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Hello Sue!
How long is your sleep window? It should be a minimum of 6 hours. Feeling sleepy way before your bedtime can be a result of an excessively shortened sleep window, so you could be slightly sleep deprived. Good luck!Hi @eviancenita!
You should be able to get over the anxiety in the same way most of us did. By slowly desensitizing yourself to your fears over time. And then realizing these fears are way overblown and irrational. By being willing to entertain the idea of poor sleep. Ultimately if you believe in yourself, your confidence should return.
In the end, it boils down to your relationship with poor sleep and how you think about it. Another person could have exactly the same sleep patterns as yours but still thinks he sleeps okay, is okay with it, goes on his life as usual, and not making a big fuss out of it. Because he thinks nothing is wrong and therefore nothing needs fixing! It is really all about perception and a change of mindset. If you don’t make a big deal out of it or endlessly trying to seek answers, it will blow over and your issues will resolve on its own with almost no effort.
Nobody came into this world “learning how to sleep”. There’s no kindergarten for it! As babies, we just slept whenever we wanted and that’s how nature really intended it. If everybody just goes to sleep whenever they are truly sleepy, and not because so-called science or whatever literature says “you should sleep at 11pm and wake at 7am”, then technically insomnia won’t even exist at all. Go back to basics if you have to. Ditch all the rules and the efforts. Be brave to face whatever the outcome and understand that true sleep requires neither effort nor preparation. It is supposed to be natural and effortless. But it should be pretty consistent if you are consistent with your sleeping schedules. Good luck.
Conversely, if you can’t sleep, either because you are prob quite well-rested or suffering from extreme stress (even under great stress, you will still sleep if you are sleep deprived), then you won’t sleep even if you take a ton of pills, or check yourself into a $50,000 hotel suite. You can never force it! Sleep works like this: it gets stronger the longer you go without it, nothing can stop it and nothing can produce it either except being awake long enough. It works exactly like hunger, you just get hungrier the longer you go without eating. There’s nothing fancy going on here or anything that’s hard to understand. Sleep is pretty simple. But that said, the normal amount of wakefulness to generate sufficient sleepiness is around 16-18 hours for most people so ask yourself, have you actually been awake long enough to be sleepy? Stop going to bed because of what time it is, go by the amount of time spent awake. If it’s a consistent amount every night, your sleep should be pretty consistent too. This is what cbt-i is all about. Setting a regular bedtime schedule and that’s it! The rest is up to your body. Excessive worry over it or taking unnecessary measures to force sleep to happen is not only counter-productive but also reinforces the fear around it which only prolongs the insomnia episodes. Stop all the sleep efforts, only this way will your mind settle down enough for your body to get its rest. Good luck!
Hi @eviancenita
Advice to combat this? What about no advice? Because nothing is wrong. Never was and very likely never will be. Your ability to sleep can never be broken. It is built in since birth. Just like eating, breathing, peeing or defecating. Your body takes care of it! If you can’t sleep, then it prob means your body doesn’t need it at that point in time. If you are very sleepy due to going on for prolonged period with it, you can and you will sleep, practically anywhere, standing or hung upside down, it doesn’t matter
Hi @anamarija
You can slowly bring forward your bedtime in 15-20 mins intervals until you achieve the desired amount of sleep. But if you go to bed earlier, you are also very likely to wake up earlier. The 2nd part of sleep after the first awakening can be a bit challenging for most people. Expect this to happen so there are no surprises. As long as you take it gently and don’t stress too much over it, you should be able to fall back asleep or the time to fall back asleep should get shorter. Being okay with waking up after sleeping several hours sleep is key. Stop the pondering, the questioning, or the endless seeking for answers is key to quieten down your mind so you can go back to sleep. Accept everything as it happens and that you have very little control aside from keeping to a regular bedtime schedule and enjoying your wakeful hours the best you can. Good luck!
Hi @Takoba66
Best of luck to you and I hope you find your relief soon. As you start letting go, I hope the hurdles you need to jump over become smaller. But even when you are back to sleeping well, do expect the occasional off night, don’t be startled and it will pass. At the end of the journey, it’s really about your relationship with poor sleep and how you think about it which shapes your attitude and mindset towards it. You know you’ve truly overcome it when you think nothing about poor nights and go on as usual. The fear is completely gone. After that, it’ll be like you got the “insomnia jab” and you become immunized!
Hi guys!
Sleep can happen quite independently of stress or anxiety or whatever else that’s going on, otherwise virtually everybody wouldn’t be able to sleep at all! Everyone will have some sort of stress, it’s just life. But people still sleep regardless. You can make whatever connections you want about sleep but one thing is for sure: it will always happen at some point with the passage of time regardless of how stressed or anxious you get over it or the other things going on in your life. It’s just that you have chosen to obesess over it unnecessarily and quite unproductively. Because worrying about it won’t help you or your sleep or whatever problems you have in life. So just get over it! That time and effort would be better utilized to solve your other problems. Sleep will take care of itself, just getting in and out of bed at regular times is more than enough.
3 most important things??? If this is your mindset, then you are not getting the point. As you as you keep thinking you MUST do something to sleep better, you are doomed to continue the struggle indefinitely. Because you are choosing to continue playing a game you can’t win. Who’s the enemy here?? Fighting your own body??
Just commit to a regular bedtime schedule. That’s all you need. Everything else is frivolous. The emotions and thoughts WILL take time though, but by being extremely patient and not setting a timeline to “recover”, they will eventually settle down. You reach the “nirvana”, a state where you don’t care about how much and what kind of sleep you get and sleep thoughts no longer bother you. Best of luck!
Hello @HelpMeHypnos
I don’t wish to write a long post about this. Because there’s really nothing here to talk too much about. Fearing poor sleep is like fearing having a poor appetite or fearing being hungry or fearing how to breathe. How’s that even possible if you eat three meals a day and never think about breathing?? Because your body takes care of it, all by itself and everytime you think of wanting to control it or trying to override your own body systems, that’s where the problem and the obessesion begins. And when you fail, the despair and gloom sets in. When you simply have no control over it to begin with! The problem is not the kind of sleep you get. Thinking there’s a problem when there’s none IS the problem! What a complete waste of time.
Hi!
U won’t get over this as long as you continue to fear poor sleep. It really comes down to your relationship with poor sleep and how you think of it. People without sleep problems just shrug it off and go on as if nothing happened. Poor sleep happens to everyone, there’s no such thing as a good sleeper, it’s just sleep in however shape, form or duration and there’s no way your body can do it wrong. The only other thing you can do is to keep your bedtime schedule regular which helps keep your nights more consistent. There’s no other thing you can do to sleep! This is really important and you must understand this before you can begin letting go of the struggle. The faster you let go, the faster you return to normalcy.
Hello!
Fine then so sleep whenever you feel sleepy and when you aren’t taking care of your baby. Disregard what the clock is saying or what conventional wisdom says about sleeping at regular hours; only go by how your body feels. If your body feels sleepy and you have the time for it, then take it! Who says this is wrong or prohibited?? It’s like slapping a fancy medical term on someone who eats whenever he feels hungry and then saying that’s abnormal because he doesn’t eat breakfast at 7 am or lunch at noon or dinner at 7pm. If everyone follows this, then technically the term insomnia doesn’t even exist. Because everybody can sleep. Your body is proving this to you every single day! Though it may just be 3 or whatever hours. Then sleep at other times too to feel rested! That’s how sleep’s supposed to work in nature. If people could stay awake indefinitely without needing to sleep, then we’ll all be doing that because sleeping is such a waste of time. But the fact is nobody can stay awake indefinitely. Sleep drive will kick in at some point, just like hunger will. So worrying about it is a complete waste of time and efforts, which might be better spent on being a better parent or doing the things you truly enjoy in life.
You don’t need anyone to tell you how to sleep lol. The fact is anyone should be able to sleep anywhere as long as the sleep drive is there.
To answer your questions, I don’t think I experienced 5 or more nights of poor sleep continuously. Mine was typically poor sleep one night when I hardly slept a wink, then I’d be thoroughly exhausted the next night and would sleep quite well again. I’m not sure about you, is it possible you actually slept more than you think? Try not to make this a numbers game, where you become obsessed with counting how many days you slept poorly or how many hours you slept on a particular night
For me, now, I just stay in bed during all of my bedtime. If I can’t fall asleep straightaway, I would just lie in, close my eyes and think mundane things until I eventually drift off and fall asleep. I don’t care how long it takes, I always fall asleep in the end. I don’t get caught up in counting the minutes spent awake in bed or doing stimulus control. I found this kept me up more! When I implemented SC, the pressure to sleep increases and the frequent process of getting in and out of bed very frustrating. Now I just get into bed at X and out at Y. I don’t care what happens in between or how much sleep I got.
Hello guys!
The thing is stop pressuring yourselves to sleep. Because the truth is you dont have to sleep well every single night. Stop making bad nights such a monster because it really isn’t and you must be friendly and accepting of them in order to stop being afraid. When you start thinking you must do something to avoid it, like taking a pill or doing cbt-i or whatever, it means you are still afraid and you probably will encounter more bad nights more often.I highly doubt anyone here can help you with your problem because I believe nobody is an “expert” on sleep except Martin, well he’s got some certs or something under his belt. Speaking about your “light sleep” problem, there’s another person too who purportedly has the same problem as you: Jess84. Maybe you both are the same person so why are you flooding this forum with the questions, asking endlessly about the same stuffs for years. If you aren’t her, then go to that thread and see if you can find anything helpful, though I highly doubt it.
