Conquering Insomnia, Anxiety, and Sleep-Related Issues, Part 1 | Ep. 12 (Audio Only)

One of my biggest pet peeves is when people declare, you know, sleep is really important. You should really work on getting a good night's sleep. When I hear that, I want to smack them across the side of the head and shout, what a good idea. I wish I'd have thought of that. But then I take a breath, I count to four, I exhale on four counts and thank my prefrontal cortex for preventing me from having an outburst when someone is simply trying to be kind and helpful. But if you're listening to this, it probably means that you, like myself, struggle with sleep, and I'd be willing to venture that helpful advice, like what we just heard doesn't help. Instead, it reminds you how powerless and frustrated you feel every single night when you get into bed and lay awake counting sheep while the rest of the world snoozes away. The good news is, is that sleep again. And I am going to show you how. I'm Dr. Nicole Kane, a naturopathic doctor with a master's in clinical psychology and a former anxiety sufferer turned anxiety Freedom Rebel Meltdown I was staring at the ceiling, the distant sound of the living room clock ticking in the back of my mind. The pillow beneath my head is too hard, so I punch it. It's too hot in my room, and so I flip back the blankets. But sleep doesn't come. Instead, my little helpers, which is what I call the parts of me that step in when things seem to be going awry, they take center stage. Did you remember to call the pharmacy back regarding Bob's prescription? One whispers, and it's been a while since Stephanie's called. You should check on her, says another. Your rent is really expensive. You should really be adding more clients to the schedule. A third chimes in. A surge of adrenaline pushes up through my chest, and I reach for the bottle of kava kava on my nightstand. I am afraid of taking benzodiazepines. I've heard about how addictive they can be, and besides, I'm an integrative physician. My expertise is mental health, including insomnia. I shouldn't need those drugs. I should be able to supplement my way through this kava. Down the hatch. I pick up my phone and ignore the whispers from my helpers chiming in about sleep hygiene, and I open my email and check my client schedule. Hours pass, the sun comes up and I still haven't slept. Heart throbbing with anxiety and heat coursing through the nerves along my back and arms, I get up, shower, and head into work. This happened the next night and the next and the next. Now I'm getting frantic. To compensate for exhaustion, my body is likely producing buckets of cortisol and adrenaline, and my helpers are now desperately spinning through all of the things that could be wrong with me and are creating complex stor treatment regimens in the back of my mind. I try acupuncture, amino acids, herbs, homeopathic remedies, meditation, hypnosis, guided imagery, eft, sleep apps, distraction, positive affirmations, cognitive behavioral therapy, Ambien, and finally benzodiazepines. What started as a little bit of difficulty sleeping had blown up into a full blown stage of crisis where I felt trapped, afraid, despairing, and I was now taking the drugs I had feared the most. There was one giant pink elephant in my story and it was something I had been unwilling to face and no one else knew about it. Your Big Pink Elephant when it comes to sleeplessness, there's almost always a giant pink elephant. It can range from an unresolved issue at work to guilt to a medical concern or even the need for a relationshipectomy. There are four things about elephants that you need to know. 1. Elephants don't live in the city. That means that you have to get out of your neighborhood and go into the wilderness of your experience. Get still, crouch down and listen. If you're lucky and patient, after a while an elephant might emerge. Elephants take up a lot of space. This is one reason elephants are such bad house guests. They are large and they can occupy so much of your real estate that they interfere with your day to day living. Some elephants are so big relative to your space that they can literally occupy every single nook and cranny so that you barely fit. Number three. Elephants are high maintenance. Elephants require a lot of care. Being as large as they are, you have to put a lot of effort into keeping them around. This is where your helpers come into play, constantly feeding your elephants with thoughts, rearranging furniture in order to make space, and making excuses for the giant piles of poo all over your metaphorical floor. Our helpers are such adept elephant keepers that many of us go for years without an audit of our living situation. And finally, number four Elephants are heavy. My pink elephant was powerful, elusive and clever. She did such a good job at showing me what it was that I most desperately wanted that I did not realize that she was what was sitting on my chest, pressing the air out of my lungs and crushing my ability to make change in my life. She had left the country and had come into the city into my home and into my world. She was occupying space, but I couldn't see her. I was unwilling to see her. I didn't pay attention. My elephant came with me everywhere. She and my menagerie of little loyal helpers directed my frenetic energy from doctoring others to doctoring myself. They kept me company while I swallowed back hundreds of dollars of supplements, patted my hand while I was in pincushion sessions with my acupuncturist, and trotted along by my side when I exerc meditated and they crowded in the treatment rooms as I cried from sheer exhaustion. During a massage, I talked with some of the best experts in the field and no one asked me about my elephant. No one thought it was particularly odd that I had a 14,000 pound critter at my heels. But here's the reason why my elephant was making friends with their elephants. We were like one big happy family. And as I settled into my bed at night, night after night, six months in bottles of pills on my nightstand and listening to all sorts of worthless advice from well intended friends, family members, clinicians and all of their elephants, their denials, their issues, their shadows, I decompensated. My elephant ate up my well being in order to sustain her massive size. And her ears gently pumped the oxygen into the fire, causing it to grow bigger and bigger. Instead of getting the fire extinguisher, I scooted over and I made room for my giant pink friend. I wasn't interested in what she had to say. The kaboom. For some people, realizations seep in slowly, like an essential oil diffuser, gently filling the room until it becomes detectable to the human nose. And then we say, oh, what's that for me? It's usually a whisper that I ignore that gets louder and louder and louder until eventually it becomes a great big explosion. And then my eyes go wide and my heart slams up into my throat and I'm stunned. For better or for worse, I have a very keen ability to compartmentalize my feelings and thoughts until they get so big that it takes a giant kaboom in order to get my attention. Some people call it stockpiling. I prefer to call it selective attention. But one day, that smack in the face got my attention. I blinked and I blinked again and I saw my elephant sitting right there in my face. And I said, what are you doing here? I'm protecting you. She answered. From what? From you came the reply. Let it burn. One of the worst symptoms that came with my insomnia and anxiety was burning the Best way to describe it is like coals from a fire being placed against my muscles, between my shoulders and the back, my chest and down my arms. I was on fire, but not in a good way. The fire tormented me. My nerves were screaming with the best voices they knew how, and they finally had my attention. I looked at my elephant and I realized that I had created a life for myself that was in absolute defiance of what my soul needed. There had been a thousand opportunities to choose differently. But ignoring the whispers from my inner knowing, I made decisions that were in direct opposition of what was right for me. My health, my relationships, and my well being. I was living a life running on a hedonic treadmill. And every time the helpers chimed in and reminded me of what else I needed to do, they reminded me of what I was running away from. I pumped up the speed. I ran harder. I ran faster. For me, the giant pink elephant that had been with me all along was a representation of the life I had created. She was asking to simply be seen. Most of us will not make a change unless the suffering overrules the effort of doing something different. For me, that moment had arrived. I was out of air. My relationships were failing. It was game over. Sometimes our lives hold us captive. Whether it be a belief system that is no longer useful, relationships that crush our spirits, or traumas that are burying us alive. Sometimes the answer is this. Just let it burn. As the burning pain tormented me, prevented sleep, and drove me into hysterics with anxiety, it was also the method by which I was finally set free. The binds that tied me down caught fire and burned up. And so I closed my location, packed up my house and moved across the country. I cut back on my work hours, and instead of clocking in over 60 hours a week, I dropped down to 40 hours. Instead of spending my weekends studying cases and expanding my knowledge of materia medica, I had tea with my neighbor and I convalesced. And I healed. And the other amazing tools that I had in my repertoire as an integrative physician and counselor worked. I used amino acids, botanicals. Breathing. I went to counseling. I learned mindfulness. It helped me taper down on the medications, and I started to sleep again. The burning embers became smaller and my elephant visited less often. Sometimes now I miss her. But mostly I'm happy that she's back in the safari where she belongs. This is about you. I'd like to stop here and share with you some questions that helped me identify my elephant. Try to spend time with these questions. Let Them, marinate, simmer with them. I want to encourage you to take your time, often come back and add to your responses. You might find that you feel differently about them at different times of day. It's very likely that your elephant has been with you for a while and is friends with your friends, elephants. And so it's up to you. And as you may be coming to realize, elephants have deep memories. They're highly intelligent and they're masters at their craft. And so here are the questions I encourage you to write down and to start to examine and ask yourself over the coming days and weeks. What is my deepest core fear? What's in their love? What are you most afraid of? What is that thing that you don't want to face? What is that thought, that circumstance, that experience that is so scary and difficult for you that you either shove it in the back burner, you ignore it, you repress it. What is that? What is my deepest core fear? And the second is, what am I doing to avoid experiencing that fear from coming true for me? Loves? I was working, I was always saying yes. In fact, I remember when I was in my residency in medical school after I graduated, and I was sitting with an attending physician and he said, nicole, you know why I like you. And I turned to him and I said, why? And he said, because you never say no, you always say yes. What was I saying yes to? As a trade off? What was I avoiding? Ask yourself, what am I doing to avoid experiencing that fear from coming true? And then third, in what ways do I feel chained? What's tying you down? What are the bonds that are holding you captive? What is the elephant that's sitting on your chest? What is your obstacle? What is preventing you from living your best life? In what ways do you feel chained? And then fourth is, what is my anxiety, my anger, my grief? What is it trying to tell me? What are your knowing helpers saying to you? What is your elephant's message? Our symptoms are our body's best attempts to give us data on what needs healed. What are your feelings trying to tell you? What is your insomnia trying to tell you? If you wake up every morning at 4 o', clock, what's underneath of that? What is it trying to tell you? And then fifth, drop in and ask your body, ask your gut, ask your knowing, what is my pink elephant? Don't answer this from your thoughts, answer it from your gut, what is my pink elephant? And then ask yourself, where are the holes in my life? Where does the emptiness lie? We're exploring those Dark crevices. Those conversations that we often don't pay attention to, we don't want to have, we don't want to think about. Oftentimes in therapy, we identify negative thoughts, inaccurate thoughts, feelings that we're having. But oftentimes our therapists, pink elephants are hanging out with our pink elephants. And we're all left crowded out by elephants so that we can't see these things. And so it's your turn. It's your time. It's your chance to ask yourself, what is my pink elephant? Where does the emptiness lie? What is my deepest core fear? What is my elephant saying to me? What's next? Often the question that follows this is what's next for me. It was hitting control, alt del on my life and moving east. But that might not be the answer for you. Sometimes the answer is just the opposite. Maybe it's pacing something that you've been avoiding. Maybe it's stopping doing something that you've been doing. This is where the deep work shines. For me, what came next was a fire hydrant of change. The trajectory that I had been traveling for 15 plus years had not been honoring what my soul needed most. And my elephant came and she sat on my chest and stayed there until I finally paid attention. And this brings us to the most important question that no one asked me. And so I'm going to ask you now. What do you need to let go of? What do you need to let go of? Love. You can sleep again. I promise you this. The first step is to find your elephant and get up close and personal. Only then will you understand. And by understand, I don't mean just logically. I mean in the kaboom sense. And that life changing, oh my God, I get it. Sense. And what typically follows the awakening is the burning. And then after the burning, the rebuilding. So do the journaling. Be brave. You can do this. I'm going to be writing this up and putting it in a booklet for you. And in the next half of the booklet, I'm going to share with you everything that I know in terms of integrative and counseling approaches to helping you sleep. But I don't want to share that with you here today because I want you to just focus on your elephant. It's so easy to want to bypass doing the work and to say yes, yes, yes. What were those bottles of supplements on your nightstand? Hook me up. But I think we can do better than that. I think we can do better than the pill for an ill or the supplement for a symptom. I believe that if we can identify the root of the root of the root, then that is the answer to getting your life back. And this doesn't have to take years on a counselor's couch. It doesn't have to cost you thousands and thousands of dollars. This is work that you can do, you can do on your own, and it would be done by investing in yourself and you're worth it. And it works. I'm telling you from my personal testimony and having worked with people in the last decade on doing this kind of work, love, you can get well, it's worth the effort. It's worth the time. Like we said earlier, oftentimes we don't make change until the symptoms of suffering overrule the effort of doing something different. Has that moment arrived for you? Is it game over? Is it time to control, alt delete? Is it time to start afresh? What needs to burn? You can get your life back, and I'm going to be here with you every step of the way. So as the next weeks come, stay tuned because I'm going to be releasing that booklet and I'm going to have all of this in writing. I'm going to have the journaling questions for you, and I'm going to include all of the integrative naturopathic counseling techniques that I used. These things work, love, but you have to do this part first. So commit to yourself to doing the journaling and do the work. And let's get going together. Hey everyone, thanks for listening. This has been Dr. Nicole Caine. If you want more free information on how to get your life back, check out my website@www.Dr.nicolecane.com. you can send me questions, learn about consulting with me directly, and even preview my online courses. And now for the disclaimer.

The recording you just listened to consists of the personal opinions of Dr. Nicole Caine, a naturopathic doctor with a master's in Clinical psychology. While these opinions are based upon literature, her counseling education, medical training, and clinical experience, this content should not be viewed as the definitive opinion on these subjects. Listening to this podcast is not not a substitute for any sort of medical, psychological or other form of treatment. If you are in a Crisis, please call 911-OR call the National Suicide Prevention Line at 1-800-273-8255. If you're in need of counseling, don't hesitate to make an appointment with a counselor in your area. Dr. Nicole Kane is so passionate about people getting their life back. If this resonates with you and you think this podcast will would help someone you love, please share it with them. Stay in the conversation with Dr. Nicole Cain about writing the next chapter of your life so that it plays out just the way you want it. Explore your options for working with her at www. Dr. Nicolecane.com that's Dr. D R Nicole N I C O L E Caine C-A-I n.com when you're there, be sure to take advantage of of the Free Anxiety Freedom One week Challenge. We look forward to seeing you on the next episode of the get your life Back podcast. Here's to your next chapter.

SA.