If you're reading this at 3 am, I see you. If you've tried everything and still can't sleep, I've been there. For most of my life I was a textbook insomniac. What finally had the biggest impact was resetting my circadian clock and regulating my nervous system.

My sleep protocol

I'll start with what works for me now. Not as a prescription. As someone who has spent years figuring out what works for this particular body. Take what's useful. Leave what isn't.

In the morning:

Morning sunlight as close to sunrise as possible. A Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement lesson in the Pauseture app. Then coffee. Coffee is not optional for me, but it comes third.

We are not light switches that get turned off at night. I prioritize my sleep the moment I wake up. The conditions I create in the morning determine what happens when I close my eyes hours later. Regulating my nervous system helps my resilience throughout the day and helps me settle in easier at night. That's not a sleep hack. It's nervous system education.

Before bed:

I eat a protein snack before bed to prevent the blood sugar and cortisol drop that wakes a lot of people up at 3 am. I hydrate heavily in the morning and taper in the evening so I'm not getting up in the night. Alcohol affects my sleep more than almost anything else. I'm not perfect on that front. But once my Feldenkrais practice improved my interoception — my ability to sense what's happening inside my body — I became acutely aware of how alcohol made me feel the next day. When I made choices that helped me feel better, I slept better too.

Supplements that work for me specifically: Glycine helps me fall asleep. Tart cherry helps my sleep duration. I've tried different brands of both, even higher quality ones, but these are what work for me. This is my body, not yours.

I also take progesterone as part of my Hormone Replacement Therapy. This turned out to be more significant than I expected. Progesterone has a calming effect on the nervous system and plays a direct role in sleep quality. For women in perimenopause and beyond, low progesterone is one of the most underdiagnosed reasons for waking in the middle of the night and being unable to fall back asleep. I didn't connect this until my ADHD diagnosis led me to understand that my brain was already running a dopamine deficit — and dropping progesterone made everything worse. If you're a woman in midlife and sleep suddenly got harder, this is worth a conversation with your doctor. Though I'll say — I've had to do my own research on this. A GP once told me "you know more about this than me, what do you want me to prescribe?"

If I'm having a particularly hard night — stress from the business, nerves before a podcast — I'll do a Dan Clurman lesson before bed. His background as a Zen Buddhist teacher comes through in how he teaches. Very regulating for me specifically.

When I get into bed:

A few tools that genuinely help me sleep: a Dohm White Noise Machine, White Noise for when I travel, a Sleep Mask, and a Sleep Bonnet that works well if a mask isn't comfortable (just pull over your eyes.  And some say it helps your hair). I share these because they work for me, not because healing comes from products. Most of what helps is already inside you.

I then use an image that came out of my Feldenkrais practice. I imagine I am hot candle wax, melting into the bed. My tissues soften and release until only my skeleton remains. This lets go of unnecessary muscular effort. Why do we hold effort when we're in bed? I don't know, but imagining I'm hot candle wax helps.

Then I breathe. Inhaling for four counts, exhaling for six. No pausing between. For me, pausing triggers a creepy anxious feeling that defeats the whole purpose. I stay focused on the count — four in, six out — until I fall asleep.

When I wake in the middle of the night, same protocol. Hot candle wax. Four six. If that doesn't work within a few minutes, I add eye movements. Eyes shifting left and right, slowly, while maintaining the breath count in the background. Still awake? Eyes circle clockwise, then counterclockwise. Still awake? Eyes move up and down.

The layering does something important. It gives the mind enough to do that it stops fixating on the fear of not falling back asleep. The fear is usually what keeps people awake far longer than the wakefulness itself. Confusion — in the gentlest sense — breaks that loop.

I used to be someone who needed the protocol. I read the books, listened to the podcasts, collected the information. What changed wasn't finding the right protocol. It was that I started noticing how I felt. Once I could feel the difference between a morning when I'd done a lesson and one when I hadn't, the protocol stopped mattering. I just did what felt better.

If you're curious just how early and how bad my insomnia was — and how I went from ordering mystery pills shipped from China to waking up naturally before sunrise — I share the full story below.

The long version

Before the internet. Before cable TV. There was genuinely nothing else to do at one in the morning. I couldn't focus long enough for a real book. So I read the encyclopedia. Random facts, one entry at a time. My dad would find me downstairs and yell "Get to bed." Nobody questioned what was wrong with me. I was just “bad” for not being asleep.

When my alarm went off in the morning, the whole family would stand there wondering how I could possibly sleep through it. Multiple alarms, very loud. I slept through all of them.

I later learned I have a chronotype called The Wolf. Wolves are wired to stay up late and wake late. In college I could finally live like a Wolf. Noon classes, 2am bedtimes. It was the first time sleep made sense. Then the real world arrived and none of that was available anymore. Corporate schedules. Early morning triathlon training. The Wolf doesn't thrive at 6am stand-up meetings. So I found ways to cope. Mostly Ambien.

The Ambien years

In my 30s I took up running, then triathlon. I thought the exhaustion was solving my insomnia. Part of it probably was. Morning training meant morning sunlight, which I had never deliberately gotten before. But when I wasn't completely physically destroyed, the insomnia came back. So I leaned harder on Ambien.

I became reliant on it for years. Any early training morning. The night before Ironman Hawaii. Two Ambien. Ambien is well documented for causing parasomnias — behaviors during sleep that the person has no memory of. Night eating is one of the most common. I became a textbook case. The night before a triathlon, staying at my sister's house, I got up and ate an entire roasted chicken. I had no recollection of it. My two young nephews watched. I think they're still traumatized.

At some point my doctor cut me off. So I started buying "Ambien" online, shipped from China. It knocked me out more completely than anything I'd ever taken. I sometimes wonder if I was a fentanyl user and just didn't know it.

When I was working high-stress jobs in tech, the stress was significant. Ambien. Wine. Both.

Then I put my back out badly. I was at a resort in Mexico. Pain pills, Ambien, and somewhere in there, a Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement lesson. The back pain got better after one session. I started doing the lessons daily because I was scared of the pain coming back.

I began sleeping better. Without anything.

I couldn't quite explain why. My first theory was posture. A lot of the lessons worked on opening the ribs. My posture was visibly changing — people were commenting on it. I assumed I was breathing better and therefore sleeping better. That felt right.

Then I was diagnosed with ADHD. And I realized there was probably a second explanation. The lessons were doing something I had never been able to do on my own. They were quieting my brain. Not at night — I was doing them in the morning before work. But for the first time in my life I was downregulating a nervous system that had been running hot since I was a child sitting in the dark reading encyclopedias.

Before I knew I had a nervous system to regulate, I was finally regulating it.

It turns out the Wolf chronotype and ADHD are often the same thing wearing different hats. The dopamine dysregulation that makes focus difficult also disrupts circadian rhythm. And dropping progesterone in perimenopause made everything worse — a third variable I didn't understand until I did something about it.

But in Feldenkrais we often say we spend too much time diagnosing the why and not enough time on the how to feel better. So the why doesn't matter as much as this: I found something that worked. The Wolf became a Lark. The insomniac started sleeping. Without Ambien. Without anything shipped from China.

Being honest about what this is

I still have bouts of insomnia. Starting a business will do that. I care deeply about the Pauseture user experience, and when something goes wrong, or I'm nervous before a podcast, sometimes my sleep suffers.

That's not a failure of the practice. That's a nervous system responding to real stress. The difference is that I have tools now. I know what helps. I know what makes it worse. And I know that one bad night doesn't mean I'm back where I started.

One more honest thing. I quit working out for 18 months when my back went out and focused only on the lessons. My sleep improved significantly during that time. But these days, if I go two or three days without real cardio, I feel it. The anxiety starts to creep in. I keep anxiety away through movement -- both the lessons and the kind that gets my heart rate up. For me, both matter. The lessons regulate my nervous system. The cardio burns off what accumulates when life is stressful. I'm not prescribing that for you. I'm telling you what I've noticed in this particular body over many years of paying attention.

There is no single fix for insomnia. That's the honest answer. But regulating my nervous system through Awareness Through Movement lessons has been the most meaningful thing I've done for my sleep in fifty-nine years. More than the Ambien. More than the exhaustion. More than anything shipped from China.

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