Can Insomnia Be Cured?
- John Navilliat
- Nov 30
- 5 min read
If you've had chronic insomnia for awhile, you're probably not wondering what insomnia really is.
You're probably wondering:
Can insomnia be cured?
Will my insomnia ever go away?
Am I stuck like this forever?
What exactly is severe insomnia?
What's the miracle drug for insomnia
Let's walk through all this in a clear, honest way with no sugar coating.
This article is not medical advice, it is strictly educational. If you're worried about your health or safety, please speak with your doctor.
Can Chronic Insomnia Go Away?
Yes. Chronic insomnia can go away. It can improve dramatically to the point where you can get back to sleeping like how you used to.
However, it wouldn't be due to a single pill or a hack. At least not in the long run.
The medical criteria for chronic insomnia disorder according to Cleveland Clinic is as follows:
Lasting 3 months or longer
Sleep difficulty of at least 3 nights a week
Comes with daytime effects like exhaustion, grogginess, etc.
It's not chronic because it's not curable but rather it's chronic because that's the pattern that's stuck around.
What keeps chronic insomnia going?
Insomnia typically starts with a sleep disruption. This can be many different things:
A new job
Illness
New medication
Stimulating substances too late in the evening
A new baby
By itself this isn't a big deal. No one gets perfect sleep 100% of the time, that's just a natural part of life.
When it becomes insomnia is when we start to react in an unhelpful (but understandable) way to try to fix it. This is when we start to:
Micromanage our evenings
Adding more sleep related rules and rituals
Checking sleep tracker
Googling more and more insomnia information
Relying more and more on sedating substances
Eventually your brain starts to learn "Being awake at night is dangerous and I have to learn how to fight it."
This fight, consisting of hyper-vigilance, self-imposed pressure and efforts to make sleep happen are what adds more fuel to chronic insomnia.
What Is Considered Severe Insomnia?
Often people wonder if their insomnia is "bad enough" to count as severe.
From a purely medical diagnosis we can see if we meet the criteria for Insomnia by referring to the DSM-5.
Frequency & Duration
Trouble sleeping at least 3 nights per week
Ongoing for at least 3 months
Daytime Impact
You feel exhausted and groggy regularly
Your quality of life as diminished
Disturbance is not due to another cause
Substance abuse
As I have said before, while this is helpful for a medical export to give someone the diagnosis of insomnia using quantitative benchmarks it does a rather poor job of explaining the inner struggle that really encapsulates insomnia.
In my opinion, what would be considered severe insomnia is if we are frightened of not getting enough sleep, these thoughts are happening very frequently and we are very often not satisfied with the sleep we get.
Can Medications Cause or Worsen Insomnia?
There's a lot of nuance here.
Medications can cause sleep disturbance, in which our sleep can be disrupted momentarily. However, insomnia is a different thing altogether where we make note of that little sleep and decide to put more and more conscious effort to overcome it. This is when the cycle of insomnia can begin. So in that sense medication cannot cause us to have that internal and unhelpful reaction to that initial lack of sleep.
However, it is easy for us during our struggles of insomnia to come to believe that we can only sleep if we take a certain amount of medication. This is where medication can be unhelpful. Not because of the medication itself but rather our outlook towards it.
"I will only sleep if I take this drug."
While it may comfort us to take this "magic pill" that takes away this massive problem in our lives it's not addressing the unresolved fear of wakefulness during the night.
So when or if the medication stops "working" it can be particularly scary for us because it feels like our safety net has failed us.
What Is the Best Treatment for Insomnia?
In my opinion the best way to address insomnia is to address the unresolved fear or lack of acceptance of nighttime wakefulness using ACT-I (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for Insomnia).
ACT-I typically includes:
Acceptance of uncomfortable experiences (and yes, this can be done in a practical way)
Refocusing on the parts of your life that bring you joy (Yes, this is possible even if you didn't sleep great the night before)
Rebuilding a friendlier, gentler sleep pattern (We don't need rigid rules to make sleep happen as we didn't need that before).
Anything that puts us toward how we approached sleep beforehand in my opinion is a better approach.
Is there a miracle drug or “drug of choice” for insomnia?
For better or for worse we don't have a miracle drug for insomnia as there isn't a drug that removes the anxiety around it.
Usually people at this point ask if we should play around with anti-anxiety medication, but that seems to persist the same struggle but in a different way. At the end of the day we are running from anxiety or wakefulness because we've told ourselves that they are simply unbearable.
If instead we take steps to voluntarily embrace the discomfort and wakefulness then that is very helpful in drastically reducing the fear (and discomfort) that we feel. Similar to any other exposure therapy.
What Is the Fastest Way to Start Getting Better?
The more pressure we put on ourselves to overcome insomnia as quickly as possible the less helpful that typically is. Fortunately the struggle of insomnia becomes easier and easier as time goes on, and as a result we naturally feel less and less pressure.
If you want reassurance that there is nothing medical going on I would recommend you speak to your medical provider, but if you've already done that and haven't learned anything satisfactory then I would highly suggest taking steps towards improving your relationship with sleep.
How can we do that? For starters stepping away from all the efforts that we've picked up towards making sleep happen. Those extensive night time routines that take up hours of our time are causing us much more harm than good.
Find ways to make the most out of wakefulness and stop trying to escape it. When you find yourself awake in the middle of the night instead of asking yourself what you can do to make sleep happen, instead try to ask yourself "I'm awake, what can I do to make the most of this time?"
I go into this approach much more thoroughly in my Path to Peace and Sleep Compass programs:
So… Can Insomnia Be Cured?
Insomnia can absolutely be cured. Sleep can go back to a gentle, peaceful and boring aspect of our lives. However we need to remember that we will not find peace in the form of a pill, but rather be relearning a healthy relationship with sleep and wakefulness.
It's not a quick fix magic bullet, however there is an easier and gentler path forward.
Author:
John the Sleep Coach
Certified Sleep Coach | Insomnia to Peace LLC
B.A., University of Rhode Island | Certified by the Sleep Coach School
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