[Ambleside]

I am new to the forum and have read through the two weeks of emails. I’m able to fall asleep and stay asleep (aside from a wake up or two but can usually go right back to sleep) easily. My problem seems to be sleep quality- I will wake up many days feeling like absolute crap, like I barely slept. I am stuck in a perpetual yoyo cycle of good nights/bad nights. Clearly I build up enough sleep drive from a bad day to then give me a good night of sleep, but a good day almost always leads to another bad day. I do have a consistent wake up time and don’t nap. According to the emails, I need to adjust my bedtime based on when I feel sleepy, but here is my problem- I usually get super sleepy within the same window of time regardless of how I felt that day. But I suspect I haven’t actually built up enough sleep drive on those good days. I’m not sure how to follow his advice when I can’t seem to trust my sleepiness level as a cue as to when to go to bed. The best thing I’ve found to do is to try to exhaust myself with exercise on my good days, but that has various problems and doesn’t always work anyway. TIA for any advice!

[Megan B7]

This is exactly what happens to me! I have wondered about the sleep drive, and that’s what I thought was my story. But I think what may be happening is this: I have developed the belief that I can only sleep when I’m absolutely exhausted, but it’s not quite true. Instead, after a good night, I become desperate to believe that I’m done with this. I stay up to the start of my bedtime, but I want so badly for this bout of insomnia to be over that I end up creating a struggle. If I don’t fall asleep immediately, or if I start awake after a short time, I lie there and start thinking things like “I’ve stuffed this up again, I thought I was coming to the end of this,” etc. I lose patience with myself quickly, and then the cycle starts over.

I’ve only started to realize this in the last day or 2 and noticed that as soon as I woke up this morning, instead of appreciating that I had a struggle-free night & slept well, I started worrying about tonight. I’m trying to be more mindful about not getting tangled in those thoughts, hard as it is. Anyway, I don’t know if this resonates for you – I wonder if you might be going through the same cycle?

[sleep]

I am also trying to appreciate sleeping thru a struggle free night. You see I wake up at 5:30 am which is much too early for me. I want to sleep until 7 at least. I have tried going to bed later and this messed me up and I did not sleep at all that night. I am really trying to just accept this is as good as it gets and be glad I am sleeping from 12 until 5:30. It beats being up all night, that is for sure. I was hopeing I could sleep later in my retirement. I do usually take a half hour nap in the evening but I get so sleepy then. Doing best I can.

[Author]

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