[BenjaminR]

Hello fellow insomniacs

I am new to Insomnia Coach and came here because my wife convinced me that, after years of trying one remedy after another with no sustained success, it was time to stop trying everything under the sun to “cure” my insomnia and find a way to learn to live with it.

Just received e-mail #6 from Martin, in which he discusses the idea of not sticking to a bedtime schedule but rather going to bed only when you feel sleepy. This certainly makes sense, but I have settled into a nightly ritual that seems to be pretty effective, and I thought I would see if anyone has any comments on this vs. Martin’s suggestion.

My wife and I have our evening meal at around 7PM or so, and we watch TV for a while – either a movie or a couple of episodes of our current streaming series (finished “Dune: Prophecy” last night). This ends somewhere between 9:30 and 10:00, depending on the show. After that, I retire to my recliner and read a book. At 10:30, I sit in a bathtub full of warm (not hot) water, with lavender-infuse Epsom salts, and continue the book. No late night screen time of any sort.

At 11:00 after the tub soak, I insert my sleep EarPods, pick an episode of my sleep-inducing podcast, fire up the CPAP machine, and go to bed. Since starting this ritual, I have had little trouble falling asleep, the problem is in staying asleep, which is what I’m here to deal with.

So any thoughts? If I’ve got a routine that at least seems to be helping with falling asleep, is there any real need to follow the suggestion of waiting until I am sleepy? I like this routine, and trying to time it to a sleepy feeling would be a challenge.

[RandomName47]

I’m still working on this myself but I think a consistent wake time is more important. To set your wake up time use the time you usually actually sleep through a night but not less than 5.5 hours. Use the time you go to bed plus this time and you have your wake time. This should build sleep drive overtime. I’m still struggling with this myself ive been laying in bed past my wake up time. Good luck.

[BenjaminR]

Thanks for your response. Coincidentally, e-mail #7 today covers the exact same subject.

I tend to get up around the same time every day, usually 6:30 to 7ish. I’m not sure how much actual sleep time I’m getting – I do tend to wake up at some point during the night and lie awake for a while, but I’ve stopped looking at the clock, so I don’t know when or how long it is. Thanks to Insomnia Coach, I’m already having pretty good success at not obsessing over the wakefulness during the night and just letting it happen.

It’s hard to say how much time I actually sleep each night, as opposed to lying quietly in bed. I’ve tried various sleep trackers with my Apple Watch and iPhone, but they are pretty unreliable. The only way to really know what phase of sleep you are in is by way of an EEG. That information is not available to the apps, so they track movement, heart rate, and breathing rate, and make an educated guess (really an assumption) as to what phase you are in and for how long. I find even the most highly rated of them to be very inaccurate. They will tell me that I’m in such-and-such a sleep phase when I’m actually lying there quietly, not moving, breathing slowly, with low heart rate, and staring at the insides of my eyelids.

[RandomName47]

I know from my reading awakenings are completely normal. Most people wake up a couple times ab hour they just don’t remember them. As insomniacs we are just more aware of them and stress about them. As for figuring out the exact amount of sleep you get I think that is counter productive. I went down that path too. Maybe just set your sleep window to something like 7 hours. Most normal sleepers overstate how much they sleep and get around this much. I wish you luck on solving this in the new year.

[Author]

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