[Steve]

Sorry to hear it Mac. But at least you are having many more good nights than bad nights. But I know how disappointing it is to have to deal with the bad nights. Just keep going as you are and hopefully the bad nights will get even less.

[Mac0908]

Thanks Steve. I hate to get all overly negative because I know that’s bad for you and bad for the forums in general, but when I’ve been telling myself “hopefully they’ll get less and less” every week of these last 5+ months and they still happen what seems like SO very easily, not to mention my 2.5+ years of on and off insomnia in general, well it’s all just sickening to me after a while. I’m an absolute zombie today. It’s tough to feel so amazing one day and maybe even get to a point of progress where I have even a week straight of good/decent nights, and then boom, not just an “off” night, but a flat out bad night, like I had last night. I know I might sound spoiled and that’s fine to think, but this isn’t my first week of SRT or trying to get better, you know? I can only say “keep going” for so long until I feel like I’m conditioned to get at least one horrible night a week no matter what.

[Steve]

I guess it’s time for everyone to check in and tell how they are doing. I myself am doing a little better. In the last 6 nights, I have gotten three 5.0 hour nights, two 4.5 hour nights and a very bad night of 3.5 where I was a zombie the next day. The problem for me is that I am still getting less sleep than before I started SR. And the lack of sleep is starting to hurt me as I am getting more migraines and unable to focus my eyes. I have been unintentionally nodding off before my SW as well. I am so tired I sit in a chair in the evening and next thing you know, I am out for 15 or 20 minutes. Martin told me if I feel sleepy during my wind down time, I can go to bed to see what happens. But I can’t tell when I am sleepy. I guess I must be if I am nodding off. Last night I finished up watching the hockey game on TV and sat in the chair. This was during my wind down time and I unexpectedly fell asleep for a half hour. I woke up at the start of my SW. I am going to do two things starting tonight. The first is that I am going to try to see if I feel sleepy during my wind down time and then go to bed. But I am also going to increase my SW by 15 minutes starting tonight. Over the last 6 days, I have an SE of 85%. If you take the bad night of sleep out, I have an SE of 89%. While I am not sleeping through to my alarm, I hope the slightly longer SW will give me a little more sleep at the beginning of the night. So, overall, I am slowly improving, but very slowly. At least I got a couple of 5 hour nights in. I should mention that tonight is the end of my 5th week of SR. It is the end of the third week of working with Martin , so five weeks of SR in total. This is just going so slow for me. I really thought by the end of my 5th week, I would have an SW of 6.0 hours.

How is everybody else doing?

[Mac0908]

Steve, if you are at a point where you legitimately cannot keep your eyes open and are craving sleep like crazy, THAT is when you know you are tired and it’s ok to hit the hay. Right now it still seems like you’re in a bit of an “all over the place” kind of phase with your SRT. I was there too. That being said, I think you are making SOME progress which is good. It will take time, maybe longer than you would have hoped, but I do believe you will improve.

[Steve]

Don’t worry about being negative Mac. It’s okay to vent here. I already know it’s going to take a long time to kick this. Besides, I also know you have a lot of good nights. What I wouldn’t give for a 7.0 hour sleep! Right now though, I’m just battling the dry eye syndrome that this insomnia has left me with.

[Steve]

Thanks Mac. the trouble is, I NEVER feel that tired. So I believe you may be right. I am all over the place. Maybe once I stop these naps I will feel like that because I believe the naps are cutting into my sleep drive.

[Daf]

Mac,

You are very similar to me. I’ve had it for 2 years and 9 months, on and off. Slowly getting better. In March, April and May I had just one nil sleep night in each of those three months. Yipee!

But in June I have had 2 nil sleep nights so far.

Still, it is all better than last October when I had 9 nil sleep nights… which was v frustrating because that came after my longest good spell of going 7 weeks with no nil sleep night at all.

If I get 4 hrs I feel fine, just great.

But normally my pattern is either nil sleep at all (now rarer than before) or somewhere between 5 and 6 hours.

It is tough but you just have to accept it and do the right things – the relaxing down time, not eating late and all that good stuff for the rest of your life.

But even doing that you may, like me, still get the odd night of no sleep at all for ABSOLUTELY NO REASON AT ALL.

Some research I posted on another thread said it is in our neurochemical make up.

Like you, I feel awful after a nil sleep night. But then I’m lucky enough to always follow that with a night where I get at least 5 hours and I feel great again.

Fact is you (all of us) have to just live with it and do the SC stuff and SRT to minimise the frequency of the duff nights. For me, that is my reality.

But there are worse things one could have and suffer from. That is what I tell myself.

Some friends with cancer, they have to face feeling lousy every day and with the uncertainty of it not being cured. Whereas I have good days that far outnumber the bad. I wouldn’t swap with them, so I am grateful.

[Mac0908]

Thanks Daf. Appreciate all that. What did you do to begin to really turn things around? Just SRT?

Maybe it all is just in my mechanical makeup. I’m a pretty anxious person to begin with and always worried about good sleep even before this all began. Maybe this is just the way it is for me sadly.

Steve if you are never feeling flat out tired/head nodding/eyes drooping then you MUST wait until you do. Only then will you really begin this process the right way in my opinion. Believe me I went without feeling that way for a long time too. I think it was just my nervous system going haywire around bedtime and never allowing me to get that feeling again. That all changed when I came back from a Euro trip late last year and was jet lagged my first night back. I’ll never forget it. It was 9pm and I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I thought to myself oh hey, I remember this feeling. After that my brain was trained to remember what that felt like and I began slowly but surely beginning the REAL journey to getting better. Obviously I still had many struggles until I finally caved and began SRT in January, but point is, its crucial to wait for that truly sleepy feeling. On nights when I have it, as I said the other day, it’s around a 90% chance I get a decent night of sleep. If I go to bed not completely shot, those odds seem to go way down. Add on some sugar before bed like last night, and well, here I am today, zombie city.

[Steve]

Well, I can tell you Mac that my eyes do burn in the evening and I do have to keep re-reading some passages in the book I’m reading. But I don’t know if the burning is due to the dry eye syndrome or sleepiness and the re-reading of the passages is due to sleepiness or just failure to comprehend things because of the insomnia. I do know that I usually fall asleep within 15 minutes after getting into bed. I never really did that even before I had insomnia.

[Deb]

Like you guys, I have had my frustrations too. After 7 weeks I was still averaging 5 good nights and 2 bad nights a week. Also, I was staying up until until 11:30 to 12:00 depending on how sleepy I was. But even if I was really tired when I went to bed, there was still no guarantee that I would sleep because in general, if I didn’t fall asleep right away I could be up half the night.

So my frustrations have been with having to stay up so late every night to the point of exhaustion in order to fall asleep. And even with this, I was still having 2 bad nights a week. It seemed like it was going take quite awhile for things to change.

So I decided to do an experiment and try ACT again for a few days and see what happened. I reasoned that I could always go back to SR & SC if it didn’t work or I just couldn’t stand it. Also, my level of anxiety if so much lower than the first time I did it, so it might work this time.

So I started 3 nights ago, going to bed with my husband between 10:30 and 11:00 and not waiting until I got to the point of exhaustion. The first night I was awake all night except maybe 1-1.5 hours in the wee hours of the morning. I figured that would probably happen because of my first time trying this. Fortunately that day I wasn’t a zombie because I had slept well the 5 days before that. The second night I fell asleep within an hour and was in and out of sleep all night. I got up around 7:30 and felt pretty good even though my sleep had not been concentrated. Last night it took 10-20 minutes to fall sleep and I slept solid all night, waking around 7:00. Feeling well rested today. So far, my experiment is going well. I’m crossing my fingers.

[Steve]

So Deb, what is the difference between what you did with SR and SC and what ACT is having you do? I did ACT as well but it never did anything for me. What is ACT making you do different in this case than when you tried t before?

[Deb]

I’m not doing anything differently than what I did before. However, before I had a lot more anxiety and became confused with the symptoms I was experiencing. After the first night of sleeplessness, I had several nights of very light sleep with a lot of dreams. I would wake in the morning completely exhausted. I didn’t know if this was normal or not and had no one to ask. So I just became confused and anxious and as a result my sleep was not getting any better. Also, I had no backup plan, so when things weren’t going well I fell into depression and hopelessness. This time I have a backup plan of going back to SR & SC if this doesn’t go well. So overall this time I’m a lot more calm. My anxiety has gone way down due to my quick response to SR & SC the second time around and my sleeping well at least 5 nights a week, giving me confidence in my ability to sleep. In addition, I’ve been on an antidepressant for two months now which I’m sure is contributing to my emotions being more steady. Also, I did have one session with the ACT people awhile back where I was able to ask my question about the light sleep and dreams and now I know that is normal.

[Steve]

Well, I wish you luck. You seem to be doing okay with it now. My biggest problem now is that I fall asleep unintentionally when I sit down in a chair in the evening and I’m sure that is killing my sleep drive. Last night I fell asleep twice. Once for around twenty minutes and another time during my wind down time for a half an hour. When I woke up, my SW was starting. I’m sure that’s why I only slept 4 and a half hours last night. I probably could have logged more. However, I am slowly improving. In the last six days, I have had three 5 hour sleeps and two 4.5 hour sleeps. I have had only one 3.5 hour sleep which I consider a bad night now. (When I first started SR, a 3.5 hour sleep would have been considered good for me.) So my SE for the last 6 days has been 89% and if you take away the bad night, it’s 85%. Martin said since I am unintentionally napping, that if I feel sleepy during my wind down time, I can go to bed and see what happens. Based on my SE for the last 6 nights, I am going to increase my SW 15 minutes and go to bed and see what happens. I need to get over 5 hours of sleep as under that doesn’t help me at all. I am now getting migraines and some vertigo from the lack of sleep, and my dry eye syndrome is worsening as I am still getting less sleep than before I started SR. I know that can be normal so I’m not worried yet but I would like to try for more than five hours. Hopefully, the extra 15 minutes and not napping will give me more sleep in the beginning of my SW. I never feel sleepy but I am falling asleep before my SW so I must be sleepy. And when I do go to bed at beginning of my SW, I am falling asleep within 15 minutes. This is a much slower process than I thought it would be but I am sticking with it. Any encouragement would be greatly appreciated.

[Daf]

Hi Mac,

NP – Happy to help.

Basically I just try to use stimulus control and a little bit of SRT. I actually watch TV and fall asleep on couch. Only try to sleep when tired.

Re SRT I’m lucky? because I wake up 3 or 4 times in night to use the toilet, so its easy to keep sleep restricted. Even so, once I have had 5 or 6 hours, I simply cannot sleep anymore, even if the night before was a nil sleep night.

On caveat… I’m not over-sold on the idea on getting out of bed after 15 mins if one cannot sleep, though I would probably after say an hour. I think this must be up to you. I try to accept and be “OK” with being awake.

Like Deb, I also use an accepting approach to things (ACT / Mindfulness) it’s the bleeding same thing really. I recommend to google “7 Attitudes of Mindfulness” by Jon Kabat Zinn video on youtube plus get the book, “The Power of Now” by Eckhart Tolle. That is as good as anything I have read or seen.

I do think that insomnia sufferers tend to be rather controlling, probably usually successful people. I don’t mean to upset people but that is how we often come over. It was certainly true of the folks I met on the courses for insomnia I have been on. (I found my insomnia was worse than others, so would avoid in future).

But it’s our over emphasis on CONTROL – and our frustration that our control over sleep is limited – that sets us out from other folks.

Example – If my wife had some affliction that meant she had to do some things at certain times and record the outcomes, she just WOULD NOT do it…or not do it well…… and yet, all us sufferers from not sleeping seems to know how many hours we took to fall asleep, what our ratios are etc. We are actually a little bit nuts, a little bit hypochondriac, maybe. There is nothing wrong with that – it makes us the people we are.

My controlling nature comes from in part my childhood. But it is there and real.

My wife loves me for who I am and admires my drive to get things done, my control and at times, my party spirit.

But all this controlling can be an impediment, when things are to some extent out of your control – like sleep.

But self -recognition helps one get by.

[Steve]

So how is everyone doing this morning? Time for a check-in I guess. I had a relatively good night last night. I could barely keep my eyes open while watching TV last night so I switched to a book and that helped. As I said yesterday, I was going to increase my SW by 15 minutes last night but since I was so tired, I ended up increasing it by 30. So instead of a 5.5 hour SW, I planned on a 6.0 hour SW. There was good news and bad news with that. The bad news was that I awoke at 4:30 in the morning and while I tried to get back to sleep, I couldn’t after a half hour so I just got up for the day 15 minutes early. So instead of increasing my SW by 30 minutes, I effectively only increased it by 15 minutes to 5.75 hours. But I am going to stick to that 6.0 hour SW tonight. The good news is that while I didn’t increase my sleep any, I did get another 5.0 hour sleep last night. And better yet, it was all in one block as I don’t remember waking up at during the night last night. That means while I still have trouble focusing my eyes this morning, I am not exhausted either. So, my SE for the week is 85.5%. If you discount the one bad night I had, it’s 88.5%. I also got 4 nights of 5 hours of sleep, two of 4.5 hours and one bad night of 3.5 hours. This is the end of my 5th week of SR. I am hoping to maintain the gains I made but also to increase on the 5.0 hours of sleep that I have been getting. I really would like to get up to 6 hours soon but I know that’s going to take awhile. And I also know there will be setbacks along the way. But I am committed to keep working on this.

[Author]

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