Sleep Wins Come in Different Packages: A Real Story of Insomnia Recovery

Malka, 32 years old, came to me after two years of severe insomnia that had slowly taken over every part of her life.

By the time she reached out, she had already tried everything she could access—multiple sleep programs, a long list of sleeping pills, adjustments, switches, dosages, and she described a point where she felt like she was just “popping pills like a drug addict,” because nothing was working anymore.

At some point, her doctor added a small dose of Ativan.

It didn’t fix her sleep, but it softened the edges. It calmed her body enough to get through the night, and over time that calm became something she relied on just to feel like she could survive nighttime.

Underneath all of this, something deeper was unfolding.

Malka wasn’t just carrying sleep issues.

She was carrying years of unresolved emotional experiences, relationships that left pain behind, conversations that never fully landed, situations where she felt misunderstood, assumptions that were never corrected, and a quiet accumulation of hurt that never really had space to be processed.

Nothing about it was dramatic in the moment.

But it built slowly.

And her system never really got to come down from it.

What she described wasn’t just stress. It was a constant internal alert state. Her body didn’t feel safe. Her mind didn’t feel settled. There was always something to hold, manage, anticipate, or control.

At night, when everything went quiet, that internal load became impossible to ignore.

Malka is highly analytical.

Everything in her world gets organized, structured, and understood, and even her recovery became something she tracked precisely—33 days off Ativan.

That structure helps her feel safe.

But insomnia doesn’t stay inside a structure.

And neither does healing.

We began working together in December.

And like many stories of severe insomnia, it didn’t unfold in a straight line.

At the beginning, Malka tried to approach recovery the way she approaches everything else: logically. If she followed the steps, she expected results.

But very quickly, she was confronted with something deeply destabilizing:

Two things can be true at the same time.

She can sleep very little… and still be healing. She can have a hard night… and still be moving forward. She can feel stuck… and still not be back at the beginning.

That tension was extremely difficult for her system.

Because her mind wanted certainty. Linear progress. Proof.

But her nervous system was learning something very different.

That safety does not always look like progress. And progress does not always feel like safety.

Session by session, we worked on widening that lens, moving beyond control and into regulation, beyond tracking and into tolerance, beyond fixing and into allowing.

There were sessions that felt heavy. Some where things opened up. Others where everything felt like it had collapsed again.

And that’s something most people don’t understand about recovery:

It is not linear.

It moves forward… and then it doesn’t. It improves… and then it dips again.

But none of that means nothing is happening.

Over time, something began to shift.

She started tolerating uncertainty differently.

She loosened her grip on needing to control outcomes.

She began to notice moments where rest could happen without forcing it.

And eventually, she reached a point where she felt ready, carefully and with medical guidance, to begin reducing reliance on Ativan and transition into a different prescribed sleep aid.

That step was not just physical.

It was emotional.

It was the release of something that had been acting as a safety anchor.

What followed was not immediate relief.

It was a recalibration.

Yesterday, I received an email from her.

She wrote:

“I am now 33 days off Ativan. Things are slowly stabilizing. Most nights I am sleeping 3–4 hours, and I have already had 2–3 nights with 5 hours of sleep. While I’m still tired, I do feel things are gradually moving in the right direction. The sleeping pills are now working when previously they weren’t.”

What stood out wasn’t just the numbers.

It was the direction.

There is still fluctuation.

Still tired.

But there is also something very important:

Movement.

And what is unfolding now is not the same intensity she was in before,  it is real recovery beginning to settle in.

This is no longer crisis language. This is recovery language.

And I find myself seeing this more clearly now, that what often looks like “not enough sleep” or “not enough progress” from the outside is actually something very different on the inside. It is a system slowly learning how to come back to itself.

Malka didn’t give up on this process.

Even when it was messy.

Even when it was painful and emotionally draining.

Even when it didn’t make logical sense.

Even when she couldn’t reduce it to a spreadsheet and find certainty in it.

She stayed.

If you are reading this and you see yourself in her story — in the overthinking, the exhaustion, the feeling that nothing is working anymore, you don’t have to keep holding it all on your own.

Sometimes the most important step is simply having a conversation, and seeing what is actually going on underneath the surface.

If that feels like you, let's talk and finally get you some sleep! https://calendly.com/chevymermelstein/30min