 Hey, I'm Drew and you are watching or just listening to The Anxious Truth. The Anxious Truth is the podcast where we talk about anxiety, anxiety disorders, and anxiety recovery. So if you're struggling with things like panic attacks, panic disorder, OCD, health anxiety, or agoraphobia, you are in the right place. Today we have Daniel Erickson on. Daniel is a sleep physician and a sleep coach who's going to talk about insomnia, talk about the fear of not sleeping, and a lot of sleep related concerns that run rampant through this community. It's going to be really good. So let's check it out. Hello everybody. Welcome back to The Anxious Truth. This is podcast episode number 236 where recording in the beginning of November 2022. Don't know when you're going to see this, but today we're going to talk about sleep anxiety. I've done a few podcast episodes about this lately, but it's important because it's a huge topic in this community. People have a hard time sleeping because of their anxiety problems and then they freak out because they're having a hard time sleeping. And today's guest, my new friend Daniel Erickson, who is just a good guy. I was on his podcast a few weeks ago. He is a sleep physician and a sleep coach now and he actually takes a cognitive behavioral approach to insomnia and sleep. It's awesome. He's going to have a lot of great information for you guys. And it is going to sound strikingly familiar to you. But before we get into the episode, I just want to let you know this week's sponsor, we don't have a sponsor. I was going to do one of those silly sponsored things. Actually, we might have a sponsor. Let's do it again. Ready? Three, two, one. Hello everybody. Welcome back to the anxious truth. This is podcast episode number 236. We are recording in October now beginning of November of 2022. Not sure when you're going to see this, but today we're going to talk to Daniel Erickson, who is a sleep physician and now a sleep coach who takes a really exceptional cognitive behavioral view of insomnia and sleep disturbances. He has so much good to say on this topic. I was on his podcast a few weeks ago where we talked about the overlap between what he and I do. And he has so much good information for people in this community who are freaking out because they're having sleep disturbances. But I'm telling you, his information and his message is going to sound strikingly familiar to you. And I think it's going to really resonate and I think it's going to really be helpful. Before we get into the interview with Daniel, just a very quick reminder that the anxious truth is more than just this podcast episode. There's three books that I've written about anxiety and anxiety disorders. There's my free morning newsletter. There's all the previous podcast episodes. There's a ton of social media content. There's a free one hour anxiety one-on-one workshop that's on my YouTube. There's the monthly webinar I do with Joanna Hardis about distress tolerance, a ton of resources. You can find them all at the anxioustruth.com and all the ways to support this work financially or otherwise are also there at the anxioustruth.com slash support. It is never required, but I always appreciate it. Thank you very much. However way you support this work, I appreciate each and every one of you. Let's get into this with Daniel. We went for about the half hour. It's chock full of great information. If you're dealing with sleep problems and freaking out over it, you're going to want to listen to this one. I'll be back afterwards to wrap it up. Here we go. Daniel, welcome to the show. Glad you're here. Hi. Thanks so much for having me here. Yeah. Yeah. So for like I mentioned in the intro, oops, hang on a second here, a little technical detail. I forgot to turn off my screen blanking software. So as I mentioned in the intro, Daniel is a physician. Where in the U.S. are you? You're on the West Coast? Yeah. I'm in U.D. in Oregon, a little south of Portland. Okay. Who puts out a ton of really great and informative and educational information about sleep and freaking out about sleep. He and I connected. I don't know how we connected, but I was on his podcast not too long ago and I decided you got to come online. So we're going to have Dan pop in here and talk about some of the most common things that people in our community worry about when it comes to sleep. So Danny, want to give us the reader's digest version of what your background is. How'd you get here? Absolutely. So I'm a sleep physician. I did a one-year fellowship at University of Chicago a couple of years back and I worked as a sleep physician for about eight years. And I saw really how insomnia was such a great issue for my patients. That led me to start a podcast YouTube channel and eventually like I started really getting into insomnia, writing books and now I no longer work as a sleep physician. I'm really out there kind of like a U educator, coach, etc. Yeah. Interesting. Discussed. It's an interesting question. I'm sure you get asked all the time. So you don't practice. You just decided to do this instead of continuing to practice medicine. I take it. Yeah. That's right. Right. I loved practicing medicine, especially sleep medicine. It's a very nice feel because it's not a high acuity feel. Nobody is really, really sick, but you still help a lot of people. But there are also limitations within the system. You see someone and you educate them, kind of an initial visit, and then you say like, oh, I'll see you back in two weeks. And then between now and two weeks from now, that person is kind of completely on their own. And so it wasn't ideal. And there isn't really a lot of opportunity for kind of creativity within the system. So I really love what I do now. That's interesting. So as a, and I get that, you know, two weeks, that's a long time for somebody that's sort of struggling, right? So is it an unethical thing or just out of the realm of thinking a little bit out of the box for a physician to stay in touch over those two weeks? That's not a thing that you would just normally do. What doctor does that? No, that's, that's a great question. And you know, if you, if you ask the physicians, you know, about this, like how would you feel about being able to be in touch with your patients, like on a daily basis or so? Most of them would kind of like first freak out. They'd be like, that's impossible because I have so many patients. But if they really had sort of the freedom to set up the practice the way they wanted, I think a lot of people would actually love it. They would love to be able to, to, to communicate much more frequently with their patients with the flexibility. So yeah, I think, I think we were really helpful if we had that kind of opportunity for people. Yeah, it makes sense. It almost seems like what you're doing now is a little bit more in alignment with why somebody practices medicine to begin with to be, to help, to help solve problems to make people better, right? Or at least help them. Yeah, it is sort of like that is kind of an irony that so many people just like myself truly went into medicine because we just want to help people. You know, I really, my dad is a doctor, my mom's a nurse. I saw what the work they did and I was like, I want to do what you guys do. I would really want to help people. But the practical reality becomes that there's so many layers actually between yourself as a doctor and the person in front of you that you want to help, you know, you have billers and coders, you have administrators, you know, you have managers, you have supervisors, you have like medical boards that look into things, you know, and I'm not saying that all these things are bad and not at all, but it creates a lot of layers between yourself and your patient and you can't really simply, you know, do whatever you think is best for your patient. It becomes quite tricky. So in a weird way, I think as a kind of an educator and coach, I can help people more effectively actually now than I did as a doctor. And again, you know, I'm not providing any medical advice to anyone out there. I don't even have a license anymore. But in a way, I think I can help more people now than I did them. Yeah, no, that's interesting. We always try and say that. Of course, the podcast is never substitute for medical advice. It's not therapy. Take what you can out of it, but always consult your own physician and healthcare providers. So the question that comes up here, here's the biggest issue, now Daniel being a sleep coach and a sleep expert. These are the things I know that the people listening would want to ask you. And the big issue that I find in sleep and the anxiety disorder community is people, it's not so much the sleep disturbance, which I'm sure you're aware is really common for people who are dealing with things like panic disorder and agoraphobia and OCD. It's the freaking out about the sleep disturbance. That's really the main issue here. So is that something that you see pretty commonly with people that have insomnia, there's the insomnia and then there's the freaking out because they have the insomnia. Yeah, absolutely. 100%. And I thought this question might come up. So I thought we could actually do a little bit of kind of like, you know, explain kind of the words I use when I talk about this. So when I say sleep disturbance, that is basically something happened that made you have some choppy sleep. Let's say you fell down and you hurt your ankle, you know, something like that you naturally will not sleep quite as well for a couple of days, or you're stressed about something at work, then that will keep you up for a while. This is sleep disturbance to me, but this is self regulating. It takes care of itself. We don't, you know, when the ankle is healed, when you're not so stressed about work anymore, you just sleep better again. That's the sleep disturbance. Now, that to me is very, very different from what I call insomnia. I know some people have kind of a broad definition of insomnia, but when I think of insomnia, I think of this self perpetuating, ongoing struggle with sleep, you know. And the focus there is kind of self perpetuating. And that goes along with what you said, that when something can happen, we have one night where we don't sleep for whatever reason, but then we go like, oh no, I didn't sleep. This is a real problem. I have to do something about it, this. And then naturally, we do something like, you know, we try some melatonin or something. And because the reason we slept is actually kind of this fear and anxiety we have within us, that may not help at all. And then we go, oh no, this didn't help either. Now we're even more scared. And the paradox here is, of course, that the more scared we are, the less we sleep, which leads us to try even more things, which keeps us awake. And then we can be stuck in this kind of perpetual ongoing cycle of trying to sleep, which keeps us awake. And I call that insomnia. That is probably the best definition that I have. I'm going to use that going forward, if you don't mind, because that is absolutely excellent and spot-on accurate in this community. And I think most people, and I would have thought, oh, insomnia is just when you can't sleep. I love the self-perpetuation part of it, because I think that is 100% true. So it's super common, too. I hear it every day, like, well, I only slept for six, sometimes I get it laugh. I only slept for six hours. I only slept for five hours. And some people would pay for five hours of sleep. But nonetheless, and then there's the distress over, this means that. And what are all the things that you hear people terrified of because they don't sleep enough or they don't sleep proper properly? What does it mean? Oh, yeah, no. Yeah, exactly. Was there a question there about what I hear people are scared about? Yeah, what do they get? What are they afraid of? I know what people tell me they're afraid of when they don't sleep. What does it mean when they don't sleep? It means that these things will happen. I'm guessing you hear very similar things. Yeah, I know that those narratives are so common. And sometimes it's just, it's very, sometimes it's just diffuse. Sometimes it's just kind of completely reactive, meaning somebody didn't sleep. And for no other reason than that they didn't sleep, they just want to sleep more. They're like, this is, it's kind of like, you know, we have a high blood pressure, we want it down low, low blood pressure, we want it up like kind of that reactive, like diffuse, just scared because something unusual happened. But, but often it's also maybe the most common one is fear of how their next day was going to be like, you know, because I didn't sleep today, I'm not going to be able to function. I'm not going to be able to focus. I'm not going to be able to do my job. I'm not going to be, you know, people are going to look at me strangely, like that some catastrophic event along the lines of functioning is very common fear. And then you also have another common fear, which is like health health consequences, that somebody is like, if I don't sleep, if I sleep deprivation, I'm going to have like a heart attack or develop dementia or some kind of health issue. I think those two are the real big ones, the most common ones. Yeah, that's it. Within this community of people who are dealing with anxiety disorders, the third one that I would add, well, the one that's an enhancement of the first one, I'm afraid of how I feel the next day, or developing a health condition, there's a serious fear of insanity or psychosis, which runs really common in this community. I'm at the edge of snapping and I think I'm going to lose my mind. Literally, people are afraid that they will tip into insanity for some reason, which is not a thing. But they fear it even more if they're feeling sleep deprived, like somehow being sleep deprived makes them more likely to have a psychotic break. Now, we can't pile reassurance on top because I'm sure most people have already heard that that's not a thing. Do you hear this? And how do you respond to that? This week's episode of The Anxious Truth has a real life sponsor for the very first time in the history of this podcast. The coolest thing is it has nothing to do with anxiety, recovery or mental health. So it's not some sort of crackpot cure because I would never do that to you guys. Today's episode of the podcast is sponsored by mylifeinabook.com. It's just a cool, thoughtful service that I thought was useful and I thought you might, too. This might be the most thoughtful gift I've ever seen for parents and grandparents, older members of our family, especially as the winter holidays approach and we get together to celebrate. It's a really powerful way to connect on a emotional level with the older members of our family and to start to preserve their most precious memories, show them that we really care. 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To save $10 off your first purchase, use discount code TAT22. That's TAT22. To get $10 off at mylifeinabook.com. And thank you to mylifeinabook.com for sponsoring The Anxious Truth, being our first sponsor and supporting the work that we do here. Yeah. Well, the third one there, extremely common as well. Yeah, I think I'm going to go crazy. Can I get psychotic if I don't sleep enough? And I want to say that I always, I always word it this way that I've done a lot of research and I've not come across any evidence that shows that little sleep causes psychosis, that it causes any health issue actually despite what you hear. And this might be shocking to somebody because of all you hear, but I've not found any issue that little sleeper insomnia causes actually any issues. And there's no causes of evidence for that whatsoever. And just to add, it might be a little bit more in this fear of going crazy and psychosis. It is, when we are drifting into sleep and drifting out of sleep, we can often have dream content mixed in with actual thoughts, which can be a little bit bizarre, but it can make people think like, oh no, I'm going crazy. But having those kind of sleep transition events and et cetera is very, very common. So that can be recurrent to hear. Yeah. But that's actually pretty common too. Well, I wasn't sure if I was awake, which everyone experiences at some point was I awake, was I not, but then they interpreted as that's the confirmation. Here comes the psychosis. So I get that. Thank you for bringing that up. The health issues is another common concern. And we could talk about some of those narratives. We touched on it a little bit when I was on your podcast. There are books out there. There are a ton of websites right now that will tell you that you're drowning in cortisol because you don't sleep enough and you're going to kill yourself. You're destroying your body by not sleeping eight hours a day properly, which is really difficult for people to digest. How do you combat that narrative? We talked about this a little bit. The need for actually better information out there, not just clickbait. Yeah, it's a great question. And I think a lot of it is just kind of general education and demystification. For example, you mentioned that somebody may be really scared if the quote unquote only slept like five and a half, six hours or something like that. So what we hear so often is we should get eight hours of sleep or seven to nine hours. But here's an interesting thing. There's actually a lot of good studies on this, like high quality studies where people have put an EEG, like check brain activity on people. And do you know, I'm going to ask you a question here, Drew. Do you know, actually two questions I'm going to ask you. Do you know, if you take a random adult, do you know how much they, and random adults has no problem sleeping, do you know how much they think they sleep? If you ask them like, how much do you think you sleep? How much do you think most people answer? I feel like they think they sleep seven to eight hours a night. Yeah, that's exactly right. On average, people think that they sleep seven hours. How much do you think they actually objectively sleep? So here's a trick question. We're on a game show now. So I'm going to try to win instead of saying what I think is real. I'm going to say probably four hours. Oh my gosh, that was a bold bet. That's a nice one. You know, it was, it was a little bit off, but you were in the right direction, meaning objectively measured, most people sleep around six hours. And I think just knowing this can be so relieving for people like it takes so much pressure off. So anyway, what I'm trying to say is like education like this can be really helpful. Now, how do we get it out there? Like, how do we actually make a difference? Because the quote unquote forces that are on the, I hate to be kind of like, you know, the forces against us, so to speak, are so huge, you know, like mainstream media, a lot of like wellness industry bloggers, even academia, like a lot of them, it's in their interest to propagate this message that little sleep is dangerous because that gets attention. People can sell things, et cetera. So it's tricky, but I've not come across anything quote unquote better than just, you know, you know, being out there teaching and kind of spreading the word the best I can. Yeah, yeah, I get that. And I appreciate that effort. I really do. You and I, we talked about it in your show and I think we're in alignment on that. So I love that what you bring up here, like it's true because that gets attention and then it's sure easy to sell supplements and programs and all kinds of stuff to help you sleep. But now let's get to the nitty gritty because I know people listening are going to want to hear this. What are you teaching your clients? What are you teaching people who come to you for help? I'm guessing that it's not a giant bucket full of pills and supplements and techniques. I bet you it's a lot simpler than that, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, most of the students, clients, the followers I have, they have that box. They have that box of supplements and pills and things like that. So clearly that's not the answer. And the answer is just like you said, is so much simpler than we think. So I would like to say, I would like to put it this way. I think the fundamental truth when it comes to sleep is that it is effortless sleep is like sleeping well. It's an effortless process. I think it's the same with actually peace of mind. Peaceful mind and peaceful sleep are effortless. And, you know, the sort of evidence that I used to back this up is I asked somebody who has trouble sleeping, like, do you know anybody who sleeps well? And everybody goes like, yeah, my husband or your partner, I hate that person. I want to strangle them. It's kind of like a common thing I hear. But then, you know, in a serious note, I asked them, so how, you know, imagine asking that person, like, how do you do that? How do you sleep so well? And that person will give you the secret, the secret to sleeping well by shrugging and going, I don't know. I don't know, you know. It sounds that is the secret to sleeping well. There's no effort whatsoever there, which then leads to a whole bunch of other questions, which is kind of like, well, why can't I sleep then? Why does it take me hours to fall asleep? But the essential core message I have is that sleep is effortless. And when we abandon the struggle to fight the attempts to sleep, it just happens by itself. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that becomes, it's a thing that I do say often. I don't claim any special sleep qualifications. But for me, when I was struggling and going through the recovery from my anxiety disorders, I had, I'm a terrible sleeper as it is. I'm literally, you're going to turn sleep elite, sleepless elite. I might be one of them. I don't know if that's a thing or not. My doc kept time to tell me about it. So I'm like a three or four hour night guy. And then every two weeks I'll crash and get about eight hours and that works. Seems to work for me. Okay, cool. But when I was having my biggest struggles in recovery, my sleep was horrible. An hour here, a half hour there, 45 minutes there. And in the end, what did I, what could I do? There was nothing I could do about it anyway. So it did get a whole lot better for me when I stopped trying so hard to fix that. And suddenly I began to sleep for longer and longer amounts of time. It still wasn't perfect, but it took a while to get back on track. Does that sound about right to you? Like, I just gave up. I can't fix this. So I'm going to stop trying so hard. Yeah, that is the way that is the path. I, you said it so well, so well, like when it's hard to see this as somebody who's struggling, but it's truth. It is sort of surrender. When I'm, when I'm giving up this fight and struggle, then it all falls into place. And one thing when, when we're talking along the lines of kind of acceptance and surrendering, some people, a lot of people that hear this go like, so what are you telling me? I have to accept that I'm going to have insomnia for the rest of my life. And of course that's not the case. That that would be like hard for the impossible. Like who wants that? Nobody wants that. It's impossible to accept that, but it's more like accepting that there's nothing I can do to control my sleep. And when we accept that, like things get easier and easier. Yeah. And I think that for those of you guys listening, I'm guessing this is good. That sounds very familiar to you. Like, as I hear the same thing, are you telling me you just have to panic every day for the rest of my life? No, no, no, no, no, it's not, it's not all what I'm saying. But if you're willing to go to a place of acceptance where well, I might panic now and then, or I might have some crappy sleep now and then, but that's okay. I can handle that. I can be tired and still be okay. That's when things change. I'm guessing. Absolutely right. And you know, there was another thing I thought I might just comment on, which was like, you describe how you're sleeping, which is like, you don't sleep a whole lot. You sleep quite a little most compared to a lot of people, but then sometimes you sleep a whole lot more. But I can tell that it doesn't bother you. That's, you know, you don't think of that as a problem. And a lot of people ask me, like, so Daniel, like, when I get over this struggle with insomnia, like, what am I going to sleep be like? Well, I often say that we, I believe we do have some type of like, call it personality or call it temperament, whatever you want. Some of us are very kind of easy go lucky. And we may have a little bit more like maybe fall asleep easier and sleep a bit longer. Some of us are a little bit more type A. And maybe it takes a little bit longer to fall asleep. Maybe we have a little more superficial sleep. But none of that keeps us from like living a very fulfilling, meaningful, wonderful life. As long as we, you know, we don't think of it as a problem. So yeah, I think everything falls into place as we let go of the struggle. Yeah, I would agree with that. My own personal experience with this is, and even with the sleep thing for me, and I've learned over the years to accept, like, well, I'm having a really sluggish day, like lately in the last two years, I might fall asleep at six o'clock in the evening for a little bit. I'll wake up again. I'm not going to sleep all night. But that's okay. If that's what happens, that's what happens. And I will admit on a personality, I struggled with that and I fought with that. But whatever, like when sleep comes, it comes and it is what it is. So for me, I had the binaural beats. I did the sleep mass. I did every possible thing. So in a nutshell, what are you teaching people without giving away all your trade secrets here? I do give away my trade secrets all the time. Yeah, we have no secrets. But yeah, I would say this, I think what really truly helps is really understanding where Insomnia comes from. So I'll share with the audience kind of my take on this and how it develops. I think it could be really valuable. So the common Insomnia stories, somebody tells me like, oh, I've struggled with this for like 10 months or a year or longer. Like it really actually doesn't matter because the story is similar. But somebody says, I've struggled with this for a while and this is what happened. I had a health scare two years ago, let's say. I was worried about my heart and it turns out it was nothing. But during that time, I stopped sleeping and it never came back. Something like that is a common story. And what I then tell that person is that, okay, the brain is this like survival machine. It always wants us to stay safe. That's kind of its main mission in life. And when we go through something that's scary to us or something that's stressful in some way, it is completely normal that we sleep less. It's just a state of like being kind of prepared, being ready for something. And so when you had health scare, for example, it's completely natural that you slept less during that time. But when the brain is in this frazzled and confused state and state of fear, it can identify threats that aren't real threats. For example, being awake. At some point during that initial stressful period, your brain probably went, oh, wait a minute, not only am I scared about this hard thing, I'm also not sleeping, maybe this is the problem. And now what the brain has done is identified a perceived threat, something that's not actually cannot hurt us, cannot harm us. Being awake is completely harmless, but the brain has identified that as a threat. And then what happens, the next step is very natural. Whenever we think we are facing a threat, the brain wants us to stay safe. And it doesn't matter if it's a real threat, if we're being attacked by a grizzly bear, or if we're afraid of being awake, we're going to do the same thing. We're going to try to hide, stay safe or fight back. And that leads to kind of the next step here, which is that set a person who had a health scare and then kind of like no longer has a health care, but not sleeping, they're going to try things like you said, the binaural beats, the supplements. And here's the thing, when we're trying, when we're running away from a grizzly bear, it makes total sense. Like, you know, I would do that, it's like what we should do, right? It keeps us safe. But when we're trying to kind of escape a perceived threat, what that does is really just teaching, it's kind of teaching the brain that, oh, this is real, like you're trying to escape from it, you're doing things, that means there must be some real threat there. So the more we try to escape, the more it just reinforces that there is a problem, which leads to kind of this ongoing struggle again. So when people understand that, you often have this aha moment and like, ah, now I understand. And from that kind of understanding, then you have a foundation from which things get easier and easier. So that's kind of the starting point. Yeah, which is tremendous. And for anybody who has listened to this podcast, welcome to all 235 previous episodes of the anxious truth, literally applied in the realm of sleep. So I'm guessing there's a large number of people right now that was like, this MF or just told me that sleep is like an anxiety symptom because it's a true, it's a huge overlap. Like, I don't have a sleep problem. I have this is just another symptom of my anxiety and I'm afraid of it and I'm running from it. Tremendous. That was worth the price of admission right there, folks just saying. So that's so good. Yeah, I'm so glad it made sense. And just to kind of add one, one little extra thought to this one is, you know, another way to answer like, what is insomnia? I often think of it as like, it's a surface manifestation of anxiety. It's a surface manifestation of fear, just like, you know, palpitations are at the surface. And when we focus on kind of the surface, we're like, why do I have palpitations? What's wrong or why I'm not sleeping? We're not really seeing what's really going on. But when we understand, oh, this is just a manifestation of anxiety. Now we're seeing things clearly and things can change for us. Right, because the I mean, I read when I was on your website, I noticed that you talked about CBTI. So clearly have some background in that. And you can see the parallels here. So when you run away from your racing heart or your palpitations or your shaky legs or whatever it is, things just get worse. So it's the same exact approach when it comes to sleep. But unfortunately, that that means that for your folks and the people that we clearly share in an audience here would be, that means you have to accept the fact that you might only sleep two and a half or three hours tonight broken up here and there and you might be really tired tomorrow. So what do you tell the person who says, what am I going to do about that? Yeah, no, it's not it's not easy. And I think that's absolutely right. Like when we start doing this kind of like, you know, inner work or whatever we want to call it, like we learn, we educate ourselves. I think it is very true that things, things will get easier. Sleep will come to you. It will get easier for you. But tonight what's going to happen tonight, nobody can predict that nobody knows. And again, like one of the most common fears again is like, how will I feel tomorrow? I'm going to be kind of drained, exhausted and feel terrible. Well, what I share with the person who has that fear is, is that it can really help to see where does, where does that come from? The way you feel tomorrow potentially, or have in the past when you slept very little, why was that? And we can, we can sort of answer this question by doing a mental, like a mental experiment here. If we take a random person, random person who's never had any sleep problems, right? And we say, we're going to make this person sleep two hours. And we do. And then we imagine asking this person how they feel the next day. Well, that person is most likely going to say, I do feel tired. And I feel sleepy today. But that's it. You know, there's not going to be so much more to that. But if you take a person with like insomnia and they slept two hours the next day, they're going to say, I'm totally drained. I'm exhausted. I can't function. My world is collapsing upon me. Like, this is terrible. And there again, we have the narrative. It's not that little sleep makes us feel terrible. It's the narrative around it that we think it means that I'm sick. It means that I'm never going to get better. It means that. So I tell people like, when the narrative changes, everything changes. That's kind of probably the most helpful. And the second thing that I will share with people is like the self compassion component that when we add like, oh, I didn't sleep. What am I doing wrong? What's wrong with me? That's really just self criticism. We think we did something wrong. But when we go like, I didn't sleep much. And that's okay. That's because I was scared. We're kind of kind and gentle with ourselves. That also helps so much. Yeah, what that's such a great message. I really appreciate that in a big way. And it will resonate with the people listening because it's the same thing. My standard answer not coming from any sort of expertise is it's not sleeping doesn't make you feel anxious. It makes you feel. And since my people are already afraid of how they feel, it just it's like getting matched onto throwing match on a fire. So yeah, it's the narrative that like, Oh, no, my anxiety will through the roof. No, no, no, you'll feel tired. You'll be sluggish. You'll be dragging like what the rest of the world drinks a coffee or a Red Bull and they stumble through their day and then they go to sleep the next night. They don't add a narrative on top of it. So I so appreciate that it does. The messages are astoundingly parallel. Like really, it's astounded. It's striking in the parallel nature of this. So anyway, we're about 27 minutes in. I try and keep it under half hour or so just to keep people on their way. So Daniel, I so appreciate it. Anything you want to wrap up with any particular words of wisdom that you would leave people with? I would just probably just spin off of what you just said, which is it is it is kind of all the same. The answers are all the same. Often people ask me like, Oh, Daniel, like, first, I had trouble falling asleep. Now I have trouble staying asleep. Well, now I have nightmares. Now I have a dream. Now I had this. And what am I going to do? And my answer becomes like, you know, spinning off of what you said, the answers are kind of shockingly similar, whatever inner struggles we're dealing with. So anyone out there, if you have like listened to Drew here and learned a lot, but you're struggling with sleep and just seeing that the same thing that leads you to like, you know, more peace of mind also leads to more peaceful sleep and you know, peace, more peaceful existence in general. So it's all the same answers. Yeah, great. Great. Love it. Well, thank you so much for coming. Where can people find you? I think the best place is actually YouTube, the Sleep Coach School. And we have a podcast as well that those are great places. Sounds good. What I will do is if you guys go to the show notes for this website, for this episode, which is at the anxioustruth.com slash 236, I'll link all of Daniel's stuff, your website, your YouTube, I'll put it all there so you can find him there. Thank you so much, my friend. Hopefully do more of these going down the road. It's been great to, to connect with you and share ideas. And I appreciate you sharing with my people. Can't wait. It was super nice. Yeah. Yeah, we'll see you next time. Okay, we are back in the studio and by the studio, I just mean still sitting here on my desk with that Daniel next to me. So I so enjoyed that interview. I enjoyed being on Daniel's podcast. I'll link that over. I'll link that episode over in my website so you guys can check it out if you want to. And it's always great to come across somebody who has a useful message, who's not trying to sell all kinds of crazy snake oil, who's in alignment with the kind of things that you hear me talk about and all of my frequent collaborators. When we share a message and you know that somebody is out to actually help people, it's always a pleasure to hook up with them. Bring them on the show. Have you guys get to know them? I hope that you found that helpful. I'll probably work with Daniel again here and there as we go. But I would wholeheartedly recommend him as a resource because there's no magic behind dealing with your sleep. He's going to sound very familiar. These, his concepts are going to overlap a lot with the things that we talk about here on this podcast. So go check him out. If you want to find more about him, you can go to my website, the anxioustruth.com slash 236 will be the show notes for this episode. I will have all Daniel, all Daniel's links there. Go check him out. Tell him I said hi. Tell him I sent you. Good dude. Anyway, that is it. Episode 236 is in the book. You know, it's over because music that is afterglow by my friend, Ben Drake. You hear me say that every week. That is the music that you hear mostly at the beginning, but always at the end of each one of these podcasts. Ben is nice enough to let me use it. So if you would like to learn more about Ben and afterglow, go check out Ben Drake music.com. If you are listening to this podcast on Apple podcast or Spotify or some platform that lets you rate and review the podcast, leave a five star rating. If you dig it, then take a second and maybe write a review because it helps other people find the podcast. And that's how we reach and help as many people as we can, which is really the reason why I do this. If you're watching on YouTube, hit the subscribe button, turn on the notification so you know when I upload new things, like the video. What else are you supposed to do? Leave a comment. I'll answer you. I promise. And that is it. Hopefully this has been helpful to you. I will see you again next week. We'll be back with another podcast episode. Do not know what I'm going to talk about, but I will be here. And remember, as always, this is the way it's all around you. You can breathe it in. This is where your story begins. You got the feeling that you're going to win.