Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
T6001,
You found a great place to search for help. This site has information about methods to overcome insomnia. Insomnia is a psychological/cognitive condition and should be addressed through cognitive approaches. There are two approaches.
1) Cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBTI). CBTI is mostly based on behavioral changes: you start to spend less time in bed to increase sleep drive and you leave you bed when it starts to feel unpleasant. Through these behavioral changes you aim to unlearn to associate bed with wakefulness. You can learn about CBTI in Martin Reed’s (resource owner) youtube videos, his podcasts and from main page of this website (not forum part of it). You can read success stories on this forum. You can sign up for free sleep training course from Martin. You can enroll into Martin’s sleep coaching.
2) Acceptance and commitment therapy for insomnia (ACT). The method is described Guy Meadows’s ‘Sleep Book’. In this method you learn to think about you sleep worries differently and you address them mentally. You can read ACT discussion in another thread on this forum (ACT for insomnia). You can reach to Katharina Lederle through SleepSchool or Somnia for private sessions. But be sure to read Sleep Book several times before that. ACT will likely take some time to get into.Good luck. You can do it.
I see some struggles in the ‘ACT’ thread. Perhaps I will contribute my advice as well.
Chen, I see you are Martin’s client. Why don’t you just stay with the course for now and don’t overthink it. Stop solution-seeking behavior for now, wait for withdrawal symptoms subside and see if the Martin’s approach brings you results. You already have paid for the course, why not go through it diligently? If it doesn’t work well enough for you, try ACT.
If you want to dive into ACT I have several recommendations for you:
1) Read the ‘Sleep book’ of Guy Meadows multiple times. I don’t remember how many times I read it, perhaps 6 times at least. Every time I was discovering what I was doing wrong. You will find advice here, on this forum, but none will be able to do your homework for you. Ultimately, it is you and your inner world, which you will need to accept.
2) The major rule of ACT that you need to remind yourself over and over and over and over and over and over again: whenever you try to change things, you bring more arousal. That’s what keeps you awake at night. Through mindfulness techniques you will learn how to recognize what is happening and detach from it without trying to change it.
3) About ‘not caring if you sleep tonight’. I guess it was Deb’s advice. With all due respect to Deb (I mean it), I think this advice to be potentially misleading. I’m glad that this way of acceptance works for Deb, maybe because she is very spiritual person, but it never worked for me and given what I’ve learned from Dr Katharina Lederle, I think that this approach will not work for everyone.So what is acceptance? What is acceptance of sleeplessness, of insomnia? I will talk from my experience (including experience with Dr Lederle): acceptance simply means acknowledging what is present, what is happening. It does not mean you have to like it, it does not mean you need to ignore it. These are the opposite of acceptance. Remember point 2): whenever you try to change things, you bring more arousal. For instance, you go to bed and you hope to get a good sleep tonight. Ask yourself what do you feel, what do you experience. Be honest with yourself! Consider it like a confession in a church and you are your own priest. Maybe you feel anxiety, you feel desire to be asleep, you feel desire for your insomnia to go away. It is ok to feel it! Don’t try to change those, because see point 2). Or during daytime, you may feel anxiety, nasty physical sensations due to lack of sleep. If you try to ignore them or make them go away or force yourself to like your current state, it is the opposite of acceptance.
So how do you accept? As I said consider it a confession to yourself. Describe yourself what you feel. For instance, you feel anxiety. Ok. Where do you feel it? Give it shape, give it color, give it temperature etc. After you do that, you will suddenly feel that miraculously …. nothing has changed. These feelings did not go away. You did not start suddenly like them, your life did not suddenly return to normal. But what happens at this moment, is that you start to open to your feelings. You simply acknowledge that this is present, this is part of you, with shape, color, temperature, character etc and it feels unpleasant, but this is not whole you. By simply describing it, you will start accepting it.
When Dr. Meadows says ‘to accept it’ or ‘let it go’ in his book he always means ‘let it be’, by describing and seeing it as part of you or entity in you but not whole you. Through mindful exercises you need to learn to see you feelings, thoughts, urges etc. Meditation itself is useless for sleep if you don’t learn from it to see your feelings, thoughts etc. Meditation is just a practice of this noticing and accepting, not a trick to get you into sleep.
So you feel anxious? Accept it. You feel depressed? Accept it. You desire to be asleep and you are self-monitoring your sleep status? Accept it. What does this desire to be asleep/sleep expectation look like? Where is it located? Mine is like a cloud in my head. It is perfectly ok to feel those, because you are human being who suffers from insomnia. Don’t try to change those, because see point 2).
Do you feel like you are abusing mindfulness tools turning them into trick to get yourself to sleep? Accept it. Be honest with yourself, open to your feelings.
Final advice, if after Martin’s course you decide to seriously try ACT, contact Dr Katharina Lederle from the Sleep School. By the way she can also be contacted through another company Somnia. She is so, so worth it.
Taylor,
Then indeed try this exercise that I suggested. Even without mindfulness and anything else, reserve first 15 minutes in bed for just being and not planning to sleep. Just lie with your eyes open and allow your mind to bring you worrisome thoughts whether you are going to sleep tonight. If your mind does not bring any thoughts, perhaps you are thinking about not having thoughts and that is the thought as well. Notice it and just stay calm. See if it helps you to calm down, and when you are calm and sleepy, close your eyes, and see if you can remain in this calm state.
Do you have anxiety in the beginning of the night or after awakening in the middle of the night? In the beginning of the night give yourself some time (~20 minutes or more) to just lie there and not trying to sleep. Just reserve this time for light pleasant thoughts or for just calming down and allow yourself not to sleep during this time. See if helps to reduce anxiety before sleep. In the middle of the night, try a short break like a bathroom visit to reset your mind, and then go to bed like if it was a beginning of the night: give yourself 5-10 minutes of allowed not sleeping time and then try to sleep (but don’t force sleep). See if it helps. Consider your bed as experiments in which you are trying to dial things right.
Taylor, don’t confuse acceptance and resignation and don’t overthink it. Just be a neutral observer of your thoughts and feelings at night like if you are not there to sleep at all. If course you are there to sleep, don’t lie to yourself, but practice to be an observer. Your goal is to give your mind no job to do. Whenever, you want to react to your insomnia, you are giving your mind a task pushing it away from sleep. If you try to distract yourself from being awake, try to deny feelings, suppress thoughts, change thoughts etc, you are doing a mental job. It helped me greatly to personify my internal overthinker: whenever I had an urge to do something or I started questioning whether I do acceptance right, I knew it was my overthinker which worries about me. This overthinker wishes me well and does its best to protect me. So personify it and attribute all your doubts to your overthinker. It was important for me at some point to realize, that these anxious feelings and thoughts ARE in fact my allies, my friends that worry really bad me and trying to help me. Thank them wholeheartedly, in heartwarming manner and let them be! As I said the book should be just taken literally. Personify your struggles, thank them for being there with you and for you in this difficult night and let them be.
Thank you Deb.
Overthinking and sleep effort were my thing, my major challenge. It is surprising that even small amount of mental effort to fall asleep can lead to a no sleep night for me. In the beginning of my insomnia, when I didn’t understand what’s going on, I was trying hard (mentally) to force myself into sleep. I realized my mistake early on, but still during most of my insomnia, I did apply this mental effort to fall asleep without realizing it. It was a subtle effort and it was really hard to catch and yet it was enough to prevent sleep from happening.
In the beginning of my recovery it helped greatly to personify all my struggles (it was an invaluable advice from Borgesbi): I had ‘sleeper’, it is an entity which waits desperately for sleep to happen. And I had overthinker/overdoer. It is a creature which wants to do something about sleep. Sometimes I was seeing pressing hard on my mind trying to force me into sleep, sometimes I was hearing it asking whether I am doing it right, whether I need to accept better, whether I need to think about something, whether I am applying sleep effort etc. Watching my mind interacting with these creatures (like if I was sitting in a theatre) and doing nothing, gave me my first experience of doing nothing and welcoming during my recovery.Mac,
For me sleep onset was the major issue. I do have middle of night awakenings, but I had them even before insomnia, so I don’t consider them as a problem, as long as I am able to fall back to sleep in a reasonable time. Somehow, I still managed to largely retain sleep confidence for middle of the night wakefulness. Plus, I knew that even little bit of deep sleep makes huge difference for the daytime feeling, so after getting even little bit of deep sleep I already felt more at ease. Sleep onset was perceived as a challenge, and I knew that when I went through at least one cycle of deep sleep, I will fall asleep again after awakening. This sleep confidence for middle of the night was eroding slowly however, so I now rely on mindful ‘do nothing’ approach for middle of the night awakenings. I would say that for sleep onset my current formula is 80/20 – 80% of doing nothing and 20% sleep confidence. For middle of the night awakenings it is 40/30/30 – 40% sleep confidence, 30% mindful doing nothing and 30% of ‘I don’t care that much, I already got at least some sleep for tonight’ mindset.
Borgesbi had sleep maintenance insomnia and she pretty much relied on ACT to overcome it, so ACT should work for your type of insomnia. Her recipe was pretty simple: no sleep expectation, thought welcoming and consistent sleep schedule (you can call gentle sleep restriction or simply being reasonable with your sleep schedule). I guess one hurdle of middle of the night awakening is that it catches you off guard. For sleep onset, I can give myself wind down time in bed, acquire right mindset and slowly get into pre-sleep phase. For middle of the night awakening, it may be harder to reach this state if you wake up with rush and agitation. Perhaps, short bathroom visit to reset you mind before going back to bed can help? If anxiety if overwhelming, I think it may be helpful to interrupt it with a short break. I am not suggesting to do stimulus control and stay out of your bedroom until sleepy etc, but I think short break from being in bed can help to reset your mind and remind yourself that you should behave just like during the beginning of night. You have no problem falling asleep in the beginning of the night, try to bring the same mindset to the falling in the middle of the night.
Hi everyone, I didn’t post here and didn’t visit for a while. I am doing fine now. I finally figured it out how to ‘accept wakefulness’ and do nothing about it and hence, to just fall asleep. So sleep is mostly not a problem anymore. It may take longer sometimes to fall asleep, if my mind is agitated by daytime events or future plans, but it does not worry me much. I guess this will be my farewell post here. This forum was increasingly supportive for me during my low times last year and I would like to give something back. I will share my experience with ACT and my understanding of it. Hopefully, it will be helpful for forum newcomers which still struggle to understand ACT.
My insomnia was a terrible sleep onset insomnia. On average I slept only every other night for most of the 2019, with occasional back to back no sleep nights. I tried SRT first, but I did it on my own, got even more anxious and dropped it. I did it few times actually but not for long every time, no more than two weeks in a stretch. I know that SRT is pretty much enough for some folks to improve substantially, but no sleep nights even with 5 hour sleep window really freaked me out. I therefore pursued ACT, but couldn’t figure it out for a long time. Deb’s and Borgesbi’s support were essential for me, but it still took some work to figure it out for myself completely.
Below I will describe you my experience and advice on recovery with ACT. After reading the Sleep book few more times and reflecting on things I missed and after experimenting with sleep, I can tell you that book should be just taken literally and it has all the tools you need. The essence of the book is pretty much summarized in these few pieces:
1) “The effort I was putting in to sleep had not worked and then it hit me: perhaps I was trying too hard. I rewound to when I slept well to figure out what I was doing. How did I do it? Really I did nothing special at all. The only thing I did to sleep was close my eyes”
2) “Any attempts to fight, avoid, change or get rid of experiencing your insomnia tell your brain that you are being threatened, triggering your innate survival response. In this moment you become mentally and physically alert as your brain prepares you to stand and fight or withdraw in flight.”
3) “The most important thing to note about a normal sleeper is their willingness to relax and be quietly wakeful in the presleep phase. They aren’t trying to force sleep upon themselves”
4) “Here you accept the fact that you are awake and are willing to ‘watch’ and ‘welcome’ any of your wanted or unwanted thoughts, memories, images or sensations that arise in your mind and body moment by moment. You take the position of a peaceful bystander who watches over your internal world without judgment or comment.”
5) “When you can let go of the idea that you need to be asleep, then you remove the obstacles in the way of falling to sleep.”Some people (not me) are likely naturally more mindful than others and can figure out ‘do nothing’ thing even without ACT. Check two recovery posts on this forum (one from obriri and one from Rion123). In my opinon, the most important part of obriri’s story is this:
“When I feel ready, I make my mind go blank as if I’m meditating …. If you’re thinking about your mind being blank, you’re still thinking too much and you’re not relaxed.”
In the Rion123 story:
“Most importantly, don’t force yourself to sleep, dont put any effort into it, when you sleep just do nothing, think of nothing and you will sleep”So it goes down to do nothing and think about nothing. Yet, it is so easy to overdo this! (many, many exclamation marks). That was my major roadblock. Without realizing it, I was gently trying to suppress thinking (so called self-monitoring). I thought I was doing nothing and yet didn’t sleep. I was afraid that I am broken now, and yet I was simply doing too much.
So I was putting too much mental effort into falling asleep without realizing it. And that’s where mindfulness helps. Mindfulness is useful in two ways: First, mindful meditation will remind you what it’s like to just be, to just be present. Second, it provides the best terminology to understand pre-sleep phase. First, about doing nothing. If you ever did mindful meditation after bad night, you might have noticed that you become sleepy during meditation. In my opinion, the reason is thatyou are not striving for anything during meditation. You are just being present, willing to feel and experience sensations of your body and thoughts in your mind. You don’t set goals for your mind to achieve something and if sleepy, your mind will tend to drift off. I find my pre-sleep state now to be very similar to meditation and it consistently sends me into sleep at night. Yet, don’t meditate to fall asleep! Meditation experience should give you an idea what it is like to just be. Then, when you are in your bed, just close your eyes and just be! Just be there, in you body, in you mind. Just realize that you are here, you are human being, suffering from insomnia, you are alive, you are present, you are awake and you choose to do nothing about it. Don’t distract yourself intentionally with pleasant thoughts and yet don’t try to suppress thoughts either. If you mind wanders off, you might fall asleep while being in a random thought (which you didn’t force yourself into). If you realize that your mind has wandered off and you are not sleeping yet, just return to the state of being present. Yet, it is not meditation. Don’t do intentional body scans and active thought watching. Just be there, whole, human, alive, awake.
Second, mindfulness provides great terminology. If someone just tells you: close your eyes and don’t think about anything to fall asleep, they will be absolutely correct. Yet, if a person with insomnia will try not to think about anything, he/she will be trying to suppress thinking altogether and force sleep. ACT reminds us what it is like to not think about anything: be willing to stay awake and just allow your mind to bring you random thoughts. Don’t worry about these thoughts. After all you may drift to sleep while being caught in a random thought. If you are still awake after realizing you were in the thought, return to just being awake and just being present without striving to achieve your goal.
With this being said, I want to comment on Deb’s advice to surrender desire for sleep. Just like a suggestion to think about nothing to fall asleep, it is absolutely correct! Yet, it will be interpreted wrong, if not through the prism of mindfulness. I was doing it wrong first. I was trying hard to reject this desire for sleep, and it did help partially since I was no longer trying to force sleep while surrendering desire for sleep. Yet by rejecting this desire I was putting me in conflict with myself. I am human being, I am here, in my bed, I am here to sleep. Then I realized, that I working too hard. So, yes, you need to abandon desire for sleep, but with mindfulness. It pretty much means just to realize that you have this desire and acknowledge it. Personify it, if necessary. The moment you look at your desire and allow it to be in you as an distinct entity, you are no longer trapped in this desire so tight and you don’t need to do anything about it. Just let this desire be. After all you are here to sleep, it is a normal human being. With your rational mind, however, do realize, that you might not sleep well tonight and it may take time to figure out ‘do nothing’ thing (it took me time for sure). Yet some people are naturally more mindful than others I guess. One of the comments on Sleep Book on Amazon, says that the woman cured her insomnia in two days after realizing that it’s just her effort that prevent her normal sleep. Consider your bad nights as experiments on your way to recovery. I did it. For instance, at some point I decided that this week I would be focusing on my breath and my chest as a way of being willing to stay awake and watching my internal world (as Guy Meadows puts it). Didn’t work well (see below), but this week-long experiment was informative to understand, what I was doing wrong.
I had some rough patches even after initial understanding ‘do nothing’ thing. It was happening when I was starting to overthink the process. Since it feels good to just be awake before sleep and not worry about anything, after first stretch of good nights with acceptance I started trying to achieve this state of ‘feel good and not worry’ instead of just being and not doing anything and allowing ‘feel good’ state to emerge itself. I realized that I was again doing too much instead of just being. Another patch of bad nights came, when I started to intentionally focus on my breath, thinking that it was ok way to accept wakefulness and be willing to watch my urges, feelings etc. It was not. I did it for about a week and I considered it an experiment. I realized I was again putting mental effort into sleep with subconscious self-monitoring kicking in. After I realized that, I returned to just state of being while being awake before sleep.
My current recipe for falling asleep is similar to obriri’s and is the following. When I get into bed, I give myself some cooling down time. I allow myself to not sleep at that time, while my mind is cooling down and I am slowly transitioning into the state of just being. After that I gently focus on just being here, alive, existing, in my body, in my mind and being awake and I choose to do nothing about it. I just allow myself be. With my rational mind, I tell myself that it may take some time until I fall asleep. Perhaps, my mind is still too agitated tonight (e.g. due to daytime events or tomorrow plans), then it may take me longer to fall asleep. I realize that maybe I will be awake for next couple hours, but most likely I will get some deep restorative sleep. Usually I fall asleep much faster, but I don’t stress if I am still awake after 1 or 2 hours, because I know that got the hang of acceptance and I know how to fall asleep, and it is simply my agitated mind that still needs time to wind down or it simply needs more time for recover from insomnia completely.
I hope this writing will be helpful for someone. Insomnia is a terrible thing. It was the worst and the most unusual challenge in my life, but I think it is mostly over now. I think I will be having short relapses here and there and occasional bad nights due to my awareness that such thing as insomnia exists and I am prone to it. But I think I mostly got the understanding of acceptance and of doing nothing and I will be fine in the long term. I will hang on the forum for a while, but I will stop attending it after some time.
Deb, I am forever thankful for your inspiration, for you being a personal example of ACT success and for all your support. My insomnia and recovery journey would be so much worse and longer if not endless, without you. Thank you.
Nik.
Vcbrooklyn,
Primary insomnia is psychological condition and needs psychological intervention. There are two approaches that are effective, CBTI and ACT.
This forum is part of the website of sleep coach Martin Reed. Martin practices cognitive and behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBTI) and helped many people to restore normal sleep. Go the main page of the website, learn about CBTI, look Martin’s videos on youtube, listen/read to Martin podcasts available on this site. They may be able to explain you your insomnia.
Another effective approach is acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) for insomnia. You can learn about it from Guy Meadows book (How to sleep well every night). The method is discussed on this forum in the thread ‘ACT for insomnia’. Read people’s posts there to better understand nuances of the method.
For now just remember, that you did not loose your ability to sleep. It is only your worries about sleep, desire to fall asleep (that your brain perceives as mental work and gets activated) that keep you awake. When you re-learn how to be more relaxed in bed (with either CBTI or ACT) you will sleep normally again. Everything will be alright in the long term.
Hello everyone. I didn’t post here in a while.
Four weeks ago I noticed slight improvements in my sleep. On my bad nights, which used to be completely sleepless I started getting couple hours of sleep. I focused on these improvements, I was able to release frustration that followed me every day and become more positive and optimistic overall. And my sleep has improved further! Releasing sleep expectation became easier and as I result I sleep better now. It’s been now four weeks of acceptable sleep!It’s still far from ideal. I had three bad nights and few not so great nights. But these problems are dwarfed by insomnia pattern of sleeping only every other night that I used to have. I started fall asleep faster, but I am waking up more frequently now and do not fall back to sleep right away as I used to. However, middle of the night wakings worry me less than terrible sleep onset I issue I used to have for the last half a year, and I usually fall back to sleep eventually. I think these wakings should disappear in time. Overall, I would describe my current transition as from a person with insomnia I turned now into a person with manageable sleep problems. And I hope to improve further in time.
I am not sure what happened few weeks ago. I guess repetitive calm response to insomnia started to calm down the mind just like Guy Meadows predicted. And focusing on even minor improvements has turned my entire mindset toward optimistic mode. Life feels pretty much normal, and I don’t feel like my life quality is limited by sleep problems anymore. It is something to be thankful for in this holiday season :).
I wouldn’t make it to here without Deb’s and Borgesbi’s advice. Thank you!!! I have still a long way to improve. I think it will take time to make ‘no sleep expectation/complete relaxation’ a habit and stop worrying about sleep completely. But I am happy with where I am now.
Noel,
What you are going through is typical. Follow Deb’s post and learn about techniques that can help you to reduce your worries about sleep.
Meanwhile do the following: when you go to bed, don’t aim to sleep. Just go to your bed with intention to rest. Imagine how great it will be to spend a night resting and not worrying about sleep. Imagine how refreshed you will be in the morning after struggle-free sleepless night compared to a morning after a night full of struggles. Don’t force yourself to sleep, don’t expect sleep to come, don’t try to distract yourself from being awake, just rest. In other words do not have expectations beside expectation to rest peacefully all night while being awake. See if you can do it for couple weeks and get any results. At the very least you may notice that your sleep related worries will start to subside.And maintain reasonable sleep window, do not try to compensate for bad night by going to bed next night too early.
Deb,
Only when I tell my mind gently in the beginning of the night that my goal is rest and I am not expecting sleep, it starts to wander sometimes. Otherwise, I think my mind is too focused on sleep. So telling myself that the goal is rest is my way of “letting go of the idea that I need to be asleep”. To make it clear, I am not focusing hard on the idea of rest for a whole night, but in the beginning of the night, that’s what tell my mind to liberate it little bit from performance pressure.
I think mind wandering began happening little more often recently, which I consider a good sign.JT,
I thought a bit more about your question on paradoxical intention. Perhaps there is little bit of paradoxical intention in the approach that I am practicing. I try to add just a little bit of this intention to stay awake to balance out potential sleep effort. It is my way to remove the idea that I need to sleep and stop subconscious self-monitoring. But it is important not to overdo it and not cause hyperarousal.
While I am not in the position to teach anybody acceptance, since I am still learning it, I think any degree of acceptance is beneficial.
As we know, our sleep system is not broken and never was and it doesn’t need any fixing. It is arousal that need to be fixed. Arousal can be fixed either through growing sleep confidence with CBTI or through releasing expectations of sleep with ACT. I think even alleviation of frustration if not complete extinction (I can’t do it yet) is beneficial. Fueling frustration and reactivity will not help for sure.
