If you’ve ever found yourself staring at the ceiling at 2am, exhausted but wide awake, you’re not alone. Nearly one-third of adults struggle with insomnia.

And yet, despite its prevalence, insomnia is often treated as a personal failure: “I can’t shut my brain off.” “I must be doing something wrong.”

But at MOVN, we understand sleep struggles differently.

Insomnia isn’t just a mental issue. It’s a systemic one.

When we look at sleep through a systems lens—drawing from thinkers like Donella Meadows and from decades of clinical experience—something fundamental shifts. It stops being about fixing you. It starts being about understanding how you’re embedded in a set of feedback loops—physiological, psychological, relational, ancestral, organizational—that are keeping you from rest.

Quick Fixes vs. True Restoration

For years, the go-to solution for insomnia has been medication. And while medications like Ambien or Lunesta can help people fall asleep, they don’t often lead to restorative sleep.

Why? Because they disrupt the body’s natural sleep architecture—particularly the deep and REM stages where emotional and physical repair occur. You may be technically asleep, but it’s more like floating in shallow water than diving into the depths where true transformation happens.

Medication can provide short-term relief. But without attending to the deeper patterns, the system remains out of rhythm.

Sleep Hygiene Is Helpful, But It’s Not the Whole Story

Many people are told to improve their sleep hygiene—a set of habits and environmental cues designed to support better sleep. This might include:

• Going to bed and waking at the same time each day
• Avoiding screens an hour before bed
• Limiting caffeine or alcohol intake
• Keeping your bedroom cool, dark, and quiet

These tips are evidence-based and can be truly helpful for some.

But here’s the thing: for many people with chronic insomnia, sleep hygiene isn’t enough. In fact, being repeatedly told to try these techniques—when you’ve already tried them—can feel disheartening, even shame-inducing.

Why? Because when the system is dysregulated, it can be nearly impossible to enact even the most well-intentioned habits. This is the very nature of interdependence: sleep, mood, stress, and behavior are co-arising. You might know what to do—but still find yourself unable to do it. That doesn’t make you broken. It means your system is overwhelmed.

At MOVN, we understand this. That’s why we move beyond behavior checklists and toward co-creating conditions that allow your system to shift.

Sleep Is a Living System

Drawing from Meadows’ work on leverage points in systems, we understand insomnia as a symptom of systemic imbalance—not just a localized issue, but a larger pattern of dysregulation.

In systems terms, we might call insomnia a “signal” from the system—feedback indicating that something is out of alignment.

Insomnia is not the problem—it’s the body’s way of asking for change.

To address it, we need to consider:

• Environmental rhythms (light, temperature, noise)
• Social dynamics (isolation, conflict, overstimulation)
• Psychological narratives (fear of not sleeping, performance anxiety)
• Physiological feedback loops (cortisol cycles, heart rate variability)

When we engage with these dimensions, insomnia becomes a doorway—not just into better sleep, but into a deeper integration of mind, body, and world.

CBT-I: Gentle Precision, Rhythmic Intervention

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I) is a highly effective, evidence-based approach that works with—not against—the system.

It doesn’t just change your thoughts. It supports re-regulation.

Key interventions include:

• Cognitive restructuring: Softening the stress-based feedback loop of “I have to sleep or else”
• Sleep restriction: Aligning time in bed with actual sleep time to rebuild pressure and restore rhythm
• Stimulus control: Re-training the brain-body relationship with the sleep environment

These are not just “tools”—they are part of a therapeutic repatterning process.

Beyond the Bed: Expanding the Boundaries of Care

Insomnia doesn’t just come from the mind. It’s affected by:

• Workplace culture and overstimulation
• Relational rupture or emotional overexertion
• Cultural ideals of productivity, speed, and hyper-vigilance
• Ancestral patterns of vigilance, trauma, or exhaustion

This is what MOVN means by embeddedness.

And this is why our therapy doesn’t reduce you to sleep hygiene checklists. Instead, we work with:

• Your whole system (biology, story, nervous system, social world)
• A felt sense of rhythm and timing
• The possibility of co-regulation in the therapeutic space itself

Rest Is a Repatterning

True rest is not passive.

It is an active recalibration—a movement of the system back toward coherence.

This is where MOVN therapy shines. We work gently but precisely, drawing on trauma-informed, body-based, systems-aware practices that are designed to create the conditions for emergence.

You don’t need to control your sleep. You need space to meet your system where it is.

You Deserve Sleep That Goes Deep

Insomnia affects everything: mood, memory, immune health, boundaries, grief.

But it doesn’t have to define you.

When approached systemically, insomnia becomes an invitation to meet yourself at a deeper level.

MOVN offers integrated psychotherapy throughout California, combining CBT-I, somatic approaches, and holistic restoration practices for real, meaningful change.

Schedule a free 15-minute consultation and let’s find a rhythm that works for you.

You may also be interested in this recent article: NatureNew treatments to put insomnia to bed