Insomnia and the Limits of Understanding

What does insomnia reveal when we stop treating sleeplessness simply as a problem to be corrected?

This developing project explores the lived experience of persistent insomnia through in-depth qualitative interviews, bringing psychotherapy into conversation with phenomenological and sleep-science perspectives.

Rather than approaching insomnia only as a behavioural, cognitive or medical problem, the project asks what sleeplessness is like to live through: how it is experienced in the body, through time, and in everyday life.

The work is supported by UWE Bristol's Higher Education Innovation Fund and is intended to develop practice-relevant understanding for therapists, supervisors and wellbeing practitioners.

Interviews are currently underway. The emerging accounts will inform practitioner-facing work and future writing on the experience of insomnia.

The aim is not to develop another treatment protocol, but to understand more fully the lived experience of sleeplessness and its implications for those working alongside people with insomnia.