Befriending Wakefulness - the Key to Insomnia Recovery
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 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 insomnia 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 is everything when it comes to healing.
Prefer watching to reading? Catch the video below, or keep scrolling for the full blog.
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 not 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 can also feel like a counter-effort. Instead of dropping the effort, you try very hard at letting go, or proving to yourself that you can be OK being awake at night. That’s not the goal.
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.
Watch for the ‘struggle switch’: This is a term I learned from ACT psychologist, Russ Harris, and it’s such a helpful concept. We can’t control what emotions come our way, whether it be: anger, sadness, fear and everything in between. For a lot of people though, they want to get rid of the emotion, or see them as unacceptable. That’s when you can get fear of experiencing fear, and even self-criticism on top of that. It creates more layers so it feels like we’re fighting ourselves when we’re already down. This is what Harris means by the struggle switch being turned on.
Switching the ‘struggle switch’ OFF:
Notice when it’s ON - it could simply mean naming it as being in the spiral, or oh, my struggle switch is on. That can help you catch yourself, and again, keep the prefrontal cortex on.
Normalize and validate whatever you’re feeling. Insomnia is a real test of mental fortitude. It’s only human to feel frustrated, anxious, and even a little hopeless sometimes when going through this. Your nervous system and brain are in survival mode - they’re trying to alert you that being awake at night is dangerous.
Re-frame. Remind yourself that your brain and nervous system are operating in survival mode. They’re trying to alert you that being awake at night is dangerous—your system isn't broken, its alarm system is just misguided.
2. Acknowledgement is the Door to Acceptance
Sometimes when people first learn about the concept of befriending wakefulness, they think that they just have to fully accept and embrace it all: the pounding chest, racing thoughts, body tension, and everything else.
The reality? Some things might be easier to accept than others. Some nights might be harder than others. That is all OK.
It can be such a reflex to want to fix or solve things when that happens though, that it keeps us in a state of resistance that only feeds further into the cycle. The solution? You don’t have to be in some zen-like state at night.
When things feel tough, rather than try to tell yourself you’re Ok when you don’t believe it, acknowledge what’s happening.
"I’m having a hard time so far tonight. My chest is tight, and I wish I was sleeping.".
That’s you being honest. You can acknowledge all of that and still practice acceptance. In fact, that’s what acceptance is: you come back to where you are right here, right now, and learn how to respond in a way that helps you loosen your grip on the outcome, even just a little bit.
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 acknowledging where you’re at (#2), while reframing the night.
It can look like:
"Tonight has been really tough so far, and I hope I sleep. Either way, I’m learning to support myself through these hard nights."
This means bringing in choice. We can’t control sleep, but we can learn to have agency over how we spend our night.
If you’re awake, ask yourself:
"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 finding an overnight fix. 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 takes time to rewire that response.
Some nights, you might feel more spacious and able to meet wakeful hours with 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 in the middle of learning.
This is where gentleness comes in. You’re not trying to win 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. This is a process of reminding 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 my words resonate and you're looking for support from someone with both clinical training and lived experience, book a free 20-minute consultation here to see if insomnia coaching with me feels like a good fit.
