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Hello!
I think what Martin means is you often can’t control your original but unhelpful sleep thoughts, like “I slept only 2 hours last night, now my day’s completely ruined!”. And as you pointed out, we can often adjust or control our responses to these thoughts and quite often, that response can be a thought in itself. Ultimately, as insomnia starts becoming less of a problem, we don’t pay as much attention or attach much less meaning to these thoughts anymore. It’s like you have become as indifferent to your sleep thoughts such as (my sleep was bad last night so I should worry over it) as you are to an innocent every day thought like (the sky is blue and the clouds white). Your brain processes both sleep and non-sleep thoughts identically. So the issue then becomes how seriously you view your thoughts and how emotionally and mentally upset you get over them.
Try doing nothing! What did you do before insomnia when you woke up during the night? Probably got up to use the toilet and then straight to bed again. Try to rest even if you can’t sleep. Close your eyes and let your mind drift. Try not to care if you slept or not. Stop trying so hard to sleep! This is the common mistake I’m seeing people do. They do a ton of stuff which they never did before, hoping they can somehow make sleep happen. Try being okay with wakefulness of any kind. Your past history is your best clue. If you never had to do any stuff to get back to sleep, chances are you probably don’t need to now either. Good luck!
Hello everyone!
This is a productive discussion. But anyways, here’s my summary:
1. Your sleep is not broken. Never was or will. Your body will get what it needs as long as you allow the right conditions for it to happen.
2. Feeling fear is normal when you don’t understand something. Your brain is only trying to protect you.In both cases, nothing is broken. How to fix something that’s unbroken? Well, you can’t. That’s why it’s a futile exercise. You have to believe this 110%. Your personality might play a role as well. Pretending to ignore or ‘faking it’ just to sleep better or longer might be considered a sleep effort so I’d caution against it. That can only come when you fully realize sleep isn’t something you need to worry about. You then start reorganizing your other priorities in your life so sleep no longer becomes a huge part of it or becomes the main consideration. Good luck!
Hello @sleepybee
Great question! As a recovered insomniac, I’m going to give you a spoiler alert and my answer from experience: Not fixing your sleep. And being okay with waking up during the night because it’s an evolutionary mechanism to keep you safe. While you can’t control sleep, you can quite often shift it via something called a sleep window and sticking to it.
Of course, that’s just my answer. Your journey might be a bit different. Martin’s and Scott’s style, as you’d have taken notice, is prodding you along by asking a set of questions so you formulate your own answers. You come to your own conclusions. But ultimately, the destination is the same. I highly recommend you to sign up for the free 2 week course or even better, subscribe for the paid course for exclusive 1-to-1 coaching if you can afford it.
Good luck and I hope you get the most out of this journey.
Hello!
Please don’t focus too much on results and actual sleep duration this early in your cbti. Focus more on the thoughts and behaviors around sleep, as these have an influence on sleep. Because sleep can never be directly controlled by anyone or anything. It just happens when the conditions are right, ie, high sleep drive and you are not nervous or anxious. Focus on these two. So continue following your sleep window. This helps to keep your sleep drive regular. There are no mistakes, rights or wrongs here. Nobody is judging this except yourself. Try not to stress too much over it, because it won’t help. It may seem hard at first but definitely doable! Everything will start falling into place once you get on the correct page. At the end of your journey, the highest form of recovery is you are no longer afraid of waking up during the night or care about how you sleep anymore. Your body will take care of everything for you. Good luck!
Hello @grangers
Waking up is really normal and common! It has nothing to do with arousal but more to do with our thousand year old survival mechanism. It’s built-into our sleep system so that we wake up occasionally and scan for external dangers or threats and then if everything’s safe, we can go back to sleep peacefully.
If you continue to see this as abnormal or something to be avoided at any cost, or think you need to have high sleep drive to get back to sleep, you will keep having trouble falling back asleep. Your sleep drive will naturally reduce after sleeping, even for a while, so the reduced amount of sleep drive will not be enough to overcome any learned arousal associated with waking up during the night anymore. So the only way is to convince yourself that waking up is normal and nothing to be afraid of. This reduces the arousal. Only then you can go back to sleep quite easily. But waking up will still happen regardless of what you do or how safe you feel!
Hello and welcome to this forum!
Great to hear your success story, being an almost 2 year graduate of Martin’s course myself.
I guess you described it well. Insomnia is mainly a problem of over problem-solving and over troubleshooting. The result of these efforts or a lack of success from them are what keep us stuck in the loop.
I am still sleeping well after almost 2 years. “Well” is subjective, I guess, because 4 hours of great quality sleep is still sleeping soundly to me. At this point, sleep in any way, shape, form, or duration means absolutely nothing to me. I basically stopped losing sleep over sleep because it is not what defines my life or capability. It simply doesn’t matter anymore.
My best wishes to you. I reckon you will still get those occasional difficult nights but I believe you won’t be overreacting to them. They will come and pass like countless times in the past. Good luck!
Hello!
No, you don’t reset everything to zero and restart all over. You continue as if nothing happened.
Feeling the cues of sleepiness and getting drowsy before bedtime is normal. When you get into bed, have the mental preparation for sleep. This means you lie down quietly and make yourself comfortable. You may also start yawning at this point. Let your mind drift and let whatever thoughts come through. The process of falling asleep is complex and hard to explain even by science today. Some people may experience hypnic jerks. Your thoughts may momentarily take on a life of its own, you start dreaming and lose contact with your body senses. Then all of sudden, you are jerked back into your body and you become awake again. This process may repeat several times before you finally doze off. This is actually quite normal! I suggest you don’t treat it as a sign of not being able to sleep, having to get up and do stimulus control. You can continue staying in bed if the conditions for sleep are right (you are comfortable and calm).
Good luck!
Glad to hear this. Insomnia is a really a problem of unhealthy obsession with sleep and too much overthinking, causing an over-reaction to a harmless problem. If you study yourself before and during insomnia and between yourself and that person you saw napping, your ability to sleep has not changed or differ from that person. The real difference is your perception and how you view sleep. Good luck!
Hello @cat_ncsu!
The real breakthrough for me happened when I completely ditched everything. Including doing CBTI and avoidance of naps. I stopped timing myself, or tracking my sleep and slept whenever I felt sleepy including taking naps in the afternoons occasionally. I don’t care what this does to my nightly sleep. Ironically, during CBTI, with a sleep diary and following a sleep window, I could never get past sleeping 6 hours. It was always in between 4 and 6 hours. Later on, I realized it was doing all these things for sleep that was keeping my “partial” insomnia in place. They were forcing me to pay a lot of attention on sleep to maintain some kind of performance. Therein lies the problem. Pressuring yourself to sleep always backfires.Now, I don’t care about sleep anymore. I go to bed usually between 12 and 1am. Some rare occasions even earlier at 1030 when I am really sleepy or as late at 2am when I had to stay up. I always get out of bed between 8 and 9. I wake up during the nights too, usually once to go to the bathroom typically at 3-4 am. Then I go back to bed and usually fall asleep within 10-20 mins. When I don’t track sleep, the time really flies!
I think you will one day look back at this occasion, and find it funny you have to follow all these sleep “rules”. Yes, use them to help you get back on your feet like crutches but you should be able to abandon them once you’ve outgrown them. Only then will you discover the vast freedom that lies ahead when you are no longer bound to them. One day, you too will be able to take that nap on the train and probably someone else will look at you in the same way as you are now. So the roles have switched. And then you will get off that train and get on with your business as usual and not think about sleep at all anymore! Good luck.
Hello!
If you strictly follow traditional cbti methods, first you need to keep a daily sleep diary, and record your total time spent in bed, how many times you woke up during the night plus estimating how much of that time in total (no clock watching) was actually spent sleeping. Then you calculate your sleep efficiency = total time actually sleeping ÷ total time in bed. If this number is 85% or higher, you can increase your time in bed by 15 mins for 2 weeks. Every 2 weeks you keep adjusting until you reach your desired time.Of course, the drawback of doing this is you focus too much on the sleep metrics and forces you to pay a lot of attention on sleep. Actually your best sleep happens when you have no rules and are really carefree about it! But you are free to try it though and good luck.
Hello again!
It really depends on you. Theoretically, anyone can stop doing cbti and sw/sr immediately if they are no longer scared or frustrated over not sleeping. Your sleep will always go back to normal. Think about the times when you had very little sleep due to exams, presentations or whatever stress you were facing. Once the event is over, you always go back to your normal sleeping pattern almost immediately.
On other hand, if you have insomnia for a very long time, constantly taking pills, still very scared with poor self confidence, have poor understanding of sleep, have a ton of anxiety over it and not sure what to do, then it might be better to continue. A standard course of cbti lasts about 8 weeks.
The objective is the same for both. You need to stop being afraid of poor sleep or believing your sleep is broken.
Only you have the freedom to make the choices you need to live the life that you want. Ultimately, nobody can tell you what to do with your own sleep and/or lifestyle. Because these matters are deeply personal. Good luck!
Hello and welcome to this forum! Sorry to hear about your recent struggle.
Some points I wanna highlight here:
1. It is not uncommon to have ups and downs during cbti. So having a sleepless night here and there is not surprising.
2. When you try something new like cbti, it’s very natural to immediately start monitoring for results or expect instant success. This monitoring can be a bit stimulating to the mind and make sleep difficult. Your expectation is also unrealistic. Most people need few weeks to sometimes months to see improvement. But you can usually start seeing results the longer you familiarize yourself with cbti. Try to be very patient with yourself and manage your expectations.
3. Try not to focus too much on the end result, which is sleep. Yes, it is important but try to understand that nobody controls sleep, it just happens when the conditions are right. You need to have enough sleep drive from being awake long enough *plus* you are calm and relaxed. It is often not helpful to monitor if you have fallen asleep. Try to relax and let sleep happen naturally by itself.
4. The real recovery for insomnia is not good sleep but how you respond to bad nights and how you think about them. Really, it’s your mindset. No matter how good sleeper you are or how well you’ve recovered, you will still always get some bad nights occasionally. Being able to handle bad nights and seeing them as actually harmless is really important. Ultimately, you have to really think why you fear or hate poor sleep so much that it interferes with your life and cause so much fear and misery. When you no longer fear poor sleep and when you become more accepting of them, then it has no more control over you. Good luck!The issue is still about the sleep. Always. When you said hypersensitivity to noise, what are you really hypersensitive about? Is it really the noise or because your sleep was disturbed? It’s always hypersensitivity to sleep disruption. Everytime you obesses over trying to protect your sleep, you continue to face more problems down the road.
Hello!
You can always go to bed later if you’re not sleepy as long as it’s within your sleep window. But try to keep your out of bed time the same.Just take note if you are not sleepy by bed time, the simple explanation is that your body just doesn’t need to sleep yet. You can always wait it out by keeping yourself busy such as watching tv, reading a book, doing a puzzle, browse the internet or whatever you find enjoyable. Even laying in bed just resting is okay. The idea is to take the pressure off sleep for a bit. Sleep will always arrive in the end so try not to pressure yourself too much. Shift your mindset so you don’t see any wakefulness as unpleasant or to be avoided at all costs.
Good luck!
