[Farmgirl1961]

I’m into my second week of CBT-I and each morning I reflect a bit on my sleep and think about any adjustments I need to try to improve my sleep. The very good news is that I am falling asleep shortly after I go to bed (15-20 minutes). The other very good news is that when I wake up in the middle of the night, or early in the morning, I have usually been able to fall back asleep relatively quickly.

I am still waking up frequently during the night. It is not as bad as the first couple of days, but generally I wake up 2-3 times and often times after a short spell of falling asleep. For example, last night I went to bed at 10:30 pm. It was a bit earlier than my other nights (which have been 11:00 pm to 11:15 pm), but I continually nodded off while reading and decided to use that as a cue for getting into bed. I fell asleep relatively quickly (yay!!!), but awoke shortly after midnight. I got out of bed, went to the bathroom, got a little sip of water and decided to get back into bed. I did fall asleep quickly, but have a recollection of waking up, then falling asleep, then waking up and falling asleep, then waking up enough to check my watch at a little after 4:00 am. I got up again, went to the bathroom, had a sip of water and drifted into a light sleep. By shortly after 6:00 am, I was unable to sleep anymore and got out of bed by about 6:10 am. (my normal sleep window is going to bed between 11:00 pm and 11:30 pm and having the alarm go off at 6:30 am. Wondering if I need to tighten this up a bit. My sleep efficiency is improving during the second week (haven’t finished running the calculations but I think it will be in the mid 80’s — not where it needs to be, but better than where it was during week 1.

I’m wondering what I can do (if anything) to minimize these sleep disruptions/awakenings.

[Chee2308]

Greetings!
You wrote a lengthy post but
in it, never mentioned a word why waking up during the night is so bad that you have to intervene. So what is so bad about waking up? Are your days much worse if you woke up then if you didn’t? If let’s say, you woke up 3x during the night, are your days going to be 3x worse or you would feel 3x as tired? Try to think rationally about this. The whole thing about insomnia is really about thinking why poor sleep has such a bad outcome that it must be avoided like the plague. Can you identify the reasons? Then find out if they’re true. Majority of the time they’re outright false and misguided! Other than that, no, you can’t control waking up as much as you can’t control sleeping. Your body is in total control. But not treating waking up as problem has a better chance of making you sleep better than otherwise! That’s just how insomnia works: the more you think there’s a problem, the worse it gets because thinking there’s a problem becomes the problem! Good luck in your journey to sleeping better.

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