This is my sleep story.

When sleep fails to come it is always a symptom. The cause is different for everybody. For some, it’s a racing mind, negative emotions, the nutrition, and for me, it was the pain!

MASSIVE pain.

Once upon a time

a disk in my spine decided to slip and left me with tremendous amounts of pain. On my personal pain scale from 0..10 it was constantly ranging between 7 and sometimes even 10 depending on things I didn’t know at first.

• I wasn’t able to work.
• I could only walk more than 200 meters even using crutches
• I wasn’t even able to sit or lie on the sofa

I was in trouble.

But I knew one thing. I will get this fixed.

My personal sleep story

With those levels of pain, you can probably imagine that my sleep got a serious hit. As a result, I felt in double trouble. Mainly because I needed my sleep to feel good (as we all do) and because it was the only time of the day when I was pain-free.

Here I was now, having tremendous amounts of pain and sleeping only 2-3 hours a night. Furthermore, I wasn’t able to sit or lie on my sofa. As a consequence, I was living on a yoga mat in my living room for months. I felt like a burden to my family during those times.

Working as a high-performance coach I knew exactly about the structure of change and what it takes to make it happen. But now it was my turn. My mind was distracted from the massive and omnipresent pain and on top of that, I was sleep-deprived.

What now Mr. Super-Coach is what I thought to myself!

Believing enables achieving

There are a couple of things that you simply want to have in place when it comes to big changes. Things that truly challenge you. Hence I needed to find my motivation and my belief.

Firstly I never saw myself as somebody who was not able to move his body freely (and without pain) and
Secondly, I wanted to be able to play with my kids as other dads do.

What might sound a little bit boring for you was deeply motivational for me.

As a result, I began to believe that I would be able to run again and I knew I would do anything that it takes to get there.

My journey back to sleep

Being motivated and believing (=knowing) that I would be able to move and sleep again was a great thing to have in place. But that didn’t take away the pain and it also didn’t bring me to sleep. What it did do was to fuel all the following and necessary steps back to great quality sleep!

I went to the doctor. I saw a couple of them. I got medications. I got injections. I got active.

Here comes the first thing that doctors quite frequently don’t do or even tell you to do…measurement. So important. You can’t improve things that you don’t measure and therefore I started to measure everything I was doing. And I was doing a lot.

• pain killers
• hot baths
• walking
• meditations
• supplements (e.g. magnesium, Curcuma, …)
• physiotherapy
• swimming
• osteopathy
• gymnastics
• massage
• and so many many more

The probably craziest thing that I did was to use an electroshock belt my mom bought for me that was supposed to prevent the pain from wandering from my spine into the brain. In summary – I was desperate and I tested anything that looked as if it had a chance to work.

And I kept track of everything. In particular, I wrote down what I did in the morning, around lunchtime, and in the evening and how my pain levels were accordingly. I additionally wrote down how long I slept every single night.

As a result of this, I was able to see small improvements over time. And small improvements compound if you do more and more of them.

Seeing the light

I believe anybody that ever struggled with sleep problems can relate to the joy I was feeling when I first slept 4-5 hours in a row instead of the 2-3 that I was getting consistently before. Then my first night of becoming 7 hours of sleep.

The story didn’t end here as I still had a couple of steps to take until I was able to run again and do all the crazy stuff dads want to do with their kids. But now gratitude further fueled my motivation and made the last steps easy to take.

What’s the catch

It’s that we all have to face challenges. Some have bad sleep, others have even worse problems. During my healing, I met somebody that died because of cancer only months after we first met.

Probably one of my personal take-aways is that life got more precious to me after this experience.

It was also the beginning of sleeptrust as the vision to help others find back to good sleep again came up during that time. Since a lot has happened and I brought together sleep science with the best coaching models to serve the sleepless.

As a result today anybody can use the clear 9-Step Sleeptrust Sleepmap as a guide back to good, resting sleep with clarity.

I created the guidance I desperately missed when I got hit with my insomnia. Now it’s up to you to use it!

Sending you love and sleep

Michael Hildebrandt

P.S. – You can download the Sleeptrust Sleepmap for free here.