[Cathy]

Hello everyone
My insomnia started 3 months ago
It takes me forever to fall asleep every night and some nights are sleepless. When I do fall asleep eventually I only get about 1-3 hours
I have started with CBTi last night.
Stimulus control x3-
Stayed up til 03:00 and took me awhile to fall asleep only to wake up at 5:00. My SW is 12:30-4:30

I usually go to bed at around 23:00 lie ages awake and if im lucky drift of to sleep at 2:00 only to wake up at around 4:00

I hope im doing CBTi correctly and that there are other people out there also struggling to fall asleep for such a long period.

At least I started the CBTi 🙂
Hopes this takes me into the right direction

[Chee2308]

Hi Cathy
A sw of just 4 hours is way too short! It’s kinda like limiting your daily calories to just 600-800 a day on a diet, only to discover it’s so hard to maintain you just abandon it altogether! Then you swear off it completely because it didn’t work and go on to try other things which also didn’t work or had mixed results and you keep going around in endless loops trying to seek a cure, which just doesn’t exist, to your frustration. All because you set an impossible goal to begin with.

A sensible sw should be at least 5.5 hours. But 6 hours would be a great starting point! Keep it reasonable so it’s easier to stick to.

Also bear in mind, the journey will contain a lot of ups and downs. More downs than ups, I’d say, in the beginning and especially if you normally fall asleep at 3-4 am and your sw now begins at 1230. As your sleep improves and you start sleeping more, you will also encounter more awakenings and tend to wake up way earlier than you anticipate. Understand that this is normal and is usually a result of reduced sleep drive due to the improvements you have experienced.

Towards the end, try to see that using a sw and even doing cbti themselves are not sleep generators. Only your own body can generate sleepiness! Cbti only helps regulate your sleeping patterns so your nights become more consistent. The key to a complete recovery is an altered mindset and response to the idea and experience of poor sleep, leading to an acceptance and tolerance of it. True recovery is not living with the fear of poor sleep anymore.

With that, I wish you best of luck and hope you find your way to better sleep soon.

[hiker]

Hi Cathy, suggest you touch base with Martin on your CBTi regimen.

And sleep anxiety is always a big part of it. And it’s true there are ups and downs.

Most of the time, when I wake up early and don’t get back to sleep right away, I realize that my thoughts are going haywire. Example: last night, I woke up around 2:30 am., couldn’t get back to sleep. After a few minutes of worrying about it, I realized my thoughts were making things harder. Who knows why, but the memory of getting a lousy evaluation at work 30 years ago popped into my head. And the conclusion that “I am a failure.”

This time, I was fortunate to remember that this is just a feeling: “I’m having the feeling that I’m a failure.” This is much different than: “I am a failure.”

I was about to just get up anyway. Laying there worrying doesn’t do me any good. This time, I actually fell back asleep, but sometimes I don’t.

Who knows what pops into any of our heads. It could be that your thoughts will center on how you are doing with CBTi, are you timing things right. And your option would be along the lines of:

1. I am not doing my sleep therapy right and it isn’t going to work and I am doomed to lousy sleep. as opposed to:

2. I’m having the thought that I am not doing my sleep therapy right. I’m having the thought that this isn’t going to work, and that I am doomed to lousy sleep.

If this seems like a distinction without any real difference, allow for the fact that it is really hard to think clearly enough to see distinctions when you are tired. When I am having a tough day(s) after bad sleep, I try to give myself a break along the lines of, “Wow, I am really hammered right now. And I feel like I could get irritable over just about anything, and my brain feels kind of scrambled. And then I just try to do the best I can. What else you gonna do, right?

Take care, it doesn’t last forever, and you are not even close to alone on this. Everybody else might look like they are totally together, but they’re not.

[Author]

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