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It has been 38 days since I had a sleeping pill. During that time, I have moved my sleep window up to 6 hour and 35 minutes. I had three bad nights (less than 5 hours sleep) in the first 11 days. In the last 27 days I have had 2 bad nights. My sleep window is up to 6 hours and 30 minutes, and I am sleeping between 6 hours and 6 hours and 20 minutes every night. I feel better about sleep than I have in over 30 years. I am confident that I am well on the way to full recovery. Thanks, Martin, for providing the boost I needed to keep at sleep restriction, and finally to stop fooling myself about whether or not I was complying with the instructions.
I am replying to my own post. I am happy to report that tightening my sleep window is working. For the last two weeks, my sleep has continued to consolidate. I am allowing myself an additional 5 minutes after 5 days of sleep efficiency of 85% or better. I am now sleeping a solid 6 hours, with only one bad night about a week ago. And I feel fine all day, but I still get quite tired and sleepy at night. I need just a bit more sleep to feel refreshed. I will keep at it until I get there. This is 15 minutes more sleep, and even sounder sleep than I was getting two weeks ago. I am so grateful to Martin’s 10-week course. If you haven’t taken it, please do yourself a great favor and sign up today! Martin’s course is the best thing I have found in 30 years of looking!
I discovered a week ago that I have been making a big mistake, which is using sleeping pills contingently. As a result, I have been sleeping erratically, though sticking to my sleep window pretty consistently. When I discovered my error, I essentially started over without any sleeping pills. Since then, I have been sleeping 5:45 to 5:50 minutes on a 6 hour sleep window, from 10:45pm to 4:45am. Then, two days ago, after three nights of solid sleep, I suddenly got only 3 hours sleep. I went to sleep at 4 am for the first time that night, and allowed myself to sleep for three hours, until 7 am, rather than getting up at 4:45 am. The last two nights, I have gone back to the 6 hour sleep window, I am very tired during the day, and have a hard time staying awake until my sleep window starts. I am optimistic, mostly because I recognize that consolidated sleep is so much better than sleep with sleeping pills. Since I have had insomnia for so long, I am going to adjust my sleep window by 5 minutes every 5 days if I am achieving sleep efficiency of 85% or better, rather than adjusting by 15 minutes every 7 days. I took Martin’s free online course abut a month ago, and found it extremely useful, giving me tips I have never had before.
HI Dreamland,
You are so wise to catch this insomnia demon in the bud. I am having great success with CBT-I, after 30 years of struggling with sleeplessness, anxiety, and day-time fogginess. The key for me has been to keep at it. Stick with your sleep window. If you’re awake at bedtime, stay up till you are sleepy. When you can’t keep your eyes open, try walking around — just getting up and walking across the room has helped me. If you lose sleep, try thinking of it as part of a long-term project, and that not sleeping tonight is actually building your sleep drive for a better sleep in the coming days. I have found that I can actually do ok on less sleep than I thought. As you continue your journey, you will find thoughts of sleep and not sleeping taking up less of your precious mental space. And I find that a little bit of sound sleep is so much more refreshing than sleep ever was with sleeping medication. Do your best not to worry. Congratulations on successful surgery and on getting healthier. Saying goodbye to insomnia once and for all will follow, I’m sure, if you just keep reading this forum and working with Martin’s advice. It has been so helpful to me to hear from others, and to have Martin’s encouraging voice in the background.
Hi Hutch, When this happened to me, I found that I needed to cut back on my hours in bed. I had been fooling myself about how much time I was allowing myself to be in bed. I was allowing too much time in bed. Cutting back by an hour and dragging myself out of bed every day for a week got me back on track. I had allowed myself 7 hours in bed over a period of about a month, when I really should have been allowing only 6 hours in bed. During this time, I was only sleeping 4-5 hours a night. When I cut back to 6 hours in bed, I slept a solid 5.5 hours, woke up feeling more rested, and was able to build up again very slowly from there. Hope this helps. Don’t give up!
