It's my experience as well (though I'm starting to think my insomnia is very mild reading this thread). I find my insomnia tends to get worse the more I fight it. So I stay up later than I'd prefer, so that I'm more tired, and less likely to be awake in the middle of my sleep. I also will get up in the middle of the night if I can't sleep and just be awake for a few hours until I feel I can go back to sleep. But if I fight it at any step sleep seems to be harder to come by, regardless of how tired or lacking if sleep I am. I also can't use an alarm clock. If I do then the odds of sleep go way down, since now there's a race and if I don't fall asleep now, then 'I might not get enough sleep' or 'I might wake up in the wrong part of my cycle'. I've also neen experimenting with lighting. Blue lighting definitely wakes me up at night so I avoid them.

But I consider myself lucky. I've mostly engineered my life such that I don't need to function before 10am (I think I'm genetically predisposed to a late sleep cycle, so far it looks like 2/3 of my kids may as well). I can afford to not use alarm clocks most of the time. And, it's possible my insomnia is nowhere near as bad as others'...