Chronic insomnia and damage to the stress system

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  • #27841
    SIimon
    ✘ Not a client

      What do people think about this?

      Gayle Green discusses it in her excellent book, Insomniac, how sleep deprivation increases cortisol levels which in turn make sleep harder to come by….permanent hyper-arousal of a physiological nature instead of a psychological one. This ongoing process will also wear out or damage the stress system over the years making quality  sleep even harder to attain.

      Utterly depressing if true as this is coupled with our stress system and sleep drive diminishing naturally anyway with age.

      I’ve had chronic insomnia for 15 years and honestly can’t see it improving much as I am in my mid 40s. In fact it has got worse in the last year or so and I now regularly pull ‘all nighters’ which ruin me. This is proper debilitating insomnia to me, I can function OKish on 4-5 hours and the difference between that and no sleep is massive.

      I am not after cures… Tried CBT-I and it didn’t really work much for me and don’t get me started on Sasha Stephens books, she comes across as thinking she is some sort of high priestess here to cure ALL insomniacs. If it doesn’t work it’s because you haven’t done ‘it’ right (fair play to those it has helped but it just wasn’t for me)

       

       

      • This topic was modified 5 years, 9 months ago by Martin Reed.
      • This topic was modified 5 years, 9 months ago by SIimon.
      #27908
      Martin Reed
      ★ Admin

        Hello SIimon. Although there is no evidence that chronic insomnia causes any health problem, it would certainly not surprise me to find that people with chronic insomnia have higher levels of cortisol due to the stress and worry associated with finding it hard to sleep.

        You mentioned that you tried CBT-I and it didn’t work for you. Although you could be one of the 10-20% of the population it doesn’t seem to work for, I tend to find most people who determine the treatment didn’t work for them sometimes weren’t given the support they needed to be successful.

        Can you tell me a bit more about the CBT-I you tried? Was it online or face-to-face? What kind of techniques did you implement, and why do you think they didn’t work for you? Hopefully, I can offer some guidance and advice.

        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 Mastery program.

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