[rottenplant]

Hi all! Glad to be joining the forum : )

I’m not going to lie, I’m quite desperate to get out of this sleepless loop. I’ve been struggling with poor sleep for 2 years but nothing prepared me for the chain of insomnia that started about 6 months ago and is still going on.

I used to have an episode once a month, it would be quite bad, but I would sleep the next night and forget all about it. Slowly but surely it progressed to twice a month, from one night to a couple nights, and nowadays it’s 1-3 times a week, ranging from 3-5 nights in a row…

I’m quite an active person – I study in university, I work on personal creative projects, keep a healthy diet and routine, go to the gym – and I feel like this inability to sleep is making my life fall apart. Feels like I can’t catch up with the rhythm of my life and it’s taking a huge mental toll on me, plunging me further into depression, making me very closed off and irritable.

I’m at the point where I am absolutely terrified of my bed. Every time I look at it, every time it gets dark outside, my body is reacting with fear and panic, anticipating the worst.

Every time when I don’t sleep I don’t only feel mental pain but crippling physical pain too – my immune system is quite weak as it is and I suffer from early stages of an autoimmune disease, so the poor sleep is making my days quite insufferable.

I have an anxiety disorder but lately I’ve discovered that my insomnia is not influenced by my anxiety… on the contrary – my insomnia is one of the causes of my anxiety. It’s frustrating – but I’m glad that I’ve been able to identify it.

I’m quite hopeful that I can re-learn to sleep. I don’t want to be dependent on sleeping pills and supplements anymore, I want to see my bed as a safe place it once was, and I’m glad that I can join this journey!

[Chee2308]

Greetings!
I am sorry to hear about your experience in your long post. Fortunately, as a recovered person, I can tell you there’s absolutely nothing wrong with you and there’s nothing medically wrong with your insomnia either! You are just in a state of confusion all along, instead of thinking not sleeping as a disease or problem, it is actually more likely to be due to being well or adequately rested therefore no issues here! You need to find ways to convince yourself in this direction otherwise you will continue to struggle indefinitely. Try to think back to times when you had little sleep but achieved a lot or had a great time because you wanted to be up and didn’t see not sleeping as a huge problem. Things like studying all night for an exam, taking a long haul flight or preparing for an important interview. Then your sleep recovered all on its own, didn’t it? In your dilemma, there’s actually no problem but seeing it as a problem becomes the real problem. Makes sense??

In regards to relearning sleep, absolutely nothing to relearn here, because your body already knows how to sleep since you were born. This ability can never be lost therefore there’s no relearning required. Just keeping to a regular bedtime schedule is all you need. Think of sleep like hunger, after you eat, of course your hunger is less, sleep is exactly like that, you don’t need to relearn how to eat!

Be patient and continue educating yourself about sleep. Then when you start to see the bigger picture, you begin to understand how silly this all is. Best wishes.

[Author]

Posts