Beating Insomnia: A No-Nonsense Way to Natural Sleep

A book review from Self Publishing Review/Publisher’s Weekly

Beating Insomnia by Stephen Altschuler, M.Ed.

Beating Insomnia by Stephen AltschulerStephen Altschuler, M.Ed. tackles the frustrating topic of insomnia and sleep struggles with his exhaustively researched and compelling new book, Beating Insomnia: A No-Nonsense Way to Natural Sleep.

Part memoir and part sleep guide, Altschuler welcomes readers into the sleepless recesses of his own experience with insomnia as a result of cancer, while also providing a wealth of resources and mental frameworks to address and overcome common sleep issues, whatever the cause. Despite the unique aspect of a memoir, Altschuler’s approaches to addressing his own insomnia could be applied to anyone’s experience, and many elements of the book are broadly philosophical, rather than specific to one person’s experience.

Altschuler’s conversational tone, with frequent asides and varied anecdotes, makes it feel like readers are having a long chat with a close friend, rather than a long lecture from an experienced professional. This is not to say the book lacks concrete information, as it is comprehensive – the second chapter is particularly interesting, asessing many of the available solutions for insomnia, with the author’s informed take on their efficacy.

Some parts of the book, including Chapters 8, 9, and 10, don’t feel as fully fleshed out as others, and could potentially be compressed together, or expanded individually, but there are some wholly original ideas here that could be of real help to people. Overall, the gentle pace of the writing and the personal flourishes to the author’s story combine for a revealing and genuinely insightful guide that should help readers attain a more rested life.

***

Beating Insomnia

Stephen Altschuler

Sacajawea Press

9780578299082 $9.99 Paper/$4.99 Kindle

https://www.amazon.com/Beating-Insomnia-No-Nonsense-Natural-Sleep/dp/0578299
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Review by D. Donovan, Sr. Reviewer, Midwest Book Review

Insomnia is a widespread problem, and shelves of books about the subject
have already been written. What sets Stephen Altschuler’s Beating Insomnia:
A No-Nonsense Way to Natural Sleep apart from most is its review of why most
sleep advice doesn’t work, and the methods which have been proven
successful.

Altschuler experienced powerful chemotherapy, which saved his life but
exacted many tolls-among them, the inability to sleep. The cookie-cutter
approach of many doctors towards fostering elusive sleep didn’t help. In
fact, they made matters worse.

Timing is everything; but nowhere is that adage more effective than in sleep
patterns. Body clocks vary, body chemistry differs, and this is why ‘one
size fits all’ approaches to insomnia are more likely to expand the problem
than solve it. And that’s the ticket to success in Beating Insomnia, which
presents a self-help program of identifying and working with one’s natural
rhythms instead of a singular approach.

There are many avenues towards reaching the goal of better sleep that are
involved in this process. Some may be surprising to readers that anticipate
nighttime mantras or wind-down routines alone.

One example involves the move to improve overall life quality: “To shift
attention away from sleep difficulties, you must find something in your life
to look forward to waking up to-a purpose that is enjoyable, that fires your
creative juices, that literally consumes you with interest and
thought-something you find so interesting that it can distract you from
obsessing upon insomnia.”

It seems counterproductive to get all fired up about an effort to sleep, but
Altschuler maintains that this and other life-changing approaches all
contribute to better sleep by improving the quality of not just nighttime,
but daytime routines.

He defines “natural sleep” as “sleep without prescription medications or
over the counter sleep aids,” and he attends to routines and measures which
also are not too addictive or rigid in their deployment.

As self-help readers and insomniacs pursue the many tips to creating a more
restful, sleep-inducing environment, from outfitting a room with blackout
curtains and making sure it’s cool to adopting a regular schedule that
encourages sleep, they will find it easy to adjust these tips to suit their
own lifestyles and approaches. And yet, the basics of these admonitions
allow for understanding the fundamental influences on reaching the goal of
natural sleep patterns.

Reading Beating Insomnia is like pressing the “reset” button. It allows
readers to better understand the roots of their individual problem and
pattern disruptions, and to adopt the routines and processes which mitigate
sleep-reducing influences and patterns. It also helps identify and address
anticipatory fears and many other underlying psychological factors that
interfere with sleep patterns. It is best used by the self-help insomniac
who would consider and revise perceptions not just of sleep, but their
lives.

Libraries looking for new approaches to self-health and beating insomnia
will find Beating Insomnia filled with examples gleaned from Altschuler’s own
experiences as well as a host of practical solutions any insomniac can
readily employ to address their own sleep-elusive issues.

The book will help its readers fall and stay asleep. Its author’s
experiences offer invaluable keys to identifying common pitfalls and
overcoming them, making Beating Insomnia a highly recommended choice above
many competing sleep aids.

***

BOOK REVIEW

This memoir and self-help book presents one man’s experience with anxiety-related sleep deprivation and how he overcame it.
In 2017, California-based mental health counselor Altschuler was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. After his return to work following cancer treatments, he found that constant sleep deprivation resulted in anxiety, social isolation, and, eventually, suicidal ideation and despair. Desperate for a solution, Altschuler tried multiple options—from medication to therapy to neurofeedback—until he encountered Springfield, Oregon–based sleep physician Daniel Erichsen, who provides this book’s foreword and whose coaching became the basis for Altschuler’s own sleep hygiene tips and best practices for a sound slumber. He calls these the “Six Ps to Better Sleep”—“Preparation,” “Plan,” “Possibility,” “Positivity,” “Passion,” and “Pay Off”—and explains each in detail. He also discusses myriad strategies that didn’t work for him as well as other established approaches that proved successful. Many tips emphasize an approach to sleep that’s related to cognitive behavioral therapy; specifically, they draw strongly upon the idea that a person can change their perspective about insomnia and replace intrusive thoughts that induce wakefulness. These arguments, built more upon personal experience than evidence-based strategies, will offer many readers some insight on ways that one may be able to facilitate slumber without medical intervention or expensive technology. However, more specifics about these strategies would have greatly added to the book’s value. This sleep guide also contains a great deal of summary and repetition that detract from the book as a whole. Still, there are some strong stories here, such as one in which the author tells of how reaching his lowest point led him to a place of greater resilience.

An earnest but disjointed personal guide to overcoming chronic insomnia.

—Kirkus Reviews

A personal note: Nothing is more disjointed than insomnia, making my book appropriately disjointed but an effective way to beat insomnia.