[juliejanis96]

Hey everyone! I’m Julie and I’ve been dealing with insomnia for a little over a month now. I used to have no problem sleeping until I had a bad night of sleep on a trip and chose to let bad sleep continue on.

The first month was hard with lots of stress, anxiety, and thinking about sleep constantly. I’m now trying the sleep restriction and I’m really hoping it will help me. Right now, my anxiety is gone and I’m living life as normally as I can. I average around 2-3 hours of sleep each night and the thing I struggle with the most with sleep restriction is getting to bed at the start of my sleep window. It’s hard staying up when you’re so sleepy and only go to bed at the start of it. I’ve found the last few days I’ve been going to bed 10-30 minutes before the start of my sleep window. I’ve been able to fall asleep just fine for the most part but I always wake up 2 hours later and have a hard time falling back asleep. I know we’re told to get up when we can’t sleep, but because I feel relaxed and calm in bed, I just lay there with my eyes closed. Also, my sleep window is 1am to 6:30am (again haven’t been totally consistent with this).

Anyway, with everything I’m implementing, is there anything I should change in order to see improvement? Or am I doing this right and just need to have patience?

[Chee2308]

Hello Julie!
It is quite impossible to go on with just 2-3 hours of sleep per day indefinitely so are you napping during the day? Stop the naps if you want to have a healthy sleep drive at night! Also try to lengthen your sleep window by going to bed earlier or getting out of bed later, so you don’t get too sleepy earlier in the evening and no sleeping outside that sleep window! I suggest to allow a 6 hour sleep window at least and slowly add to that to as you sleep more. Best wishes.

[juliejanis96]

Perhaps I’m getting more rest than I think per night, because I’m not napping during the day. And I could try lengthening the sleep window. Thanks!

[Chee2308]

Greetings!
Great to hear that. If you really do just 2-3 hours of sleep per day, it would be almost impossible to concentrate on anything during the day, and you would be crashing to sleep almost anywhere, even standing up. It would also be extremely difficult to not take naps and a lot of people just give in.

Could you at least learn to trust your own body? Leave sleep all alone to your own body. Because it knows how to sleep, much like it knows how to eat and breathe to keep you alive. Then as you start letting go of control, you sleep better and longer and then the occasional difficult night(s) would creep in, you’d have an occasional difficulty falling asleep at start of bedtime and the sleepiness way before bedtime would start disappearing, all this is normal! This is a sure sign of sleeping well, just as your appetite eases after eating. Go along the path of “there is nothing I need to figure out or solve about sleep anymore, because the “problem” is beyond me or maybe there really isn’t a problem at all, it’s all just me and my active brain making groundless and baseless accusations about my sleep and my body, therefore everything I am trying to do is a complete waste of time and effort.” Good luck.

[juliejanis96]

That’s very true. I definitely could be controlling my sleep when I may not even be realizing it. I’m definitely a person who overthinks things and this may be something I’m overthinking. It’s been hard to not think about sleep and not think I have a problem just because I’ve had several restless nights. But I do think if I learn to let it go that I can sleep normally again. It’s just a matter of how that is tough.

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