[Recovery]

Hi there, anyone with similar experience please share you insights. Martin would love to hear from you.
So i have been doing srt for about 7 weeks now. It has been difficult. Results seems to be mixed. My current window is 115-740. Im still waiting for the part where i can barely stay awake until my window hits. I missed that so tired sleepiness feeling. My sleep efficiency average is around 85percent. There are def good nights and bad nights. Even though my sleep efficiency is alright my duration have not really improved. At the beginning of srt i got around 5.5 hrs just like now. I just wonder when i will be increase my duration. Right now i don’t make it to my wake up time of 740 and that frustrates me. One or two nights i slept till the alarm that felt like an accomplishment and help with confidence. I feel like i should be able to get to the alarm wake time because ive been doing srt for awhile now. Also when i wake up before 740 and i toss and turn but can’t fall back asleep does lead to adrenaline rush in my body. My sleep efficiency will not improved if i constantly get up before my wake up window. I will continue to stick with srt. I am waiting for that break through. I need to believe that i will be able to gradually increase time. I want to get that sleepiness feeling back. I want to get to a point where i will not think or worry about heading to bed or waking up thinking and worrying about the night. Anyone one with similar experience and success please reply. I need all the support i can get. Anyone currently in similar position lets chat and beat this together.

[Martin Reed]

Glad to hear you’re implementing sleep restriction as a way to build sleep drive and reduce nighttime wakefulness!

It sounds as though you aren’t recognizing a lot of sleepiness when you go to bed but you don’t mention any issue with falling asleep at the start of the night. Do you usually find it easy to fall asleep at the start of the night? If so, this suggests that you are sleepy enough for sleep when you go to bed. If not, you might find it helpful to think of the start of your sleep window as your earliest possible bedtime and only go to bed when you feel sleepy enough for sleep once the start of your sleep window has passed (while still keeping the same final out of bed time in the morning).

It also sounds as though you might be spending a lot of time in bed when being in bed doesn’t feel good (you mentioned tossing and turning and feeling an adrenaline rush when you wake before the end of your sleep window) and this could be creating arousal that makes it harder to fall asleep.

With this in mind, you might find it helpful to work on lowering arousal since that could be an obstacle to falling back to sleep. We can help reduce arousal by actually getting out of bed when being in bed doesn’t feel good, by not checking the time during the night, and by eliminating all sleep-related effort and striving.

Often, it’s our desire to fall back to sleep, our desire to sleep until a certain time, and/or our desire to get a certain amount of sleep that is the biggest obstacle to reaching those goals!

I hope this helps.

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