Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
Hello @momup and welcome back! It’s comforting to hear you are doing well. I commend @hiker for his reply.
Stop seeking the perfect sleep or the perfect environment for sleep because there’s none! Your mind will come up with a million and one “stuffs” that it thinks can affect your sleep. If you try engage with all of them, you will be in for a hell of a ride. You will get all sorts of results but good sleep won’t be one of them. It’s the relentless pursuit of perfection that makes good sleep so hard to come by.
In situations like these, try to be normal and reasonable. Keeping the windows closed and using earplugs are reasonable steps. But of course if you can afford it, then move out. Because the hazards of prolonged noise exposure are real and there’s documented scientific evidence it can mess with your physical and mental health. If moving out isn’t an option, then try to keep the noise levels down as much as you can. But either way, you should still be able to get some amount of decent sleep.
Hello and welcome!
Bad nights are completely normal and happen to everyone. You’d have encountered them plenty of times in the past but they didn’t turn into big problems simply because you promptly forgot or didn’t care about them and your sleep always got back on track.
You can try doing this too. Nothing has changed except your thoughts about sleep. Just ignore your sleeping problem and it will pass. That’s the weirdest thing about insomnia, if you can forget about it, then it isn’t there anymore.
Or you can start implementing simple cbti techniques and develop healthy sleep habits. Do things like having a regular bedtime schedule every day and not staying in bed frustrated if you can’t sleep. Just get up and do something enjoyable and relaxing until you are ready to sleep again. All these habits will change your negative behaviors and mindset around sleep and help get it back on track.
In the end, it’s really all about your relationship with poor sleep. If you can develop a working relationship with it and not see it as a big issue, you will never be bothered by it anymore. Good luck!
Hi Paul!
I note you do lots of relaxation techniques. Qigong, breathing etc. Before insomnia, did you do any of these things? If not, then they are sleep efforts. You are only doing them out of fear and desperation. As long as there’s fear, your recovery won’t be complete.
You need to look at insomnia square and hard in the face and not be afraid anymore to fully recover from it. Stop running away but face your fears head-on. Be adventurous and even dare it to make your it worse! There’s actually nothing there. Insomnia is an adult version of “I’m afraid of the monsters in the closet” story often told by kids. You are just frightened by a set of your own thoughts.
A good way to get grounded and not be carried away by emotions is to be yourself as much as you can before your insomnia. Start regaining your personality. Stop altering plans and stop doing things to relax away the fear. If you didn’t do any of these things before, then you certainly don’t need to do them now either. It’s those things you do to try to escape that are keeping your insomnia firmly in place.
Get away from forums like these, the youtube videos, the googling and all the researching. Stop talking about sleep to anyone. Get engaged in your planned activities for the day. Just keeping to a regular bed time schedule is more than enough. Leave sleep to your own body. Stop judging your sleep on a daily basis. Remember only yourself knows what’s going on, therefore the only person who can pass judgment is yourself! So in a sense, your suffering are entirely self-made. Do nothing at least for a few weeks. In sleep, less is more, nothing is best! That slowly takes away the power that insomnia has over you. Good luck!
In general no, you don’t keep changing your sleep schedule. Unless of course, you are expanding it to allow more time in bed which reflects the improvement you are making.
How long are you waking before your scheduled wake up time? Ideally you’d want to give your body the opportunity to go back to sleep in all cases of early awakenings, but if this is not happening and it’s already close to your scheduled wake up time, you might as well get out of bed to start your day a bit early.
For most people including myself, I chose to get up early at first, but then discovered I could actually go back to sleep. Nothing beats my warm comfy bed in the cold early mornings and I almost always fall back asleep now. The time to fall asleep also got progressively shorter.
Hi Paul!
Your sleep will improve as long you stick to the plan. Having a consistent sleep and wake up plan is key to this, especially the wake up part. It will work regardless of whether you believe in it or not, because that’s how the human body works. It might take some time though. Human sleep system works on a clock, as long you only allow sleep to happen at certain times, your body will start responding. Waking at regular times regardless of how you slept the previous night, will allow your sleep debt to build up again, so that you get sleepy when the start of your sleep window comes around.Then when your sleep improves, everything will start falling into place. Your anxiety levels and obsession will start coming down and you will be able to start letting go easier. Note that we are not trying to directly control sleep here, we are creating favorable conditions or the fertile ground for natural sleep to happen.
One more tip regarding the awakenings, they are normal but your responses do matter. Start acting like you don’t care. Be okay with waking up and try not to struggle. Keep going and best wishes!
It is usually not helpful to just focus obsessively on the end-result, over-monitoring it. These are the things which are stimulating to your mind and makes sleep more difficult. For many recovered people, it’s usually more productive to focus elsewhere: on the things that do lead to better sleep, like going in and out of bed at consistent times, and tackling the negative behaviors and thoughts around sleep.
People desperate for sleep don’t sleep. See, this is the thing with sleep, it is paradoxical. You get it when you don’t want or think about it. Recall those times when you were in a boring lecture, meeting or movie, you start dozing off. You weren’t trying to sleep, but it keeps coming to you, almost effortlessly. Stop trying so hard. Don’t chase or miss sleep, let it chase you!
Hi
Always do what is best for your own body. If sleeping and waking early is what you prefer, then please go ahead! There are no right or wrong ways to do this, also question the need to do sleep restriction/compression. Is it really necessary in your case? Are your sleeping patterns erratic and inconsistent? Do you tend to fall sleep at irregular times and have excessive sleepiness during the day? Or do you already fall asleep and awake at regular times? If your sleeping patterns are consistent, then you don’t need to do sleep restriction at all.So if your average sleep duration is around 6 hours, then aim to spend 6.5-7.5 hours in bed regularly and at regular hours. This is already all you need, your body will take care of everything else by itself. Good luck and best wishes!
Your sleep seems quite okay to me. Why do you even need to do sleep restriction at all? Do you have sleep anxiety? Waking up several times during the night is also very common and normal. Other than that, if you have excessive sleepiness, you could have a medical condition that’s causing it (please visit your doctor) or you may simply need more than 7-7.5 hours of sleep. If you feel sleepy by 10, then try going to bed at 10.30 and see what happens. You may start waking up earlier but try to go back to bed to see if you can still sleep.
Please don’t make baseless and groundless connections between bed and sleep. Because there is none. Your ability to sleep is independent of your thoughts or actions. So if you wanna snuggle in bed in with your partner, that’s okay! Do whatever makes you feel good, if you can do something that’s pleasurable to you in bed, that’s even better because it helps reinforce that association between bed and pleasant experiences. Good luck!
Hello!
I don’t think there’s right or wrong sleep restriction. If you just do it, your body will respond accordingly. How long is your sleep window?
Hello @alax
It doesn’t actually matter when you start but since you have started, you might as well get on with it. A few tips I wanna point out:
1. Select your get out of bed time and a reasonable sw. 6h is a great starting point for most people and please keep sticking to it, don’t gauge your success on a bad night or string of bad nights because each success or failure are completely independent of each other. 6 hours is a reasonable sw to keep to, sticking to this will strengthen your sleep drive over time. It might take several weeks for your body to respond. As your sleep improves, you may slowly begin to extend your sw but keep in mind, your sleep quality will suffer a bit. You may get more awakenings and/or start waking up earlier than usual. This is normal and to be expected. You might also regress to an occasional sleepless night, this is also normal. But for most people, as long as they are not overstressed and stay disciplined, the improvement will continue and people are usually able to fall back asleep with no incident after those awakenings.2. The other part is the mental aspect. In most people who recovered, as they begin sleeping better, they either start to forget about their problem or stop fearing it or both. This is crucial for total recovery. When you are able to look at insomnia hard in the face and not show any fear, you will sleep very well. Minimize the obessesion with sleep, by stopping going on forums like these, researching or goggling it, watching youtube videos or do anything related to sleep. Do nothing except sticking to your sw at least for a few weeks. Stop the obessesion which feeds the insomnia. Do nothing to try to sleep better, have total trust in the system and your own body, this will usually work wonders. Good luck and best wishes to your success.
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.
