[Edgar]

Eleven o’clock, time to hit the sack. You feel calm and ready, encouraged by 5-6 good nights in a row, where you only used a small dose of Valium (less than 2 mg), more as moral support than anything else.
You go to bed. There is nothing stressful scheduled for tomorrow. You take your small dose of V and pretty soon get sleepy, almost to the point of dreaming. Everything is going the way it’s supposed to.
Suddenly, the feeling of falling to sleep just… evaporates, and you realize you are in fact awake as an owl.
You are surprised, this doesn’t usually happen like that. Usually, you either fall right to sleep and often wake up too early, or you, rarely, struggle to get sleepy from the get go.

But, the night is still young, you lay there calmly, waiting for the sleep ghost to come visit you again. God knows what chased him away in this specific way tonight. But time goes by and you’re still just as awake. You don’t look at the clock, a skill you acquired long ago.

Finally, you cave in and get up, take a little more V and flush it down with a couple of sips of beer. Nothing happens.
You do the same a little later, but still nothing.

The night goes on and you even manage to wake your wife with your tossing and turning, but she’s used to you by now. A little playing (silently) on her phone and she’s back to sleep, bless her. But you are still not sleeping, though.

It’s dawn. Time to give up. You look at the clock, it’s 6 a.m.

Time to get ready for the day. You wish, yet again, that you could at least nap a little over the day like EVERYONE ELSE when they have a rough night, but you never could nap. The sleep ghost is never there during the day, for reasons unknown. “Exhausted, but not sleepy” is the motto for the day.

Next chance for sleep to come will be around ten or eleven p.m. tonight, so in about 15 hours. By then, you will be awake for some 40 hours. Time to load up on coffee, run on fumes all day and wonder, once again, what is the point of this kind of life.

Sitting in the park a couple of days ago, looking at couples walking with their babies, I asked my wife how come we never even talked about having kids. She said “are you crazy, you don’t sleep as it is”.

• This topic was modified 3 years, 8 months ago by Edgar.
• This topic was modified 3 years, 8 months ago by Edgar.

[Martin Reed]

This is a very insightful post about what it can be like to live with insomnia, Edgar. Thank you for sharing.

I hope things improve for you — after being awake for 40 hours I suspect that at least a little bit of sleep occurred not too long after.

—

If you are ready to stop struggling with insomnia you can enroll in the online insomnia coaching course right now! If you would prefer ongoing phone or video coaching calls as part of a powerful three month program that will help you reclaim your life from insomnia, consider applying for the Insomnia Clarity program.

The content of this post is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied.

[hiker]

Your post really resonates with me, Edgar. I too have been dealing with insomnia for a long time.

I suspect you already know all the sleep hygiene stuff, and that the V and beer aren’t the ultimate answer. And that there is no magic formula.

I do think CBT as described on this site is worth a serious shot. While it is not a magical cure either, just learning how thoughts can worm their way into the whole sleep issue is valuable information. Probably the biggest thing I have learned is not to put a whole lot of stock in our thoughts—especially when tired. All sorts of weird sh– can start flying through your brain and lead to some dark rabbit holes.

Actually I have found living out many days of fatigue has given me a tool, which is this: you know what, if I don’t get much sleep tonight, I know I can still make it through the day. Sure I’d rather get back to sleep right now, but if I don’t, I can make it. Done it before. (Often this leads to falling back to sleep, but you can’t sort of recite it with that in mind.)

Take care.

[Edgar]

Thank you both for your responses, and especially Martin for even running this site. As far as I know, the only one of its kind, I hope you last.

As for this post, I have recovered since, the very next night was all right (about 6 hours). I’m sorry for whining, I just hate nights when I miss sleep completely, like I explained. I feel like I could die on those days and the fact that I can’t crash for an hour or two during the day really gets me down, not to mention makes me feel like I’m crazy. I doubt I will ever know why I can’t nap, is it a conditioned habit I developed sometime in my life, is it genetic, or something third. Doesn’t really matter in the long run, I guess.
The sleepless night that I described in the post happened the night before going on a romantic weekend with my wife, which bummed me out even more, but like I said the second day was all right.

Now I’m back to my usual early morning awakening insomnia. It’s harder for CBT to help in this scenario, that’s a different kettle of fish.
V is more of a crutch than anything else, the dose is so small it doesn’t really make a difference.
Anyway, thanks, I didn’t really expect a response (so many people with sleep problems posting, it’s a pandemic alongside the Covid one, except nobody talks about this one.)

[Martin Reed]

Great to hear you got that long period of sleep — it was inevitable because sleep drive always wins in the end! If you regularly find yourself experiencing “rollercoaster nights” of short stretches of sleep followed by a night or two of better sleep, you might be allotting too much time for sleep. If that’s the case, this video might be helpful:

How to stop the sleep roller coaster and make sleep more consistent and more predictable.

You might also want to explore what it is about wakefulness that seems to generate worry or anxiety since it’s often the fear of wakefulness that can be a huge obstacle to sleep.

Not being able to nap is not unusual whatsoever because, ironically, people with insomnia are very rarely sleepy during the day (they’re typically fatigued instead). When we aren’t sleepy, it’s always difficult to sleep!

From the snippets of information you’ve shared, I can’t think of any reason why you wouldn’t find it helpful to implement cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) techniques.

I hope this helps.

—

If you are ready to stop struggling with insomnia you can enroll in the online insomnia coaching course right now! If you would prefer ongoing phone or video coaching calls as part of a powerful three month program that will help you reclaim your life from insomnia, consider applying for the Insomnia Clarity program.

The content of this post is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied.

[Chee2308]

Hi Edgar, thought I would chip in and share my thoughts. Try going to bed later but wake up at the same time every day, this is even after u had zero sleep the night before. Building your sleep drive is key to overcoming your anxiety over sleep. I would construe all of your efforts like going to bed early to try to force your body to sleep when it is hyper-aroused, taking V, all of these are sleep efforts which are counterproductive because sleep simply cant be controlled. The more sleep efforts u take, the less likely u fall sleep because that then makes u think more about your sleep and when u cant sleep, the more aroused u get and this feeds into the vicious cycle that keeps u awake. Personally for me and many insomniacs, the mistake we made was going to bed too early when we just weren’t sleepy or think we were sleepy when we were just fatigued and then try to fall asleep with our minds just not in the mood for sleep. From my experience, if u are truly sleepy, u wont have any space inside your head to be anxious about anything, instead u would be quite calm and most likely fixated on going to sleep and u could just fall asleep watching tv or playing your phone. This is the real feeling of sleepiness. Try going to bed later, that helped me break out of the vicious cycle and with bedtime restriction, made my sleep get back on track. Good luck.

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