[Mentjes]

I’ve been practicing a 6 hour sleep window for months, I’ve listened to all the advice and tried to accept the sleep I’m getting. Most of my struggle is daytime anxiety symptoms. The daytime anxiety always seems to happen after a night that didn’t go well. It’s been happening every other week for a while.

I keep hoping that if I experience this enough that my mind will relax so I have an enjoyable day even without a good night. I feel like the secret is to experiencing it enough to not care. I’m just not getting to that point yet. Obviously it will happen on its own time. My question would be should I keep the six hour sleep window long term until all the fear is gone? The sleep window seems like a good idea – I wonder how many people make this a permanent change.

[Martin Reed]

Hello Mentjes and welcome to the forum! A sleep window is only one tool — many people need more than one tool to move away from struggling with insomnia.

A sleep window can easily become an additional sleep effort — something we are doing in an attempt to make a certain amount or type of sleep happen.

For as long as our goal with any action is to control sleep, what we think, or how we feel, we can end up setting ourselves up for a struggle since we cannot directly or permanently control any of that stuff.

I like to think of the sleep window as a tool with one main purpose — to help us move away from chasing after sleep (since the more we chase after it the more elusive it can become). It does that by giving us an earliest possible bedtime and a consistent final out of bed time in the morning. That’s really all there is to it.

A sleep window isn’t intended to help with daytime anxiety or other difficult thoughts and feelings associated with insomnia — they require different tools.

It makes complete sense that you want to be able to relax and to not care and to eliminate fear — and yet, we can’t usually force ourselves to relax and we can’t usually choose what we care about and we will always experience fear from time to time since that’s a normal and natural human emotion.

These are things inside us that we cannot directly or permanently control and the more we try, the more we can end up struggling.

Is there anything useful here?

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The content of this post is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied.

[Liz Bentley]

This was helpful to me. I can be very rigid in my thinking about any tool.

[Author]

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