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I’ve been reading through some threads on here and they’ve been super helpful. I also just signed up for the newsletter. My husband has been suffering from insomnia since June/July stemming from a medical scare and losing our 14-year old dog all within one weekend. He is medically fine but just the entire situation around caused him to overthink his health resulting in him tossing and turning at night and it snowballed from there. He could not fall asleep. We did cbti through August but our didn’t do sleep restriction, she had him just do stimulus control and positive thinking etc. and it helped him become confident in falling asleep again. We stopped doing that, but he has very fragmented sleep. Some nights he will sleep for an hour straight and will be up for another hour and then when sleepy he will sleep again for maybe half an hour and is up again, and that will continue through the night until he is no longer sleepy and then he’s up the rest of the night. Some nights he falls asleep and is up within minutes.
On our own, we began sleep restriction therapy 7 days ago (while implementing all the things we learned about cbti). He was averaging about 4-5 hours of sleep a night but gave him a sleep window of 11:30pm-6:00am. We noticed that during this week, he will have a great sleep one or two nights (sleeping the entire sleep window with maybe one awakening to use the bathroom but falling right back to sleep). And this is huge because he never has had a night with this many hours of sleep since this all began. The following night after one or two good nights he will have a night where the sleep window comes and while he feels sleepy, he just can’t fall asleep. He stays in bed because Martin has said if he feels fine in bed it’s ok to stay, and he ‘thinks’ he sleeps a little here and there for maybe a few minutes at a time. He mentioned that one of the nights this past week, he wasn’t as sleepy as other nights when the sleep window began, which means he ends up not sleeping that night. But other nights he seriously can barely make it to the sleep window and is asleep so quickly.
I guess my question is, should he continue with this sleep window? I’m assuming it takes more than one week of sleep restriction to work but I’m assuming his arousal system is stronger than his sleep drive and that’s what keeps him awake on the nights he can’t sleep. Will this arousal go away the more he does this and then we should start seeing consistent progress? I know that there are setbacks, but want encouragement that this DOES get better!Hello Tess!
Welcome to this forum. So what was his sleep window before he ‘developed’ insomnia? I use ‘ ‘ because nobody ever lost the ability to sleep. It’s usually the thoughts towards sleep that has. And therefore the brain thinks that something is wrong when nothing is. I always recommend going back to your habits and patterns during pre-insomnia days. Try to regain your personality and identity as much as you can. To get as nonchalant and indifferent about sleep as you can because this is the state where you want to return to. When you no longer obsess over sleep, spend hours of your waking hours thinking about it, or make decisions about your everyday life around it, you will do a lot better.
If it’s only the first week, and this is the sleep window you want to keep to, I recommend sticking to it. Try to not make the focus too much on the end result, ie sleep, focus on other things like enriching your daily life with memorable experiences, doing the things you love and spending time with your loved ones. The sleep will take care of itself in the end. Your body will regulate itself if you just allow it.
The mental work that goes into ‘fixing’ insomnia is a significant part because insomnia is mainly a mental issue. It is usually a result of overthinking, overdoing and over monitoring. Reframing your mindset around insomnia is key. Be simply okay with wakefulness. When you find yourself having to make a choice, do as if you don’t have insomnia and sleep isn’t the main consideration. When you no longer fear insomnia, it has no control over you. There is no one way to do this so you need to find a narrative that fits you best. Some people do meditation, others write positive sleep affirmations or yet others use metaphors. Say for example, if you are unhappy just because you only have $6 in your bank account, it still doesn’t change this fact. But if you look at it in another way, say, you have a roof over your head, enough food to eat and your basic needs are taken care of, that $6 becomes insignificant. The thought then fades away and your bank balance just is a number. Do like this for sleep, if you are optimistic about life, are happy where you are and what you do, then how many hours you sleep really doesn’t matter. It becomes just a number. Good luck and best wishes to you all.
Thanks for your response! He is trying his best to work as much as he can and do things he loves, but he is getting physical symptoms from the lack of sleep and the depression/anxiety that goes along with that. He gets headaches a lot and facial sensitivity etc. He honestly is not too thrilled about the current sleep window bc he BARELY makes it to 11:30pm (on the nights he does sleeps) and gets deliriously sleepy between 9-10pm. Before the sleep restriction he would just go to bed when he was sleepy which was around 9pm, but he was having fragmented sleep and every night was different (could sleep 1 hour or four hours per night, or none at all) so we were trying to work on his sleep maintenance. Before insomnia he’d sleep from 10pm to like 6/6:30am and 7:30am/8am on the weekends. Should we continue the sleep restriction a little longer and then bump his bedtime to like 11pm or 10:30pm? I guess we were hoping to get longer stretches of consistent sleep doing this.
Hi Tess!
What used to work before should work now. Because nothing really changed except your thoughts! Don’t approach cbti as if it’s a magic pill that guarantees sleep. It isn’t. It’s more like a crutch you use to help you get back on your feet but should be abandoned when it’s done its job.
You should also make choices about sleep as if sleep isn’t the main factor but because that’s what you really want. In regards to physical symptoms, my feeling is that they should go away over time. Mine did. Unless of course you have an underlying medical issue that causes them. Recovered insomniacs aren’t necessarily sleeping a lot better or that insomnia has left them. It just means we have abandoned the struggle and are much more open to having wakefulness and not struggle as much than those who do. Good luck!
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