[Tlusebrink]

Hello All-

I’m relatively new to insomnia and feel a bit lost. I’ve never had any issues with sleep in my life, and only recently would experience a night every other month when I’d go to bed too late and I’d get anxiety about my lack of sleep. As my general anxiety during the day increased substantially, I now find myself having multiple nights a week with little to no sleep. This has been going on for about two weeks or so and has caused a lot of concern.

Being an anxious person, it’s spiked my anxiety levels and has my mind thinking about sleep all day. I’ll have a good night where I’ll get about 7 hours and the next night I’ll get about 3-4. Not sure what the answer is, but hoping there is some light at the end of the tunnel.

[Chee2308]

Hello
Your story is so extremely familiar and very typical of a person struggling to sleep. It almost always starts with a poor night, and then you begin to panic over it because of perceived bad outcomes like purported health consequences or having a bad day at work. This then develops into an obessesion and you end up trying countless methods to “fix your sleep” or “figure this out”. My advice is don’t go down this rabbit hole of trying the various fixes because there’s nothing wrong with you. Your sleeplessness isn’t the problem, but you thinking that there’s a problem, that becomes the problem in itself.

Your most effective solution to break the cycle of insomnia is to always not react strongly to poor nights and continuing your normal bedtime routine, practicing non attachment, being non judgmental on how you sleep and a lot of patience. Ultimately you want to reach the stage where you have complete confidence in yourself agian. Normal people sleep well because they are confident of sleeping and having this confidence back is what you want to achieve. For most people with sleeping problems, they continue to have problems because they get impatient with the process and become frustrated with how long it’s taking. Don’t commit this common mistake! Just get into and out of bed at your regular times, don’t worry if you can’t sleep well initially, don’t track your sleep by clock watching or using sleep tracking devices, be patient and compassionate to yourself if poor nights happen (which is common anyway because everyone gets bad nights occasionally) and truly believe that your sleep will get back on track over time. This is how you will recover. Best wishes.

[Tlusebrink]

Thank you so much for the kind response! It’s been a challenging couple of weeks, but i’m dedicated to remaining positive, not chasing sleep, and following the advice that Martin calls out in his videos.

Not reacting to a poor night has been a struggle, but one that i’m actively applying this morning. I’ve noticed that I get lost in my emotions when I have a bad night, don’t fully act myself, and my Wife/Kids can tell a difference. This, IMO, is letting Insomnia win, and results in me trying harder to fix the problem. I love the ‘fake it to you make it’ comments I’ve seen, making myself believe that I slept better than I may have, I’m fully capable of functioning on little sleep, and that sleep will come when it’s ready.

I also appreciate your comment on researching methods and trying a variety of things to make sleep better. Nothing has really worked and it’s caused me to push away a ‘normal’ routine at night that I used to carry on with, and never impacted my sleep (relaxing and watching shows with the Wife on the couch, going to bed when i’m sleepy, etc.).

[Jaran]

Hello @Tlusebrink. I’m glad you found Martin’s podcasts. Under the “Resources” menu at the top of this page there are lots of helpful things. If you haven’t done Martin’s free 2 week email course (also found under the Resources menu), I highly recommend it!
Wishing you the best.

[Chee2308]

Hello Tlusebrink
You are on the right track! By doing these 3 things you will do extremely well:
1. Have a regular bedtime schedule. Trying not to sleep at other times. This alone is 75-80% of the work already.
2. Being NATTO, aka, not attached to the outcome, ie, not attached to how you sleep. Trying to create a distance between your thoughts and emotional well-being and acknowledge that many things your brain warns you about, especially about sleep, are way overblown and dead wrong. Over time this will get easier as you begin letting go.
3. Try your best not to research too much on sleep, or have too many questions because of over thinking and just accepting sleep as it is. I found sleep is basically just a numbers game. If I am up for 16-18 hours continously, then sleep is extremely likely to happen because sleep drive works a lot like hunger and accumulates the longer you go on without it. Best wishes.

[Author]

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