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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.
If sleep wasn’t any concern, or you have no concept of it, how would it affect what you are doing or enjoying now? And why do you even think sleep has anything to do with your joy or suffering? Does sleep really define who you truly are or what you are capable of? Reflect on these points deeply because I believe everyone, including you, already have the answers but you refuse to acknowledge them.
Making sleep the basis of your successes or failures is like blaming a rainy day for ruining your day and whatever your future plans are, the thing is does it really?? You can’t do anything about a rainy day, nobody can. And that’s exactly what you are trying to put the blame on when it comes to sleep. If your sleep has suffered as a result of having your girlfriend sleeping over, was it really all that bad? Well what about the joy of spending time intimately with your loved one in bed beside you and haven’t you enjoyed that as well? There are always two sides to the same coin. Why do you only want to find faults in your actions but refuse to acknowledge and cherish those good moments? Then what are you really complaining about? Everyone has the same 24 hours every day but it’s like you are still dissatisfied with your 24 hours and you want it to be 25, 26 or 30 hours! It is unrealistic and continuing to harbor unrealistic expectations will only prolong your suffering needlessly and not end it. Quit the complaining and relentless dissatisfaction and start accepting and appreciating things as they are. True joy is rarely ended through sheer effort alone but only through wisdom, deep understanding and empathy. Good luck.
Nobody can control when they fall asleep or when they awake. There is no point trying to stop or prevent anything. Just spend total 6-7 hours in bed with consistent bed times is all you ever need. The rest is up to your body and not you. Good luck!
You are being unrealistic because you keep trying to escape that one thing which is natural to humans and all living things. Which is awakeness! Being awake is completely natural and a part of being alive! The only living thing that expects to sleep forever is, well, no longer alive. I think lots of people here have explained to you why it’s unrealistic to expect sleeping well forever, or to expect sleepless bouts can only get “this bad” and never “worse” because it can and it WILL but only if you allow it and you keep engaging in the unwinnable battles to make it all go away and never come back
Hello
The thing about feeling sleepy before your bed time is that you can’t control when your body feels sleepy or when it falls asleep when you finally go to bed.
There is no such thing as, I will set my bedtime at X and get out at Y and I expect to be completely asleep in between and be totally awake with zero sign of sleepiness outside of X and Y. The human body doesn’t work that way because it is not a switch you can turn off or on just because you are doing some things for sleep religiously! The human body works by hormones, and get cues from what you are doing or exposed to, for example, if you are relaxed and bored, doing nothing in a dimly lit room, you will naturally feel sleepy because the conditions are right for sleep. Whereas if you doing strenuous work like heavy lifting, go for a walk or are in an intensely bright room, then your body gets revved up and you become more awake. Stop having unrealistic expectations of yourself and your sleep. Sleep will always come regardless of what of you do or think, doing cbti or not doing it doesn’t make much difference, everyone will get sleepy as long as they have awake long enough and the problems start happening when people start “fixing” their times and expect to sleep X hours exactly and must stay asleep between whatever times they set themselves, because all these rigid rules only make it worse! Your best sleep happens when you do nothing, fix nothing, and expect nothing!
