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What an excellent share! Thank you and congratulations. This is what I always tell people who have sleep problems: make light of your insomnia and it will go away. Manage to forget about it and it ceases to exist. The best thing to do is plain nothing. Not cbti, no sleep restriction, no sleep diary, no stimulus controls, no rules basically. Really what everyone who doesn’t believe they have insomnia will do.
Pre and postnatal insomnia is really common so your story is relatable… If you go to the success stories section you will find plenty of mums who suffered like you did and are doing extremely well now like Cindy, who is a mother AND a musician, and she has plenty of insights to offer to new mums like you. For a lot of these stories, the underlying message is always the same: Don’t react, focus on your daily tasks and keeping your spirits up. As you journey through this, you will begin learning that your fears are way overblown, your insomnia can’t continue indefinitely, the longer you stay awake, the stronger your sleep drive gets, and that it is impossible to circumvent this despite your anxieties and worries. Worrying over it unnecessarily just makes it worse and will prolong your suffering, but YOU WILL ALWAYS GET THE MINIMUM SLEEP YOU NEED TO SURVIVE REGARDLESS OF ANY SITUATION. Good luck and congratulations on being a parent.
The final part of the recovery is when you have completely stopped tracking your sleep, stop obsessing over how many hours you get, or how “tired” you still feel despite sleeping X (or whatever) hours. Sleep becomes less and less of an issue, and you completely accept what sleep your body is giving you. At this stage, your pondering stops and you no longer seek answers or ask any more questions because you realize they do absolutely nothing.
The faster you let this matter rest, the faster you recover. You didn’t have insomnia for only 15 years either, because bouts of sleeplessness have always been part of your life from the moment you were born and will always remain a part of you until your last day. The last 15 years stand out because it was some moment that many years ago which triggered your brain to start paying special attention to sleep and that’s when all this efforts and monitoring of your sleep started going on. But of course, monitoring your sleep cannot and will not negate your body’s natural ability to sleep because this ability is separate and independent of thoughts. Thinking you are a bad breather or a bad eater will never prevent your body from breathing or eating because these actions are truly innate to your body in the same way as sleep is. Good luck!
There’s nothing to be creative about when it comes to sleeping. Your body already knows how to do it but your relentless dissatisfaction with it is what’s keeping you from sleeping! Forget everything you learn about sleep, the cbti, the rules etc. Set a get into and out of bed time and completely ignore everything else. Just give up the constant figuring out how many hours you slept and how many times you woke. Abandon the chase and ultimately the struggle! Return to basics and try going back to sleeping like when you were a baby. Has anyone heard of babies getting chronic insomnia at all? NO, because they have no concepts of such things and are not bothered with chasing sleep or results. Good luck.
I apologize for my intrusion but there’s something about this thread that I just had to speak out. There’s just too much detail about sleep here and all I read about are endless attempts to control it. Let me ask you a simple question: Aren’t you supposed to be enjoying yourself or do you want to embark on this trip just to SLEEP?? Haven’t you slept enough already while at home?
You can’t control sleep. Neither can you control when you wake up. Nobody does. The fact that you feel sleepy before your bedtime and not sleepy at some times even when you’re supposed to be sleeping is testament to this fact. Sleepiness just happens when you are up long enough. And waking up after sleeping for some time is entirely normal too! Because your sleep drive is getting reduced once you’ve slept. Getting stressed over this is futile and actually makes going back to sleep worse. Embrace the wakefulness. For people who recover, the time it takes for them to fall back asleep after waking up just gets shorter. Good luck to you.
Hello!
Feeling sleepy before your recommended bedtime? That’s so common for people doing sleep windows, so perhaps you could think about it in a different light and from another angle:
1. Feeling sleepy = shows your sleep is not broken and your body is perfectly capable of it because otherwise, how would you even begin to feel sleepy?
2. If there’s evidence your sleep is not broken, why do you even need to follow a sleep window? To prove what? Show your body that you can sleep? Well that’s like getting up and walking around to prove to your body you can walk perfectly fine, with no problems whatsoever. So why don’t you do that and walk around for every minute that you’re awake? Well, the reason is when you are already so completely convinced that there’s nothing wrong about something and you’re not obsessed over it, you just stop doing that anymore and in this example, people would rather sit down and relax and than try to show to themselves what they already know is true. This is exactly what you trying to do with a sleep window. You want nightly proof that you can sleep at specific times and you desperately try to achieve, build and keep the momentum by following a fixed set of rules. When you no longer need to convince yourself, you just give up and move on. This is what every insomniacs should aspire to return to. That perfectly innocent blissful ignorance of a baby who doesn’t care about these things, aren’t caught in it because of stuff they read or heard everywhere and where sleep just comes and goes as it pleases. Good luck!
Hi Sam!
I don’t use a sleep window anymore, my earliest bed time is now midnight which I happily oblige if I am sleepy by then and the latest 2am in which I climb into bed regardless of how wired I am. My out of bed time is anytime between 7-9am. I also do afternoon naps if I have the time and space for it. I stopped tracking my sleep and I have no idea how much I sleep. I seem to function fine like this, I might get sleepy at several times during the day but I take that as a sign my sleep system is in perfect working order and not because I was sleep deprived which I used to believe. My advice is only use a sleep window as a temporary crutch, because it is neither a sleep guarantee nor a sleep generator. Using a sleep window still won’t make you sleep more than what your own body needs! Thank you and good luck to you.
Hello @momup and welcome back! Haven’t heard from you in ages and it’s comforting to hear you are sleeping well.
Back to your queries, it’s quite likely your sleep will mess up a little bit. Hence it’s common to hear about people getting sunday night insomnia because they go to bed later and wake up later on the weekends compared to weekdays. But that’s life so the real question here is whether the weekend night life is worth losing some ZZZ over.
That said, it’s also impossible to tell how your body will respond to the new schedule until you actually do it. There is a chance you still sleep well on both weekdays and weekends despite the altered sleeping schedule anyway. Or even if you change nothing, you still get the occasional sleepless night. So why fret about it when you can’t control it? You should live your life as you want and not make sleep as the main consideration.
Hello Paul! You are already using the shortest sleep window and there’s really no need to change anything.
I think you have the wrong concept about sleep windows. It’s only there to help regularize your nights and keep your sleep consistent, but at no means, does it guarantee you will sleep. Obsessing over the details and asking too many questions is probably not going to help you very much. Your best sleep happens when you don’t obsess over the tiny details or wonder if you are doing it right. It is in letting go completely and letting your body take over.
In a way, your sleep window questions are like asking if you eat your lunch at 1pm, will you get hungry enough at 7 pm for dinner or do you need to eat lunch earlier so you get hungry by 7pm, or something along those lines. The answer is does it really matter? Does it matter if you eat lunch at 12pm, 1205pm, 1230pm, or 130pm or 2pm or whatever, are you so obsessive in getting hungry enough to having dinner at 7pm sharp?? When you start doing things like this for everything, you only create unnecessary hassle, inconvenience and disappointment to yourself. And when you don’t achieve your desired result, you begin to despair over it and think something has gone wrong somewhere and start doing different things in an attempt to “fix” it, when you really should just RELAX and let your body do its job. Your body just knows how and when to sleep in the same way as it knows when and how to eat, breathe, plus many other functions. Obsessing over details is pointless. You get sleep when you don’t think about it or even want it (think about those time how sleepy you got when you were stuck in a boring movie, a boring lecture, or just plain bored from doing nothing). People desperate for sleep and wait all day for it to happen just don’t get very much of it! Learn to appreciate the overall process and not the outcome, stop chasing sleep and take your time to appreciate the other things in your life. Hope you find this useful and good luck.
You’re right Paul. In general, that’s what you do in life too, don’t get overly attached to anything and you will live a happier and more content life. Good luck.
You eventually just get used to it. Because you go through so many good and/or bad nights it really doesn’t matter anymore. You get desensitized over time.
Sleep anxiety is actually pretty common as is transient insomnia. Everyone experiences it at some point. The key is your reaction. You only struggle because sleep wasn’t anything you thought about before, therefore you have little understanding of it, and now you begin to think something has gone wrong. I am here to tell you that is usually false and misguided. Your sleep is never broken, it probably never will be but it’s your thoughts towards sleep that has changed. And it’s your reaction to these thoughts that keeps you stuck in the struggle. Don’t struggle! Let it be. Continue your bedtime schedules (keep it pretty consistent), and your daytime routines. Act as if nothing happened. If you can’t act, then at pretend or make an effort at it. The key is to not react explosively to insomnia and the problem usually fixes itself. Ever wonder why babies don’t have insomnia? That’s because they don’t have such a concept. Ignorance is bliss. If you are taking medications for sleep, which is what medical professionals will give you when you see them, it’s usually a very good idea to get off them slowly but eventually. Anything that chips at your sleep confidence and makes you think a drug is actually what made you sleep is usually not a great idea. Only your body can make itself sleep and only sufficient wakefulness can make your body get sleepy enough. Anxious thoughts including about sleep itself can put off sleep temporarily but it can never suspend it indefinitely. Good luck to you and congratulations on being a parent.
WOW, Tess, WOW! Your story will reverberate in this forum for as long as it is up. I have no doubt in the future, someone in a similar situation as your husband (which is a lot, I can assure you) will get so much inspiration from reading your story, and it eventually helps them move past their struggle. You have no idea how many potential insomniacs you’d have helped to heal. THANK YOU!
