Befriending Wakefulness - the Key to Insomnia Recovery
The Problem With Fighting Wakefulness
If you have insomnia, you’ve been here — oscillating between staring at the ceiling in agony and compulsively checking the time, anxiety mounting as the morning draws nearer. It’s only human to want a quick fix for sleepless nights. Sleep feels urgent. There’s a problem, so the brain goes: “Well, what’s the solution? Better find it.” We google symptoms, get flooded with advice, and are offered countless ways to spend money on a promise of sleep.
Before I understood the concept of befriending wakefulness, I was so desperate I would have gone into debt for a cure.
It’s natural to want a solution — especially when it’s something as essential as sleep. That’s what makes it so hard to take a step back. It took me years to realize that seeing wakefulness as inherently bad or dangerous was part of what was perpetuating my insomnia. It seems simple in hindsight, but because we’re so culturally conditioned to fix things, we don’t always stop to question our approach.
This post delves into one of my favorite insomnia topics — befriending wakefulness — because it’s at the core of healing. Learning to befriend wakefulness is everything in recovery. We’re taught to fight it. But the entire angle we use to approach sleep — control, fixing, resistance — actually creates more anxiety. The moment we stop seeing nighttime wakefulness as the enemy, we begin changing our relationship with sleep — and that shift is already part of the healing.
Why Wakefulness Isn’t the Problem
Being awake at night can feel like a cruel fate when others are easily whisked into dreamland. While it’s deeply unpleasant when you’re exhausted, we can learn not to fear it. I’d even argue we have to, in order to truly recover.
To understand this, it helps to distinguish between sleep disruption and insomnia. With sleep disruption, there isn’t much fear wrapped around it — it’s temporary, and tends to resolve on its own. All kinds of human experiences can trigger short-term sleep issues: adjusting to medication, a new relationship, a breakup, grief, a move, a new job, a promotion — the list goes on.
Whether painful or exciting, our nervous systems need time to adjust to change. Then, the sleep disruption usually passes.
With insomnia though, even if there’s an obvious trigger, it doesn’t go away once the trigger is removed. I spent years spinning my wheels trying to identify the root cause of my sleep issues, which only led to more fear and fixation. The real issue? I was looking outside of myself, instead of at my reaction to being awake.
If you take anything from this post, let it be this:
Insomnia is rarely just about disrupted sleep — it’s about a learned fear of being awake at night.
Before you developed insomnia, I’d bet you didn’t feel dread creeping in as bedtime approached. That dread is a conditioned response.
It’s like quicksand — your instinct is to fight it, to try harder to scramble out. But, in order to free yourself, you have to move slowly and gently. Your body has to loosen, so you can float. That’s what befriending wakefulness is all about. Instead of reacting with a sense of urgency, you learn to soften toward it — to ride the wave, rather than resist it.
What Befriending Wakefulness is Not
This might sound simple in theory, but what does it actually look like in practice?
It’s Not About Giving Up on Sleep
Befriending wakefulness doesn’t mean giving up on sleep, or deciding you’ll be okay with being awake forever. It’s not about caffeine-fueled, all-night TV binges. You’re not trying to sabotage your chances of rest, because if you try to face your fears in such an extreme way, it can be too much for the nervous system, and backfire.
It’s Not About Enjoying It
It also doesn’t mean you have to enjoy being awake at night. It’s usually not pleasant. You can experience the whole emotional rollercoaster while learning to befriend it: fear, grief over lost time, mourning the “pre-insomnia” version of you, frustration about your energy, and helplessness when things feel out of control.
If it required faking some kind of zen state about sleeplessness, it would mean dismissing all of that. And that’s not what this is. This approach is about facing it — not bypassing it.
What Befriending Wakefulness Is
At its core, befriending wakefulness means softening your stance toward being awake at night. As you soften, it becomes easier to recognize that while wakefulness is uncomfortable, it’s not dangerous. This is exactly the message your brain and body need to receive in order to let go, so that sleep can happen naturally. It’s about supporting your nervous system from within — not endlessly searching outside yourself for remedies.
It also means coming to terms with a hard truth: there is no guaranteed way to sleep.
That might sound terrifying at first. But, once you start peeling back the fear, there’s actually freedom in it. Your body already knows how to sleep. So, the work becomes about removing the barriers to sleep — which are usually the anxious reactions to wakefulness, not the wakefulness itself.
How to Befriend Wakefulness
While it’s helpful to outline some steps, I see this less as a checklist and more as a process of doing less. Insomnia is a paradox — the harder you try, the worse it gets. So this is a gentle guide for slowly loosening the grip of control.
1. Learn to Get Separation from Your Reactions
When anxiety rushes in, it’s easy to get overtaken — the flight response hijacks your body and brain. But with practice, you can begin to relate to this part of you more mindfully.
Start by naming it. Maybe you call it “the anxious part” or “the survival brain” — whatever fits. By naming it, you create a little space. It’s part of you, but not all of you.
When the survival brain takes over, the prefrontal cortex shuts down — and that’s the part of your brain responsible for perspective, emotional regulation, and decision-making. By naming what’s happening, you re-engage the prefrontal cortex. That helps you notice the anxiety without becoming it. It interrupts the spiral, and makes space for mindful noticing.
Another area that can be sneaky, is when you have secondary reactions. As the term implies, this is when there is one reaction, such as anxiety, and then a reaction about having the anxiety, like frustration or self-criticism. That’s when it’s easy to get caught in a spiral, and lose perspective. There is nothing wrong with having secondary reactions - it’s a normal part of the human experience. But, it’s important to catch yourself when that happens, so that you can acknowledge both: the anxious part, and then the frustrated part that comes up in response to the anxiety. Again, this facilitates a mindful relationship, so we can keep the prefrontal cortex online, and observe rather than get hijacked.
2. Acknowledgement is the Door to Acceptance
When there is some space from reactions, and you are able to name the anxious part, you are acknowledging it. It might feel deeply uncomfortable, but it is important. It’s about learning to tolerate the distress, without getting caught up in spirals. This doesn’t mean you’ll never get hijacked by anxiety again, but a you practice, those moments lose their grip. Being awake at night starts to feel less threatening.
So, as soon as you have some separation from the anxious part of you, it can be helpful to acknowledge how it is showing up. Is it physical? Or, is it showing up as fearful thoughts?
3. View Nights as an Opportunity to Face Fears
A huge part of befriending wakefulness is behavioral. When you can, reframe a sleepless night as a chance to practice being with the fear of being awake — and relate to it differently.
This means bringing in choice.
If you’re awake, ask:
What would help me feel 5–10% more comfortable right now, whether I sleep or not?
This question brings you out of rigid sleep efforts and back to your nervous system. Maybe that means getting out of bed and stretching. Maybe it’s staying in bed with a podcast or a comforting show.
It’s not about forcing sleep — it’s about creating a gentler environment to meet the night.
4. View Befriending Wakefulness as a Process
Befriending wakefulness isn’t a one and done technique. It’s a non-linear process — more like learning a new skill than flipping a switch. At first, it will feel unfamiliar, especially because our natural instinct is to brace against being awake. With insomnia, the body and mind have learned to associate wakefulness with danger, frustration, or failure, so it can take time to rewire that response.
Some nights, you might feel more spacious, and able to meet wakeful nights with more openness. Other nights, the anxiety might be yelling in your ear incessantly. That doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong — it means you’re practicing.
This is where gentleness comes in. You’re not trying to get an award in insomnia recovery. You’re learning to meet yourself where you’re at, over and over. The real shift comes not from doing things perfectly, but from changing how you relate to the experience of being awake. It’s about building trust — with your body, with your nervous system, and with sleep itself.
The more you can see each night as an opportunity to practice — not perform — the more space you create for sleep to return on its own.
Befriending wakefulness doesn’t mean loving it. It doesn’t mean giving up on sleep. It means changing the relationship — from one of fear and control to one of gentleness and curiosity.
You don’t have to do it perfectly. In fact, perfectionism is often part of what keeps insomnia going. This is a practice to remind yourself again and again, that your job isn’t to force sleep — it’s to care for yourself through the wakefulness. When you stop fighting wakefulness, you stop fueling the fear that keeps you stuck. That shift — from resistance to acceptance— is what allows your nervous system to start letting go.
Your body remembers how to sleep. And even on the nights when it feels impossibly far away, you can begin to shift — not by trying harder, but by trying less.
If this post resonated, you might find my free email course helpful — it's a gentle introduction to my approach for healing insomnia. You can sign up for it below.
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