Thanks, @Marina T Alamanou PhD for your great wisdom on sleep. Sleep is so important! However, I want to share a short snippet of my own experience that helped me a lot in my thinking about sleep.

I was in a very dark place at the time emotionally. I thought I needed sleep to heal. But my body thought otherwise. In the end, it took me almost a year of no (or little) sleep. People told me: take a pill. And my gut said: no. My body knows best.

What helped me: the thought that we live in cycles. And sometimes the body just needs other things than sleep to regain its balance. Accepting that helped me a lot in those awake nights.

Instead of sleeping, I trained to meditate. First a little, later hours on end. Not sleeping, still finding the calm in my brain to heal. Also taking power naps during the day if possible (sometimes also just body resting, not sleeping, but listening to shamanic drums or silence).

The period of my life passed. Now I still have an occasional night of being awake. And I can smile to myself then and think: my body knows best. Let’s not try to fix it too forcefully…