I can't fall asleep

Is this how it feels like?

You go to bed and you just can’t fall asleep. This has been happening long enough that you’ve started dreading bedtime. And you wonder: am I now insomniac? How is lack of sleep going to affect my job performance? Why can’t I just sleep like a normal person?

What have you tried already?

You may have browsed the web and saw a few influencer videos, some by qualified sleep doctors, and you followed their advice. You might have done any of the following:

• Stopped consuming caffeine after noon
• Avoided staring at screens an hour before bed
• Purchased those cool looking blue-light blocking glasses
• Took Melatonin. 3mg, then 5mg, then a different brand, then another.
• Listened all night to a white noise machine
• Counted your breaths or imaginary Dutch sheep
• Covered yourself with a weighted blanket
• Subscribed to a few sleep meditation apps
• Disciplined yourself into a strict sleep schedule, even on weekends
• Followed the path of least resistance by trying not to try

Some of it helped on easy nights. On the nights you needed it most, it didn’t.

Is it insomnia?

What could help you fall asleep beyond anything else is not another app or a sophisticated nighttime routine. If you came to see a strategic practitioner, the first thing you’d be asked is to fill out this kind of questionnaire to figure out if your issue can be labeled with the dreadful “insomnia” label.

Why none of it worked

Every one of those approaches targets the conditions around sleep. They’re all based on the same assumption: fix the environment, fix the sleep.

Your environment is fine. That’s not what’s keeping you awake.

When you try to sleep, two things are running at the same time. One you can name: the replaying, the planning, the conversation from this morning. The other you can’t quite get hold of. You know something is unresolved but you can’t land on what it is. Your mind won’t release either one, and that split is what stops you crossing into sleep.

Melatonin doesn’t reach it. Sleep medication sedates you past it temporarily. The breathing exercise keeps the nameable part occupied while the other one keeps going. Nothing you’ve tried has touched it because nothing you’ve tried was aimed at it.

How we work with it

Strategic therapy identifies the exact split that’s keeping you awake. Your version. Not a generic sleep problem. We address the unnamed half so both halves stop running at lights-out, and sleep stops being something that happens to you or doesn’t.

Sleep becomes a decision again.