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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!
It’s always the fear of poor sleep that’s driving everything. Essentially the stress over not getting sufficient quality sleep is enough to keep you awake. This has nothing to do with cbti, taking meds or whatever. As long as you continue to have fear, you will continue to have sleeping problems on and off, here and there. But with or without fear, some form of sleep will still happen. No matter how afraid you are, your sleep system will continue to work to give you the minimum sleep you need to survive, regardless of what you do, or what you take. This means you WILL sleep but you would just carry this fear with you all the time over nothing. Think about why you need to fear poor sleep so much. Is it because you are scared of having health problems, dying, feeling tired or whatever? Then find out if it’s really true. It’s almost always false, having little sleep is harmless. You may feel a bit more tired, or feel sleepy all the time (which shows your sleep system is perfectly functional!) but you won’t die or have any kind of health problems.
Hello!
Rebound insomnia is just classic insomnia. Nothing different. Comparing between one who takes pills and one that doesn’t, but both are still extremely anxious about sleeping, they would both present the exact same symptoms.
It’s still your fear of poor sleep that’s driving this. Always was and still is. Maybe others here have a better answer for you. But I think I have spoken enough. Best wishes!
Hello!
Imagine this senario: your doctor told you that all along you had not been given sleeping pills at all, you had been given placebo pills instead. Shocked? So how did you sleep all this while? Because this is exactly what happens when you take sleep meds, meds can only make you drowsy, but not put you to sleep. Only your own body can make sleep happen.Essentially, what are insomniacs trying to do when they crave sleep so much? They are constantly trying to prove to themselves that they can sleep. And they do this desperately every night, trying to prove this already well-known fact and yet despite that, still always live in fear lest their sleep gets broken somewhere somewhat.
Didn’t you say you slept for 6 somewhat nights without meds? So there already is your partial proof. Just keep going and the longer you go without meds and still sleeping, the more solid that proof becomes. Then one day, you don’t feel compelled to prove this anymore. The evidence is so overwhelming that it’s rock-solid and unshakeable. Think of it as something as natural as walking. But now you would rather sit than walk because you just don’t need to prove, over and over, that you can walk. It’s about time you really let this go. There will come a day when you think nothing of sleep. Good luck!
Hello
It tends to get better over time. As long as you’re on the right path and start adopting the right mindset.
Well, I think you already get the rough idea when you said ‘do’ in quotes. Which brings to mind some phrases I’ve come across that people here use to describe this stage of the recovery, such as “Act like you don’t care”, “Fake it till you make it”, or some people wrote down repeated affirmations like “I sleep great” which they claimed sound ridiculous at first but then suddenly the statement started to become self-fulfilling, to their disbelief and delight, or some who engage in mindfulness or meditation of some sort. I think the basic idea is the same. To keep yourself occupied with something other than sleep. To get the pressure off sleeping for a bit.
If I asked you, how did you learn to walk? You might go, “well it started with crawling, and then this and that, I was walking before I even knew it. It’s really kinda the same here. You really learnt to walk because you didn’t pressure yourself, weren’t bothered with the final outcome or which stage of the process you were in. That is achieving without caring! Good luck.
Hello and welcome to this forum!
Unfortunately, sleep is one of those paradoxes in life where the more you do or try to control it, the worse it gets. Please don’t chase sleep or make it your ultimate goal. Just do the bare minimum, such as regular bedtimes and pretty good sleep hygiene (like a wind-down period and sleeping in a cool, dark, quiet environment). Leave the rest to your body. Try not to fret over it! Trust your body, it knows how to sleep. Nobody ever went to kindergarten to learn sleeping.
Depending on your personality and patience, it’s going to take some time for things to settle down. Be very patient and non-judgmental with yourself. The real cure isn’t sleep itself, it’s really your tolerance to poor sleep and how you react to it. The final stage of recovery is not missing sleep anymore. You automatically want to stay up more because it’s more fun that way and perhaps even feeling that sleep is a waste of time. Good luck.
Why is it relevant what other people say? Do you even know them personally? Are you absolutely sure that your circumstances are identical? If a child told you there’re monsters in the closet that are keeping him awake, would you take that seriously? Yet, that’s exactly what you are doing with these “stories”.
What matters is what you truly believe in. Ultimately, do you trust your own body? Sleeping is really like eating or breathing. To your body, they are no different. All these are core biological processes which your body needs to do to stay alive. Try to go on days without eating or breathing, is it possible to forget how to eat or breathe? How does that even work? Eating is as easy as putting food in your mouth while to breathe, all you need to do is just inhale. For sleep, the act of going to bed is akin to putting food into your mouth. It’s your overprotective mind that’s feeding you with unnecessary and unhelpful information. But even your mind can be wrong!
Please stay off the forums if you haven’t developed the ability to independently evaluate the info. Or, if you insist, take everything with a grain of salt. Otherwise, you will only suffer needlessly. As it doesn’t matter what you read or do in regards to sleep, your body’s sleep system will kick in when you have been awake long enough, every single time! Going to bed regularly helps keep that system healthy. Ignore everything else because they’re truly irrelevant. If you are trying to sleep, making your mind go into overthinking mode by reading irrelevant stuff is probably the last thing you want to do. Stay off them, at least for a while. Then when you’ve recovered, you’ll probably laugh at them and yourself for being so ludicrous. A lot of the stuff are rubbish. All this while, all you ever did was hoodwinking and scaring yourself with a set of your own thoughts by imagining all these worse-case senarios which haven’t even happened yet, if at all!
Hello and welcome to this forum!
Your sleep problem is a very common and classic one. Almost every insomniac’s nightmare started like this.
The root of every insomnia is almost always the overthinking, overdoing and over-catastrophizing over lack of sleep. I and many others are here to tell you there’s nothing wrong with the occasional sleepless night or with your sleep system. Believing there’s a problem when there’s actually none is the main problem.
Keep your sleeping hours regular, get out and into bed at the same time every night. This is the core of cbti and the most practical step to get out of insomnia. Be very patient, disciplined and super compassionate on yourself. Because this will take some time to get back to normal. How long will depend on your personality and patience. Remember nobody is judging your sleep except yourself. Never measure success or failure based on just one night. One poor night never means your future nights are doomed, on the contrary, after poor sleep, it means good sleep is always just around the corner. Because these polar opposites are connected together and form opposite sides of the same coin.
The other aspect is the mental part, which is the fear and over-catastrophizing. Try to remind yourself these are only thoughts and don’t shut them out. Allow them to form in the mind and experiment with yourself to see if they’re really true. As you get better, most people will start growing out of them. Then they just don’t bother you anymore because there’s no shred of truth in them at all. All this fear has been a hoax all along.
Toward the end of your recovery, try to see that true recovery is never about getting good sleep every night. It is your response and mindset to poor nights. If bad nights happen, which they almost always do occasionally, but you’re no longer bothered at all, not compelled to ask many questions and try to seek quick fixes, or actively try to avoid them, then congratulations, you’re cured! True recovery is not living in fear of poor sleep. Good luck.
The bottomline is perfect sleep isn’t the cure. A change in mindset is. Ultimately, you want to reach a stage where you don’t lose sleep over sleep anymore, or couldn’t be bothered even if you did. You’ve become indifferent to a night of poor sleep and it doesn’t register in your mind that something is wrong or needed fixing. And you just know, from experience, constantly asking questions or actively seeking quick fixes, is probably futile and only distracts you from enjoying your life in the present moment. Good luck!
