Do You Treat Your Sleep Like a Villain? Your Sleep Mindset Might Be Why Insomnia Won’t Budge

9 min read

In a hurry? Scroll to the bottom for a summary.

What you’ll learn in this article

• Why chronic insomnia often turns your own sleeping self into something you’ve stopped trusting
• How surveillance, blame, and sleep effort keep the cycle going
• What a less adversarial relationship with sleep looks like in practice
• Why your mindset toward sleep shapes what CBT-I can actually do for you

At some point, without really noticing, you probably declared war on a part of yourself.

Not on sleep exactly. On the part of you that’s supposed to sleep. The part that lies there stiff and wired while the rest of the world drifts off without apparent effort. Over months or years of insomnia, your sleeping self has quietly become the enemy.

It’s understandable. When something keeps letting you down, you stop trusting it. You start watching it, demanding things from it. You might not call it that. But the way you lie down at night, braced, measuring, waiting to be disappointed: that’s not how you treat a friend.

Jade Wu, a behavioural sleep medicine specialist at Duke, opens Hello Sleep with a distinction I find myself returning to regularly in my work with clients. She describes two ways of approaching sleep: as a friend, or as an engineering problem. The engineering approach is logical enough. Something isn’t working, so you gather data, run experiments, try to fix it. The friend approach is different. You listen with curiosity instead of imposing expectations. You forgive a bad night instead of cataloguing it. You invest in the relationship rather than trying to debug it.

What Wu is pointing to is something I see in almost every person I work with. The thing you’ve been treating like an engineering problem isn’t just sleep. It’s a part of yourself.

How insomnia changes your relationship with your sleeping self

Most people with chronic insomnia can name the moment things went wrong. A stressful period at work. A health scare. A pregnancy, a grief, a move. Sleep got disrupted, which made sense at the time. What didn’t make sense was what happened afterward: sleep stayed disrupted long after the original cause had resolved.

Once insomnia settles in, you start to experience your sleeping self as unpredictable. Defective, even. You stop believing it will show up for you. And when you stop believing something will show up, you stop treating it like something worth trusting.

Think about what that looks like at night. You get into bed and immediately begin assessing. Will tonight be okay? How tired am I exactly? Is my mind too busy? You track how long it takes to fall asleep. You check the clock at 2am and do the math again. This is surveillance, not rest.

There’s a reason this makes insomnia worse. Sleep is a process that largely happens when you’re not trying to make it happen. It requires a kind of letting-go that’s very difficult to access when the stakes feel high. The hyperarousal that keeps insomniacs awake (elevated heart rate, busy mind, the sense of being switched on when you should be winding down) is a stress response to sleep itself. Your nervous system has learned that bedtime is a threat zone.

What sustained hostility looks like in practice

None of this is intentional. No one consciously decides to go to war with their sleeping self. But the patterns that develop over months of insomnia look a lot like the behaviours you’d show toward someone you’ve stopped trusting.

Surveillance. Tracking your sleep, mentally or with a device, converts what should be a passive experience into a performance with a score. Every night becomes a test, and your sleeping self is the one being graded. Sleep trackers, clock-watching, the 2am hour tally: they all send the same signal to your nervous system. This can’t be trusted to take care of itself, so we need to monitor it closely.

Sleep researchers sometimes call the absence of this monitoring “passive wakefulness” — the relaxed, not-quite-trying state that sleep tends to arrive through. You probably remember what that felt like before insomnia. The night doesn’t need to be assessed. It needs to be inhabited.

Rigid expectations. A lot of the suffering in insomnia comes not from bad nights themselves but from the belief that bad nights shouldn’t be happening. Eight hours. Uninterrupted. Every night. Any deviation feels like a malfunction. When your sleeping self doesn’t meet the standard, it isn’t just a disappointment; it’s evidence of a problem, and the problem feels like you.

Sleep naturally varies across nights, across weeks, across seasons and circumstances. It always has, in everyone. Bringing some looseness to your expectations won’t fix everything, but it will stop you from adding a layer of distress on top of every night that falls short.

Blame. After a rough night, notice what you do with it. Many people with insomnia wake up already annoyed: at themselves, at their brain, at the part of them that did it again. That frustration tends to carry forward. You approach the next night with a grievance already loaded, the previous night’s failure filed as new evidence. One thing I often ask clients is whether they’d speak to a friend the way they speak to themselves after a bad night. With the same impatience, the same “what is wrong with you” energy. Most people say no. The gap between how they’d treat a friend and how they treat their own sleeping self is often quite wide.

Sleep effort. Wu describes a quality she calls sleep effort: the active, striving quality that comes from trying hard to make sleep happen. The harder you push, the more you signal to your nervous system that sleep requires effort and vigilance. That’s exactly the opposite of the conditions under which sleep actually arrives. Effort keeps you awake. The trying is part of what’s not working.

This is one of the harder shifts for people who’ve been managing insomnia for a long time, because the instinct to try harder is deeply reasonable. You’re tired. Of course you want to fix it. But your sleeping self responds better to being given space than to being pressured.

This isn’t a case for acceptance

Here’s the objection I’d expect: isn’t this just telling me to feel okay about not sleeping?

It isn’t. Treating your sleeping self as a friend doesn’t mean you stop caring whether you sleep well. It means you stop treating the relationship as adversarial. Those are different things.

CBT-I (cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia, the first-line treatment recommended by Choosing Wisely Canada) is not primarily about acceptance. It works through structured techniques, some of them genuinely uncomfortable in the short term. Sleep restriction, for example, temporarily limits time in bed to rebuild sleep drive and consolidate sleep. That’s a specific, active intervention.

But underneath the techniques, there’s a stance. People who approach CBT-I braced for it to fail, ready to abandon it if it doesn’t produce results in a week, tend to get less from it than people who come with something closer to patient curiosity. The techniques work better in a body that isn’t braced.

This is part of why so many people try pieces of CBT-I and conclude it didn’t work. It’s not always that the techniques were wrong. Sometimes the frame was still adversarial: the methods being applied as a new attempt to control an unreliable system, rather than a way of working with a part of themselves that had been stuck. If you’ve been considering CBT-I but aren’t sure what it actually involves, the overview of CBT-I as a treatment explains the components and what to expect.

What a less adversarial approach looks like

I’m not suggesting you give your sleeping self a name or write it letters. The shift I’m describing is quieter than that.

It might look like going to bed without immediately checking how tired you feel. Letting the first few minutes in bed be genuinely unassessed: no calculating, no deciding in advance whether tonight is going to be okay.

On a rough night, it might mean noticing that you’re frustrated and leaving it there. Not demanding more from the night. Not deciding what it means about next week.

The morning version is dropping the performance review. Instead of “how did I sleep?” as a grade, something closer to how you’d check in after a hard week: roughly, warmly, without score-keeping.

None of this replaces structured treatment if you need it. Insomnia that has persisted for months or years usually needs more than a shift in attitude. But the attitude shapes what treatment can do. And if you’ve been fighting your sleeping self for a long time, the fighting itself is part of what needs to change.

Your sleeping self hasn’t turned against you. It’s just been treated like it has.

What this looks like in practice

A client I’ll call Donna came to me after years of what she described as “bad sleep genetics.” She’d tried every supplement, every app, every white noise configuration she could find. By the time we started working together, she checked her Oura ring score before getting out of bed each morning, and the number set the emotional tone for her day. A bad score meant she’d “failed” overnight. In our first few sessions, she noticed something she hadn’t before: she was angrier at herself after a rough night than she would be at anyone else. Shifting that wasn’t a technique. It was a precondition for the techniques to work.

TL;DR: What we covered

• Chronic insomnia often transforms your sleeping self into something you’ve stopped trusting. You approach the night watchfully, braced to be let down, and that vigilance feeds the arousal that keeps you awake.
• Surveillance, rigid expectations, blame, and sleep effort are all forms of hostility toward your sleeping self. None of them are intentional, but they maintain the cycle.
• A less adversarial stance doesn’t mean accepting poor sleep. It means stopping the pattern where the attempts to fix sleep become part of what’s breaking it.
• CBT-I works through structured techniques, but the mindset you bring shapes what those techniques can do. People who approach it with patient curiosity tend to get more from it than those who come braced for failure.

If what you’ve read here resonates and you’d like to talk through what’s keeping you awake, I offer free 15-minute consultations. No commitment: just a conversation about your specific situation. Book a free consultation

Graeme Thompson, MA, RCC is a Registered Clinical Counsellor in British Columbia (RCC #21951, BCACC) with specialised training in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I). His practice, BC CBT-I, is a virtual insomnia therapy service serving clients across BC. His mission is to improve the waking lives of people struggling with insomnia and sleep.

References

Wu, J. (2023). Hello sleep: The science and art of overcoming insomnia without medications. St. Martin’s Essentials.

Choosing Wisely Canada. (2015). Insomnia: Don’t use prescription sleeping pills to treat long-term sleep problems. https://choosingwiselycanada.org/insomnia/