Set It & Forget It: by Daniel Erichsen
Overcoming insomnia and transforming your sleep.
From the cover:
Most books about sleep give you the same old advice: Create a bedtime ritual, avoid screens, cut down on coffee, bla bla bla. If that’s the book you’re looking for, keep browsing the store.
Set it & Forget it teaches you something new. Read it and you will understand why sleep hygiene is a trap, why giving up anything in the pursuit of getting more sleep is a bad idea and why nothing you tried has worked. Most importantly it will teach you what you should do: Much less than you think. Understand why you haven’t slept well, let go of habits that have gotten you stuck and restful sleep will come your way.
Why should you read this book?
About 30% of people suffer from some form of insomnia. If you’re one of these people, you understand how helpless it can feel when nothing works to help you sleep better. This book tackles insomnia from its root cause. Our fear of sleeplessness. When we start to see what’s really causing our insomnia, we can learn how to treat it. And it won’t cost anything. There’s no supplements or pills or special tasks. If you’re struggling to sleep, give this book a shot.
Key Insights:
Sleep isn’t complicated. In fact, it’s super simple. There are only two factors that determine how well we sleep. The gas and the brake.
Sleepiness, or sleep drive, is the gas in the sleep system. The longer you’re awake, the stronger your sleep drive is and the more your body wants to sleep.
Hyperarousal (any type of heightened alertness such as stress, anxiety, or excitement) is the brake in the sleep system.
If we’re not sleep or tired, we won’t sleep. If we’re anxious, we won’t sleep. But if we’re tired enough and feel relaxed, sleep usually isn’t a problem.
Hyperarousal is the key to insomnia. When a certain event/night or a series of bad nights occurs that keeps us from sleeping, we get frustrated by it. This triggers anxiety about not sleeping. This inner anxiety triggers our fight-or-flight response. Your brain starts to see insomnia as a threat. Because our sleeplessness makes us feel bad and when we feel bad, we worry about it. Now our brains start to fixate on sleeping. It activates, looking to understand the threat, which creates hyperarousal. Now we can’t sleep.
Imagine you get food poisoning from poorly cooked chicken at a certain restaurant. You spend days sick to your stomach. Afterwards, you start to worry about eating that same chicken at that same restaurant. This is how your brain works. It remembers the threat of something that hurt you. The same thing happens with our sleep.
Once this anxiety kicks in about sleep, our sleep only becomes harder to manage. So we worry more about it. We take supplements and sleeping pills, we wear sleep masks and drink tea and meditate before bed. We end up making sleep a really big deal, which puts more pressure on it. More pressure means more anxiety. More anxiety means less sleep.
Set it & Forget it will help explain how to manage this hyperarousal and get back to sleeping well again.
About the Author
Daniel Erichsen is a sleep sleep physician obsessed with helping people reach their goal of amazing sleep all the time.