Dr. Michael Grandner

And.

When you think about what that means in terms of difficulty falling asleep, there's no hard and fast rule, but a good rule of thumb we use is about 30 minutes.

So if it's taking you at least 30 minutes to fall asleep or you're awake for at least 30 minutes during the night trying to sleep and you can't, that's a good sign that maybe what you have is an insomnia disorder where a lot of people will have occasional sleep difficulties sometimes.

But that's really the difference where it crosses the line to where it's really interfering with your function.

Yeah.

So there's actually something really interesting about chronic insomnia versus acute insomnia.

So acute insomnia, there are an almost unlimited number of things that can cause acute insomnia.

for a very good reason.

I mean, evolution figured out a long time ago that when we're under periods of stress and our survival is questioned and it's bedtime, we kind of should just keep going until we're safe, right?

And we have all these systems in place to protect ourselves.

So under any kind of period of hyperarousal or stress or anything, whether it's mental, physical, or both, we have systems in place that can prolong wakefulness relatively safely, especially in the short term.

And so there are a million causes of short-term insomnia.

But

There's only really one cause of chronic insomnia.

And, and that's, there's a switch that flips from short-term insomnia to chronic insomnia.

And that switch is all around the concept of a conditioned arousal.

That's why when someone comes into the insomnia clinic, often the thing that caused their acute insomnia is actually no longer relevant.

It's sort of like a ball is rolling, right?

And if the ball is rolling down a hill,

And with the ball was pushed, shoved, kicked, leaned on heavily, whatever caused the ball to start moving is important because you want to prevent that in the future.