Q&A 50 – The Wisdom in Insomnia

In instances where our bodies and our innate wisdom are speaking to us, it can be tempting to see those messages as problems. But when we see them for the wisdom they carry and stay open to the messages these ‘problems’ have for us, we begin to see that they are always trying to help us on our paths as human beings.

You can listen above, on your favorite podcast app, or watch on YouTube. Notes, links, resources and a full transcript are below.

Show Notes

• When a good sleeper encounters a bout of insomnia
• Discovering insightfully that is people pleasing tendencies keeping me awake
• How insomnia does not mean that I’m broken or that my ability to sleep is broken
• How insomnia, like overeating, is feedback about our mental state
• What is insight and how does it arrive?
• On the universal intelligence that is always flowing through all of us

Transcript of episode

Hello explorers and welcome to Q&A episode 50 of Unbroken. I’m Alexandra Amor.

Before we get started today, I want to have a little mini celebration with you. Because this is q&a Episode 50. That means there are 100 episodes have Unbroken now. 50 episodes like this q&a one and 50 interview episodes. I’m pretty happy and proud of that milestone and I thank you for being with me here along for the ride, however long you’ve been joining me.

It’s a real pleasure for me to be here to do this every week, and to share what I see with the aim of helping others, of supporting and uplifting and sharing what has made such a big huge difference in my life. So here’s to another 100 episodes. I aim to be around for the next year as well.

February 14, 2024 will be the one year anniversary of the current website and the Freedom From Overeating course and Unbroken podcast. So we’ll celebrate that as well.

Today’s q&a episode is going to involve a bit of a story.

I’m also going to give you some background to give some context for what I’m about to share. And this story today has to do with insight, it has to do with our unbrokenness, which is really nice given that this is the 100th episode. So let’s get started.

I’ll begin by telling you that about towards the end of 2023, October or November, there came a situation. I should back up a little further. I’m on the board or I was on the board of a little nonprofit that exists here in the town where I live. It’s a nonprofit housing society, independent living for seniors in the Ucluelet area. I’ve been on the board for a couple of years. And there’s one paid position in this organization. And the building is just a small, like, it looks like an apartment building. It has 10 apartments, all for seniors.

And it’s independent living, like I said, so everybody is independent.

They really don’t need any kind of assistance with mental health or physical chores or that kind of thing. Some of them can get care workers to come in, but 80% 90% of them don’t. It’s like an apartment building. And there’s one paid position. And it’s an administrative position that is 15 hours a week in the building. The woman who had been doing it was of retirement age. And also, she had been with the organization for five years and had brought the people, the tenants through the pandemic. And so she was feeling a little bit burnt out.

So at the end of 2023, the board kind of came to a little bit of a crisis point in that this woman wanted to retire. And we had done some interviews looking for someone to take the position and couldn’t really find anybody who we felt would be a really good fit either because they weren’t available at the times we needed them to be or that kind of thing. And in the end, I actually had an insight. I was in the shower one day, and it suddenly occurred to me, “Well, what if I did that work? What if I committed to doing it for a year?”

Like I say it’s just two or three hours a day. So I could do it in addition to doing this work here that I do for Unbroken and Freedom From Overeating. And it would help with the board that I was on that was in a bit of a pickle.

And it would also give this business, AlexandraAmor.com, a bit of it, it felt like it just needed some space and some time to grow and to find its feet. With any self-employment venture you know they say when you start a new business it takes three to five years before it really comes into its own and has a lot of momentum and is earning its keep so to speak, that that the finances go into the black. And so I thought, well, this job with the seniors housing is doable in terms of it’s just a couple of hours a day. And I would be earning a little bit of income on the side from that, which would give this business, a little bit of space, a little bit of space and time to evolve and to find its feet.

So it seemed like a really good fit.

And because the idea came to me insightfully it felt good.

I sat with it for a while and then I put the idea forward, and it was accepted. So fast forward, it’s now February 2024. And the job is going really well. And I’m encountering real problems sleeping.

I’ve always been a really good sleeper. I’ve never had any sort of serious bouts of insomnia. I always fall asleep the minute my head hits the pillow. And in fact, I need quite a lot of sleep. I tend to be somebody who needs eight or nine hours a night. And I come from a family of nappers, so I’m also good at napping. So when these problems with sleeping started to crop up, it became a little bit worrisome.

The way it’s showing up for me is that I go to sleep okay but then I wake up in the middle of the night, sort of 1, 2, 3 o’clock, and I can’t get back to sleep. I can feel my mind just really revving up, really super revved up, I guess that’s the only word I can use with thinking. And it is about the job that I have.

Sometimes it’s so churned up and so speedy, my thinking, that I can feel it in my body as well. My body has this electrical feeling. It’s not physical, a physical feeling. It’s more like, energetic. So that started happening at probably at the end of the year, end of December, and then it’s carried on through January, and into February.

It’s not every single night, but I would say it’s probably four nights a week, which is not great.

And what it means is that it’s interfering with my daytime routine. It’s interfering with this job, with my Freedom From Overeating stuff, my website and the podcast and everything. Because the time that I do have here at home to work on those things, I often have to have a nap. That cuts into the amount of time that I’m able to devote here.

It’s been bothering me, and it’s been on my mind. And then it happened again last night. I woke up at probably about 3:30. I was awake for a couple of hours, lots and lots and lots of thinking about this job. And the challenges that we have there. What happens is that the person in my position, I’m the person that everybody brings their problems and their grievances and their questions and their concerns and to. There’s 10 tenants, so I’m the recipient of all that stuff from every tenant. And not that every tenant is complaining all the time. That’s not the case. But if there’s a challenge or a problem, I’m the logical place that the person comes to talk to.

I’m also the point of contact for the board. So if they have any questions or challenges or problems, I’m also the point of contact for the contractors. So we have, so the tenants are provided with one meal a day they get their evening meal provided by the building, as it were. And so there are two chefs that are on staff that split the days between them the days of the week. And there’s a maintenance guy, and it’s just, it’s a lot.

So last night, I was lying in bed, once again, awake in the middle of the night, staring at the ceiling and flopping around trying to find a comfortable position so that I could fall back asleep. And it wasn’t happening. And thinking about we have a meeting today actually, as I record this, that’s going to be a bit fraught. I was thinking about all these things.

And then I had a little insight, which was so nice.

I was thinking about why is this challenging? I know that we live in the world of our thinking, not in the world of our experiences, I know that for sure. And I know not to be too concerned, like when my mind is really stirred up at night, and I’m lying there in the middle of the night worried about things. I know not to take it too seriously. So I really take it with a grain of salt. And just let it happen, like a thunderstorm. I just let it roll by. And don’t try not to grab on to any one of the thoughts in the middle of the night and turn them into a bigger problem. I felt like I was managing all that stuff really well.

And given my understanding of the principles, too. So what I was thinking about last night was, like I said, Why? Why is my mind so sped up? I’m really familiar with this kind of administrative work, I’ve done it my entire adult life. And I’ve been self-employed basically since 1999. And the job itself, like the paperwork, and the all the things that go on is not that challenging. It’s pretty quiet, actually. Which is probably why the job is only funded for 15 hours, a weak and totally manageable. And so this is all the stuff that I was thinking about in the middle of the night.

Then it struck me – this was the insight – the people pleaser in me is really struggling with pleasing all these people.

And like I said, there’s a lot of them, there’s 10 tenants, there’s seven or eight board members, there’s five or six contractors. That’s a lot of people to please when you’re a people pleaser. So that struck me and was really incredibly helpful.

I’ll go back into my background now a little bit and share where this people pleasing tendency came from. And then I’m going to go forward and talk about what I see about what’s going on, and also what I can do about what’s happening now that I know what’s going on. So going into my background a little bit and how I became a great a people pleaser.

I’ve mentioned before, my dad, sadly, was a rage filled alcoholic the entire time that I knew him while he was on this planet.

He passed away a couple of years ago. But as a little child, a tiny little girl, I just remember being afraid all the time. And so as children, of course, one way that we deal with something like that, is to become a people pleaser, to really turn ourselves into a pretzel, to try to make the person happy.

As children, that’s really a survival mechanism. Because we need our caregivers to like us, to be pleased with us, to be happy with us. That keeps us alive. Really, when we think about it, in terms of the primitive parts of our brain, our caregivers being connected to us, and protective of us and all that kind of stuff, pleased with us, is to the primitive parts of our brain, what keeps us alive. So I totally get where that comes from.

And my poor old dad, I have so much compassion for him now. And for his life. He never really had a chance to be anything other than a rage filled alcoholic. He was raised by a woman, my grandmother, who was so she got married probably in the mid 1930s, to my grandfather. And she was incredibly intelligent, probably the smartest person I’ve ever met, and ambitious and driven and loved to work. And unfortunately, her husband, my grandfather, refused to let her work because it was the 1930s and husbands had that kind of control over their wives. And that makes me incredibly sad.

She would have been an amazing business woman, slash employee, whatever she chose to do, she would have been amazing at it. That makes me feel really emotional. I feel really sad for. So what ended up happening was that she stayed home, she was a homemaker. And she had a child just by default, because that’s what you do at that time, and so she had my dad and wasn’t into it at all. I don’t think treated him very well at all.

As a result, he became an adult who was filled with rage, and the way that he chose to soothe himself was with alcohol.

It makes total sense. I talk about all the time how our unwanted habits are a solution, they’re not a problem. And that’s exactly what his alcoholism was, it was a solution. His head was just must have been full of razor blades. That’s the way I describe it, like just angry, unhappy, self judgmental, horrible thinking all the time. No sense of self appreciation or self esteem, I don’t think or gentleness with himself or compassion for himself. I mean, if I had ever you use the word compassion with him, he would have said, define compassion, I have no idea what that means.

So naturally, he became an alcoholic. Of course, he did. And was one until the end of his days. And that makes me really sad as well. So anyway, this was the person that I was raised by. And that’s where the people pleasing comes in.

I thought about it a little bit over the years and noticed it in myself, of course, off and on. And when, in the old days, when Oprah had her TV show, I would really relate to when she had people pleasing episodes of the show. But I don’t give it a lot of thought on a day to day basis. I probably haven’t thought about it in years. And it’s not the way I define myself, certainly. But I do have these people pleasing tendencies.

I want everyone around me to be happy and calm.

When people get angry and upset, I really take it personally. I feel like I need to fix whatever’s going on, it’s my responsibility to fix everyone around me, which is not a great personality characteristic. But there it is, here we are. So, in the middle of the night, last night, these were the connections that I made that this is what’s causing the stress and the busy mind that’s waking me up in the middle of the night.

I notice it at other times of day too. I notice when I’m walking home from the little job, I can often be thinking a lot about whatever happened that day or what needs to happen the next day or the troubles that people have brought and laid at my doorstep. And I can also notice, sometimes when I’m wanting to be doing other stuff, like when I’m wanting to be working on things for my website, I’ve mentioned I want have a lot of creative projects that I want to be working on that instead, my mind will be preoccupied with the stuff that’s going on, at the seniors housing.

So this occurred to me last night about the people pleasing, and that it was a big relief, and very shortly after that, I was able to roll over and go back to sleep. So that was a really big deal after probably, I don’t know, six weeks, seven weeks to see what was actually happening. I knew that the busy mind stuff was related to the job. I just hadn’t connected the dots closely enough about the people pleasing stuff. So that was a really helpful insight last night.

Now we come to the point of this episode. That’s all the backstory.

I bring this up because I think it’s really helpful to see all this stuff for a number of reasons.

These are things that I talk about on this podcast and in my work all the time. So I’m going to outline them now and I hope that they are helpful for you.

The first thing I know is that I’m not broken. I am unbroken.

There’s nothing wrong with my ability to sleep. There’s nothing wrong with my circadian rhythms, there’s nothing wrong with even with my mental state. None of that stuff is broken or needs fixing at all. So that’s the first point. It’s important to note that, because I can take that worry off my plate. I don’t need to go down a rabbit hole of brokenness. Is this a problem? Am I broken? Is this never going to fix itself? All that kind of stuff. Any kind of thinking like that is not even on my plate. It’s just gone. I don’t even worry about it at all.

Which brings us to the second point. This busy mind stuff that’s happening for me in the middle of the night is feedback.

This is what I talk about all the time: we’re always feeling our thinking.

And it’s always giving us feedback about our state of mind. And so in this case, I feel it in the way that I wake up, it’s so strong, obviously, that it wakes me up in the middle of the night. I guess maybe it’s adrenaline, and that’s what wakes me up, because my mind is going so fast. And that is feedback about my state of mind that my thinking is really stirred up.

Building on the first point, this situation that’s happening with my sleep in the middle of the night, is not a problem. It’s information, it’s feedback, it’s letting me know. And eventually, I was able to connect the dots, it’s or I guess I was able to connect those insightfully. It’s letting me know that I have this people pleasing tendency, and that there’s a way to do this job that I have without feeling responsible for every person who crosses my path. And now, of course, logically, I do know that every single person here lives in the world of their thinking, and that if someone is upset about something, I don’t really have any agency over that. I can’t change their mind about what they’re seeing and what they’re thinking.

In the middle of the night, I remembered, Byron Katie has this expression or thing that she says about how we’re only ever there’s only three kinds of business:

• there’s my business;
• there’s your business; and
• there’s God’s business.

Very often, when our thinking gets stirred up, we are not in our own business, we are in somebody else’s business, or we’re in God’s business. I can really see that. That’s a really concise way of saying where my thinking is going.

As a people pleaser, I’m in other people’s business all the time.

I’m wanting to make them happy. I’m wanting to please them to change their mood, to make them be calm, if they’re upset, to make them stop being angry if they’re angry. That’s what’s going on when I’m people pleasing. At least that’s how I define it. So the second point is that this waking up in the middle of the night is not a problem. It’s feedback, it’s information. It’s was letting me know, that this was going on. And so I really appreciate that.

And building again on the first point, because I know I’m not broken, my sleep habits are not broken. I do know how to sleep, I don’t need to go down any kind of a rabbit hole about medicating myself. I found myself a few days ago getting a little bit tense before I started to go through my little bedtime routine. Thinking I would of course naturally think, oh, no, am I going to have more problems tonight? I can see that there’s a way to go down a rabbit hole with that, that on to this original situation we would build another layer of busy thinking. Anticipatory worry about how I’m going to sleep on any given night.

I noticed that I haven’t been too caught up in it. And I hope that that It really slips away entirely now that I see what’s going on.

Then the third thing I want to say is that probably my first question in the middle of the night to myself was how do I not do this?

How do I not be a people pleaser? What do I do? Give me three tasks to make this go away and I’ll do them. Absolutely. And of course, as I talked about all the time, the route to change doesn’t lie there. It doesn’t lie in finding logical solutions to being a people pleaser. At least this is what I see. And this is how I live my life now. And what really works for me.

What creates change is insight.

And we can see this already, because the thing that created the change in me, the deeper understanding about what was going on with my sleep was insight. I didn’t come to this people pleasing conclusion, logically. I felt it land with me last night as I was mulling all this stuff over.

There’s no real specific way to define insight. It’s going to be different for everyone. And it’s going to be different for everyone at anygiven time. I’ve talked in the past about how sometimes it feels like insights are almost invisible. They happen sometimes without us even noticing. I’ll just notice a behavior that’s changed or a concern that has slipped away. And that seems to me has happened insightfully. My brain hasn’t decided to have that happen. It just happens because of a shift in my own consciousness encouraged by, supported by having these kinds of conversations and staying in this conversation about our innate health and well being.

So how do I stop being a people pleaser?

I stay open to insight. And it may happen noticeably. I may notice a big insight about pleasing people, or how not to do it. Or it may happen invisibly. But I know that that’s the way to change. And I would also bet that having had that insight last night, that that was a big step towards resolving this situation that my mind might now be able to settle down. Because there’s been this shift in my consciousness, and I know what’s happening.

I’ll even consciously say to myself, I can tell moving forward that I’ll say things like, if I’m chatting with someone at the office, I’m not responsible for this person’s feelings. Not I’m not going to say that out loud, of course. I’ll just say it internally, just reminding myself this person is entitled to however they feel, that’s their business. And it’s not my business to fix them, or change them or make them feel any different.

Of course, I’m going to do my job and address their concerns and all that kind of stuff.

But the extra added layer of unnecessary responsibility is the one that I want to let go of. The layer that says I’m responsible for everybody, and how everybody feels. That’s a huge weight. No wonder my mind was going crazy in the middle of the night! That’s a lot of stuff to be carrying around.

So I think that’s about all I have to say about that particular situation. I wanted to share it specifically because it’s unrelated to food and even unrelated to unwanted habits. Although I suppose you could say people pleasing is an unwanted habit, but I just thought it would be useful to see that something so disconnected from an unwanted overeating habit. And yet the same principles apply as to how I’m dealing with it.

Not getting tangled up in the content of whatever was going on. Remembering that whatever’s happening universal intelligence is always working for me, it’s not working against me. So that was something I probably should have mentioned earlier in the feedback section, that our bodies are so wise, there’s always this wisdom and universal intelligence flowing through us. And it’s always speaking to us all the time.

This was one way that it was speaking to me trying to get my attention.

To let me know that there’s a way to do this job that I’ve taken on that doesn’t destroy my sleep, that doesn’t diminish my enjoyment of being there at the apartment building with the tenants who are just extremely lovely. I really enjoy connecting with them. It’s a real pleasure and an honor honestly, to be there, and to be in service to the elders in some of the elders in this small community. So there’s lots that’s great about this job.

It did cross my mind a couple of nights ago, I wondered whether I needed to let it go, to resign. I didn’t want to do that because I made a commitment for this year to be in the job until at least November 2024. But my sleep was so disturbed that I thought I don’t know if I can go on like this any longer.

That’s probably enough talking for me. I hope you’re doing well. I hope this has been helpful. I hope you can see that, like I say, everything that I talk about applies to this situation, as well as to an unwanted habit.

I am sending you lots of love and hoping that at some moment today, you are able to connect with your innate well-being and resilience and resourcefulness and to the wisdom that flows through you always. And I will see you again in a couple of weeks. Take care. Bye.

Featured image photo by Johny Goerend on Unsplash

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