Dr. Michael Grandner

But if you want to stop the ball from rolling, knowing what that is and doing anything about that is largely irrelevant.

The problem you're dealing with now is gravity and momentum.

And that's what happens with chronic insomnia.

It takes on a life of its own because of this concept of conditioned arousal.

So this is what happens.

Something causes you to lose sleep, right?

And

What ends up happening is you exert effort to get that sleep back.

Now, when you lose your keys, what do you do?

You go looking for it.

Where do you look for it?

The last place you had it.

And if you're losing sleep, where are you looking for it?

You're looking for it in bed.

But what's happening is you have this activation going on.

You have this cortical or cognitive or physiologic or any combination of these arousal systems engaged.

And when those are engaged, it is just physically harder to fall asleep.

So even if you are tired, even if your natural sleep-wake drive is working just fine, you have this counterweight sort of keeping your mind and body sort of activated.

So what ends up happening is the act of trying to fall asleep, whether it's the beginning of the night, middle of the night, or wherever, becomes predictably stressful.

The brain's a pattern recognition machine.