> As I mentioned above, the problem didn't even end up being with anxiety, so going to a therapist would have been worse than useless for me.
I wouldn't go that far. Therapy is a broadly-useful non-medical intervention that can increase across-the-board mental health. It bridges the gap between medical intervention, where specialists act as necessary gatekeepers to otherwise-dangerous courses of action, not that they're always successful at reducing the danger, and self-help, which is thoroughly hit-or-miss.
There is an established body of psychological research that the therapist brings you in contact with that the medical community is only tangentially aware of. Sure, you could read up on this stuff yourself. But it's the talk therapist's job to know about it. And even if you don't find purchase on your stated problem, you might find other problems that you didn't realize you'd had.
If you can afford it or get it covered, I highly recommend regular sessions for a few years.
Yea, I wasn't making a blanket indictment of therapy; I have plenty of friends who passionately describe it as something that anyone could benefit from, and I'm inclined to believe them. A combination of a familial mental health history and some childhood trauma due to same means that I'm sure I'm not a paragon of mental perfection (but again, no one is). But I don't think it's unreasonable to say that the time and expense of a treatment that wasn't relevant wouldn't have been a good thing during an overwhelmingly pressing medical issue, at the very least to the extent that it was time spent not addressing or investigating the real problem, exacerbated by the fact that impaired executive function was one of the biggest challenges of addressing a sleeping disorder.
I wouldn't go that far. Therapy is a broadly-useful non-medical intervention that can increase across-the-board mental health. It bridges the gap between medical intervention, where specialists act as necessary gatekeepers to otherwise-dangerous courses of action, not that they're always successful at reducing the danger, and self-help, which is thoroughly hit-or-miss.
There is an established body of psychological research that the therapist brings you in contact with that the medical community is only tangentially aware of. Sure, you could read up on this stuff yourself. But it's the talk therapist's job to know about it. And even if you don't find purchase on your stated problem, you might find other problems that you didn't realize you'd had.
If you can afford it or get it covered, I highly recommend regular sessions for a few years.