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Hi Tess!
Thank you for sharing. I think once the fear is gone, all the “little” things that you do to try to control sleep, even as innocent as covering clocks and taping some corner of the tv or your smartphone, which helps at first, is probably meaningless too! I used to do that until I realize it was a bit silly, a hassle and completely unnecessary for the state of the recovery that I was already in, which I believe your husband already is too. A clock just tells the time, which I now see as a neutral and completely harmless action, it does absolutely nothing else including “jinxing” the ability to sleep. Best wishes to you and your husband.
Your sleep is what it is. That’s just the way it is and there’s next to nothing you can do about it. I wish people will come to this realization sooner because it saves them a lot of unnecessary suffering. Of course, you can still do things like practicing good sleep hygiene such as retiring and rising at the same time, keeping your bedroom cool, dark and comfortable etc but these things only make the conditions more conducive for sleep, it can’t directly affect sleep in the way which you expect. Your entire life has been a sea of change. You are getting older by the day and you can directly see the effects physically and mentally. Your life’s experiences will constantly shape your mindset about the things around you. Surely you think about certain things differently now than you were when you were a child! Everything is in a constant state of change so why would sleep be any different? To refuse to acknowledge these changes is akin to refusing to age biologically which is not only impossible (at least with current technology), but pretty ludicrous and beyond your control anyway.
Learn to accept the changes around you gracefully and not react to them so explosively, then perhaps you can live a more peaceful and happier life. Cultivate the mindset of not relentlessly insisting on certain outcomes in life because unbridled dissatisfaction about any aspect in life is most probably the root cause of all suffering. Good luck!
If you have an underlying health issue that’s causing your heart palpitations, then it makes sense to talk to your doctor to find out what’s going on. Or if this is just a anxiety issue, which is purely a mental condition, which is triggered upon waking up, then you need to do some serious mind work. Trying to escape what keeps you awake at night when you awaken is not going to get you anywhere. Because these episodes will keep happening and they will keep re-triggering the same symptoms. Sleep isn’t the problem here, because it is natural and you can never lose it, it is your preconditioned fear because you are indoctrinated into thinking that waking up is bad, poor sleep is horrible and being scared is abnormal and all these symptoms, while uncomfortable, must be avoided at all cost. This is where the issue lies. You keep trying to escape it while not defining why it is so frightening in the first place. What is so scary about waking up? So what if you wake up in the middle of the night? It is common and just about everyone gets it. But normal people don’t see them as scary and quickly fall back asleep. Insomnia is almost always never about the inability to sleep, it is really the struggle with wakefulness. People who recover don’t necessarily sleep a lot better, it just means they have abandoned the struggle with it by accepting what’s going on is normal, that being afraid after a traumatic event because you have no clue what’s going on is normal and that it’s okay to feel stressed but as long as you acknowledge what’s happening, and not try to relax it all away by doing all kinds of things, people will normally get desensitized over time. And then they eventually recover because there was nothing to fear in the first place. Good luck to you.
Understand the root cause of this anxiety. What is it really all about?? Is it logical or reasonable to be fearing something that you expect to do every night for the rest of your life? Try to learn to live with this fear and really see what this is all about, or you will just keep fearing it and hating your bed, for no apparent good reason except to escape the heart palpitations or whatever physical manifestations of your fear are. Sleep will still happen regardless of all this, because it occurs independently of what’s going on, just like eating and breathing. It just means you will live in fear and anxiety needlessly for god knows how long until you truly understand what’s going on and that what you are fearing has absolutely no rational basis. Good luck to you.
Don’t fight it. Be willing to entertain worst case scenarios. Yes, expect a downward spiral. What’s the worst that can come from it? Confront your fears head-on and not choosing to escape them everytime. That’s how you truly recover.
So what’s scary about getting into bed?
Everyone expects to sleep every night for the rest of their life. So are you going to spend the rest of your life worrying about sleep every night when you go to bed? Is this practical or even rational? What is really there to be scared of?
About the expresso at 10pm, feel free to do that too! I used to think like you but as I got better, I started becoming more adventurous and began taking caffeine anytime I wanted and found I could still sleep as well because I wasn’t worried about not sleeping! I even love to indulge in a chocolate binge plus having my caffeine fix before bed. I am giving the middle finger to insomnia and show it who’s boss. Nobody gets to tell me what to do with my life, and my life isn’t all about worrying about sleep because there will be a time when we all will get unlimited amounts of it so why worry about getting it now?? To be alive is to be awake! If you are having insomnia, it’s a clue your body is telling you that you aren’t living life to the fullest and you are just wasting it by getting into bed way before you are sleepy and then waiting, practically begging for sleep to happen. Is that going to be a life well lived?? At my death bed, I would rather want to remember the cool things I did and not how horrible I seemed to sleep all the time!
You are off to a great start and I can already tell you will do extremely well. Just remember that recovery from insomnia doesn’t mean completely free from insomnia (it will happen again even when you think you are cured), it just means you have abandoned the struggle with it. Good luck and best wishes to you.
It’s simply not realistic fearing something which you expect to do every night for the rest of your life. This is akin to becoming afraid of eating after a bout of food poisoning or scared to breathe again because you nearly drowned. It’s not rational! Ask yourself what are you really so afraid about. Most of the times it’s just a set of thoughts inside your head, you are essentially just afraid of thoughts and nothing else. And thoughts can’t do anything unless you decide to take them way more seriously than you should. Nobody goes from sleeping good for a few years or even for decades then all of a sudden, the ability to sleep gets “broken” and the person now requires a ton of aids, be it drugs, supplements or whatever for the rest of their lives. It doesn’t happen like that! Doing things for sleep and/or going out of your way to achieve it is what keeps your insomnia going. Because it trains your brain that insomnia or sleeplessness is WRONG, must be avoided at ALL costs and must be defeated. This is the wrong mindset because it comes from a position of weakness. That will keep reinforcing the idea that insomnia is a monster that must be wrestled under control every night and the mistaken idea that the “stuffs” you do to escape it might help in some way. When you should just let it be, train yourself to see through that FUD, and then slowly come to the realization that it was a hoax all along. You must learn to control the fear if you want to beat this! This means adopting a plan where the ultimate goal is to use no supplements, no aids, no drugs, no anything, to sleep and eventually developing enough sleep confidence to put all this behind you for good. It’s not an easy feat, I must say, and your sleep will get choppy, you might temporarily get worse, but each episode of bad night(s) will retrain your brain, hone your skills and develop the fortitude to handle future bad nights. This means it gets easier as you get along but you must do the right things, develop the right behaviours and get into the right mindset to succeed. Good luck to you.
Great share! Thank you. There is nothing to rebel against when it isn’t the enemy in the first place. What good does it do to go against your own body anyway? Whenever you find yourself not sleeping when you think you should, just remind yourself that your body just doesn’t need it at the moment so you can go off and use the time to indulge in some quiet, relaxing and enjoyable activities (even staying in bed is fine, there’s no strict definition of what an enjoyable activity is) whilst you wait for the sleepiness to come back. I guarantee you it will.
I always can tell someone is on the right path when they accept facts objectively and are not blinded by their own emotions, ego or please excuse my choice of word here, ignorance. The key to a real recovery isn’t trying so hard to escape from it. It is in embracing it and accepting that some form of insomnia will always be a part of living. Insomnia isn’t all that new or distant to anyone. You must have had it innumerable times before in the past but those episodes are somehow conveniently forgotten now due to the FUD going on. Sleeping wasn’t a skill that was learnt or acquired so how could it ever be lost?? It was and still is part of you as much as your personality is. And where sleeping is concerned, there always will be times when it is elusive although never permanent, well that’s just life. Insomnia or not sleeping well temporarily isn’t the enemy, it was and always is yourself all along. You are finding fault with an indispensable part of life. When it rains and thunders heavily, do you go out, curse the heavens and try to punch the rain because you simply don’t like this natural phenomenon? Or would you rather just stay inside your warm comfy home and wait it out because it will pass eventually? Don’t blame yourself for what it isn’t your fault. That only creates unnecessary and needless suffering. The key to a complete and long lasting recovery is always desensitization and this usually happens over time. No amount of words will convince you that this is true now but I hope you’ll see the light eventually. Remember that any sleep you potentially lose tonight or on any nights will always be recaptured in due course because tonight isn’t the only night when you’ll sleep. There will always be plenty of opportunities to sleep in the future and each difficult episode will hone your skill and mould your mindset further. Over time, insomnia just doesn’t bother or scare you anymore. It happened like that to me and to many others as well, likewise it will happen to you too once you develop the correct behaviors and get into the right mindset. Good luck to you and always be kind and gentle to yourself.
I guess what really isn’t improving is your mindset about sleep. Your true sleep ability never changed. It’s your thoughts toward sleep that has. And it’s really hard to see the objective truth when you are being told one thing or another by an “expert” and you had no way of verifying them so you just went go along with whatever. What is the objective truth about sleep? Did anyone ever tell you that insomniacs and good sleepers don’t really sleep that much differently? Actual polysomnographic studies done on wide variety of test subjects, on both insomiacs and good sleepers, showed that the amount of time slept by these subjects varied only by, like just 5 mins on average (423 mins vs 418 mins)?? And another surprising fact, it was the insomniac group that collectively scored that extra 5 mins! Source: Youtube (ChatGPT has the answer: Heard online #39) by The Sleep Coach School.
These findings quite reflect reality in my opinion. If you think of sleep as another one of your core biological functions such as eating or breathing, then believing you are a “bad” eater or breather cannot possibly detract from the fact that your body still possess those abilities innately. Being convinced somehow that you are a bad eater will never negate the ability of that function in your body. So unfortunately, the fact here is that you are simply being confused about your own beliefs and the actual reality, leading you to reach the wrong conclusion that something about you is wrong when there really isn’t! Good luck to you and I hope you come to the same realization eventually.
When you are sleeping better, your sleep will get slightly worse going forward, what’s really so surprising about that?? What would be surprising if you kept on sleeping more and more despite the increased sleep duration! It’s like expecting to get hungrier and hungrier as you fill your stomach. Does that make any sense?
Be logical and rational with your expectations. Nothing is going to help you if you have unrealistic expectations right from the start. Expecting to sleep longer after an improvement is not realistic. So is expecting sleep through the night and not waking up at all. You will start waking up more the more you sleep, typically when your body is cycling between the stages of sleep. And the thing is you have absolutely no control over that.
Imminent death?? What kind of danger or death are you talking about when you have lived for over 40 years with it?
