[brandon123]

Hi Coach Martin, here is some quick background about myself. I started to implement sleep restriction after a short bout of acute sleep difficulties that had lasted about 3 months. For about a 3 month stretch I would struggle to fall asleep about 2 nights per week or would wake up in the middle of the night about 3 nights per week. This began to drive me a bit crazy, so I finally bit the bullet and implemented sleep restriction and really stuck to it for 3 weeks. The results were fantastic and my sleep efficiency went from being about 75% to 95% and getting a good 6.5 – 7 hours of sleep almost every night with falling asleep in less than 10 minutes most nights and never waking up in the middle of the night. To just give some tips to those struggling with sleep: the ultimate keys are really to just not try to sleep, trust your body to “catch-up” on sleep, follow the process, do not over-monitor results, stop always checking forums, do not watch insomnia-related videos, and do not call yourself someone with insomnia. All of those behaviors just lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy and to you thinking more about sleep than you should. Also, do not give up hope! That is the biggest thing, we all need hope in this world and we need it when we are suffering. Keep the hope and that will carry you through this. I know it is hard, trust me I felt broken at times, but the key is hope.

Anyways, this was going very well for me until I started a new job where I am working a wide variety of hours. My sleep window prior to starting the job was consistently 11:30 pm – 6 am and then widened to 10:45 pm – 6 am. This all helped me and I have been sleeping very well lately. Now, with my new job I have a couple shifts per week where I work until 12 or 1 am, what would you recommend I do to my sleep window those days? I have tried (the worst word in the dictionary for sleep! haha) to just keep the same sleep window length but bump it back an hour or two but that has been hard because my body seems to really want to be up by 7:00 am and then just feels groggy and tired from the lack of consistency and weird sleep schedule. Should I just wake up at 6 am regardless of when I go to sleep, even if it would mean being three hours later than my normal bed time (in bed at 2 am or so when I usually get in about 10:45 pm)? It just really is not possible for me to keep the same sleep window each night with this job change so any recommendations for what I could do to keep this good sleep going would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

[Martin Reed]

Shift work can make things a bit more difficult — and it’s not really my area of expertise, unfortunately! As you know from experience, you can’t control sleep. The only thing you can do is to give yourself the opportunity to sleep.

So, with that in mind, you might want to give yourself the opportunity to sleep past 6:00 AM after you have worked a later shift. You might get a bit more sleep, you might not — you can’t control that!

Then, on days when you revert back to “normal” working hours, just be aware that if you slept in later that morning, you might not be sleepy enough for sleep at the same time at night — so it might also be useful to ensure you only go to bed when you feel sleepy enough for sleep.

I hope there’s something useful here!

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