[Paul Lai]

I have been suffering from insomnia since October; unable to fall and stay asleep almost every night. On average, I could only sleep for 2-3 hours per night.
I have tried various kinds of sleep aids, including the prescribed ones such as Dayvigo (5mg), Rezerem (8mg), and sleep supplements, such as melatonin, etc. But none of them works for me.
Now I am going to try the combination of valerian and hops. Not sure if that helps.
Any suggestion?

[Chee2308]

Hello Paul!
You will continue to have problems as long as you keep doing all these unnecessary stuffs. If all your life, you require nothing to sleep until now, how on earth does your body suddenly need all these things within a month? Surely this isn’t making any sense.

The reason you keep having problems is because you keep trying to solve an insolvable problem. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with you at all, everyone will have sleep disruptions once in a while but for most people, they usually go away by itself without doing anything. Because they never thought there’s a problem! But somehow your mind has confused this as a big problem and keeps asking you to fix it asap.

Your sleep isnt the problem, but you thinking there’s a problem becomes the problem! And it is entirely psychological, the roots are in your mindset. In humans, it is always the mindset which shapes behaviours and attitude towards any problem. When you frequently take medications, herbs or other things to sleep, this keeps your mind in a conflicted and confused state, because when one thing didn’t work, it will automatically look for others and the frequent restlessness and overmonitoring of results make it hard to settle down and rest, which is an important condition for sleep.

Just keeping your bedtime regular is all you need. As well as befriending wakefulness, learn to be okay with wakefulness, because waking up during the night is quite normal! The faster you give up all efforts to improve your sleep, the faster your mind will settle down and then everything will start falling into place. Just trust your own body, it knows what it is doing, it has been doing this your whole life and it is basically screaming inside you, “I can sleep, pls stop giving me confusing signals!”. Also manage your relationship with poor sleep, try to make it workable by not fearing it, a bit at a time, by continuing to enjoy your day and doing your daily routines. Try not to cancel events or appointments. You will continue to think about sleep obessesively at this point, but it should slowly dissipate once your sleep improves. Be very patient and practise self compassion, don’t be so hard on yourself because you haven’t got a good night rest. Setbacks are also pretty common. Remember nobody is judging you or monitoring your progress except yourself! There’s no prize to be won for being the best or fastest sleeper anyway! Improve at your own pace and with the correct mindset and adhering to a regular bedtime, you should do very well. Best of luck!

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