Making Peace with Insomnia: A Korean Medicine Doctor’s Own Long Nights
It is a quiet irony that someone who thinks about health every day, and writes about it every day, has never had especially good health himself. In Korean Traditional Medicine (KTM), the traditional healing system of Korea also known as Hanbang (한방), sleep is treated as something to be invited rather than forced — and that lesson came to Professor Baek not from a textbook but from a lifetime of his own difficult nights. What follows is less a set of instructions than a way of meeting insomnia that, over the years, has helped more than any single remedy.
In Summary
- Insomnia has been a lifelong companion for Professor Baek, since a teenage tendency for anxiety to keep him awake.
- Two things helped most over the years: constitutional acupuncture, which once brought several nights of unusually deep sleep, and regular exercise such as cycling.
- When sleep broke down again after his children were born and exercise fell away, the turn came less from a cure than from a change of attitude.
- Reframing a 3 a.m. waking as the body’s own signal, and feeling gratitude simply for being able to fall back asleep, took much of the fear out of it.
- Meeting insomnia with curiosity rather than dread — asking why it has come — is itself part of the cure.
A Lifelong Acquaintance
Professor Baek’s trouble with sleep began around the third year of middle school, when the smallest flicker of anxiety was enough to keep him up; he would read until two in the morning and only then collapse into sleep. Through university he leaned on other things to wear himself out — long sessions of gaming, bass practice, the occasional gathering over drinks. A real turning point came in his late twenties, when constitutional acupuncture brought him several consecutive nights of the deepest sleep he had ever experienced, and his sleep quality rose markedly afterward. Cycling brought another good stretch — he slept best in those years, even if he came to depend on the riding to do it. Then two children were born, the time for exercise disappeared entirely, and he could feel body and mind sicken; for several months this year, holding more than two or three hours of sleep at a stretch was beyond him.
The Reframe
He sleeps six to nine hours now, but the most useful thing he carried out of the hard years was not a technique. On the nights he woke after only three hours, he learned to tell himself: my body woke me because this was not the time to sleep. Even recently, after a late dinner, he woke at the three-hour mark and felt the familiar irritation — then wrote two short pieces and fell back asleep, genuinely grateful that he could, remembering not long before when a sleepless night had meant going to work and drifting through the day in a fog. Insomnia wears a person down; there is no pretending otherwise. And yet, looking back, some of his most fruitful work came precisely out of the stretches when he could not sleep. You may never be entirely on good terms with insomnia. But spending the long night wondering why it has come to you, rather than fighting it in fear, is a gentler and often more effective place to begin. (If insomnia is persistent or severe, or comes with real distress, it deserves proper medical attention — this is a way of coping, not a reason to go without care.)
In Summary
Sleep has never come easily to Professor Baek, and that long acquaintance is the point. Constitutional acupuncture and exercise helped him most, but the deepest relief came from a change of stance — reframing a night waking as the body’s signal, feeling grateful for the return of sleep, and treating sleepless hours as sometimes strangely productive rather than purely lost. Insomnia is a wearying condition, but met with curiosity instead of dread, it loosens its grip. May your own long nights be, at least, ones you can spend wondering kindly why they came.
Related reading: Sleep Hygiene in Korean Medicine · Running and Depression in Korean Medicine
This article reflects the clinical observations and teaching practice of Professor Seungho Baek, Professor of Korean Medicine at Dongguk University College of Korean Medicine, specializing in Pathology and Oncology.
