[Jess84]

I have been having sleep onset insomnia now for at least 2 years while I’ve had success getting my sleep on tract at least twice now,I’ve had very long stretch of not sleeping deeply a lot of stage 1 sleep with a little rem sleep for about a year now.

What is extremely frustrating to me is that I am following SR to a tee I go to bed and wake at the same time every night about a 5 hour window,when my alarm goes off I wake up right
away get out of bed I’m extremely exhausted yet I still do things that need to be done.

Even though all this sleep drive is being built up by way of being up for so long I am still only a little exhausted no where near sleepy,so to me this could only be a subconscious thought pattern of worry or obsessive thinking keeping it going because all the areas like SR and SC are being covered.

The question becomes if its a subconscious mindset like an awareness that I’m not sleeping as deeply as I want to that is holding me back how does one get past that because at one time I adopted a care free attitude towards my shallow sleep only for it to be even worse than it is now and eventually after months of shallow sleep I had no choice but to recognize that the acceptance wasn’t working for me,it was as if by accepting the bad nights which was every night led to a new normal of this shallow sleep.

• This topic was modified 3 years ago by Jess84.
• This topic was modified 3 years ago by Jess84.
• This topic was modified 3 years ago by Jess84.
• This topic was modified 3 years ago by Jess84.

[Martin Reed]

Hello Jess and thanks for sharing your concerns — concerns that I think a lot of people reading will identify with!

First of all, you might want to give yourself a bit more opportunity for sleep — five hours isn’t a whole lot of time! Bear in mind that the start of your sleep window is nothing more than an earliest possible bedtime. So, if you don’t feel sleepy enough for sleep when your sleep window begins, it might be helpful to delay going to bed until you do feel a strong sense of sleepiness (difficulty staying awake).

If you feel as though you just never get sleepy, you might find this video helpful: How to improve sleep when you don’t feel sleepy and don’t know how to get sleepy.

Since a clock doesn’t know when we are sleepy enough for sleep, we don’t necessarily want to be going to bed at the same time each night. The final out of bed time in the morning is where we want to be really consistent.

It might also be helpful not to check the time when you wake during the night (and to recognize that waking during the night is actually a normal part of sleep).

Unfortunately, sleep is completely out of our control. It’s when we (quite understandably) try to control sleep that we can really get caught up in the struggle.

Fortunately, we can always control our actions. So, we can implement sleep-related behaviors that help create and maintain good conditions for sleep and we can do things each day that help us move toward the kind of life we want to live, independently of sleep.

I think it’s the latter point that can really help us move beyond insomnia because it shifts our attention to what we can control and what truly matters — what we do when we are awake, and whether we live a life that’s aligned with our values or not. We get to decide that, not sleep or insomnia!

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If you are ready to stop struggling with insomnia you can enroll in the online insomnia coaching course right now! If you would prefer ongoing phone or video coaching calls as part of a powerful three month program that will help you reclaim your life from insomnia, consider applying for the Insomnia Mastery program.

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