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You are definitely not alone in this process.
I picked up a few mindfulness tips along the way from reading a lot and found that the techniques that worked the best for me were every night when it would come time for me to relax, I would listen to a track from the app My Life, I did the progressive relaxation and body scan ones quite a bit as I found that they helped me unwind a lot and when I felt my anxiety starting to get the better of me I would take deep breaths and try and focus on my breathing as much as possible. I also saw a chiropractor a few times as they do a lot of cranial work which also helped me unwind. I also now set aside time every afternoon/evening at the end of my work day to think through my day and process everything that had taken place and write down anything outstanding/that I needed to address so that I wasn’t processing it all when I got in to bed at night time. Then when I woke up in the middle of the night and started thinking/stressing about those things I would think to myself that it’s not time to think about that now as I have an allotted time every day to think about those things – it takes a little while to get used to thinking like this but does work eventually.
I started to gain confidence little by little as my sleep started improving and then with that comes the thinking that it doesn’t matter if you have a bad night because you will eventually sleep and like Martin says, I realised that I could cope and get through a day even if I’d had a really bad nights sleep. Once you can get into this mindset (that it doesn’t matter and you can cope) I find that helps so much!
I have increased my sleep window now to 11pm-6.30am – I still wake up 1-2 times per night to go to the bathroom but I never look at the time and try not to start thinking about anything when I do get up and fall straight back to sleep. If I do wake up earlier I just get up and start my day then.
I was quite disciplined with the sleep control in the beginning, I would get up and down every 30 minutes (I would read when I got up) but at around 10 weeks I found that getting up and down stopped working for me as well so would just sit on the edge of my bed and stare into the darkness (for 10/15 mins) which I found at that point worked really well for me.
You will get there soon.
Hi Recovery,
I know exactly how you feel, I was at the same stage at around week 7/8, I would have a few really good nights and think that I was finally getting back to normal and then I’d have a night with no sleep or only a couple of hours sleep and feel like I was back to square one. For me, things didn’t really start to get into a more normal sleeping pattern until around week 11/12 and even then I was having one challenging night per week so please hang in there, you will get there. I also felt like SR/SC maybe wasn’t working for me and that I’d have to try a different approach such as mindfulness but I think that it just takes longer for some people to get there.My sleep window was always 6 hours (12.30pm-6.30am), I tried reducing it to 5.5 hours a few times but would find that by the time it got to 1.00am I was completely over-tired and wired so that 5.5 hours window didn’t work for me. Most of the time I would feel really sleepy leading up to my sleep window, struggling with micro sleeps and keeping myself awake but as soon as I would go and lie in bed and about to drift off, my brain would wake me up! My issue was sleep onset insomnia but when I started SR I also struggled with sleep maintenance. On the days that I would wake up too early, if I couldn’t lie in bed and relax I would either take a comfy blanket and pillow out to the couch and relax and watch TV or if I was motivated enough would go out for a walk, I just made sure that if I was ever feeling frustrated in bed that I didn’t stay in bed while I was feeling angry/frustrated.
On the days when I’d had little or no sleep I found that keeping busy and also doing some kind of exercise really helped me, even if it’s just going for a 30 minute walk. I also started to think after a while that even if I only had 1-3 hours sleep, that is still better than having no sleep! Which helped my mind set quite a bit.
From my experience, I think the CBT-I process is not a progressive one, it’s a process that has a lot of ups and downs and very slowly you make progress – you will get there!
