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Hello @dutch!
The simple answer is there’s no answer! Because it can go either way. It depends on what you really want. Go with your true desire of that moment. The thing is none of this has anything to do with sleep anyways. Sleep is only based on sleep drive which depends on time spent awake and your internal body clock. Nothing else matters. It’s your obessesing with those simple actions or thoughts and then making baseless connections with your sleep that makes insomnia worse. It’s the obessesion that turns a otherwise harmless condition into this massive monstrous phobia. If people could forget about their problem, their insomnia will disappear. It’s the weirdest thing. If you don’t think there’s a problem or a connection, then it isn’t there anymore. It’s all those simple mundane things that you do to try to sleep better or those decisions that you make based on their alleged effect on sleep that’s keeping your insomnia firmly in place.
If you can’t forget or ignore your problem then at least pretend to do so. Stay away from the forums like these, the endless researching, the youtube videos on insomnia, just about everything connected to sleep, at least for a few weeks. Stop all the obessesing and just focus on sticking to a regular sleep schedule. That might work wonders because you then direct your attention elsewhere and not on your sleep, which can actually make it worse.
Hi Cathy
A sw of just 4 hours is way too short! It’s kinda like limiting your daily calories to just 600-800 a day on a diet, only to discover it’s so hard to maintain you just abandon it altogether! Then you swear off it completely because it didn’t work and go on to try other things which also didn’t work or had mixed results and you keep going around in endless loops trying to seek a cure, which just doesn’t exist, to your frustration. All because you set an impossible goal to begin with.A sensible sw should be at least 5.5 hours. But 6 hours would be a great starting point! Keep it reasonable so it’s easier to stick to.
Also bear in mind, the journey will contain a lot of ups and downs. More downs than ups, I’d say, in the beginning and especially if you normally fall asleep at 3-4 am and your sw now begins at 1230. As your sleep improves and you start sleeping more, you will also encounter more awakenings and tend to wake up way earlier than you anticipate. Understand that this is normal and is usually a result of reduced sleep drive due to the improvements you have experienced.
Towards the end, try to see that using a sw and even doing cbti themselves are not sleep generators. Only your own body can generate sleepiness! Cbti only helps regulate your sleeping patterns so your nights become more consistent. The key to a complete recovery is an altered mindset and response to the idea and experience of poor sleep, leading to an acceptance and tolerance of it. True recovery is not living with the fear of poor sleep anymore.
With that, I wish you best of luck and hope you find your way to better sleep soon.
The simple reason could be you were just not sleepy enough when you were trying to sleep. Because if you were, you’d be out in no time. If you just can’t sleep, why force it? You can watch something funny or entertaining. Either get out of bed or just stay in, it doesn’t matter. The idea is to be okay with wakefulness and taking the pressure off trying to force sleep to happen. Apart from that, always get out of the bed at the same time every morning so you tend to get sleepy by a certain time at night. Best wishes to you.
Hello Julie!
What you described is very common. I remembered I had it too. All too familiar. So if you don’t sleep well, you naturally begin to worry about it. Then when you actually do sleep well, you also worry anyways. So it doesn’t matter how you sleep at all, you still worry regardless! And how and when does this all end? It becomes an endless cycle that feeds on itself, like insomnia.I recommend you go to youtube and search Insomnia Insight by Daniel Erichsen. Insights #316, #322 and #392 are relevant.
I remember I got over this by slow desensitization over time. I just got used to it. Quite frankly, I actually got bored by it! Because nothing was happening and I wasn’t in any danger at all. I also began to realize the futility of catastrophizing over things that might or might not happen in the future anyways! I don’t have to sleep well every single night, I came to become unattached to the outcome. Because all that isn’t important. How I live my life is! As I worry about this useless stuff, time is flying by and they ain’t coming back. My existence is completely defined by my own experiences and how I live my life. I did not come into this world just to sleep or worry about it endlessly. I am here to live my life, to accumulate memorable experiences, to fully enjoy what life has to offer and at the end, these will be all that I am left with, not how I slept!
I hope you begin to see the light. Realize also that sleep and worry are not mutually exclusive events. There’s no such thing as “I must get rid of every ounce of worry right before bed”. Otherwise, nobody would be able to sleep at all. Sleep can still happen in a state of stress, it all depends on sleep drive, which is dependent on how long you have been awake. That’s all there is to it. Be enlightened and be free. Maybe you have read how sleep drive overcomes everything else, and you began worrying how one good night will start ruining everything else. What if you wasn’t aware of this or was blissfully ignorant of it, what would your feeling today be? Your mind may have been corrupted and gotten biased by your seeing and hearing, because you started favoring certain outcomes based on them. Suppose you are blind and deaf, and have no concept of time and no idea how long you slept, will these things matter anymore? Continue adhering to your current bedtime routine and ignore (or try to) everything else, you will do quite well indeed. Best wishes.
Ignorance is bliss. Your beliefs may have been biased based on what you heard or read, which aren’t necessarily true. Suppose you are blind and deaf and have no concept of time spent sleeping, do these things even matter anymore
Hello Brendan
I advise you not to play this dangerous game. Of trying to second-guess your body and attempting to override it. Firstly, it’s futile because there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it. After you have fallen asleep, your body takes over completely. In the same way you don’t tell your body how to digest the food you eat. You can neither control nor tell your body what kind and how much of light, deep or rem sleep you get. Period.
Second reason, you may stumble upon some unsavory findings that cause you more misery because it’s not what you expected or had in mind. You then go into a downward spiral where you start to worry about sleep and taking unnecessary and ridiculous steps to try to control it. Then when you don’t the results you want, this leads to more conflicts between mind and body which makes sleep way harder or almost impossible. Not knowing is way better than seeking to know. This is a powerful way of letting go and accepting that some things are just beyond your control. And sleep is one of those things which sits right on top of that list. Let it go, buddy! Just enjoy your moment in bed and rest. Sleep, in whatever shape, form or duration will come when it comes. That’s how it supposed to be in nature.
Hello @mango!
Not sure what you want to hear from others. I suggest you read the success stories, there’s plenty of inspirations there. But ultimately, don’t seek to listen to other people’s stories just to justify your insecurity that you are not alone. This is “safety-reinforcing” behavior which just perpetuates your fear. Because people do this only if they are afraid and try to seek safety in numbers. And if you are afraid, you won’t overcome your insomnia. Insomnia feeds on the fear of not sleeping well. If you want to recover, you first need to stop fearing. Good luck!
Hi @danzer!
All suffering, including about sleep ones, are the result of wrong perceptions. Try to do some deep reflection within yourself. You said something about whether caring how you sleep helps. If you think you care, then what is the actual basis of it? Is it even worth caring about when it’s supposed to be natural? Or if you don’t care, is this really true? Could it be possible you somehow still care obessesively but you are just kidding yourself that you don’t because that’s what people here or everywhere else told you this helped them? Think very deeply about this. It can also be applied to other things in your life. Just deep reflection, examining any ideas or notions that you have then observing really carefully and without prejudice whether this actually reflect true reality.
That said, waking up throughout the night is normal. So could it be possible that you are overstressing yourself over issues that many people don’t perceive as problems at all? Could all this “suffering” actually be self-inflicted just because of a wrong perception or notion? Good luck!
Hello!
How does anyone define suffering? Well it depends on the person. If you don’t see something as a suffering, then it ceases to become as such.Sleep is very much the same concept. Any perceived sleep suffering is just your perceived notion of it. It comes into being because you have defined that inside your mind. But notions are not necessarily real or reflect the true reality. All notions are just figments of your imaginative mind.
The basic science is that sleepiness builds from adequate wakefulness. Therefore, a regular bedtime is more than enough that makes your sleep more consistent. That and an open mind is all you need to free yourself from your perceived “suffering”. Good luck!
The cure is nothingness. A complete abandonment of all efforts. There is no holy grail when it comes to sleep. Good luck!
Everyone will be able to see your posts. But of course, it’s their choice whether to respond. Maybe nobody is interested. There’s nothing complex about sleep either that can’t be explained in a few sentences so I am not sure what kind of insights you want to share here. Sleep is just sleep, it works like hunger, it gets stronger the longer you go without it. And it works like a timetable, ie, if people go to bed at consistent hours, they tend to get sleepy by a consistent time also. And that’s all there is to it! It’s not complicated at all, in fact the more anyone tries to make it so, the worse it gets
Hello!
Great to hear. So what did you do? I did nothing, and just went to bed and got out at the same time every day. With Martin’s guidance and advice, of course. But I now know, I really didn’t need anything else other than a regular bedtime schedule.Hello!
4-5 hours of deep sleep??? That’s way more than even the healthiest person gets! According to the sleep foundation, getting 55-97 mins is pretty typical, excerpt below. This means only one to one and half hours of deep sleep is normal so you are getting way more already. What then are you trying to fix? And then asking if doing sauna will fix an impossible or non-existent problem just doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Excerpt from From Sleep Foundation:
How Much Deep Sleep Do You Need?
To calculate how much deep sleep you need, first determine how much sleep you need overall. Most adults should aim for seven to nine hours of sleep each night. Between 13% and 23% of that time should be spent in deep sleep. If you get seven hours of sleep each night, then you spend approximately 55 to 97 minutes each night in deep sleep.
To a certain extent, the body self-regulates amounts of deep sleep. For example, you might spend more time in deep sleep if you are recovering from sleep deprivation or if you regularly experience short sleep, such as over the course of a work week.
Source: https://www.sleepfoundation.org/stages-of-sleep/deep-sleep
Hi Sue!
If you have no commitments and love getting up at 3am, then sure why not. 5.5 hours is probably a bit short though if that’s how long you intend to sleep over 24 hours. But what you could also do is wake up at 3am, stay awake and keep yourself occupied/entertained with light duties like reading or watching tv for 2 hours, then try sleeping again at 5 am for a further 2 hours for a final out of bed time of 7 am. Remember that you are automatically accumulating sleep drive for every minute you are awake so that 2 hours in between two distinct sleeping phases could help you achieve more overall snooze time. It would be interesting to note that many pre-industrial revolution humans slept like this. They went to bed at dusk and had a “1st” and “2nd sleep phases” separated by a period of wakefulness in between where they ate, prayed, made food, hung out, had sex etc. The idea is to be flexible and go easy on yourself when it comes to sleep. Just don’t stress over it and you should do quite well. Best of luck!
