A Counterintuitive and Censored Approach to Sleep
A nascent organization, The Sleep Coach School, founded by a former sleep doctor has entered the $5 billion insomnia marketplace that is dominated by sleeping pills, essential oils, and weighted blankets. But The Sleep Coach School sells no such products. In fact, their primary product is education that teaches people that these products actually perpetuate instead of solve insomnia. This revolutionary approach is already helping many people, but is also facing resistance and censorship from those guarding the established way of thinking about insomnia.
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In 2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a study that showed 14.5% of adults in the United States had trouble falling asleep most days. That roughly translates to 37 million adults who are struggling on a daily basis with insomnia. The National Institutes of Health found that between 2002 and 2012, the amount of people with insomnia increased from 15.6% to 17.1%. At the same time, the insomnia “solution” market is only growing, with market research firm Imarc forecasting that the market will expand from $5.1 billion in 2023 to $6.1 billion in 2028. It would be logical to assume that the more money that goes into the industry, the less insomnia people would be experiencing. Yet the results are just the opposite.
The Sleep Coach School was founded by Daniel Erichsen, a Swedish-born doctor who did his residency in New York and a fellowship in sleep medicine at the University of Chicago. On his YouTube channel, he describes how he started to see the problems with the medical community’s approach to insomnia, primarily that prescribing sleep medications to his patients wasn’t helping them. When he stopped doing so, he experienced push back from his superiors and colleagues which ultimately culminated in him being fired.
Even before this disruptive shift in his life, Erichsen had slowly been building what would eventually become The Sleep Coach School. There are several ways to work with the School, through an app called Bedtyme, group sessions with sleep coaches, or one-on-one coaching. Every avenue covers The Sleep Coach School’s curriculum, which centers on the premise that sleep is a passive bodily process that cannot be forced or intentionally created by any person. In contrast, the mainstream sleep doctrine is that people can bring on sleep by taking warm baths, drinking chamomile tea, or eventually taking sleeping pills. Yet Erichsen and the School’s followers promote the counter-intuitive idea that actually nothing can bring about sleep and furthermore, sleep can only occur when we do not consciously try to sleep.
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What does this mean exactly? The Sleep Coach School teaches that because sleep is an effortless process, it necessitates a release of attempts to control and acceptance of any outcome, including not sleeping! It’s completely normal and expected that sometimes we will have trouble sleeping. Life is full of stress and challenges, whether it’s a heavy workload, a family member’s health, or something else, everyone experiences sleeplessness at some point.
According to Erichsen, the way insomnia frequently begins is when someone experiences a period of sleeplessness for any given reason and based on that, assigns a judgement about themselves, their ability to sleep, and in doing so applies a novel pressure to sleep. When this happens, each failed attempt to sleep creates fear and anxiety, which are emotions that cause our brain to shift into problem-solving mode. And when we enter problem-solving mode, we start to take any and every effort in order to do the impossible: bring about sleep.
Sleep efforts are defined by The Sleep Coach School as anything that is done with the intention, conscious or not, to force sleep. This can span everything from taking melatonin, to not drinking coffee, to forcing oneself to get out of bed when you can’t sleep. According to Erichsen, these things only make insomnia worse because the person doing them expects to sleep as a result of them. Especially when someone hasn’t slept and is feeling hopeless and isolated, which is common when one has insomnia, these efforts increase anxiety around sleep. Erichsen’s philosophy is that sleep is a passive process which can only occur when our brain decides it is safe enough to do so.
When it comes to feeling safe, the current literature on insomnia does not promote any such feelings of reassurance. The internet is ripe with articles about how insomnia causes a variety of different health conditions, causing many to conclude that lack of sleep leads to only catastrophic outcomes. On The Sleep Coach School’s YouTube channel Erichsen has a series called “Heard Online” in which he breaks down the holes in various news articles by analyzing the research cited in the sensationalist headlines. This relates to a critical tenant of The Sleep Coach School’s teachings: correlation does not indicate causation. Meaning, just because a certain ailment is shown to be present in people with insomnia does not necessarily mean that lack of sleep causes said ailment.
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This type of critical approach towards the established way of thinking around sleep has not been welcomed by the powers that be. In May 2022, Saniya Warwaruk, a former student and follower of The Sleep Coach School’s philosophy held a TEDxtalk in Alberta, Canada speaking about her own personal experience with insomnia and how embracing fear of not sleeping helped her move past insomnia. Despite the moving Ted talk, it seems that those promoting the traditional approach to insomnia were not happy to have their teachings negated in such a way. As a result, Ted posted the video as unlisted on YouTube wherein no one can find the video on their own and must have the link to watch it. In doing so, the talk was severely limited in its reach.
Even with such blatant censorship, Erichsen was still proud that The Sleep Coach Schools’ teachings made it to the TedX stage. In line with his teachings, the decision to make the video unlisted was not in his control and as such, all he could do was accept the events as they were. Indeed, such pushback was confirmation to him that the ideas being promoted by the school were immensely powerful. Throughout history, we’ve seen that minority philosophies and opinions are often aggressively ridiculed and shunned by those who stand to lose out as a result of such ideas. While The Sleep Coach School is still in its infancy, its already proving itself with the thousands of recovered insomniacs and is bound to continue.
