[Aunternie]

How do you stay up for your recommended bedtime?! I can barely keep my eyes open past 9:30pm and according to CBT-I my “recommended” time is 11:30, which seems painful and impossible. I wake up between 4:30 and 5:30 most days (without an alarm), for reference

[Chee2308]

Hello!

Feeling sleepy before your recommended bedtime? That’s so common for people doing sleep windows, so perhaps you could think about it in a different light and from another angle:

1. Feeling sleepy = shows your sleep is not broken and your body is perfectly capable of it because otherwise, how would you even begin to feel sleepy?

2. If there’s evidence your sleep is not broken, why do you even need to follow a sleep window? To prove what? Show your body that you can sleep? Well that’s like getting up and walking around to prove to your body you can walk perfectly fine, with no problems whatsoever. So why don’t you do that and walk around for every minute that you’re awake? Well, the reason is when you are already so completely convinced that there’s nothing wrong about something and you’re not obsessed over it, you just stop doing that anymore and in this example, people would rather sit down and relax and than try to show to themselves what they already know is true. This is exactly what you trying to do with a sleep window. You want nightly proof that you can sleep at specific times and you desperately try to achieve, build and keep the momentum by following a fixed set of rules. When you no longer need to convince yourself, you just give up and move on. This is what every insomniacs should aspire to return to. That perfectly innocent blissful ignorance of a baby who doesn’t care about these things, aren’t caught in it because of stuff they read or heard everywhere and where sleep just comes and goes as it pleases. Good luck!

[Aunternie]

My sleep is broken–I wake up between 1 and 3am every night for 30-60 minutes and sometimes I’m just up for the day. Trying to condense so that doesn’t happen.

[Chee2308]

You can’t control sleep. Neither can you control when you wake up. Nobody does. The fact that you feel sleepy before your bedtime and not sleepy at some times even when you’re supposed to be sleeping is testament to this fact. Sleepiness just happens when you are up long enough. And waking up after sleeping for some time is entirely normal too! Because your sleep drive is getting reduced once you’ve slept. Getting stressed over this is futile and actually makes going back to sleep worse. Embrace the wakefulness. For people who recover, the time it takes for them to fall back asleep after waking up just gets shorter. Good luck to you.

[Aunternie]

Very helpful, thank you 🙂

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