[brandon123]

Hi Coach Martin, I really want to thank you for how your program has helped improve my sleep. One thing I have noticed is that the past week or so I have been sleeping a bit worse and I have noticed a growing anxiety about how I may “reteach my brain” to no longer associate the bed with sleep. My understanding with sleep restriction is that the goal is that you spend more time asleep in bed than awake to retrain your brain to just associate the bed with sleep. My concern is that, if I have some bad nights, am I going to lose progress on how I have retrained my brain? I know one solution would be to institute stimulus control, but I noticed that when i tried that a few months ago, it actually hurt my sleep due to anxiety of “not being asleep yet” and what best helped me was sleep restriction.

To give more context, I recently went one whole month without a single poor night of sleep and then had two nights in the past week now where it took me about an hour to fall asleep (I normally give myself a 7.5 hour sleep window at this point). I guess it may also be important to note that I do not really have insomnia anymore and the worst I had was acute for like two months and it went away from sleep restriction so I may just be overthinking this. Thank you, your feedback is appreciated

[Martin Reed]

Thanks for the great question — I think this is something that can trip a lot of us up!

If we consider what people without chronic insomnia do in bed, many of them spend a lot of time awake there. They watch TV, they read, they use their phones, their tablets, maybe even their laptops. They sleep fine even though they do all these “awake” activities in bed.

So, why does stimulus control tell us we need to associate the bed with sleep and nothing else?

I think it comes down to the fact that many people with chronic insomnia spend a lot of time struggling when they are awake in bed. And it’s the struggle that’s the real issue rather than the wakefulness (since if wakefulness was the problem, all those people without insomnia who do stuff in bed other than sleep should have insomnia, right?).

So, I think a more useful way of implementing this can be to shift the goal away from trying to get rid of wakefulness when in bed (sometimes this can lead to more effort to make sleep happen, something that’s not usually going to be very helpful) toward allowing wakefulness to happen and only responding if it feels really unpleasant.

You might, therefore, give yourself permission to be awake in bed at night for as long as that feels comfortable. If it feels really unpleasant, you might give yourself the opportunity to do something more pleasant instead — and since the goal isn’t to get rid of wakefulness or to stop wakefulness from happening when in bed, you might do something more pleasant in bed rather than getting out of bed.

I hope there’s something useful here!

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