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Thanks for posting your progress. I’m new at the course, too, and struggling, but I believe we’ll both get there. The fact that you got 5 hours proves your body will get the sleep it needs, and it’s also a testament to your efforts.
I feel for you, and I agree with the previous poster that the ideas in Martin’s free courses and podcasts can help. I hope you’re also getting help with OCD.
I understand the challenges of having an anxiety disorder along with insomnia. (I have generalized anxiety disorder and health anxiety disorder.) I also get how a bad experience can bring back the trauma of 2020.
Good luck. I agree with the previous poster, no one dies from insomnia, and remember what Martin says: you can sleep. (It might just take a little while and some retraining to get there regularly.)
I have a lot of causes for my sleep anxiety. I have general anxiety disorder and health anxiety. (I have a therapist; I know this forum isn’t therapy.) Recently, my stressors are family, the pandemic, the vulnerability of myself and my family to Covid.
Also, in the first year of the pandemic, I had traumatic nighttime experiences. My income had dropped by two thirds, putting me at risk of homelessness, and I lived in a violent neighborhood. I used to just hear things at night in the streets–yelling, fights–but in the pandemic it got worse, and I witnessed violence and gun violence outside my window in the daytime. I had a hostile neighbor across the hall. He used to just glare at me, but in the last months of 2020 he started actively harassing me at night: bouncing a ball of my apartment wall in the hallway, running his dog in the hall at night (1 a.m., 3 a.m.) There’s a reason they use sleep deprivation for torture: it works. When I wasn’t being woken up by him, I was often huddled in bed, vigilant and frightened.
I was able to move in December 2020 and I’m safe now.
Short answer, I have PTSD. Again, I do have therapy and I know this course and this forum aren’t therapy. My income is going back up, and I recently got a business grant. But it’s taking time to get over that year, and with Omicron I again don’t always feel safe even in my building, since people are cavalier about masking.
Thanks for your answer, Scott. I’ve had unhelpful sleep habits for years. I used to read in bed in dim light before drifting off to sleep unawares, just so I could avoid that feeling of lying in bed with nothing to do but wonder when sleep will come. Would that be a bad habit to bring back, reading in bed?
At some point I replaced that with TV-watching in bed, and that wreaked havoc. It works great up until it doesn’t, and then eventually sleeping and waking and TV-watching and dozing become hard to distinguish, so it’s more like being a zombie than getting rest.
I haven’t watched TV in bed for 9 nights now. I’ve been putting a crackling fireplace video on at low volume and draping the laptop screen with a black cloth. The sound helps me not focus on unpleasant sounds like traffic.
The proximate causes for this recent sleep anxiety–I will answer in a second post. I think I’ve run into a word limit on the forum before.
