I have had severe chronic insomnia for 15 years. Along with C-PTSD, depression, and anxiety, which is all my therapists, psychiatrists, and doctors would ever treat, always promising the insomnia would resolve when I got my other diagnoses under control. But how do you resolve trauma when every single night is retraumatizing? This sounds so dramatizing but no one who hasn’t suffered from chronic insomnia could ever understand how far from “dramatic” my statement is.
Pannell is the only sleep advice expert that I have ever read or listened to that actually truly understands insomnia: the anxiety ABOUT sleep that no provider seems to get, the way it controls your life, every minute of the day becoming obsessive ritual to attempt to unlock the right code to sleeping, the true hell that life becomes. Every piece of advice any other provider has ever given me has only fed the insomnia and anxiety and attempts to control. They should all be in jail (not really but I do wish them a few years of the same fate). I am not exaggerating when I say that years of “true” Trauma did not break me the way insomnia did. No abuse or assault gave me the suicidal fantasies that insomnia did. No Traumatic event in my life made me hate everything about myself and lose any trust in my body or mind the way chronic insomnia has. No Trauma made me wish to be anyone else except me the way sleep anxiety did. I thought my insomnia must be so much worse, so much different and more deeply rooted in who I am than it was for others if no sleep advice seemed to work for me. My therapists want to rehash all my Trauma and process it and tell me everything from relaxation techniques to hula hooping would cure me (if I did it right, often enough, and stood on one foot, hopped around, and said a prayer while crossing my fingers). I berated myself for not being able to meditate well enough, that I must be doing relaxation techniques wrong, that my anxious brain must be seriously so damaged and deranged as to override its need to sleep on such a consistent pathological basis. When Pannell disparaged sleep hygiene and relaxation techniques and all the rituals we create trying to do everything perfectly in order to get sleep, I could have kissed him.
I have only begun to implement these techniques and was going to wait to write my review after I’ve been “cured,” but this book has instilled such confidence (for the first time in 15 years) in my ability to implement these techniques and that they’ll work, that I don’t even need to wait for them to work before writing this. That’s a miracle by itself. I have hope for the first time. That’s everything.
Additionally, the author’s use of humor is brilliant and so validating in a way I never thought possible, and I am honestly in awe of him. I’ve read other CBT-I books and half-heartedly tried the techniques that I quickly determined were only making the problem worse for me (because my insomnia was different, worse, and incurable, of course). He has given me a kind of hope and promise that I never thought I’d ever have. I am so grateful for this wonderful, wonderful man. At the very least I know for the first time I’m not alone and someone (finally someone) truly understands.