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Hi Daniel
Let me share my experience the best i could remember it as it happened way back now. During my recovery journey, i experienced a lot of early morning awakenings too. At first it was a bit frustrating to me as well until I decided to just expect them every night. And I just did what you do now. I got up early and had an early start to my day, I would find stuff to do like my laundry, make breakfast or just watch my favorite shows. I appreciated the quiet moments because there was nobody fighting with me over the tv and what nots. Then I grew tired of this routine so I decided I would just lay in bed. I started falling asleep again, only briefly at first, maybe less than 5 minutes or so which slowly but steadily grew longer until I was sleeping all the way till my alarm went off. So this was how it happened to me. I am sleeping great now, still wake up at least once during the night but I always fall back asleep in no time. Good luck to you and I hope you find your relief soon.
Hello @jakeawake
I would just completely forget about how I slept on any particular night and do away from all that, what I deem, as useless sleep journaling. Because it’s extremely likely that one year, six months, 3 months maybe even a few weeks from now, you would have completely forgotten how your sleep was on X day, Y month and Z year anyway. Unless of course, your journal might remind you of it, but at that point, would it still be of any use to you at all? I go about my life expecting to sleep between x and y hours, exact numbers aren’t important, in a cycle that continues until the end of my natural life where I expect to get unlimited amounts of it so no point missing it badly now or putting my life on hold just over it.
Hello and welcome. I don’t think you need to do sleep restriction at all! You are doing great and 6.5 hours is a healthy amount of sleep. My curiosity is what do you really expect to achieve from doing sleep restriction anyways, and if you don’t get it or in fact, got the opposite result, how would you feel? Would you get upset, dejected or depressed, and this is exactly when people start getting into problems and they start doing more and more stuff in an effort to control their sleep, which is uncontrollable in the first place, because it is your body that is in total control to determine what type of sleep you get and how much and not you or your efforts.
Hello, sorry to hear about your condition. I hope this is only temporary, and eventually everything will settle down, and your health and sleep return to normal. My suggestion is work on your health first, consult your doctors and do your follow ups. When your health is better, your sleep likely improves as well. Good luck.
The biggest step in my recovery were these:
1. Get off forums like these.
2. Stop asking too many questions.
3. Start accepting your situation.
4. And the final step: Stop doing sleep restriction. You can say to your insomnia, f*ck off and I will do whatever I want, sleep whenever I want, with no fear because I have been afraid of you and trying to run away for far too long, so I will not run anymore, and I will just sit here and let you do whatever you want and it will not affect me anymore.
5. Finally, laughing at yourself and others for allowing the situation to continue for so long.Trust me, once you get into the correct mindset, you will get out on the other side with a smile on your face. Insomnia will no longer bother you because you realize it’s not an illness, there’s really NOTHING there, so there’s NOTHING TO FIX. I recommend you to watch YouTube under The sleep coach school, Talking Insomnia #39, interview with Sasha Stephens. After that, deeply reflect on it for a few weeks and go quiet for a while. Let everything settle down, okay? This will be the best thing you can do for yourself, less is more and doing nothing by going quiet is actually the best! Good luck to you.
If you slept well, of course you will start sleeping badly again 😂. What did you expect? Did you expect to keep sleeping well all the time just because you followed “sleep restriction”? Because I will emphasize this again, nothing will alter your ability to sleep, including doing sleep restriction. Your body is in total control not you. You won’t have any control over when you fall asleep or when you awake either!
If you have eaten, of course you won’t feel the hunger anymore, the same goes with sleep. What’s not normal is getting hungrier and hungrier even after having a large meal! Then that’s something wrong and you need to see a doctor immediately. The same with sleep, don’t expect to keep sleeping well after you have slept because unless you are sick or have an illness, that’s just not going to happen.
Go to bed at X and out at Y, the time in between should be around 6-7 hours. That’s it! Forget the rest. The rest is up to your body. Resist the temptation to keep “figuring it out”. Sure you can continue to worry about sleep, and ask endless questions about it, that’s your choice, but it won’t help you because there’s nothing else anyone can do including yourself. Whatever your state of mind, some kind of sleep will still happen for sure, but you’d have carried this worry and anxiety over nothing. You can only make it worse not better with worry and endless efforts! True peace is not achieved through sheer effort, but only through wisdom. See the wisdom in this, by not continuing the ignorance. Good luck.
@afshar
It doesn’t really matter what you think or do, I already said it, your body ability to sleep is independent of all that. If you can’t sleep, the simplest explanation is your body just isn’t sleepy enough yet. So the only thing is to just wait, either stay in bed or get up, do whatever you like and try again later. The same scenario is like this: if you don’t feel hungry, but it’s meal time already, what do you do? So you can either just go ahead and eat first but you probably won’t have good appetite and the food won’t taste as good OR skip the meal, go do something else and then come back when you are really HUNGRY and by then you will likely have a roaring appetite and you eat a happy, hearty meal. The choice is up to you, you cannot control your sleep in the same way you can’t control your appetite. But the main point is sleep and hunger will always come to you the longer you have gone without them.What did you do before you have insomnia when you couldn’t sleep in bed? Then just continue doing that. Your ability to sleep remains unchanged, it is independent of your actions and thoughts. Best of luck to you.
Sleep isn’t a problem that you should worry about. On the topic about cancer, many who had it will attest that they slept poorly with plenty of sleepless nights while doing chemotherapy, were in pain or plainly worried sick about dying yet many also survived it and their conditions went into remission. They were many also who had advanced stages of the disease, were so sick so they just kept sleeping all the time and they didn’t make it. So what gives here? Your preconditioned mentality about sleep has caused you to make an unsubstantiated and unwarranted connection between sleep and your overall health when none really exists. In any healthy person, a lack of sleep can only exist momentarily. The body will almost certainly make up for it over time so the average sleep duration over a longer time period will converge towards a number, which is usually between 5.5 and 6.5. If you think of missing sleep temporarily as missing a meal because you were too busy or just weren’t hungry at the time, ask yourself if this is something you should spend the rest of the day worried about, or should you just let it be because the shortfall will eventually catch up as there is NO WAY your body can do it wrong. There is nothing you can do about your sleep in the same way you can’t do anything about your appetite, what you can do is just play along and see where it takes you. If someone or something had no concept about sleep, and its alleged effects, perhaps like a baby or a pet cat, did you think they would regard it as a problem? The answer is NO because they slept whenever they felt like it and seem healthy so where is the problem??
It doesn’t really what you do. If you are unwilling to let go of the deeply entrenched belief that not sleeping isn’t a problem, you will continue to struggle, mainly with your own set of thoughts.
What time do you go to bed?? Actually it is really normal to wake up after sleeping for 3-4 hours! So Get up, use the toilet and go back to bed. Most people go back asleep in no time if they are not anxious, worried about anything including sleep or try to fix anything.
Hi @Becc!
Welcome to this forum. I reached this conclusion after periods of deep reflection and eventually I just saw the light. As far as insomnia is concerned, there is nothing to fix here. You are just being flustered and jerked into action by an over-protective mind and you eventually just let go until it doesn’t bother you anymore. When you were a child or a baby, did you think about sleep, ever? Surely there were times when you slept poorly as a kid, but did you think anything was worth fixing then? You need to start being that kid again, be blissfully ignorant about your sleep problems and when you no longer think there’s a problem, it no longer is one, that’s the weirdest thing about insomnia, when you forget about it, it’s no longer there.
