If you’ve lived with chronic insomnia for any length of time, you’ve almost certainly been taught to think of it as a problem to solve. Somewhere in your body, the story goes, something has gone wrong. Perhaps it’s a hormone imbalance. A neurotransmitter deficiency. Elevated cortisol. Poor sleep hygiene. An overactive nervous system. The search becomes endless, with each new theory offering the promise that the next supplement, medication, or lifestyle change will finally restore your sleep.
For many people, that search never ends.
Over the last several years, however, an entirely different way of understanding chronic symptoms has begun to gain traction. Physicians such as Howard Schubiner (2026)*, author of Unlearn Your Pain, propose that many persistent physical symptoms—including chronic pain—may not be caused by ongoing tissue damage or disease, but by learned neural pathways in the brain. These are what he calls neuroplastic symptoms.
At first glance, this idea sounds almost unbelievable. After all, pain feels real. Sleeplessness feels real. How could something so tangible be produced by the brain itself?
The answer lies in neuroplasticity, the brain’s remarkable ability to learn, adapt, and strengthen patterns through repetition. We readily accept this concept when we think about learning to ride a bicycle or play the piano. Repeated practice literally changes the brain. Schubiner argues that the same learning processes can sometimes work against us. Under conditions of prolonged stress, unresolved emotional conflict, trauma, fear, or repeated hypervigilance, the brain can learn to generate symptoms that continue long after the original trigger has disappeared.
Importantly, this does not mean the symptoms are imaginary. Neuroplastic symptoms are genuine experiences produced by the nervous system. The suffering is every bit as real as pain from a broken bone or sleep loss caused by a newborn baby. The difference is that the brain has become stuck in a learned protective response rather than responding to an ongoing physical threat.
Although Schubiner primarily focuses on chronic pain, I believe this framework offers a compelling lens through which to understand chronic insomnia.
For many people, insomnia begins during a genuinely stressful period of life—a sick child, grief, divorce, illness, caregiving, or overwhelming anxiety. Initially, the inability to sleep makes perfect sense. But what happens months or years later, after life has stabilized, yet the insomnia stubbornly remains?
The traditional medical model continues searching for something physically wrong. Yet many insomnia sufferers undergo sleep studies, blood work, hormone evaluations, medication trials, and countless lifestyle interventions without lasting improvement. If no ongoing disease process explains the persistence of the symptom, perhaps the question itself deserves to change.
What if the brain simply learned insomnia?
This possibility understandably generates resistance within much of Western medicine. Modern healthcare has been extraordinarily successful by identifying structural problems that require structural solutions. Broken bones are repaired. Infections are treated. Tumors are removed. This model has saved countless lives. But conditions driven by complex interactions between the brain, emotions, and the nervous system don’t fit neatly into that framework. When objective tests fail to reveal an obvious cause, both physicians and patients often feel frustrated.
Unfortunately, suggesting that the brain plays a central role is sometimes misunderstood as implying that the symptoms are “all in your head.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Neuroplastic medicine does not deny biology—it expands it. It acknowledges that the brain itself is a biological organ capable of generating very real physical experiences. In fact, modern neuroscience increasingly demonstrates that our expectations, emotional states, memories, and learned associations profoundly influence how the nervous system functions.
For those of us who have battled chronic insomnia for years, this perspective can be surprisingly hopeful. If the brain learned the symptom, then the brain can also learn something new.
That doesn’t happen by trying harder to sleep. It happens by gradually reducing fear, addressing the emotional patterns that keep the nervous system on high alert, challenging the brain’s learned predictions about sleep, and teaching it that bedtime is no longer a place of danger.
This philosophy lies at the heart of the Rest ReSET program. Rather than offering another collection of sleep hacks, supplements, or rigid rules, Rest ReSET helps you understand the deeper processes that may be keeping insomnia alive. Through guided journaling, emotional awareness, and a fundamentally different relationship with sleep, you begin creating the conditions for your brain to unlearn the very patterns it once learned so well.
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* Schubiner, Howard (2026). Unlearn your pain: The science of recovering from chronic pain, fatigue anxiety, and Depression. Penguin Random House, LLC.
