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Hello and greetings… I am sorry with what you are going through. For many people, it’s often the frustration with the process and impatience of why it’s taking so long that makes it feel so hard to move forward. Maybe for now just go to bed and kinda expect your heart to race a little for a while. Accept that it’s gonna take a while for your heart to settle down and it’s okay! Be kind and patient to yourself, try to stop this self blame game because your brain is only trying to protect you. Re-establish that loving relationship with your bed in your own way. Some people like to read in bed, do a bit of yoga or light stretching, or ultimately, for me because I have gotten adventurous and am not trying to protect my sleep anymore, I just get on my phone and start watching youtube videos, play games or place stock trades on the stock market because I know all these stuffs have nothing to do with my ability to sleep. I slept through it all, sometimes even when the markets move against me and I woke up to find I lost over 5k overnight or gained 8k or whatever. Sleep happens independently, just have the courage to explore what works for you and ultimately stop caring about sleep. You can do this because so many others have! It’s not as hard as you think, you just need a little of patience, discipline and self-love. Best wishes to you.
I’m not belittling the pain or suffering but it CAN be done. Thousands if not millions of people have gotten over insomnia adopting a carefree attitude and the spirit of letting things be. If insomnia was so impossibly hard to overcome, everybody would still be insomniacs today and if insomnia had adverse health consequences, then people would die by the millions everyday since it’s “incurable”. And you said you’ve got it for over 30 years? Haven’t you already gotten used to it? Besides sleep is something that nobody ever has any control over so it is pointless and futile to be worrying over such things, it would be like worrying over your own breathing, whether you are getting enough oxygen, worrying about hunger, and whether you are getting enough nutrients to the exact proportions. Is there any point to be so obessesive about such things to the point of paranoia? What about just shrugging your shoulders and saying “I just can’t control sleep, nobody ever has” and completely giving up control whenever the worry or anxiety about sleep arises. Of course, I am talking about sleep related anxiety and the uncomfortable sensations that you may feel is somehow connected to bad nights. This means accepting the discomforts too because it is the only way to get out of it! Be accepting and optimistic instead of controlling, pessimistic, always doom and gloom. Of course, if your insomnia has other causes such as chronic pain, it makes sense to seek medical attention to address the underlying cause. Otherwise, insomnia is mainly just a mental issue developed as a result of a learned response to difficult nights that connects them to bad outcomes, which are often wrong and misconcepted, that keeps the insomnia ongoing.
Greetings! So what is it about sleep and insomnia that have you worried over 40 years?? Yet 40 years later, there you still are, nothing bad has happened to you at all, still able to come onto this forum, type sentences and ask questions. You seem very normal to me! Has it ever occurred to you are just being in a state of confusion for the past 40 years, you really don’t have insomnia at all because everyone has bad nights once in a while and that’s normal. Worrying about sleep is kinda like worrying about being hungry, actively trying to avoid it and seeking endless ways to cure your hunger. But then you still eat 3 meals a days, still feel every day is a misery because you are afflicted with hunger daily and asking people and almost every forum out there if anyone has ever found a solution to cure this thing called hunger forever. Sounds dumb and ridiculous?? You bet! Because that’s exactly the same thing you are doing with your insomnia, still worrying about it, asking endless people endless questions about sleep. But you know what? Sleep still happens regardless because everyone has sleep drive in the same way as hunger drive. Going forward, you can still worry about sleep. Or you can just ignore it and go on your life as usual. Either way, sleep still happens but you will just carry that worry and anxiety over absolutely nothing. Best wishes to you.
Hi Ezzo
Good news! Easily falling asleep at the start of the night and beginning to wake up earlier is two-thirds of the way to recovery! That final step is … well, complete and total acceptance of the process, not seeking to improve/fix your sleep any further and not actively seeking to sleep longer. This takes the pressure to sleep off your mind and actually allows the process to happen easier. It happened like that for me and I believe many others as well, there has to be a voluntary shift in mindset and a 100% belief in it! If you go to utube, look up Insomnia Insights #396, sleep physician Daniel Erichsen talks about this in greater detail. Good luck and remember you can do this too. Because so many have.Years have come and gone despite having insomnia. And nothing has happened, you are still able to come here and type sentences onto this forum. It’s really up to you. You can choose to be anxious and worry about sleep. Or you can choose to ignore it and go on your life as usual. Either way sleep will still happen regardless. But you’d have carried this unpleasant feeling over nothing because nobody ever has ANY control over sleep at all
Hello flight11
Unfortunately the only way to not be bothered or intimidated by sleep thoughts anymore is ironically, having more of these thoughts! Ask yourself in another way: How does one get over the fear of anything? Well the most effective and recommmended treatment adopted by most psychologists is getting their patients accustomed to them through repeated exposures. And the normal human response in these cases is eventually becoming bored and fed up by it over time that they don’t seem scary anymore. And that’s how you recover! By not doing anything to escape or avoid it, you just get desensitized over time. The mindset will start shifting “oh no I need do x,y,z to escape this” to “you know what, I just can’t be bothered anymore” or “fine whatever, I just don’t care anymore, there’s nothing i can do!”.Hello Tommi!
My advice is just do what you feel like doing. If 8-10 hours makes you more happy and productive, then allow yourself to sleep this much while accepting that you are probably overdoing it and therefore making difficult nights down the road become more likely. 6-7 hours is the minimum amount of sleep that a majority of people need and is your core sleep, anything more than that is probably bonus sleep and discretionary which tend to manifests as more light sleep, lots of dreams and awakenings in between. There is no right or wrong here, trying to control sleep or anything related to it such as dreams etc is probably futile because ultimately it’s been always your own body that decides what kind of sleep and how much of it that you need and actually get.Greetings!
The symptoms you describe is normal because you are too well rested! Oversleeping is like overeating, it won’t make any normal person feel good. A normal lifestyle should incorporate balanced amounts of rest and mental/physical stimulation by being up and about during your wakeful hours.Hello Trish
Everyone’s journey to recovery is a bit different but ultimately the destination is the same: you started to care less about sleep and it just doesn’t bother you anymore. Or it can be said you simply got bored and fed up over it. For me, the initial stage of recovery was falling asleep really fast at bedtime, maybe I was so sleep deprived then and I would get really sleepy way before bedtime. Then as I slept more, I was alert longer into the night and this evolved into waking up earlier like one or two hours before my scheduled wakeup time, initially I thought I couldn’t sleep further so I just started my day early. But one day I decided to just sleep in because my bed was so warm and comfortable and I fell asleep almost effortlessly. Initially for 5,10 mins then slowly grew into 1-2 hours. So right now I am sleeping straight for 5-6 hours before waking up to use the toilet then going back to bed to sleep for another 1-2 hours. Occasionally I would also find it difficult to fall asleep initially, it would manifest as just light sleep for the first few hours of the night with frequent awakenings. This is just a sign of sleeping really well! Sometimes they happen several nights in a row but I am not bothered by them anymore. I think the more those difficult nights happen, the faster you get used to them, it’s just a fact of life. You may still think a lot about sleep at this point, probably because difficult nights haven’t occurred frequently enough to you yet but that sleep is still going to happen regardless of what you do or think. Eventually you come to a realisation like I did that obessesing over sleep has been a complete waste of time and effort.Hello Trish
Thank you for your kind comments. Have you been sleeping in lately? Because you were told that not caring about sleep is the solution to sleep anxiety and sleepless nights, are you now sleeping more than you usually do? So therein lies your “problem”. You are simply too well-rested! I see these events manisfesting themselves all the time, people developed some sleeping problems, managed to recover, begin slacking on the discipline and ultimately finding themselves back to having problems again because it becomes way too easy to oversleep when you start letting go and thinking you are recovered. So stop spending too much time in bed and being too relaxed about your wake up time. Or taking naps during the day. Or that if you can choose to be liberal about your sleep then you will find sleepless nights manifesting more often. There is no right or wrong because your average sleep duration will stay the same over the long term. If you prefer to have a decent amount of sleep consistently, you should stick to a similar waketime every morning. Everyone wakes up with a little bit of sleep drive left. That initial grogginess is normal and it takes a bit of time to go away, just make yourself your favorite beverage, head out and get some light exposure and start your day! Your sleep should get back on track when you consistently do this and then future sleepless episodes won’t bother you as much anymore because you then begin to understand exactly what’s going on and there never was anything to worry about. Good luck and best wishes to you.Hi Eric
I am glad you didn’t find my answer long-winded. Best wishes to you and I hope your sleep gets back on track soon.Hi Eric and greetings
I wonder why you call your “dilemma” a frustration? People who have sleep disruption tend to recover better and faster if they are willing to be more accepting and optimistic about their situation. Think of sleeping more like eating because essentially these two processes are the same to your body. Are you frustrated that you were hungry yesterday, last week, last month or months ago? Or do you get upset when you just ate a bit less on a certain day? Well it doesn’t matter because you will always make up for it the next meal and you don’t suddenly stop eating one day, so the opportunities for eating and sleeping in this case, are always abundant. Therefore how you eat or sleep for a certain day doesn’t matter over the long term, the body just know how to right itself over time. Sleep is something that you have absolutely no control over, it is an involuntary process just like breathing, sweating or regulating your body temp etc unlike other
actions which you can control and are voluntary such as flexing your arms, stretching your legs or moving your jaws to chew. So perhaps you should rethink your mindset about sleep and stop trying to control an involuntary process like sleep because you can’t and never will.Hello!
Greetings and welcome. What time do you go to bed and do you sleep at other times other than at bedtime?Hello Ryan and greetings to you!
My thoughts about sleep changed dramatically when I started realising that it is just a homeostatic process in the human body in the same way as eating, breathing, sweating, body temperature regulation, removal of waste products like urinating & defacating and of course sleeping (your body just takes care of all those processes by itself so there’s simply no point trying to control it because it would be like forcing yourself to breathe 300x per minute or eat 10,000 calories per day because you somehow became convinced that horrible things will happen to you or your health if you don’t). Instead the mistake that most insomniacs do is endlessly forcing themselves to control sleep as if it was a voluntary action like flexing your arms, walking, chewing etc). If you just allow sleep to happen, it just takes place naturally and only if you are sleepy enough which comes from being awake long enough. So the only explanation for not sleeping is you are either not sleepy from being too well rested or you are worrying unnecessarily and needlessly about it because you simply just can’t let go of control and are actively trying to override your own body. I hope this helps and best wishes to you.
