[Mitch17]

Hello,
Been struggling with insomnia for just over 2 months now; usually am a very sound sleeper, sleeping 7-8 hours a night, so the shock of how horrible insomnia is has really thrown me for a loop. The anxiety it triggered was unbearable in the beginning, which sent me to my physician, who attempted to help by prescribing meds. Very few have worked, and I felt I was chasing my tail, so I am very happy to have found CBTi and am hoping it works. Preview: my question is about early waking during sleep-time restriction, but I will first list what I’ve done:

– I read 2 books and learned how to mitigate anxiety/worry/despair that comes from insomnia through meditation and mindfulness. To be honest, I’m amazed how effective these are. They have allowed me to face the reality of “it will get worse before it gets better” and stick with the CBTi program, at least so far.

– I set a consistent wake-up time (didn’t realize a big mistake was extending time in bed to 10 or 11 hours so that, even with long periods of time awake, I could “at least get some sleep.”) It is 7am every day of the week. I was hoping maybe this alone would solve everything and I wouldn’t have to do sleep time restriction, but…

– I keep a detailed sleep journal, including sleep time vs. in-bed time for sleep efficiency and behavior notes

-I established bedtime and wind-down routine that includes thoughts of “leaving the door open for sleep to arrive as a gentle, invited guest” rather than something to be forced.

– I get out of bed when I wake up in the night and don’t fall asleep in what feels like 15 minutes ( I don’t watch the clock). This is kind of hard, because if I leave the bedroom, the dog will wake-up and get hyper, but I will at least read or meditate or stretch in the other corner of the room.

– obviously, no caffeine or alcohol or food too close to bedtime. No exercise close to bedtime.

SO, since starting a consistent wake-up time and never going to bed before feeling sleepy, it have had mixed results. It’s been about 2 weeks, and I have had one or two nights when I have fallen asleep quickly and stayed asleep for about 6.5 – 7 hours total. I have had a couple where I couldn’t fall asleep and was awake many times for a total of several hours in the night and barely got any sleep. Most nights have been somewhere in the middle, totaling 5-6.5 total hours of sleep with nighttime wakings, an amount that leaves me very fatigued and exhausted during the day. So I think I need to bite the bullet and do sleep-time restriction. I started last night, going to bed at 12:00am with my 7:00am wake-up alarm set. This allowed my average sleep time of 6hrs30min + 30 min.

My question: What do I do when I wake up around 5:50 or 6ish, as I did today? I can get out of bed and read and then try to go back to sleep, but by the time I do, there will only be a few minutes before my 7 am alarm… I could just get up but then I’m not adhering to my consistent wake-up time…

If I’m going to suffer through the temporary hell of sleep-time restriction, I want to make sure I’m doing it right lol. Thanks for any input!

[hiker]

Hi Mitch 17, this is my second attempt to reply. If you should get a reply which ends mid-sentence, I must have hit the wrong key or something.

Anyway, it sounds like you are working hard toward sleeping better. The techniques sound good, as long as you can remember that we can’t accomplish sleep the way we can a lot of things by working harder.

Re what to do when you wake up early, it sounds like you are doing Martin’s course, so I would consult with him directly. I can say that when I wake up early, I just get up. Otherwise my bed turns into a battleground.

Re your doing mindfulness, that has been the most successful for me, too. No guarantee every night, of course…..I view it the same way I do in practicing guitar: it comes down to doing it, even when it seems like no progress. Doing it instead of just reading about it or talking about it or watching videos about it.

Seems like you are on the right track, even though I know it can be a weird road with lots of twists.

[Angeli]

Hello Mitch!

After a time of sleep restriction and the body itself will show you how long it needs to sleep. and your biological clock starts to set. I set the alarm for 6:30 and my body wanted to wake up at 5:30. I want to sleep at midnight and my body wants to sleep at 11 am. you have to let him define that. I got out of bed when I woke up and ended the fight. Nowadays I don’t use an alarm clock anymore and I learned to respect the time and time he wants to sleep and wake up (always the same). As for doing a lot of things to help sleep, I had to drop everything. The more we help the body sleep, the more sleep escapes. I took this matter out of my head and I don’t do anything else. I still meditate but not with the intention of helping sleep. Just to have peace. Good dreams for you!

[Chee2308]

Hi Angeli!
Congratulations on your improvement. So great to hear you are doing so well after leaving the fight. And this is key to sleeping well, being relaxed and accepting of bad outcomes no matter how bad they seem. Forget about medications, meditatations and what nots. If you are pretty advanced like me, I’ve ditched cbti also and still sleeping well. Just trust your own body firmly, it knows what it is doing. Set a regular bedtime schedule, that’s it! I now just go to bed, when I can’t sleep immediately, I just think about random stuffs, then without noticing it, I’ve closed my eyes and fallen asleep. When I next open my eyes, it’s already morning and close to wakeup time. That’s how easy and effortless for me.

[Angeli]

Hi Chee2308

CBTi helped me understand the biological clock system and how to regulate it. It also taught me to compress my sleep to get rid of insomnia gaps. With Martin’s course and the forum I finally managed to end the years of suffering and stop living in the terrible world of insomniacs. I think that CBTi is a step in the process. After a while I had to abandon the CBTi itself which also became a great effort to sleep. In other words, it was a fantastic help, without it maybe I wouldn’t have been able to, but in the end I must also drop this help. Over time I learned to be confident that my body knows everything about sleep

[Chee2308]

Hi Angeli!
So true. Insomnia really has two components to it: firstly, it’s the sleeplessness and the other part is the fear. Cbti cures the sleeplessness but not the fear. That’s why many people still have insomnia even after cbti, because the fear is still there! To cure the fear, you have to be willing to experience more fear, until you just get desensitized. Sounds ironic and paradoxical, but so true!

[Author]

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