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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.
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!
