Journey – some improvements, but worried about long term consequences

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  • #85253
    Islandtime
    ✘ Not a client

      Hello! I’m currently trying out the free 2 week course. This course and the resources in this site have already helped me. CBT-I type recommendations seem to make me obsessed with sleep and make me more worried about controlling stimuli, what happens if I don’t follow the protocol perfectly, etc.

      I’ve had trouble sleeping on and off since I was in college. It really got bad in 2019. I was in grad school for my PhD and trying to wake up at 5am to go to the gym before my day. I became obsessed with making sure I got 8 hours of sleep otherwise I wouldn’t be able to finish all my work and recover properly from the gym. If I wasn’t in bed before 9pm, I thought I’d set myself up for failure the next day. I tried making sure I got out of bed if I wasn’t sleeping, but it was a rough time. What fixed me then was when COVID shutdowns happened. Suddenly I couldn’t go to the gym anymore. I didn’t have to be on campus at a certain time. And all my pressure to get to sleep and wake up at a certain time was gone, so my insomnia got a lot better. Still had occasional sleepless nights, but it wasn’t a regular occurrence.

      It got bad again September 2024. I was about 4 months pregnant, and had a very stressful work project and a lot of work travel. I was waking up a lot because of hip pain from my pregnancy, and then I would start ruminating about work, coupled with travel anxiety. And I’ve been struggling since then. Now I keep having thoughts about how this is my last chance to get good sleep for a while before the baby gets here and I’m ruining it. I worry that not sleeping well for multiple nights is hurting the baby (and I’ve read research to support this idea). I read all these studies about how sleeping 6 or fewer hours a night regularly increases risks for dementia and other cognitive declines.

      What has helped is I stopped tracking my sleep, I have tried to get up within an hour of the same time every day. There were two nights earlier this week that I realized I only got 4 hours of sleep each night (looked at my wearable data later), and I got to see that I was still just as productive at work and felt mostly okay. I think that helped – I didn’t know how much sleep I got at the time, and when reflecting later I saw that it was a lot less than I thought and I was still okay. When I can’t sleep, I’m trying to do something pleasant and trying to reframe it as “me” time before the baby comes. I’m trying to implement most of the tactics from the two week course.

      So I’m learning that I am okay when I don’t sleep by exposing myself to what happens when I don’t. But I’m still struggling with not worrying about long term consequences of no sleep.

      Thanks for reading this really long post if you got this far!

      I’m wondering if anyone has any reframing techniques or ideas, or can just relate, I’m all ears! I’m reluctant to sign up for the longer course at this time because I’m 5 weeks from my due date and might not be able to complete the course.

      #85256
      BenjaminR
      ✘ Not a client

        Hi – Not really a response to your request, but I would just like to say that trying to track sleep with wearables is a waste of time and probably only adding to your stress, so it’s good that you have stopped. The only reliable way to do that is through an EEG. Wearables track movement, heart rate, and breathing rate and make their best guess as to what phase you are in, and they invariably guess wrong. You could be lying there motionless, breathing slowly, with a slow heart rate, WIDE AWAKE, and it thinks you are asleep.

      Viewing 2 posts - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)

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