My intuitive feelings would say it is absolute that depression makes it hard to sleep, if there is no obvious physical condition that obstructs sleep conditions. Sleep is the release of mind and let go. On the other hand, depression is troubling the mind and not let go.
Understanding Insomnia Beyond Sleep Habits: The Difficulty of Letting Go
Sleep requires a certain release. When there is no obvious physical condition preventing rest, sleeplessness may sometimes be experienced as an inability to fully release the mind from its ongoing activity. To sleep, we gradually loosen our attachment to thoughts, unfinished concerns, emotions, and the need to remain mentally alert.
From this perspective, a restless night is not simply a failure to sleep. It may reflect a deeper difficulty in allowing the mind to surrender control. The mind continues holding, reviewing, anticipating, or resisting, even when the body is ready to rest.
Sleep is, in one sense, an act of letting go. The deeper question may therefore become:
What is the mind still holding onto when the body is asking for rest?
It may be holding onto:
- An unresolved problem — the belief that something must be figured out before you are allowed to rest.
- Control — the feeling that if you stop thinking, something important may be missed or go wrong.
- Fear — especially fear of the future, uncertainty, loss, failure, or what might happen tomorrow.
- The past — replaying conversations, regrets, injuries, mistakes, or moments that cannot be changed.
- An identity — the need to remain productive, responsible, vigilant, successful, or emotionally prepared.
- An emotion — anger, grief, disappointment, resentment, or anxiety that has not yet been allowed to simply exist without being solved.
- A story about the self — What does this mean about me? What should I do? What if I am not enough?
- The need for an answer — the assumption that peace can only come after certainty.
This is why, for some people, insomnia can feel like a conflict between the body, which is ready to let go, and the mind, which still believes it has something important to protect.
Sleep requires a temporary surrender
You cannot remain fully in control and fully asleep at the same time. The thinking mind eventually has to release its grip—not because every problem has been solved, but because rest does not require life to be resolved first.
So the question is not necessarily:
How can I make myself sleep?
It may be:
What am I still trying to hold together, protect, understand, control, or resolve—Is it really important or just due to an anxious mind or a worrisom heart?
Sometimes the mind keeps working because it has confused thinking with safety. It believes that staying mentally active is a form of protection. But the body is sending a different message:
You do not have to carry everything through the night.
Even though many great ideas or inspirations are born from insomnia, it contitutes a bad habit for physical health if your body and mind cannot maintain an essential balance to keep robust energy going around.
Rest begins when the mind realizes that letting go does not mean giving up. It means allowing the unresolved to remain unresolved until tomorrow.
The deeper transformation may therefore be this:
Sleep is not something you achieve. It is what becomes possible when the inner effort to keep holding on is no longer necessary.
And perhaps the most important question before sleep is simply:
What can I allow to remain unfinished tonight?
Admittedly, it is quite difficult to let go in real life scenario. Different souls have different dispositions and emotional weaknesses. However, you may find the light in the dark tunnel of insomnia if you dare to explore the following 3 paths and find the truth about your insomnia: