Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
Have you ever wanted to find an item so badly but it always seems so elusive? Then when you focus your attention elsewhere, and stop looking for it, it starts showing up everywhere! LOL. Sleep is kinda like that. Stop chasing it, let it chase you! Chase the things you want to achieve in life, sleep will be following closely behind. On the contrary, when you start chasing sleep, it keeps moving further away. Achievement without any intention. You get it when you don’t want it. Good luck!
Great insight @LauraG7! My perspective on sleep is exactly like yours. Sleep is just NOT WORTH LOSING SLEEP OVER. Take care of everything else in your life EXCEPT sleep. To @Rubylight, good luck. You can do this too, because everyone here is cheering for you from the other side. The difference between success and failure is literally a very thin veil, because once the correct mindset is adopted, the push to get on the opposite end is almost effortless. Anyone can recover practically overnight if the mindset is correct. Anyone can be a normal sleeper or an insomniac, these two are basically two sides of the same coin. It’s like yin and yang, they’re both inside you already, you’re just only too focused on one side that you completely miss the other which has always been there all along. If you can forget about your insomnia, it basically disappears. This is the weirdest thing about it. Pay no attention to it, it’s no longer there. Best wishes to you.
You’re welcome Sam. Perhaps an admission that we are all mere mortals and that our times in this world and our interactions with it are really limited, so it’s in your interest to enjoy the time that you still have the best you can. Our entire existence is nothing more than a set of ideas, some inspires us and some detrimental. Don’t worry about sleep now, there will be a time when you will get it in unlimited amounts so why miss it so badly now? Just living your life now is what truly matters. At the end, what do you really want to remember about how you have lived: Still complaining just how horrible your sleep always is or the interesting things you did to enjoy your life to the fullest? The choice is up to you.
I have to see any medical record that said “Sleeping for patient completely destroyed” because of taking a drug, poison or whatever! If that were true, wouldn’t that be in the common medical knowledge by now? How many people experience bizarre things every day?? Go ask people who survived a nuclear blast, can anything get worse than that? Then check their medical records and try to find any that said their sleep were obliterated by that blast! I have yet to read any single case out of the millions that survived. So the underlying notion have to be false because the facts just don’t check out. Anything that fails the observational test like this, you have to quickly and completely disregard! Otherwise, you have no end to it and you only end up suffering needlessly, unnecessarily and illogically. Your sleep will still go on regardless, but you would have carried the fear, anxiety, discomfort or whatever over some useless nothing.
Great to hear that! Hope that was insightful. Nobody’s sleep ever stopped working suddenly over a single night just because they took or did something bizzare. It just doesn’t work like that! Most likely it’s your thoughts towards sleep that changed. But the ability never did and will never change until your last living day. Insomnia isn’t really about the inability to sleep at all because that’s next to impossible, it is the irrational fear of wakefulness as a result of ingrained and misconcepted notions. Sleep is really simple, you will get sleepy after being awake for long enough. That’s just the basic physiology of sleep which works exactly like hunger. Your situation is really analogous to developing an irrational of eating after suffering a bout of food poisoning. You had a trauma that caused you to change all your thinking about something.
But that ability is still intact; because thinking you are somehow “broken” will never negate the ability of your body to perform that essential function. Always remember that. Don’t feed the fear that’s fuelling your insomnia anymore. Also, stop the blame game, because it’s not your fault! Be kind, accommodating and patient to yourself. You may suffer a bit at first, like a drug addict experiencing withdrawal symptoms but keep reminding yourself this is only temporary, and you should focus for the long term. Short term pain for long term gain. You have what it takes and you can do this too! Best of luck.
No drug and no therapy is going to be really effective if your fear is still intact. Sleeping is something everyone expects to do every night for the rest of our lives so does it make any sense to keep fearing it every single night? Do you really want to keep playing the escape game forever? Saying you are afraid your sleep is broken is like saying you are afraid your breathing or eating or drinking somehow just stopped working. Because some one-off event triggered something which made you doubt your own body. You stopped believing your body will take care of itself, that somehow your bodily organs just ceased functioning as they should and they can’t do their jobs anymore? Is that even logical? The endless doctor visits, consultations and swallowing of all kinds of meds only reinforce your fears and create an illusion that “I’m really sick and broken” and I need to keep doing xyz to sleep. Taking actions like these will only keep feeding your fears and destroy whatever confidence you might have developed if you had done absolutely nothing.
Try facing your fears head on, be willing to entertain your worst fears and nightmares, that’s how we recovered insomniacs (and you can too) grow out of them. A comfy bed, consistent bed times and an optimistic outlook are all you’ll really need. Ultimately you want be in a position where you are convinced you haven’t got a sleep problem anymore and you’re just a normal sleeper as everybody else. Good luck!
Most likely, nothing is broken. If it was, you would have ZERO sleep whatsoever. And by now, probably dead from that. So all I hear about is just a very frightened person relating her traumatic experience.
Set a get into and out of bed time. This is the most important aspect and the only thing you can physically do. Keep doing it even when your sleep is choppy at first. Well that’s it! Then CARE LESS. RELAX. Your body will right itself when given the opportunity and the consistent bed time will be its bedrock. It’s okay to be apprehensive or even scared at first, that’s normal and do give yourself all the room to have those feelings or even expect them. Accept that you won’t fall asleep immediately after getting into bed and that’s okay too! Start associating your bed as your personal space where you just relax and slip away instead of as a source of anxiety and frustration. Be friendly with wakefulness and expect to get them anytime during your sleep, just don’t fight or struggle with it! Stop focussing on the direct result (sleep) and more on the other things that make it more conducive, like comfy bed, consistent bedtimes, bed as place for relaxation and sleep becomes a by-product of those things. Good luck!
I always feel a bit sorry when I read stories like these but at the same time, a bit unsympathetic as well because you become the condition you are in through wrong beliefs and mistaken ideas taking hold that have biased your mind to make certain erroneous conclusions about sleep, your body and your health. In doing this, you create unnecessary and needless suffering to yourself and probably to others who care about you.
It can take a while to untangle deeply embedded belief systems because you have become so convinced by them it feels impossible to believe other ideas. What if I told you your sleep was absolutely fine, it was never broken and this all originates inside your head?? You would probably scoff at me and say I don’t know what I’m talking about.
I was an insomniac myself so I know there’s absolutely nothing there and there can be nothing there. Insomnia is just an adult version of the classical kiddy’s monster in the closet. As adults, you just know there aren’t any. Set a pretty consistent bed time schedule and do the absolute minimum for sleep. Face your fears head on. Be willing to entertain your deepest and darkest fears about insomnia, this will open up a new chapter in your journey. Once you are willing to confront your fears and not escape them anymore, they will become more manageable until you eventually grow out of them. Insomnia can be quite scary but the suffering is really only surreal, it just gives an illusion of one. Good luck to you and I really hope you find long term relief soon.
Take care of your other stuff in your life first. Put sleep on the last spot in your to-do list. Then forget all about it and move on. If you are able to do that, you will do extremely well indeed. Just stop chasing sleep, let it chase you!
You are making good progress, so keep it up! But when your sleep improves, it tends to get a bit worse after that as you begin clearing up accumulated sleep debt from those poor nights. So expect this to happen and try not to over-react when the difficult nights do appear. It’s all part of the recovery process. Difficult episodes tends to make successive ones easier, and everyone gradually improves in this manner. Kinda in a 3 steps forward and one step back. Always remember to build on your successes and try not to get too caught up in temporary regressions. Good luck.
Hey @lynnbet
Always remember that thinking you will do poorly at sleep will never negate the ability of your body to perform that essential function. In the same way you can never lose the ability to eat or breathe. So when you think your body needs to sleep when it really doesn’t and then forcing that to happen is usually where the problem lies. Everytime you are not sleeping, always remind yourself that there’s nothing wrong, it’s because your body just doesn’t need it or is sleepy at that moment and if you wait long enough and not overly worry over it, the sleepiness is guaranteed to return. Good luck to you, you can do this too!
Ironically, the only way to cure sleep anxiety is to convince yourself you haven’t got one at all! It was all a hoax. The evidence for believing you have sleeping issues is rather weak. If you believe your sleep is broken, then how on earth did you get by in all those 46 years?? So now, suddenly in your 47th year, everything just stops working?? Deeply reflect on it, you can only “think” your way out of this, and not by doing stuffs which will not only not help you find any relief but further entrenches you in the horrendously mistaken belief that something about your sleep is terribly wrong.
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!
