155.  I Can’t Sleep! 3 Tips While Struggling with OCD 

Welcome to episode 155, where we are in a series called New Year’s Desires because we don’t want to just make resolutions. We want to be acting out of our desires. I know that some of you are just really desiring sleep. And if that’s you. This episode is hopefully going to help you know what to do to sleep a little bit better at night.

Hello and welcome to Christian Faith and OCD with Carrie Bock. I’m a Christ follower, wife and mother, licensed professional counselor, who helps Christians struggling with OCD get to a deeper level of healing. When I couldn’t find resources for my clients with OCD, God called me to bring this podcast to you.

With practical tools for developing greater peace, we’re here to bust through the shame and stigma surrounding struggling with OCD as a Christian, sharing hopeful stories of healing and helping you replace uncertainty with faith. I’m here to help you let go of the past and future to walk in the present abundant life God has for you.

So let’s dive right into today’s episode. Genuinely, one of my desires for 2025 is to know how to serve you, the listening audience, better. So if there’s anything that I can do in order to do that, I’d love to hear from you. You can always contact me through our website, carrriebock.com/podcast. There are forums on there you can fill out if you just want to leave a comment, episode suggestion, whatever you want to do.

We’re also currently in the homestretch. If you want to get into Christian’s Learning ICBT, I would love to have you. You can go to carriebock.com/training for more info. My first tip for better sleep is to rule in or out any physical causes that might be causing you sleep disruption. I talked about my own journey of being diagnosed with sleep apnea back in episode 116.

I’m going to play you a snippet from that episode, but before I do, what I want to add is that I was not your typical sleep apnea risk factor individual. What I mean by that is typically someone who has a larger neck circumference or is significantly overweight is at higher risk for sleep apnea.

However, I believe that, based on other family members who also have sleep apnea, that some of my condition is genetic. I can look back and see now that I know more about sleep apnea, I can see how my mom had some of the symptoms, and definitely My father did as well. Neither one of them were treated for it.

Because of what I’ve been through, I often will talk with clients or friends or family members that have some of these same sleep apnea symptoms and encourage them to get a sleep study because we’re in a day and age where that’s not hard to do. You can do it at home, you can get a device that they put on your finger and it will measure how many times you stop breathing, roughly.

It’s not a perfect, accurate measurement and if it comes out undetermined, you may have to do an in person sleep study. But it’s worth it just to know or to rule this in or out because it’s very treatable and the results of not getting treated are detrimental to your health physically, but also mentally and emotionally.

LRE. Sleep apnea is when the muscles in the neck relax at night, causing the airway to collapse, causing someone to stop breathing for a short period of time. This can actually happen many times in a single hour of sleep. So imagine multiplying that by the number of hours that you sleep at night, meaning that you could potentially stop sleeping 30, 50 times in a night easily.

The symptoms of sleep apnea are daytime sleepiness, fatigue, snoring. I didn’t realize that snoring meant that somehow your airway was constricted. I thought it was just a thing that some people did. Observed episodes of stopped breathing. Sometimes that may happen if you have somebody that you’re sleeping with at night, like a spouse.

Waking up during the night, gasping, choking with a rapid heartbeat or in a panic. This is an important symptom for some of you who are struggling with anxiety. You may not know that just waking up in a panic might be a symptom of sleep apnea. Morning headaches. And when you lose oxygen to the brain, your head hurts.

Trouble focusing, even on tasks that should be routine or pretty simple. Depression, blood pressure fluctuations can happen with sleep apnea. Restless leg syndrome or jerking movements during sleep. If your legs or arms just seem to be jerking a lot. That’s your body trying to wake you up. And the treatment for sleep apnea is CPAP therapy, which is where a machine blows air into your airway to keep it open, keep it from collapsing.

You may have heard all kinds of horrors about CPAP therapy, but I really didn’t have too much trouble adjusting. CPAP machines and masks. Slowly making them more and more comfortable, getting you fitted the right way so that it’s easier to get adjusted to. So often, we assume that mental health problems are always based in our mind alone.

And you have to understand that our physical health and our mental health are so intertwined. Sometimes there is a genuine medical route that is either causing your mental health symptoms, or it could be exacerbating those symptoms. Maybe you have a propensity already towards anxiety and depression, but lack of oxygen to your brain due to sleep apnea is just exacerbating that problem so much more.

If you have any of these things, symptoms that I listed before and they just seem chronic, they’re not going away, they’re not getting better. All your blood work looks fabulous but you know something’s wrong. Please get tested. Don’t let the CPAP horror stories deter you. Untreated sleep apnea puts you at greater risk of having a heart attack or stroke.

So please get tested. At least rule it in or out if you suspect that you may have sleep apnea at all. It’s been over a year since my sleep apnea diagnosis and I can tell you that I am a dedicated CPAP user. It has honestly transformed my life. I feel so much better, so much more able to think clearly, be productive, feel alert, and present with my family.

There is no reason to continue feeling horribly if you don’t have to. Maybe it’s not sleep apnea, but there could be another physiological reason that you’re not getting sleep. Make sure that you talk to your doctor about it and get a referral for a sleep study if needed. In episode 68, we talked with Martin Reed about approaching insomnia differently.

He had a story of being taught all of the general information that there is about sleep, about how to create a good sleep environment, make sure that you’re in a positive sleep routine, etc, etc. And found that he was still having a lot of trouble sleeping, which caused him to pursue further information on CBT I for insomnia.

One of the things that I asked him about was regarding, is it true that we all need eight hours of sleep? Because maybe some of you are putting pressure on yourself to try to get a certain amount of hours of sleep at night.

Martin Reed: There is a lot of misleading information out there about sleep. A lot of it does focus on sleep duration.

So many of us can have the belief that we need to get eight hours of sleep, or we need to get a certain amount of sleep. The thing about that is anytime we read information about we should be getting a certain amount of sleep, it’s always just based on averages. It’s a bit like saying everyone should be five foot, 10 inches tall, just because that’s the average height.

I don’t know if that is, but I’m just guessing here, you know, that all I’m just getting at is it’s just one of these things that’s based on averages. So there are always going to be happy, healthy people that exist outside of these averages and. Just like with our height, we can’t control sleep duration.

We can use our behaviors in a way that creates good conditions for sleep, but in terms of how much sleep we’re going to get, we have no control over that. And often we get most caught up in the struggle when we do try and control that. They don’t need to aim for eight hours or seven hours of sleep. You know, they just need to allot an appropriate amount of time for sleep.

You know, give themselves the opportunity to get sleep. And the body is always going to generate, at the very least, the bare minimum amount of sleep we need, no matter what, as long as we’re giving it the opportunity to generate sleep. We never lose the ability to sleep. So it’s really about just trying to not control things that we cannot control.

And sleep duration is one of the things that we can’t control, unfortunately.

Carrie: Are there any helpful tips for people who just have a hard time shutting their mind off, want to go to sleep?

Martin Reed: Yeah, definitely. Well, I think first and foremost is making sure we only go to bed when we’re. Truly sleepy enough for sleep.

I’m talking about finding it hard to stay awake because our sleep drive system will always overpower like that arousal system or the mental chatter. Once it’s strong enough, no matter what, without fail, it might take a night or two, but sleep will always happen. That sleep drive will always be strong enough at some point.

So we can always get ourselves one step ahead by making sure we only go to bed when there’s that strong sense of sleepiness. And then in terms of all that mental chatter, all the mental gymnastics, really all that is, it’s our brain looking out for us. You know, it’s not our brain trying to cause us problems.

It’s like our brain is being a really overly enthusiastic friend who’s trying so hard to help us out. It’s just kind of getting in the way. I think just recognizing that, you know, this isn’t an adversarial relationship. It’s just our brain trying too hard to help us out. That can be helpful. And just recognizing that that’s what our brain does.

Our brain’s number one priority is to look out for us. Often we get most caught up in all this mental stuff when we quite understandably try to fight them or avoid these thoughts, these feelings, these emotions, because they’re unpleasant. So naturally we don’t want to experience them. But unfortunately, that’s when we usually get most caught up in the struggle, trying to fight them, trying to suppress them.

It’s not usually helpful over the long term. Short term, sometimes we can like push feelings and thoughts away. They always come back and then when they come back, they tend to be stronger. It’s a bit like pushing a beach ball down under the water. You know, it’s just going to push back harder and harder the more we try and push it away.

Sometimes I think it’s just helpful to recognize like, this is my mind looking out for me. I’m feeling, identifying and acknowledging everything you’re feeling. This is my anxiety coming back. This is my frustration, my anger, whatever it is you’re feeling, just identifying it, labeling it, recognizing it, not trying to fight it or push it away can be really helpful.

Just the fact that we’re thinking Thinking certain things or our mind is racing doesn’t mean we’re not going to be able to sleep. We can still sleep when we have difficult thoughts and difficult feelings and difficult emotions, but it becomes a lot more difficult for that to happen when we try and get engaged in controlling them and pushing them away or trying to avoid them, trying to fight them.

And I think, you know, as a last resort was if you’re just spending a lot of time in bed and it really just does not feel good to be in bed. It might be helpful to just get out of bed and just do something a bit more pleasant until conditions feel a bit better for sleep.

Carrie: I wanted to share that I know what it’s like to not be able to sleep.

When I was pregnant with my daughter, I had very intense restless leg syndrome, and nothing would relieve that. There wasn’t any medication that I could safely take while pregnant. I remember just crying and begging God in the middle of the night that I would just be able to sleep. I will say that God didn’t always give me rest during those periods, but what he did give me.

was his strength and power to keep going through those difficult times until I could get to a place where I could sleep again. One thing that often troubles us and keeps us up at night is stressing about not sleeping. We will watch the clock. We will think, Oh, I only have three more hours and then I have to get up for work or, Oh, no, what if I can’t fall back asleep?

It’s 2 a. m. right now. So if you can come to an acceptance of things outside of your control, even though you can create the optimal environment for sleep. That may not mean that you get the sleep that you need. That’s a hard thing when you feel like, okay, well, I’m avoiding the caffeine, and I have a dark, cool room at night, and I’m going to bed around the same time, and I’m, etc.,

etc. All the things that people tell you to do. So what we can do is do the best that we can, and then we have to rest everything else in God’s hands. So Martin there really gave us tip number two, which I labeled as resist the urge to fight your inner experience. We talk about this a lot on the podcast, learning to be in a state of mindfulness.

It takes practice. It takes intentionality. It is not going to happen overnight. But learning to really be present and say, Okay, I’m feeling angry. I can sit with that for a moment. I can be curious about it. I don’t have to immediately make it go away. I don’t have to immediately judge it. I can create space and allowance for this emotion, and in doing so, that often gives the freedom for that emotion to dissipate.

Emotions are like waves. They will come up, and they will go down. If we try to block them or stop them at some point, it usually makes the entire process last longer, and we end up in a longer period of suffering than we really need to be in. Mindfulness helps you create a sense of distress tolerance, being able to tolerate difficult thoughts, feelings, and body sensations.

And our third tip is to reflect. On if there is something God is trying to speak to you. This comes way back from episode 51, Surrendering Our Insomnia to God with Dr. Charles Page. And he shares how he handles being woken up in the middle of the night. As I know some of you feel like, hey, I can fall asleep just fine, but then I wake up in the middle of the night and can’t fall back to sleep.

So this tip is for you.

Dr. Charles Page: Sleep was God’s idea. We were created to sleep. And I think one of the big ideas that the scriptures tells us, and it kind of fits in with the rest of our lives. One of the reasons I think we were to sleep is God really wanted us to turn off. You think about the creation story, I mean, starting in Genesis one, it says in the evening and the morning were the first day.

And so it’s funny, you know, we get it the other way around. We think, well, you know, when the day starts, when the sun comes up, when I get up in the morning, that’s when the day starts. When a competing thought or worrying thought enters our mind, we can’t just take it out of our mind because it’ll boomerang back into our thinking.

We have to replace it. And that’s where meditation comes in. For example, Philippians chapter four, you know, talks about there’s anything good, anything noble, you know, think about these things, just talking about that kind of that art of meditation. And I think that’s so key for us, you know, because, you know, you show me your focus, I’ll show you your future.

And as we begin to focus on the scriptures, It begins to fill our minds with the good stuff. You can even go back to the Psalms. For example, if you think about David, one of the Psalms is the fourth Psalm. It was an evening Psalm that David prayed when he was going through the toughest time in his life.

This was when Absalom had usurped the throne and he was running for his life, crossing the sea. Jordan River. I mean, just multiple stuff that was robbing him of sleep. And as he goes through this process, you know, at the end, he says in Psalm 48, I will lay me down in peace and sleep for you, O Lord, let me dwell in safety.

And so this process of prayer and meditation, I think, is huge. For me, when I am woken up in the middle of the night, one thing that I’ve learned to do many times. When I’m kind of tossing and turning in my bed is take a step back and listen to God. Sometimes those are opportunities that God is trying to get our attention.

I think most of us in the culture that we live, man, we’re going so fast during the day that we don’t have time to really stop and listen. God wants to speak to us and sometimes He has to wake us up at night to get our attention. In 1 Samuel, you know, the story of Samuel, he has a little boy and he’s there and he’s there at the temple with Eli and he’s going to sleep, you know.

God’s saying, Samuel, Samuel, when he gets up and goes to Eli, it’s back and forth, you know, and all the time God’s trying to get his attention to give him a message and he doesn’t catch it. And I wonder how many times I’ve done that. It’s actually an opportunity to meet with God and think about what Samuel would have missed out on if he hadn’t.

He would have never stopped and heard that when that was the beginning of a series of steps that set Samuel in the direction. So often when I’m waking up in the middle of the night, just kind of keeping in my mind, you know, God, are you saying something to me? And sometimes he’s not. I always try to keep a journal at the bedside because, you know, sometimes a thought will come into my mind.

It may be just a random thought, or it may be something that’s really something that God has woken us up to tell us.

Carrie: To sum up, our sleep tips are the three R’s. Rule in or out any physical causes that may be causing sleep disruption. Two, resist the urge to fight your inner experience. And three, reflect on if there is something God is trying to speak to you.

I hope these tips helped you, and if they did, feel free to share with a friend.

To receive weekly encouragement, find out about our monthly Meet the Podcast host Zoom meetings, and receive information on exclusive sales, become an email insider today. All you have to do is go to carriebock.com and scroll towards the bottom of the page.

You’ll find a spot to put in your email and receive a free download in your inbox from us.