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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?
When you’re first starting out, it’s pretty hard, everyone is the same. The key to recovery isn’t about not caring. Because everyone cares, that’s why we go to bed to sleep and and not in the kitchen or toilet. The real key to recovery is actually a 180° change in mindset. Important questions that need addressing are like: Why do you think your sleep is broken? Is it possible to sleep well for decades and then suddenly out of nowhere, completely forget how to do it? What is it really about sleep that I am worried about? Is the health consequences, not feeling refreshed, looking like crap, mental fog, etc? Then you need to establish the basis for these assumptions. Are they rooted in logic and fact or are they actually just hear-says? Be perfectly honest and open with yourself.
I found using metaphors worked for me. I equate sleep to eating. Is it possible to forget how to eat? No, that would be silly because you just put food in your mouth and you naturally just chew and swallow. So is it possible to forget when to eat also? NO as well. Everyone will eat when they get hungry enough. And how to get hungry enough? Simple. Just don’t eat for long enough. Would it be possible to refuse a feast of delicious food in front of you when you have been starving for a few days? Again NO. So when applied to sleep, will your body refuse to sleep if you have been so tired and deprived of it once you lay down on a comfy bed? NO! Your body will get what it wants, one way or another. There is just no way it can do it wrong. You came into this world with this innate ability and it will stick with you for the rest of your life regardless of how worried you get or what you do or believe. It wasn’t a skill that needed to be learnt or acquired in the first place so how can it be lost?? So it’s futile and even silly getting worried sick about it.
The real key to recovery is how you view your insomnia. Is it really a problem after all or just a conjured up hoax because you have been indoctrinated that somehow lack of sleep has devastating consequences? If insomnia was deadly, wouldn’t the morgues now be filled with corpses of people who somehow forgot how to sleep? On average, roughly 30% of the world’s population suffer from some kind of insomnia. So 30% of the 8 billion people is what? 2.4 billion?? So are there billions of corpses in the morgues now that died from lack of sleep or somehow lost that ability? NO, I hardly ever heard about ONE case let alone billions! So then the underlying notion must be false! The facts just don’t check out.
I know no amount of words is going to convince you overnight that your insomnia isn’t a problem. Please go through this journey with an open eye and heart and truly see what it’s all about. You might find you will laugh at yourself for acting like this, for believing and doing crazy stuff for sleep for what is essentially a very harmless and very normal situation. Good luck.
For short term insomnia, the answer is yes! Absolutely. It also happens in people who don’t have insomnia either.
Hello!
Insomnia is a very peculiar affliction. It just stops bothering people when they no longer want to get rid of it. Strange but true! And waking up during the night is 100% common. The issue is how do you react to it. If people are indifferent and couldn’t be bothered by it, they will usually fall back asleep pretty quickly.
Hello @bjorn!
If you need to get up at 4am regularly then just start going to bed at 10pm so your sw is still 6 hours. Keep doing that and your body will start adjusting to the new timetable in a few weeks.
If your 4am wake up time is just a one-off, then just stick to your regular sw and you don’t need to change anything. It will mean you will sleep less on that particular night but us recovered insomniacs don’t obsess over numbers anymore. I will catch a nap if I have the chance (eg on a train or flight) and then just get on with the day. Normal people do that anyway and recovered people won’t be thinking much differently. In fact, physiologically, you and any normal sleeper are no different. Any difference exists only in mindsets and therefore this becomes a mental problem and not a physical one. Good luck.
