Is it a vision or a nightmare that keeps you awake at night?

Purpose, passion, healing, good sleep and the future of medicine

So, where I currently stand in my healing journey is this: the nightmares and flashbacks are finally becoming a little less intense, which honestly feels like a big win, but it doesn’t mean I’m sleeping a lot more. Because when it’s not the trauma that’s keeping me up, it’s the vision. The overwhelming excitement of what I see coming.

I’m working on the mission statement for the new website, and every time I sit down to write it, I close my eyes and picture a world where my knowledge is already fully shared, fully embodied, not just by me but by everyone who needs it — doctors, patients, medical students, residents, and decision-makers alike.

I get chills because I can see it so clearly: I see patients walking into a consultation room without fear in their hearts. I see them being treated not as a burden, a chart, or a problem to fix, but as real human beings, whose voices matter, whose presence matters, who aren’t rushed or dismissed.

And I see the doctors, too, and in that vision, they are not crushed under impossible admin or buried under soul-numbing systems; they are actually free to show up as who they are. I see the weight of bureaucracy and survival mode lifting off their shoulders; I see them reconnecting with why they became doctors in the first place.

I see them ending the day not completely exhausted, collapsed on the couch with a bottle of wine, just to cope somehow. However, they walk through the door of their home, able to play with their kids, laugh with their partner, and enjoy their evening because they’re not wrung out like a dishrag.

I see a genuine partnership forming between doctor and patient, where they work toward a shared goal without either having to sacrifice their humanity or dignity along the way.

And the most powerful part is that this isn’t just some distant dream. It’s not a utopia or a fairytale. Every tool we need to create this future already exists. We have all the opportunities, but we lack aligned efforts, knowledge, and fair distribution. But this problem can be fixed, and I’m here to show you exactly how.

What today appears as failure, fear, anxiety, pain, and burnout on both sides can be transformed, and tomorrow it can become commitment, connection, clarity, emphaty and passionate healing.

And I know this because I see it, not just in theory, but in my body, in my bones. This vision doesn’t let me rest because I’m not meant to sleep through it; I want to build it. This is the part no one sees: the late nights, surrounded by books and tabs, the blinking cursor, the warmth of my sleeping dogs by my feet, and the weight of a future I can’t not write, even in the dark.

Writing this future into existence while the world sleeps, this is the only reason I want to stay awake at night. This calling, this pulse that beats through my chest even when I try to rest, this is the only thing I hope will finally be louder than the pain.

For long months, I couldn’t fully dedicate myself to it. I wanted to, God, I really wanted to, but my energy was spent on survival, patching the holes. I tried so hard to stitch myself back together in the background so I wouldn’t fall apart while no one was watching.

And I honestly believed that once it all started again, once I had to speak out loud, name things, touch those stories again, it would break me completely, that it would ruin the little sleep I had managed to reclaim. That my nervous system would collapse under the weight of everything.

But that’s not what’s happening.

What’s happening is relief. Like a storm has passed, and even if I’m still drenched and shaking, I can finally breathe because the heaviest thing I was carrying was the silence. It was the unbearable, slow-dripping guilt of knowing something needed to be said, and not saying it.

There’s a line in Hungarian that’s incredibly beautiful: “Vétkesek közt cinkos, aki néma.” It means: Among the guilty, the one who stays silent is an accomplice.

And that’s the guilt I just have to accept because I’ve finally done my part. I’ve spoken. It won’t be me who allows this to continue by ignoring it. Whatever happens from here, it will not be because I stayed silent.

And that clarity, that sense of alignment, of integrity returning to my bones—that’s where the energy now comes from. Even if the fear still whispers, even if the disgust still flickers, even with everything that’s still so f@cking broken and bruised inside me, I feel strength. Strength I didn’t expect. Strength I didn’t realize I still had.

And I’m channeling all of it into this—into creating and building. I’m proving to myself and the world what I am capable of, even with a fractured soul, slowed down, betrayed, bruised.

I will still build this future. I can still bring this vision to life, and I will. This is what kept me going when I was taking hits, trembling for my safety, sleeping on bare floors, and trying to salvage what little I could. This was what I held in front of me. This was the vision I clung to.

It gave me just enough strength to crawl into the next day, then the next, and the one after that. Saving healthcare is saving me. This is the future I choose, over fear, over exhaustion, over shame, and over silence. And if I can build this still broken, still bruised, still sleepless, then imagine what’s coming when I’m whole again.

The doctor–patient relationship is changing faster than medical training can keep up. Patients arrive informed, full of questions, motivated by data, and increasingly influenced by digital health and medical AI — yet most doctors have never learned how to navigate this new dynamic without conflict or defensiveness. Foresight Studio New York’s brand new online course, From Authority to Ally, offers a solid, psychologically informed skillset for this transition. It provides doctors with practical communication techniques, somatic regulation tools, and forward-looking frameworks that maintain clinical authority while fostering genuine partnership.

To my beloved The Lab members, I’m sharing my favorite method for those sleepless nights when nightmares persist.

After a nightmare, the brain often stays in a REM-like threat state: high noradrenergic activity, reduced prefrontal inhibition, vivid imagery, and strong emotional tagging. If you try to “go back to sleep” immediately from this state, the system tends to re-enter the same REM pathway, which explains why recurrent or looping nightmares happen.

Sitting upright, keeping your eyes open, and introducing strong sensory and autonomic inputs can help shift between different states. You’re intentionally pushing the nervous system from REM-like patterns into a fully awake state. This action triggers a reset rather than ongoing activity. Yes, this can make you feel more alert temporarily, but that is expected and purposeful. The goal is to let sympathetic arousal decrease after establishing full orientation, not before.

When autonomic activation decreases — leading to a slowing of the heart rate, reduced muscle tone, fading imagery, and a loss of narrative flow — the brain stops re-entering REM sleep. Instead, it transitions into lighter non-REM sleep, usually N2, and sometimes advances to N3. This onset of sleep often feels heavy, dull, or “dark,” with little to no memory of how it started. Trying to fall asleep too quickly keeps the brain in a predictive threat cycle, while staying awake too long risks cortical overactivation. The ideal window is usually between five and fifteen minutes, based on physiological cues rather than clock time.

Your schedule needs adjustment to ensure peaceful, nightmare-free sleep. Here’s exactly how to do it:

Behind the paywall: 5 clinically grounded night interventions
These are mechanism-based tools for what actually happens in the nervous system after nocturnal awakenings and nightmares.