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Hi @amandalea
Your question is an interesting one because I also faced a similar senario years ago. Basically I told myself I have 2 possible choices (going out or not) and 4 possible outcomes:
1. I don’t go out and sleep well.
2. I don’t go out but still sleep poorly regardless.
3. I go out and have a great time. But it may mean I mess up my sleep so I sleep poorly.
4. I go out and have a blast. Then come home with a huge smile and then sleep really well!I realized if I choose 1 or 2, I’d always lose out no matter how I slept that night. I’d deprived myself the chance of enjoying myself and still not able to guarantee a good night sleep. Whereas if I chose 3 or 4, I always win no matter the outcome, plus the chance of sleeping great would be an added bonus. So guess what?? I chose to go out and slept really well that night because I forgot all about my insomnia and told no one about it.
Years from now, how would you choose to reminisce this moment? Would it be how well you slept that night or how much fun you had with your friends? You decide ?.
Having preconceived notions between sleep and health is perhaps not helpful. Maybe it’s time you re-examine them. Can you give any source which says 12-13 hours of sleep gives higher cd4 count? If you are on anti-virals, is a high cd4 count really that important anymore? Because your viral load would be extremely low, sometimes undetectable even to the most sensitive tests. What about other hiv patients? Do they need 12-13 hours?
Or believing you need more than 8 hours to prevent headaches. Is there any basis for this? During your recent insomnia bouts, are you having headaches as alleged? Be honest, true and completely transparent with yourself. The mind can just be too full of ideas, they are mostly ineffective, unhelpful or downright false. Unleash the ability to expose the work of an overprotective mind, it is sometimes feeding you false and unsubstantiated information.
What about dropping the relaxation exercises completely? I mean really. What’s the point of continuing them if you feel they are not getting you anywhere?
Replace them with your hobbies. Doing things you truly enjoy for a change. Gardening, cooking, baking, knitting or anything you always wanted to do but haven’t got the time. When I had insomnia, I was like you. I then realized it was these relaxation techniques that were causing me to focus on my sleep, paying more attention to it. It was actually a sleep effort.
Maybe you shouldn’t relax away your fears and anxiety. Because this shows you still think there’s a problem or fear you need to manage and relaxation is the only means of escape. You can’t get over the fear if you continue fearing it. This is the loop you are caught up in. Try to see what your anxiety is all about. Is it grounded in reality or just a figment of imagination? You may start realizing it’s all just a set of thoughts after all, most of them are completely overblown and false. It’s all just over-dramatized fear. Best wishes to you.
I’m sorry you are going through a rough time now. Though I’m not sure what negative side effects you are experiencing and how bad they actually are. But isn’t insomnia itself able to cause all those effects you are talking about or even worse? A regular course of cbti is about 8 weeks. Whilst having insomnia, theoretically, you could suffer for a lot longer. So which one do you prefer: a short or a lifelong struggle? Theoretically, you could be “cured” by the end of 8 weeks and you could be sleeping well for the rest of your life! Short term pain for long term gain. It’s well-worth it. But all that said, I’m going tell you up-front that a “cure” isn’t necessary sleeping well every single night from then on and never experiencing bad nights again. It just means your nights are more regular, you have an altered relationship with poor sleep, you don’t see it as a danger anymore, you are no longer afraid, and you are in much better position to face it. This is the key to a complete recovery, it’s not living with the fear of poor sleep anymore. Good luck and best wishes!
For most recovered people, they start getting used to it. Be willing to sit with the fear and see what it’s all about. Stop hiding and running away because nothing of this nature can actually hurt you physically. Then slowly you realize there’s really nothing there at all. It’s all just a set of thoughts and how you relate to them. Thoughts can do nothing unless you start taking them seriously. Your sleep works on an entirely different level and has nothing to do with what’s going on inside your head. All you need is just stick to your sleep window! This is really important. Ignore everything else, stop researching sleep, stop listening to ideas or trying quick fixes, stop talking about it, stop fretting when you start waking up more and earlier because this is normal as your sleep improves, just quit trying to figure this out and things will start settling into place.
Talk to your doctor first if you have any concerns. But if ask me, it doesn’t really matter. Sleep is separate from what you do or feel or think. Any connection you make is entirely fictitious and exist only inside your mind, as long as keep making these decisions based on how you think it affects your sleep, you will always have difficulty sleeping because ultimately you are still very scared. You won’t sleep well as long as you have fear.
Hi @alax
Ups and downs are extremely common! Nobody’s recovery goes from getting 4-5 hours/night to 8 straight hours within few weeks. As your sleep improves, your sleep drive reduces and what you WILL experience from now on will be more awakenings and possibly lots of early morning awakenings too. The question now is how do you respond to them which then determines how fast you fall back asleep and continue making progress. If you accept all these as normal which they are, ignore them, do nothing and stop struggling, your improvement will continue in the form of falling asleep faster after these awakenings. You may also start experimenting with adding a bit more time to your sleep window to see if you can get more sleep out of it.
Remember your sleep debt accumulated from your insomnia nights is getting cleared as you start sleeping more. How fast and how long you fall asleep on any night is really just a question of how much sleep debt you have built-up over the days and weeks, so this means more insomnia nights = more sleep going forward, OR more sleep in the past week(s) = more awakenings/less sleep in future.This is the fundamental truth about sleep and there’s no way anybody can go round this. Ultimately, your body knows.
How much time are you spending in bed?? From your post, 10pm-730am on weekdays and 11pm-11am on weekends? I think you allow yourself too much time in bed, you are basically oversleeping! So of course, you run into bad nights again, no surprise there. What was your sleep window when you did the course?
Hi @RLP
Are you lying in bed frustrated and unable to sleep when you welcomed those thoughts? Then you might want to consider getting out of bed to do something relaxing and enjoyable. Get your mind off forcing yourself to sleep for a bit. You may go back to bed once you become sufficiently calm and sleepy.I believe the original intention of welcoming anxious thoughts in this post was during the day when you are not supposed to be sleeping. There’s a distinct difference between feeling anxious with a high sleep drive (which almost always leads to sleeping) and feeling anxious with very little or weakened sleep drive, which is what I think you’re experiencing. With the latter, people often have 2 choices: traditional cbti recommends you remove yourself from bed to weaken the association between bed and unpleasant wakefulness, or, for more adventurous people, to continue staying in bed just to rest/relax with no intention of sleeping. Sleep often happens with people stop trying so hard. Either way, the real idea is to be okay with wakefulness because waking up during the night is very normal. Try to be okay with these awakenings and cease struggling. After a while, you won’t see these awakenings as a big deal and your anxiety should start coming down. Good luck!
Nothing weird there. You were sleeping. Most probably rem sleep where dreams occur a lot. You also got most of your deeper sleep earlier during the night
If you have a bad night, then it means absolutely nothing except you had a bad night. It’s like you banged your toe or have an upset stomach. These events have no bearing on the future unless of course you allow it and begin worrying, which seems like what you have done. If you can ignore or forget about it, the problem will go away by itself.
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.
