Middle Insomnia: What Wakes Us Up in the Middle of the Night and What To Do About It [Sleep 05]
Most of us have moments of waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to fall back asleep. If this happens repeatedly, night after night, it will take a toll on our mental and physical health. Sleep is our body’s natural way of embracing healing and resetting, so we can welcome the day with restfulness.
In this episode, I will address several scenarios that can wake us up in the middle of the night, including when past trauma is triggered. Here, I’ll discuss what happens with your body when you wake up, and how you can approach your sleep according to the why you wake up.
Tune in and listen to how you can make sleep a valuable part of the day.
1:59 - The impact of habits in structuring sleep routine
4:34 - The mind’s ability to recognize connection (which often lead to wrong conclusions)
6:43 - The importance of tracking sleep schedule and quality
9:07 - Effects of stress and how it disrupts your sleep schedule
10:08 - The presence of dysregulation and how it becomes the “normal” for your body
11:10 - What are vocational stresses and how do these impact sleep routine and quality?
13:34 - Tips to encourage sleep when it is disrupted due to various factors
Resources Mentioned:
The Body Keeps Score - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18693771-the-body-keeps-the-score
Spotify Playlist - Floating Through Space
Dan Siegel’s Wheel of Awareness - https://drdansiegel.com/wheel-of-awareness/
Headspace App - https://www.headspace.com/
Calm App - https://www.calm.com/
Insight App - https://insighttimer.com/
Please remember that this podcast is not a replacement for treatment by a healthcare or mental health professional. This content is created for education and entertainment purposes only.
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This transcript has been created using A.I. please excuse any missed words or incorrect grammar.
Welcome to I thought I was over this. I'm your host, Dr. Kimber, a licensed clinical psychologist, trauma healer, and fellow life journeyer. Every episode, we dive into the science of human need, and whether you find yourself feeling like you've just hit an iceberg and don't know where help is coming from, or you're ready to trade in your raft for something bigger, you aren't alone, grab what you need, get comfortable. And let's do this. Thank you so much for tuning in. I'm so grateful you're here, I just appreciate all of you who have reached out to me to say how the podcast has impacted you. It's always great to hear from you. I confess, I'm still trying to find my way back to consistent deep sleep, I'm forever reminded just how much our nervous system loves what's familiar, it is getting better. And I just acknowledge, I feel burdened with so many of you about the war, holding space with friends, co workers, some clients who have family members still living in countries nearby. And also in Taiwan. Just some of the worry there about what would happen if communism came in. And I just want to encourage you, as I've heard from people, if you have family or friends in Taiwan, reach out support them support people, little by little, we can take some of the burden, so that it's not so overwhelming. In our house this week, we haven't slept well. We don't really know why my 14 year old he couldn't sleep one night, he listened to my podcast. And he said it helped. I was very proud. I internally did a flash dance routine. And then he came home the next day took a nap. Of course, he could not fall asleep again, he listened to a different podcast. And it wasn't so helpful. I have to say I did feel a little gleeful myself. So again, the next day, he took a nap only this one longer. And he couldn't, of course sleep. So yesterday, we did not let him take a nap. And I'm happy to say he's back on track, my husband, he hasn't been staying asleep, he can fall asleep. And for whatever reason, I woke up the other day at 4am. And it was a struggle to get back to sleep, I had gone to sleep at midnight. And that's only four hours. So I willed myself, I stuck with my plan my process of how I get to sleep, which is in the beginning, I start with counting backwards. That usually puts my mind in a boredom scenario, which is very helpful. When I'm really wired. I can't track my breath. It's not active enough. But the counting backwards usually helps my mind was so active, I had to put on the headphones. So I did some headphone action with have mentioned this playlist before I love floating through space on Spotify. And eventually, after an hour, I got to sleep and I slept for two more hours. And that was six hours. I felt good. It's not ideal. But I was so grateful that I made the choice not to get up. And I just stuck it out really knowing that I could have benefit my mind could benefit from sleeping longer. So I just say that as encouragement. When we wake up, we don't always know what to do. And I think there's not necessarily a right answer, because every scenario could be different. But if you know that you need to get more sleep. I think there's a certain commitment to that, that you keep asking your mind to do. And so I'm going to tackle that today. What happens when you wake up? What are some of the things that wake us up in the middle of the night in for all of you? Astronomers, astrology people,
Unknown Speaker 4:37
I'm recording this the week of the full moon. And I have to say, the younger me would have thought, well, it's the full moons fault that we can't get to sleep. But I did a little research and so far, the science can't predict that. Have a little story about that little tangent here. I worked in a psych ward Word after I graduated from college, and there was a nurse there, he would claim that the full moon would make everything crazier. And we would have more lockdowns then and take downs and crazy stuff. And so the science person in me, the researcher in me decided to start mapping out how many incidences we had when I worked, as I also, you know, worked multiple shifts, and I started keeping track. And what I noticed is it didn't scientifically pan out. But what I did notice, because I worked often with this nurse was that he was usually more escalated on the nights of the full moon, he would talk about it was a full moon, and that we should expect things to happen. And so what I started tracking was his level of regulation. And he would often escalate a situation versus de escalate a situation. So in his mind, it was the full moon. But what he didn't recognize is it really was his expectations of the full moon, that ramped him up. So that Hans herper did actions and people's behavior differently. And that's what our human mind so often does, we can make connections by noticing things, but sometimes unless we really examine them, we can make the wrong conclusion. And so that's why I encourage you, if you are struggling with sleeplessness, we got to keep track, start looking for patterns. And it's really wise to write things out down, like your food, if you're eating right before you go to bed. Notice what you're eating, if it makes a difference, how you feel, when you sleep, how quickly you get to sleep, what it feels like when you wake up. You can also look at what are you drinking? Or any substances, the stories that we tell ourselves, you know, you may say, Oh, I sleep like a baby when I have whiskey. And your mind confirms this, because it's so easy for you to fall asleep. But what you may not be noticing is, how do you feel the next day? Do you have grogginess does your mind feel alert? I mean, maybe it could still be the same thing. I'm open to that. I'm not saying that that person is wrong. I'm just saying, We got to look at the whole picture. What's important, what's important is how quickly you can fall asleep, how you feel the next day, how rested you feel, are you entrained into deep sleep. And so possibly tracking those things, maybe noticing caffeine of any kind, maybe even in chocolate, some of you may have systems that are super sensitive to anything that's a stimulant, looking at exercise, looking at emotions, maybe considering the level of anxiety that you've had. And for some of you, you have watches that track your heart rate, start paying attention to that, notice, if you're more amped up your heart rates higher during the day, does it take you longer to get to sleep, headaches can be another sign of something out of balance. So I just encourage you to keep being detectives on yourself. So like I said, this session, I'm really going to dive into things that wake us up in the night. And some of this is going to apply to go into sleep and other things. We're just going to notice you're already asleep and you get woken up. The first thing that I'm going to tackle is what wakes us up is when we have problems to solve. So it could be work ongoing could be a work project in particular, maybe things in your house, your home, maybe that is a stress, wondering where you're going to be able to shelter, maybe you're taking a class, you have an upcoming test, your system is going to want to move this threat out, it's going to want to solve it to get rid of it. And so when you wake up in the middle of the night, even if it's because you need to get up and have a bio break, your mind is going to immediately attached to your alertness and say we need to solve this problem. You need to wake up and it's going to keep your adrenaline pumping. And so it's going to be hard to go back to sleep because it is feeling threatened by the problem being unsolved. And I also want to say, if you're used to having a history of dysregulation in your body, these things are going to feel normal, you are going to feel as if you have the secret sauce. As I mentioned before, I lived many, many years in my 20s, with the feeling of secret sauce, because I could get by on a lot of adrenaline, not very much sleep. But as I got more and more regulated, I noticed actually how dysregulated getting little sleep made me. So just notice that sometimes if you are comfortable with a lot of dysregulation, you had a lot of chaos growing up, maybe you didn't have regular sleep wake patterns, it's gonna feel normal, that you would get up at 2am 3am and start working on things, but doesn't mean that that's what your body needs.
Unknown Speaker 11:10
So there are a lot of vocational stresses that we can have. We can work night shifts, we can do things like have varied shifts, like first responders, where you don't always work the night shift, but you sometimes do. We are so modern, of course, in our scheduling in our society. And yet, so often, we are not using science to help inform us how we need to structure vocations. I think even of our kids, you know, we have the robust science to prove that adolescent brains, which is for most people from age 12, to 25, the things that are happening in those brains, make them night owls, we are just now asking our schools to start later, and to not have a zero period of 6am. And we seriously had the research for about 10 years to show us this. It's not just the brain scans, we have the test scores, the learning comprehension, the discussions that happen that have been studied with control groups, we have that and we are just now making the change here in California. And likely many, many states don't even monitor it. So there's so much resistance to change. We don't always use science, but in this case, I have to cheer and get off my soapbox. So back to stress in your body. We like what feels normal. If I am used to dysregulate in my body, I will think nothing of getting up in the middle of the night checking emails, doing a little work, and going back to sleep. But what I'm telling you is, for most of us, that's not helpful. So what do I need to do to have better sleep when I wake up, and that waking up makes me wide awake and alert. And I'm suddenly wanting to go study or solve the business problem or check my emails. So what do you need to do? First thing you need to do is give it time, when I started out, my nervous system was so dysregulated that it would take me two hours to go to sleep. I was working about 80 hours a week, because that included what I was doing in graduate school. And as I began the practice of focusing my breath, I could barely do it. And so I just tell you that because it takes time to train your mind. But for me, the the thing that helped me is, on average, it was two hours. But as I started learning how to train my mind and focus on something boring, like my breath, or the kitchen clock that I could hear, it would help me focus and relax and think to myself, Well if today I go to sleep after an hour, I've saved myself an hour. I know I just shared the story of you know waking up at 4am and needing to listen to music. But that's another thing that you can do is if your mind is super wired around meeting to solve The problems are take care of, you know an issue, keep coming back to, you're gonna be able to solve this tomorrow, just remind yourself, even though your mind knows that you're telling your nervous system, it's okay, we're okay, we're going to be able to go to sleep, we will solve this in the morning, you may have to keep reminding yourself that. But the big thing here is that give yourself time, don't give yourself the option of getting up right away,
Unknown Speaker 15:34
take it off the table. And also don't worry about not getting sleep. Because when you get worried about not sleeping or not falling back to sleep, of course, your nervous system gets anxious and it gets more awake. So you're just resting, you're just letting yourself know for now you're going to be bored. Let's just rest as best we can. And again, if your mind is really racing, listen to some music that you're not gonna enjoy. You're just wanting to listen to the different sounds, and not ask questions like, Ooh, how did they do that? That is your monkey mind showing up and being just as alert. So you really want to just focus on sounds. That's why I like something consistent like a kitchen clock. I don't know why I keep saying kitchen clock, like a clock. There's bedroom clocks do just something that is consistent. But again, at times when I'm really amped up, I need to listen to music, but kind of not classical or anything like that, because my mind will actually start really listening to the music in a way that I'm waking myself up. So the second thing is what happens in the middle of the night, if you have gotten woken up by a car alarm, and or fireworks, I live in the city, all you urban dwellers out there, we can occasionally get woken up by our neighbors activities. And so the easiest thing to do in those moments is if you're living with someone that you can snuggle with, co regulation is the easiest way to get back to center because you kind of jolted out of bed. And when you are snuggling, it helps your nervous system say I'm not alone. Everything is okay. You're asking your mind to focus on the warm, just you can hear and feel someone else breathing. And so that makes it the easiest. And I'm saying this as a non cuddly person. I'm like, No, it's too warm, or whatnot. So I'm not saying you have to do this for hours, just a couple minutes until your heart rate comes down. It's magic, our bodies our neurobiology is made for CO regulation, it really is helpful. If you don't have a partner, some other things that are helpful, our pets, sleeping next to you feeling their warm, fuzzy blankets, big stuffed animals. This could be triggering, but if you so I'm just letting you know to take a deep breath, look around the space. But if you have a child who has had sexual trauma, I encourage if they are experiencing night terrors like big stuffed animals, they can really help. Of course, if you're available, you're the best thing for regulation. But again, you can't get in a dynamic where both of you are chronically sleep deprived. I always recommend getting professional help at that point. But for some kids, they're just waking up. They don't necessarily need you and sometimes just having that big stuffed animal can really be regulating. I know I've mentioned that. I support Afghani women who have come through forced migration and a couple of their kids weren't sleeping. So I recommended cuddling. And granted, these are like middle school sons. And I said listen, they're holding a lot of stress. They need you not just your words, but they need you to comfort in a way that's co regulating. And it's very, very containing when we give hugs. It really helps our nervous system. So they tried it. And I got reports back several weeks later that it had really Take out the sleeplessness. So if you have a family and you're going through stress, maybe you're moving, maybe you're getting a divorce, maybe there's been a devastating grief in the family or another stressor, make sure that you're getting the physical contact with your kids no matter what the age, because it really does help them regulate their systems. And I encourage you to ask, how is your sleep, this is something even if you don't have a lot of stress in your family, make sleep a discussion in your family, ask them regularly, don't assume that you know how well your adolescent is sleeping. There are a lot of challenges with sleep, during those middle school, high school, college years, a lot of dysregulation going on, and so have conversations about that. The next thing that I would say that wake us up in the middle of the night, our emotions, we have big emotions, when our emotional brain gets really activated. Our nervous systems go into a bit of a fight or flight. And that can be true with you know, big feelings like anger, betrayal, sadness, grief, in our neurobiology, these things feel like traumas. And it can be very difficult to fall back asleep. Sometimes it's hard to fall asleep, because our feeling is driving and saying that there is a threat to be resolved. And I again, recommend kind of this internal languaging, you remind yourself you're safe, you can just be real, this is devastating. I don't know how I'm gonna make it through the day. But right now, I'm just gonna focus on my breath. And I'm not going to worry about falling asleep, right here, right
Unknown Speaker 22:11
now I'm safe, I'm going to be able to feel my feelings, I'm going to be able to resolve the situation that's in front of me with this person, I can't control the outcome. But I know I'm gonna be able to make it work. And what you're trying to do here is stop the anxiety spiral, where one thing leads to another thing that's anxiety provoking, which leads to a bigger thing, which leads to catastrophizing. And so you really are stopping the spiral, which happens when we get in fight or flight, which happens when big feelings are present, and when we go to sleep with them. And so what you're asking is the state of mind that shows up is one of comfort is one of compassion. Imagine the next day being able to share with someone safe at work or in your family, or a friend, and imagine them being able to comfort you and just allow your imagination to go there. Getting a hug, and it can really help you in the middle of the night. Slowly, come back to relaxation. Your parasympathetic nervous system is engaged and helping you sleep. And this time, we don't try to make things up. You can acknowledge missing the loved one, you had a partner who's now missing from your life can acknowledge the sadness. But what you're asking your mind to do is not go to what am I going to do? How am I going to get through this? Those are the questions you're asking your mind to shelf, because you are in a place in the middle of the night where you are trying to rest your mind and your body as best you can. And when you're going through big feelings like grief, it can be shocking. And so your mind wants to keep you on high alert. And you should watch for this expect this and you really are coming back to I'm not alone. Right now I just need to breathe. And that's how I'm gonna get through it. powerful emotions can wake you up, even without a dream. And so just remind yourself The state of mind you're asking for is comfort, compassion, reminding yourself, you're going to be able to deal with it, process it journal about it in the morning.
Unknown Speaker 25:13
The other thing that can wake us up are nightmares. Some can be night terrors, that can happen in PTSD. And what I want to say is, if you are being woken up for more than a couple of weeks, and having a lot of disrupted sleep, and sleeplessness, I really want to encourage you to get licensed professional help. Our bodies are not made to go with a lot of sleeplessness. And it usually takes a week or two to get in to see somebody. So now we're talking about a month of dysregulated sleep, it's not something you want to sit on, you want to take care of it. Trauma is a serious threat to mental health, and physical symptoms can arise. And so take care of yourself. And I'm going to be bold here and say, Don't go to an unlicensed professional, there's no accountability, for the most part. And the training is all over the place. And I'm just talking about if we're talking about trauma, and you're getting help with trauma, you need to go to a trauma specialist who has experience who is licensed, because it's just too important. And I want to say this, because there are a lot of professionals who now use EMDR, which is a respected trauma modality. But here's the thing, you can go to one class and say that you know how to do EMDR. And that is not enough. That is not enough of an expertise to be helping you with your trauma. So interview the people that you are going to, to make sure that they know how to help you navigate through the trauma that is in your body. Okay, don't just wait, and then have to go to the person who has the first opening. That's not usually the best person to help you. Alright, I'm gonna get off that soapbox. But I want you on your behalf. I want to be your traumas advocate, get someone who has experience and care for your trauma. Okay, so if you are waking up, and you have had a nightmare, what you need to do immediately is ground yourself in the present time and space. And here's the thing, I don't want you to go listening for sound. That is usually our first sensory thing we do when we're in fight or flight. So instead, I want you to rub your fingertips together in a way that you can feel the grooves of your fingertips. And then I want you if it feels containing to give yourself what I call a self hug. And it's what it sounds like, like you're putting your hand on the opposite hand. So my right hand is going on my left side. My left hand is going on my right side. I love Peter Levine's rendition of this. I don't know why but he has you put your right hand on your heart. And then tuck your fingertips in your armpit. And there's something about that that has been so containing. I like that a lot better than just going from shoulder to shoulder and in his you would put your left hand either up on your right shoulder or somewhere on your arm. Wherever it feels containing to you. There's no right place to put your left hand but you want to be able to be in a physical place that you feel really contained. So you're asking your mind to be present. In these moments, remind yourself soften your jaw, soften your eyes, soften your hands. If you have someone next to you who's willing to be woken up, cuddle with them, again co regulation way way better than just self regulation if you can do it
Unknown Speaker 29:54
and then take in the safety of the room the present Moment. At that point, you can let your ears come back online. But here's the thing, I don't want you to be listening for threat, I want you to really be grounded in listening for familiar sounds, reminding yourself, you're back in this place in time.
Unknown Speaker 30:23
And if you need to get up, it's not necessarily bad, it's just, you want to make sure that your nervous system is not working out the fear, and the big emotions that just came up. So if you're gonna get up and walk around, slow down your pace, really, again, soften your jaw, always soften your eyes, ask your mind to notice your feet, touching the floor, and noticing, you know, heel to toe, you're really directing your mind in a very intentional way. Because when we wake up from nightmares, we are automatically in fight or flight, which alerts our whole system to be looking for the threats. And what you're doing is you're overriding and bringing yourself back to the present moment, which is very safe. And again, if things like this are happening, I just encourage you to seek professional help. Because it's too much to be asking yourself to do it if it's not working. And disrupted sleep definitely hinders our mental health. So it's a key key issue for us being able to navigate the world and navigate our mind. So I don't know if this is helpful to any of you. But when I had a trauma event in my life, I was unharmed, but faced harm. It took me about six months to regulate my nervous system. And at that time, I was going to therapy twice a week. And so I just let you know that again, these things take time, the state of mind you want in the driver's seat is a lot of kindness, compassion, you want to remind yourself, Oh, you were scared when that happened. But now you are not in that situation again. And so you come back to the present in our minds, you know, they take from the past, to worry about the future. That's what our minds are made to do. And so you really put that event back in the past, you keep reminding yourself, oh, yeah, this is why I'm dysregulated. I'm in the past, but now I'm bringing my mind right here into the future. So keep staying present. The body keeps score by Bessel van der Kolk. Great book, though I have had clients say that it might be a little triggering. So just be aware. But I find it good. It really explains a lot about our neurobiology, and how we can keep getting regulated. The last thing is maybe you are in the category that you have always been like this since birth. And you have always had a hard time sleeping, shout out to my aunt, she has a rhythm where she goes to sleep, then she wakes up in the middle of the night does things and then goes back to bed. She has done that her whole life. So that works for her that's worked for her for a long time. But if you find yourself in a place where you would like to try to change what has been present for a long time, just be committed to experimentation. Probably again, it's going to take time, you're going to have to figure out what works, some suggestions. If it is a nervous system regulation thing, you're gonna want to try to do some things during the day that access your parasympathetic nervous system. So doing things like a yoga, but a style of yoga, that is likely not like power yoga, you want to do something that's a little more, probably slower, but it can still be intense. You just don't want to be doing the postures really quickly. I personally think a hot yoga like Bikram yoga or a slower yoga like Iyangar yoga can be really helpful in down regulating your system. You could also start breath work, the Wheel of Awareness by Dr. Dan Siegel, is a great way to slow down during the day he has, I think different times like I think he has a shorter one and then a longer one. So you could pick depending on how long you want to do it. The pause episodes that I have here on I thought I was over this could help you because they're again meant to help you down regulate headspace calm inside, those are all apps inside I think is free. But headspace and calm cost something. Sometimes you could try acupuncture body workers who are trained in a good modality. Again, you want to ask them how they're trained, how would they be working with your body massages, getting massages for somebody who has a highly dysregulated system, you want to ask your mind to be focusing on what you like, and what is happening without falling asleep or disassociating. And I want to say this that, you know, when you start seeing a massage therapist, it's not that you need to go regularly, like every week or every other week, you have to go consistently in order to earn trust. For our neurobiology, we need to know that someone is trustworthy, to be you know, working on our body, at least I'm speaking as a woman, I don't know what it's like to for a man maybe they don't think of those things. But for me for my neurobiology to really get in a state where I can deeply relax, I usually have to have a massage therapist that I have been with. So those are things that you can do. For one of my clients who was born prematurely in a NICU baby for five months, he had to learn how to desensitize his whole neurobiology because he was born in a time where we don't know as much as we do now about how overstimulated these NICU babies can be. And so as he was able to dial down his, what I call signals, environmental signals, he was able to relax his whole body and actually be able to sleep much, much better. So there's something for everyone to kind of try. Again, we don't know what the answer is, if you've always had this sense of waking up in the middle of the night and kind of interrupting your sleep. But those are some things that you can try. So just to kind of summarize today, we have covered if you are having work stress, that's new, you're solving some kind of problem. Something wakes you up in your environment. You could be a city dweller, maybe you have a bear outside making mischief, raccoons. You know, something wakes you up, and you have to go back to sleep. Big emotions can wake you up in the middle of the night, as can nightmares, night terrors, those things. And lastly, if you've always been like this, be kind to yourself as you try to find deeper rest and deeper sleep.
Unknown Speaker 38:43
So in every episode, I asked you, what's an insight that you're taking away? What's something that you want to let go of? No, not now. I'm not going to try that. What is one thing that you might want to chew on? Or change? And can you put that in your calendar to really spend time to think about shifting how you navigate broken sleep. Just want to remind you, you are a sacred bean. As I was writing the script for this podcast, a raven flew over me and was joined by another on the rooftop and we hung out together. And someday I'll tell you my fascination and love of ravens. As you can see from my podcast cover. I want you to know that life can be magical. And I hope that you're in a place where you feel like you're on this path. Healing what needs Be healed. And I'm so grateful that you're here. Thank you for taking me with you. I just encourage you if you feel led to take a moment sign up for my newsletter that's coming out twice a month. At I thought I was over this.com Be well. Notice your resilience inside. It's available in you and the world. Until next time.