Do you ever wake up and you’re already tired of your own thoughts? That’s what insomnia feels like.

Insomnia isn’t just NOT sleeping. It’s lying awake at night, negotiating with your own mind. It’s your scariest thoughts and emotions keeping you company while the rest of the world sleeps. It’s waking up already anxious for the day ahead.

This week’s newsletter isn’t really about insomnia. It’s about the thoughts and emotions we run from, and how avoiding them often creates bigger problems.

Insomnia just happens to be the place where this shows up most clearly for me.

My sleep problems got really bad during COVID. It was a time when everything felt uncertain and out of my control. The world shut down. My six-year-old was suddenly doing online school. We had moved to a new city, the one I grew up in as a teenager, and we were living out of boxes in a rental house while waiting for our current house to be built. Everything felt temporary. Nothing felt settled.

At the same time, my parents were living with us because their house had flooded and was full of mould. And the hardest part of all was watching my mom battle bladder cancer. During that time, what I was really running from was the fear of possibly losing my mom to cancer.

That unacknowledged fear fed my medical anxiety, something I already struggled with. Every ache, every pain, every strange sensation felt like proof that something was terribly wrong. My mind started telling me that I had cancer too. That I was dying.

Up until the insomnia hit, I thought I was handling things well. I wasn’t.

Over the years I’ve learned that insomnia doesn’t only show up when I’m struggling or unhappy. It can hit even when I feel like I’m doing well. For me, insomnia is a messenger. And the message is usually that I’m avoiding something.

That stretch during COVID was the worst insomnia I’ve ever experienced. It lasted almost a year. I had nights where I didn’t fall asleep at all. I became convinced something was physically wrong with me. I thought it was a vitamin deficiency, a hormone imbalance, or one of a million problems suggested to me by Dr. Google.

I self-medicated with supplements which led to scary test results like elevated liver enzymes. I started obsessively researching how to sleep.

And then I started trying to control sleep.

I created rigid routines. I meditated twice a day for twenty minutes. I repeated affirmations. I tried every wellness ritual I could find. I avoided certain foods and activities I loved. And at my lowest point, I started drinking a glass of wine every night just to take the edge off.

Nothing helped.

In fact, all of these coping mechanisms made my insomnia worse. I slowly started to believe that I had to do certain things in order to sleep. I trained my brain not to trust my natural ability to fall asleep. Nighttime became something to fear.

All day long, my thoughts revolved around the night. My days felt awful because I was already anxious about bedtime.

Around that time, I read a book by Jon Kabat-Zinn about mindfulness. I started doing the exercises in the book, and I noticed my anxiety easing—not because my thoughts went away, but because my relationship to them started to change.

Mindfulness isn’t about getting rid of your thoughts or emotions. It’s about noticing them. Acknowledging them. Letting them exist without getting hooked by them or letting them control you.

Repeating positive affirmations or trying to replace my negative thoughts with positive ones never worked for me. It felt fake. It made my anxiety worse because part of me knew I was lying to myself.

What helped was learning to stop fighting my inner experience.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been focusing more intentionally on ACT therapy, which stands for Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.

ACT taught me something that changed everything for me:

Acceptance doesn’t mean liking what’s happening. It doesn’t mean giving up. It doesn’t mean approving of pain.

Acceptance simply means acknowledging what’s already here instead of fighting it.

The struggle with our thoughts and emotions is often what makes us feel worse. When I stop arguing with my mind, when I acknowledge what I’m feeling instead of trying to fix it, my thoughts lose some of their power.

ACT also teaches something called cognitive defusion, which is a fancy way of saying: you can create space between you and your thoughts.

When I notice my anxiety rising, I pause. Sometimes I say, “Oh, I’m noticing I’m having thoughts about not sleeping.” Other times I say, “Thank you, mind, for trying to keep me safe. I’ve got this.”

Sometimes I simply label what’s there: “I’m feeling anxious.”

Not “I am anxious.” But “I’m feeling anxious.”

That small shift matters. It reminds me that anxiety is something I’m experiencing, not who I am.

When I acknowledge my thoughts and feelings instead of resisting them, they start to loosen their grip. Not because I forced them away, but because I stopped feeding them with fear and control.

Trying to push away or “fix” uncomfortable inner experiences usually makes it stronger. This is exactly what happened with my insomnia — the more I fought and controlled, the deeper the loop became. Your mind is always having thoughts. It doesn’t care whether they help you or not.

ACT teaches us to:

1. Accept and make room for uncomfortable thoughts, feelings, sensations instead of fighting, suppressing, fixing, or avoiding them.

2. Defuse from thoughts. See thoughts as thoughts, not commands, warnings or truths.

3. Be present. Come back to this moment instead of living in imagined futures or replayed fears.

4. Self as context. You are not your anxiety. You are not your sadness. You are not your thoughts. You are the one having them.

5. Clarify your values. What matters to you? Not your goals or dreams. Your values. How you want to live your life?

6. Committed action. Living your life on purpose, driven by your values, even while fear, anxiety, doubt or discomfort are present.

ACT isn’t about feeling better all the time. It’s about learning how to carry discomfort while still living your life.

For me, that means being present with my family. Creating. Writing. Playing my ukelele. Spending time with people I love and anything else that brings me joy.

When we finally moved into our house in 2021, a lot of my anxiety around sleep eased, with the continued help of mindfulness. I don’t struggle with insomnia the way I once did, and many of you know that I’m going through another bout of it now.

What’s different this time is how I’m meeting it.

This bout of insomnia surprised me because I’ve been happy. I’ve been feeling like myself. So I’ve had to slow down and really listen. What I’ve realized is that my biggest struggle is the fear I have around insomnia.

Even when I’m sleeping well, the fear of not sleeping lives quietly in the background. I’ve trained my brain to associate nighttime with danger. I still avoid certain situations because I believe they’ll cause insomnia, even though they don’t. It’s my belief about them that has the power.

And I can see now that I haven’t fully met those fears with acceptance yet.

So this is what I’m practising now:

I’m accepting that insomnia may visit me again.

Instead of being afraid of it, I remind myself: I’ve been here before. I got through it then. I can get through it again. On the nights I can’t sleep, I don’t spiral anymore. I don’t panic. I don’t try to force sleep to happen.

I lie there and tell myself the truth: I don’t need to sleep to be okay tomorrow. Closing my eyes is still rest. And the next day — even if I’m anxious, even if I’m exhausted — I don’t put my life on hold.

I don’t cancel the day. I don’t wait to feel better first.

I still move through it. I still work out. I still see my friends. I still show up for my life as it is.

Acceptance doesn’t mean giving up on yourself. It means stopping the war with your own mind.

If your mind is screaming at you, try this:

When a thought shows up, add these words in front of it: “I’m having the thought that…”

Instead of “I won’t sleep tonight,” try “I’m having the thought that I won’t sleep tonight.” Instead of “I’m so worthless,” try ”I’m having the thought that I’m worthless.”

Notice how that creates just a little space.

Your feelings are not enemies. Your thoughts are not facts.

You are allowed to feel whatever comes up.

You don’t have to chase peace. You can learn to live with discomfort and peace at the same time.

P.S- I just wanted to apologize to anyone who replied to my last newsletter and didin’t get a response. I’ve been going through a lot in my personal life, and I was drowning in not just my feelings and sleep issues but responsibilites. But I appreciate every single email back that I receive. Grateful for all of you. 💛

Therapeautic Art Activity-Wheel of Emotions

This is a simple exercise to help you notice what you’re feeling instead of pushing it away. Most of us don’t struggle because we have emotions. We struggle because we fight them, avoid them, or judge ourselves for having them. Putting feelings on paper helps take some of their power away.

1. Look at the list of emotions and notice which ones are present for you right now.

2. Use one section of the wheel for each emotion you want to acknowledge.

3. Fill each section with colour, words, shapes, or drawings.