how it expressed for me. And there was someone on the group call yesterday, and this is how it expressed, you know, expresses for him as well. And it is such a bizarre feeling to have this happening, but not have like any physical symptoms to go along with it. And I think for me, this is why when someone suggested that I had sleep anxiety, I just did, I just wrote that off right away because I it didn't, my experience of it didn't match what I thought anxiety was, you know, and it almost felt a little bit offensive to me. But it really, it was, it was anxiety related. It was just that hyperarousal was happening so beneath, like it was an unconscious, conditioned response that was happening, you know, it just wasn't expressing the same. And then oddly enough, on my way out of insomnia is when I started having a more physical expression of hyperarousal. And, you know, that's kind of another whole podcast. But but I love this. And I'm so curious, like how, you know, so you were talking, and I would say for me, it was it was emotional, mental, and silent hyperarousal mostly. But I'm curious how it showed up for you, Richard.

SPEAKER_00: 13:55

Yeah, yeah. Well, it really showed up all four ways for me.

SPEAKER_01: 13:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 14:00

I think before I started learning about insomnia and learning, you know, was started to recover, kind of when I was in the thick of my insomnia, I think I had all kinds. And I'd wake up, I'd typically fall asleep fine, but then I'd wake up, say, at three o'clock in the morning. And yeah, I'd typically feel anxious. And uh that would be the kind of the first thing I'd I'd feel. And then my thoughts would be going round and round, why am I awake? What's wrong? So forth. And the physical would then kick in. And I don't think it was necessarily racing heart, but yeah, tight muscles, achy muscles. I experienced that a lot. Yeah. And then, you know, as as things got better, as I moved forward in my recovery, a lot of the more kind of dramatic aspects of hyperarousal, emotional, physical, and mental, started calming down. And but I would still have the siloed hyperarousal. Yeah. That makes sense. I think that's kind of the mildest form of it. And I think it's often the last to go. Just kind of a lack of a lack of sleepiness. You know, if you only slept three hours and you wake up, you'd expect yourself to be still kind of groggy and sleepy. And when you're not, I think that's often a clue that you're dealing with silent hyperarousal.

SPEAKER_01: 15:16

Mm-hmm. Yeah, for sure. And of course, you know, we work with people with all of these expressions in the mentorship. And, you know, it's funny because it's not uncommon for people, say, with physical expressions of hyperarousal, to wish it was silent hyperarousal. And then for the people that have the silent hyperarousal, sometimes they wish it was physical so that that there was something tangible to work with, you know, like there's nothing to actually work with. It's just sort of like just happening, and you're like, what is the deal? It's so bizarre.

SPEAKER_00: 15:49

But Beth, you know, I I found that um it's really uh helpful for a lot of the clients to break it down into these four kinds of hyperarousal. And when they hear about silent hyperarousal, they're kind of relieved that yeah, okay, this is understandable. It's the same process, not weird. And it's actually kind of a good sign that things are probably getting better.

SPEAKER_01: 16:12

Yeah, absolutely. I love that. And, you know, it no matter what the type is, like you kind of mentioned this already, the approach to both is really the same, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, what can we do? What can we do, Richard? How do we start working with hyperarousal? So it doesn't feel the need to keep showing up.

SPEAKER_00: 16:34

Right. Okay. Well, that's the big question. That's really basically what, you know, uh the whole curriculum here at Mind Body Sleep is about. Yeah. But I think, you know, the first step is realizing that there are two kinds of threats. There are the real threats like the grizzly bears, and that there are the perceived threats like the fact of being awake or uh, you know, worrying about your your taxes or job, that's not something that's appropriate to be dealing with in the middle of the night, even though it might be something to deal with in your in your life. So realizing that you're not dealing with real threats is helpful. And I think it's definitely the first step because a lot of people think that there really is a threat just by the fact of being awake. They think that it's going to be a threat to their health. And there have been studies, there was a big study, the Lovato study, with uh what, 37 million people. Yeah. There was no difference in the death rate between how long people live between good sleepers and people with insomnia.

SPEAKER_01: 17:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 17:36

So that just really, really was very helpful for me to realize.

SPEAKER_01: 17:40

I know. I love that study for the sheer sample size alone.

SPEAKER_00: 17:43

Like it's just so gigantic that, of course, I mean, it's still you still want to put your insomnia behind you, but in terms of health threats, it's not what we what we used to think. Yeah. So, you know, one of the things though is that the fear center in the brain that creates hyper-arousal really evolved way before we had logic or language. So sometimes logic and language can be limited. And if we just have them alone, I know for me that wasn't enough. I think over and above that, we need to do things to show our brain that we're not really in a dangerous situation. It's not a real threat. And we can we can show it by acting in ways that tell our brain that there's no danger. So, for example, if there were a real grizzly bear, you would be up and dealing with a threat. You'd be running away, trying to fight it and so forth, and the brain would pick up on this. But let's say it's the middle of the night and you wake up with a racing heart and so forth. Well, what if you just kind of, all right, you just open a book and start reading? Or, you know, once you kind of acknowledge the feeling, or if you go down and watch TV. I used to get up and watch Steinfeld, and that's how I recovered, basically.

SPEAKER_01: 19:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 19:02

And so doing something enjoyable tells the brain this isn't really a threat. If there really were a grizzly bear, you wouldn't be watching TV. You'd be right, right. You wouldn't be doing something enjoyable or relaxing. So I think that's where kind of your behavior uh kicks in. And I'm not saying you have to get up, you you don't. You could just kind of rest in bed. If you were a grizzly berret, you wouldn't just be relaxing in bed. So there's nothing you we don't dictate what you have to do. But if you do something that befriends wakefulness rather than kind of fighting it and struggling with it, yeah, really sends a message. The message, this isn't a real threat. And you know, the brain kind of learns to stand down and and over time when you do this over and over, sleep starts to come naturally again.

SPEAKER_01: 19:54

Yeah, yeah, so well said. I love that. And you know, I think it this really speaks to the three-step process that we use in the mentorship, which is just first, you know, understanding the problem, which alone can help so much. Because, like I said, what I would have given just to hear someone say the word hyper-arousal, you know, during during all those decades, you know, and then we learn how to respond in new ways so that we can update, you know, the brain's perception of threat. And, you know, the great thing, and this speaks to befriending wakefulness and, you know, not fighting the grizzly bear, but the great thing is that while we're while we're watching and listening to the brain, the brain is actually watching and listening to us, right? So, you know, it's taking cues from us and how we act and behave and respond to determine the level of threat in any given situation. So, you know, it's it's very teachable and changeable. And and then the lastly is just, you know, living your life, right? Because nothing is more powerful than that in terms of absolutely, yeah. You know, just getting back to effortless sleep again, where sleep is just sleep and in, you know, there's not much more to it than that.

SPEAKER_00: 21:15

So if we if we live our life uh just kind of during the day and we don't kind of put our life on hold. Oh, I I won't have lunch with my friend today because I'm too tired.

SPEAKER_01: 21:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 21:27

Sometimes there's some rationale to that, but that again sends the message that this your sleep is is a real threat that you have to deal with before you can deal with the rest of life and enjoy yourself.

SPEAKER_01: 21:39

Right. And it's actually the opposite. It's like getting back into life is what diffuses the threat. You know, it really is. And that's that's what becomes the teacher, the cue back to the brain. So yeah, yeah. All right. Well, do you have any other last thoughts to share on the subject of hyper arousal?

SPEAKER_00: 22:02

No, I think we've kind of summed it up, uh, Beth. And uh, you know, I'm certainly eager for uh any of the listeners, if they have questions, over and above what we talked about, but uh, I think this sums it up.

SPEAKER_01: 22:13

Yeah, I think this was a really, you know, good foundational episode for people that want to understand hyper arousal. And Richard, I I can't thank you enough, you know, for for coming back and talking to us. I know that your your days are busy these days. And if any of you out there want to hang out with Richard and I in the mentorship, come join us. You know, between the two of us, we have been through over 80 years of insomnia. So, you know, we we deeply understand the struggle of it, and we are here to help you get beyond it. So until next time, this is the Mind Body Sleep Podcast. Bye for now and bye, Richard.

SPEAKER_00: 22:57

Okay, bye, Beth.

SPEAKER_01: 22:59

See you later. 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.