Päivi Karhu

I know from personal experience what insomnia feels like

Tick-tock, tick-tock.

My earliest memory of insomnia is probably from when I was five years old, staying at my great-aunt’s house. I lay awake in a dark room listening to the ticking of a clock. As a schoolgirl and young adult, tossing and turning at night was familiar to me, but at that point insomnia did not yet dominate my life.

Everything changed after I had children. Repeated night-time awakenings disrupted my own sleep rhythm, and on two occasions I went through periods of three days without sleep. Later, work-related stress brought early morning awakenings. For years, sleep medication became something I relied on, and I tried many times to stop taking it without success.

Gradually, I realised that the answer was not to try even harder to make myself sleep. The biggest change came in my relationship with sleep: little by little, I learned to let go of the need to control it.

Step by step, I found something I had lost over the years: trust in my own ability to sleep.

This experience is also part of how I work today. I know personally what it feels like when sleep starts to take up too much space in your thoughts and your life. My aim is not to teach you to become better at sleeping, but to help you gradually develop a calmer relationship with sleep.