[Slarus]

Mac….the first night of SR I didn’t sleep and was in and out of bed for SC but I never did get sleepy. Second night I probably did get some fragmented sleep from 4:00 -7:00 am. Last night I was so tired I barely made it to my SW and as soon as I got in bed I was wide awake. I was in and out for SC  until I finally just got up at 5:00 am.  I can be dead dog tired during the day and fighting off micro sleeps and the closer it gets to bedtime, the less sleepy  I feel. I don’t take naps at all during the day.  I consider 3 hours or less an outlier night and don’t count them in my average hours of sleep. My SW is 12:00 midnight – 7:00 am. I’m 77 and this is taking its toll on me for sure. I’ve gone from an active, energetic 77 year old to an “old tired lady”.  It’s very discouraging.

[Slarus]

Hi Steve,  thanks for the encouragement. It sounds like if I can just get through this first week (and I will) things may start to improve. It’s a rough go right now for sure but from reading other posts, there are some great successes.

[Steve]

Hi Slarus. I have a couple questions for you. First, how did you come up with your sleep window? Seven hours seems like an awful long length of time for someone who is just starting out on sleep reductions. My second question is, have you taken any courses on CBT-i, either with a counselor in person or someone on the internet?

You can do this Slarus. Stay with it and you will eventually improve as well.

[Slarus]

Steve, it does seem a little long since I am rarely sleepy by 12:00 midnight and have yet to sleep until 7:00 am. I averaged my sleep hours per day for the first 14 days of my sleep log. It was only 5.5 hours. If I really want to get up every day at 7:00 am then I should probably be staying up until 1:00 or 1:30 am for my sleep window for SR. No, this is my first experience with CBT-I and I’m just following a workbook my primary recommended and signed up fo Martin’s free two week program. I’m sort of feeling my way through it. 8 out my first 14 days of my sleep log, I didn’t sleep.  A relatively good night is usually followed by two little or no sleep nights.

[Deb]

Just curious Slarus, how long have you had your insomnia? Mine started in October.

[Slarus]

Deb, mine started in February when I had a thyroid crisis so it has been about 3-1/2 months now. The thyroid issue resolved in 8 weeks but the insomnia rages on worse than ever. My understanding is that often when the situation that initially caused the insomnia is corrected, the insomnia does not always go away.

[Deb]

Yes, those of us with chronic insomnia had some incident or crisis that brought on the insomnia, but after that was resolved the insomnia continued. I had surgery and one night couldn’t get comfortable and fall asleep, and then started worrying about my sleep. I healed from the surgery but the insomnia continued.

[Pam1129]

Today was a very tough day!! I just did my 5th night ( my first time trying this ) last night of SR.. I’m so hoping I can get a string of a few hours sleep together! I feel like after this many years of struggling , I am ‘broken’

I am really believing this will be the ‘ticket’ ( just makes sense) and trying to keep a positive outlook, but , dang, sometimes it’s just rough!

i appreciate this forum … love to hear that it ‘does’ work and I need to just hang in there!?

[Mac0908]

Update:

So for the last week things have been ok. One bad night thrown in there and honestly it wasn’t even because of an early awakening or anything like that. It was because of a bad dream that messed with my sleep in the later portion of the night/early morning. That brings me to last night. I’ve been sticking with the 11-11:30 bedtimes as that’s when my sleep drive has usually been coming on, but last night I don’t know what happened. By 10:30p I was absolutely shot. Instead of playing games like turning the lights back on and standing up, etc, I took this opportunity to give myself a real test. I went to bed. Wouldn’t you know it, early awakening. Didn’t look at the clock but I estimated it to be around 5am. Went back in and out of light/BS sleep until my 6am alarm. While not a brutal/bad night, I am very tired today. This is just more proof that I am still not ready and cannot handle an earlier bedtime, even if I cannot keep my eyes open.

The thing of it is, I know I can sleep well going to bed at that time. It’s happened plenty of times over the last 5 months, especially on weekends. I think there is still just and was just a good amount of underlying anxiety in there over entering my bedroom at that time, 10:30pm, after sticking with this 11-11:30p timeframe so well for several weeks now. Plus, with work in the morning, there is always that built in anxiety there that is very hard to shake. If I didn’t have work and didn’t have a 6am alarm, I can almost guarantee you I would have slept better. May have woken up early still, but would have fell back into nice sleep much much easier.

Oh well, not happy today.

here’s to another cup of coffee… Large sized.

[Steve]

Hi Slarus. Yes, you might want to decrease your SW. The normal approach is to take your average sleep time and add 30 minutes. So yours would be 6 hours.

I have had my insomnia since October of last year after some triggers which caused a lot of anxiety. My triggers have since gone but as with you, the insomnia remains.

[Steve]

Hi Pam. Sorry to hear about how rough you have been having but know that we all went through the same thing. And it does work. You just have to stick with it. Actually, we are all “broken”, or at least our sleep mechanism is. But the CBT-i with it’s SR and SC will help fix it. It just takes time. Remember what I like to say. If CBT-i was easy, there wouldn’t be any insomniacs in the world. Keep us posted as to how your doing.

[Steve]

Sorry to hear that Mac but at least now you know. So tell me, when you do go to bed at 11:30 and get up at 6:00, do you feel refreshed? Do you feel like you used to before you got insomnia? Maybe you can get a good night’s sleep tonight and get back to your regular time frame. Hope so. Rooting for you.

[Steve]

So, the last 7 nights my SE was as follows. 95%, 18%, 76% 63%, 86%, 90% and 86%. Only one of those nights I slept longer than 5 hours. The other nights I ended up getting out of bed early because I couldn’t sleep and it was too close to my alarm so I got up. Only one of those nights was a really bad night with 1 hour of sleep. With that one bad night, my average sleep was 3.9 hours. Without the bad night, my average sleep was 4.4. And another plus is that most of my sleep is now consolidated and coming in one block. I start on week 4 of SR tonight.

[Mac0908]

Steve…

Some nights, yes, I feel perfectly fine. Other nights it’s just been more of an “ok” feeling to where even though I’m perfectly fine during the day, I’m not exactly ‘refreshed’. Understand that me going in bed at 11:30 doesn’t mean me passing out that split second. Usually I’ll finally crash around let’s say midnight and then with a 6a wakeup time, that’s 6 hours of sleep which was always an iffy amount of time for me, pre insomnia days or after. On nights where I’ve gotten in bed around 11 and crashed 11:30, I can tell a difference. End of the day though, 7 hours has always been my magic amount of time. Not trying to go crazy focusing on time bc I know that’s not what you’re supposed to do, but it’s just the reality of it all whether we like it or not IMO.

Really just not sure what lies ahead for me or where to really go from here other than continuing to try and stick to the 11-1130p bedtime timeframe and hope it continues to build up my sleep confidence so that I CAN actually begin to do well on 10:30p bedtime work nights. Anyway thank you for your words. As long as I don’t have another downward spiral like I did a month ago I’ll be happy for the time being. How exactly are you doing at this point in time? Would you say you are a whole worlds difference than where you were let’s say a month ago?

 

Mac

[Steve]

Deb – You said you signed up with Martin again. Did you pay that reduced rate the second time?

[Author]

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