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On Insomnia (September 5, 2025)

What could be more contemporary than the suffocating experience of insomnia?

Indeed.

It’s that moment when you wake up at 3:30 a.m., your mind buzzing with thoughts, ideas, urgent matters, not-so-urgent matters, and a life situation that feels completely out of grasp. Thoughts you’ve latched onto keep looping endlessly. Sleep medication or hypnotics might help—for a while. Yet eventually, insomnia sneaks back, making sleep even harder to reach. Therapeutic meditation can offer relief, but a quiet skepticism lingers in the background, whispering that it won’t last. Sleep hygiene routines—a cool room, blackout curtains, fresh air—may work temporarily, until you remember, as night falls, the fear: what if I wake up again to that same anxious feeling? You drift off peacefully—and then, like clockwork, bing! 3:30 a.m., wide awake and alert as a bird.
This, unfortunately, is all too familiar to me.

I know this first-hand—too well. I’ve struggled with periodic insomnia for years, and it always seems to arrive unannounced. Everything feels fine… until it doesn’t.

I’ve learned that what helps me most is the moment I let go—the moment I realize that the universe doesn’t care about my insomnia. The truth is, I’m not even consciously lamenting it; I’m simply too busy, too achievement-oriented, too meticulous about keeping a certain rhythm. 

My sleep problems mirror the way I work. I’m a person who easily blames myself, worries excessively, and gets trapped in overthinking. During stressful periods, I notice how my thoughts revolve around how things should be. That little word—“should”—dominates my inner monologue: I should do this, I should act that way, I should call tomorrow, I should stop all this should-ing.
Good sleep hygiene, blackout curtains, even fresh air don’t help in such a state. My biggest problem isn’t insomnia itself—it’s my perfectionistic approach to managing it. Insomnia is deeply personal, intertwined with stressors that, when chronic, create a self-perpetuating cycle: worrying about sleep becomes the new stressor. Soon, stress generates more stress, and coping turns into rigid self-control—a mental effort to “manage” rest, which paradoxically prevents relaxation itself.

For my clients, the most common causes of insomnia seem to be:
Diffuse worries—burdens without a clear cause, creating a sense of inner emptiness or vague anxiety about not sleeping, which in turn feeds new fears.

Chronic relational or life-management conflicts, often accompanied by self-blaming thoughts that disrupt emotional awareness, fostering restlessness and compulsive self-monitoring.

The same applies to anxiety—it often travels hand in hand with insomnia. The resulting tangle of problems leads to mental hypervigilance and compulsive thinking about how things are and, especially, how they should be. This creates inner conflict: things must not go differently, or else—and, on top of that, concern about how everything appears to others.

Obsessive Thought Patterns Behind Insomnia

Insomnia linked to obsessive or intrusive thinking often emerges when the mind repeatedly evaluates and judges the situation, forming rigid expectations of how things must look or be. From a cognitive psychotherapy perspective, this mindset is maladaptive—it maintains threat appraisals that keep both body and mind on high alert.

When attention is focused on what must not happen, inner struggle intensifies and crowds out calmness. This reveals a pattern of “should-thinking”, which heightens pressure and reinforces a sense of impending failure.

Such thinking impacts self-concept: the person begins to feel responsible for controlling the uncontrollable, and self-worth becomes tied to that perceived control. The inner critic strengthens, often straining interpersonal relationships, as mental energy is spent on managing inadequacy rather than connecting with others. Practically speaking, cognitive flexibility narrows, and a self-sustaining loop forms—one where rest and recovery fade into the background. Thus, obsessive thought patterns not only follow insomnia but actively maintain and amplify it.

Relentlessness Is a Skill (October 23, 2025)

(On Relentlessness and Understanding)

Over the years, I have worked with many different people. Much of my work has focused on understanding the experience of struggling with one’s own difficulties—and on bringing both *understanding* and *relentlessness* “onto the table.” People live their lives in constant relationship to the events that shape them. The experiences we go through teach us—or rather remind us—that the internal patterns of thought and reaction we once learned still feel functional, even when, in truth, they may no longer serve us at all. What we’ve learned is bound to time and context and often charged with a deep sense of psychological safety. That which has hurt us in the past tends to remain something we seek to avoid or prevent, both consciously and unconsciously.

And here, we often become remarkably relentless toward ourselves. The same can be said about the ways we try to ease that psychological pain—those, too, can become traps of their own. Relentlessness is, in a sense, a skill—one that requires courage to question: *Is it really worth carrying this burden simply because my internal sense of demand tells me I must?* What we call “necessary effort” may, in reality, be just our interpretation of what we think carrying the burden will allow us to achieve. And why, after all, do we assume that achievement itself is meaningful when the role we’ve taken is one of dissatisfaction—of carrying a load shaped by restlessness and discontent? Are we truly indebted to ourselves to keep striving under self-oppressive ideas and images that lead us toward exhaustion? Being active is good—but is activity, when it serves only endless survival, truly purposeful?

I often find myself reflecting on the difference between *our life story* and *life itself.* The map is not the terrain. Why, then, do we pursue experiences that weigh us down and shatter our remaining energy into fragments? Why do we gravitate toward situations that mirror old inner images—those we’ve quietly carried since childhood? Our life story acts both as a heavy ballast and as a set of survival lessons. Humanity lives *in time*, and time lives *in us.* What worked in the 1990s likely doesn’t work in 2025—just as what was true in 2019 may no longer apply now. We’ve all changed—some over decades, others within just a few years.

Modern life is characterized by refined cognition. We must be aware of *everything.* And in that demand for awareness, we return—again and again—to what feels safe and familiar: our internalized patterns. Yet by doing so, we lose touch with the emotional essence that once made those patterns meaningful. Perhaps it is this loss that leaves us yearning for a tangible, embodied sense of experience.

It is, therefore, unsurprising that we begin a relentless struggle to reclaim that lost feeling. But how do we pursue it? By turning our relentlessness inward. We ignore one need after another, chasing fleeting lights from the past that we deem significant in the present. Eventually, we find ourselves caught in a loop that demands the “right” way of being, thinking, feeling—and above all, perfect timing.
I realize that this cycle of avoidance and control reinforces a core belief: *I am safe only if I manage and endure.* Such a schema drives behavior rooted in constant striving and survival, which in turn strengthens the experience of inadequacy and emotional disconnection from oneself.

Difficult Emotions Exist Between People

What might happen in human relationships if we dared to be openly unfinished with one another—and with ourselves? I’ve been thinking about this a great deal lately. Not so much because I’m tired of the dark season or burdened by everyday life, but because I’ve begun to notice something essential about the way I relate to myself and to others: the thought “I know how this works” no longer holds.

As a cognitive psychotherapist, I see this above all as a reaction within me. Not in the other person, not in the relationship itself, but in the way I interpret and explain what I experience. This realization has been significant. It has been liberating, and at the same time it has opened up a new way of examining how easily I turn my own difficult emotions, feelings of inadequacy, and beliefs about busyness into measures of my self-worth. Moments when I have dared to say to myself and to another, “I don’t know right now how to be with this, and I don’t have a ready-made answer,” have revealed something essential. In those moments, something real happens.

Human relationships are multifaceted. They can be wounded, strong, conflicted, or sources of safety—often all of these at once. We live in relationships, and relationships live in us. We also live in relationship to problems and solutions. Our thinking is often built on the assumption that things should be resolved, clarified, and completed. For this reason, tolerating incompleteness is difficult for many. What we cannot bear within ourselves easily appears in another person, in a relationship, or in a situation—sometimes as a problem, sometimes as a compulsive solution. From a cognitive perspective, this is partly a matter of unconsciously projecting emotions and expectations outside ourselves. But the fact remains: we are unfinished. This is not a flaw, but a fundamental condition of life.

We often notice that we react faster than we have time to think. Automatic thoughts, bodily tension, and emotional responses activate in an instant. This reactivity does not ease the pain associated with incompleteness—on the contrary, it often intensifies it. Inner irritation, restlessness, or a harsh inner critic takes the reins, leaving no room for reflection. When we operate on autopilot, we become overloaded. The flood of thoughts and emotions grows, and our ability to regulate ourselves in everyday life begins to falter.

But what happens when we pause? When we don’t react immediately? When curiosity replaces certainty: what is happening within me right now?

In my experience, expertise—or humanity in general—does not diminish when we let go of omniscience and urgency in relation to one another. Quite the opposite. When we dare to meet our own reactions gently and consciously, we create space for reflection. Then incompleteness becomes something we can examine, not something we must escape. And it is precisely in that space that relationships can become more genuine and more flexible.