[turtlestamp]

I’ve been dealing with insomnia for about 1 month now (I know that’s not a very long time compared to many). Like many the initial trigger was a bad night of sleep (with little to no sleep) due to a perceived health scare that turned out to be nothing in the end but alas the insomnia persisted. It started off being difficulty falling asleep for hours and evolved to sleepless nights. My main problem is onset insomnia (i.e. if I manage to fall asleep for a while I can usually stay asleep or fall back asleep if I wake up).

Initially I took a low dose of trazodone for about a week and half, it did seemingly help after a few days of taking it, but I stopped taking it about 6 days ago or so, the first 2 days were great, but the last 4 were fairly dreadful, a combination of no-sleep (or maybe just 1 hour on and off) alternating with days with more sleep.

I am trying to implement cbti now fully, a strict window of 1am-7:30am, and even more difficult getting out of bed when not feeling asleep and a sense of frustration comes over me (I don’t watch the clock at all). Last night I did this 3 times to no-avail.

I know it’s a process but the most difficult thing is the day after no-sleep, the emotions, the thoughts of not being able to sleep again, and the biggest fear that the next night will just repeat again. Often it can translate to anxiety which can physically manifest as heartburn or the like.

Any suggestions in terms of dealing with the emotions the day after ?

• This topic was modified 3 years, 9 months ago by turtlestamp.

[Chee2308]

Greetings!
So only sleeping badly for a month? Now is the perfect time to nip it in the bud, before it and problematic thoughts start creeping in and become more entrenched. Your insomnia is caused and perpetuated by nothing else but your misconcepted perceptions about sleep and therefore how you think and perceive sleep. The best thing to do after bad night or nights, is always nothing. Don’t react to it and it goes away usually. Just keep to your regular bedtimes and your sleep should get back on track. Don’t try to fix anything, and this is key! Otherwise, you go down the rabbit hole of trying endless stuffs and when they don’t work, that’s when bad thoughts will start flooding in, and you begin believing you can’t sleep normally, aren’t normal, or something is broken with you. The more you buy into these thoughts, the worse your insomnia gets! They become self-fulfilling. The key thing to recover from insomnia is to build confidence that you can sleep all on your own, and the only way to do that is actually doing nothing for sleep! Then when you start sleeping all on your own, your confidence improves and then better sleep happens, your confidence improves some more and then you sleep better and better! Insomnia is nothing but just a set of bad thoughts inside your head spreading falsehoods which you actually believe! That’s it. To recover, you just need to disbelieve them and prove them all wrong. Good luck!

[Jaran]

Hello again turtlesnap! You’re not kidding our stories are similar—even our sleep window is very close. One major difference: your insomnia is relatively new and you’re getting right on top of it. Good for you! (Glad to hear the health scare turned out fine.) For me, it’s been decades.

I thought Chee had some great points. The “rabbit hole” of chasing various cures can be maddening and contribute to diminishing sleep confidence. Based on your other thread, I’m guessing you’ve already come to that conclusion.

In that 90 minute “Deep Dive” video, they talked about how people with insomnia are the “sleep hygiene experts.” And, sleep hygiene is what is used for the control group in sleep studies. Boy did that resonate!

What’s so surprising to me is that I’ve never come across CBT-I. I guess I wasn’t looking in the right place. To be honest, most of my searching in the last few years has been about ambien alternatives. But, I have talked with several doctors and others with medical or psychotherapy backgrounds over many years, and I’ve never heard of it til a month ago. Various bits and pieces, yes. But CBT-I as a coordinated therapy for insomnia? I somehow managed to miss that.

Glad you’re here and taking care of yourself. Wishing you the best!

[turtlestamp]

I think my post was blocked because I shared a link so let me rewrite it here:

Hello @jaran, really sorry to hear about your story ! Sadly, I had known a few people in the past with insomnia and at the time my “helpful” advice was along the lines of “don’t worry we all get bad nights of sleep” or “get some catch up sleep if you can” … which is the exact advice I’m now given by friends and the like 🙂

I’m not entirely surprised you didn’t hear about cbt-i, at least directly. I say this particularly because I was prescribed trazadone. That’s not to say I don’t think medicine has a place and a role to play but it can definitely feed into and build the “there is something wrong with my sleep”.

I actually think sleep hygiene can be a dangerous and slippery slope for anyone with insomnia ironic as that sounds. For anyone without it, sure, it may help them feel more rested but for us it’s another part of “sleep effort”. I actually had a whole song and dance I did a few hours before bed; I’d only sit up on the couch, have the lights at a certain level, watch only particular tv shows, and drink a specific tea. One night recently I was tired of all this and decided to do whatever I wanted, and, I slept, slightly better than those other nights 🙂 Which really helped enforce how all these steps have no impact or a negative impact at worst on sleep.

I do really hope you find some success with CBTi and wish you all the best. Know that I’m always here if you want to talk or just share.

[Jaran]

Thanks turtlestamp. I don’t see a way to PM on this board. If you ever want to email, mine is judyran at hotmail dot com.

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