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Hi Jacob
You sleep during daytime? And how do you feel during the day? Have you ever thought about sleeping in two distinct phases? It is something like this: begin first sleeping phase quite early in the evening (6-8pm), then sleep 4-5 hours, wake for couple of hours, then second phase for 2-3 hours. Remember you build sleep drive everytime you are awake so that couple of hours awake in between combined with your natural biological clock might help you fall asleep easier later on. You also seem to be an early sleeper and riser so when choosing the time, you need to keep this in mind as well as suitable to your current lifestyle. Best wishes!Hello Jacob!
That is old question which you keep asking over and over already. And unfortunately my answer is still the same and yes it’s me Chee answering you again ?. I would do absolutely nothing except just go back to bed and for me very often I am falling back asleep because I don’t give a crap if I can sleep or not. I have no issues waking up early I kinda expect it every morning now, I dont try to prevent it because it is futile and I cant control sleep or waking up. So I dont see it as a problem anymore and I dont care there’s light or what the birds will do outside. I set my alarm at 6 am and I stay in bed until the alarm rings and I have to snooze it 2-3 times before I finally get out of bed.Greetings!
Clock watching doesn’t really matter to me anymore. I look at the clock all the time when I’m awake and if it’s still early I just go back to sleep without a problem. I think the ultimate takeaway is being neutral in everything you do and not connecting what you think or do to sleep anymore, I hope that helps.Hi
Sleeping only 2-3 hours per night? I don’t think that’s sustainable in the long term. I bet you are slipping in some sleep during the daytime like napping or catching up on weekends by sleeping in. Either way, you are most likely sleeping more than you think. Sleep is just a part of the homeostatic process that your body controls like respiration, regulating body temperature, appetite, removal of wastes like urinating and defaecating, perspiration and so on. But sleep is a bit flexible because you can adopt a sleeping schedule that suits your current lifestyle and work. Just as long you allow sufficient time for sleep and not sleeping at other times and not wanting to take over control of sleep from your own body, like taking pills or doing a ton of other things to try to control it or getting frustrated/upset because you can’t sleep, you should do really well!The best natural remedy is self confidence. Normal sleepers don’t do anything special or take any pills to sleep because they really believe they can sleep. You need to regain this trust too in yourself by slowly tapering off your pills and be willing to experience some difficult nights in the beginning. Be brave, take that bold step and discover the new lushful bliss of natural restful sleep that lies beyond the horizons which you are so unwilling to venture into. Because you want to protect whatever sleep you have now and are unwilling to experience temporary unpleasantness, you are constantly missing the chance to improve your sleep forever. Short term pain for long term gain!
Hi Rmaas
I think you and most people over-catastrophize the senario that you will be facing. Because the truth is that people can function quite okay on little to no sleep for a few days as your body gets used to a new schedule. Based on your new work schedule, just select a time to get into and out of bed and do this consistently every day. Your body should respond within a few weeks if you are patient, disciplined and don’t cheat by sleeping in or taking naps. Adopting an optimistic, worry-free and can-do attitude helps too. But this may depend on the type of person you are and your personality. Good luck and best wishes to you.
Hello and greetings. How many hours do you actually sleep on average over the long term? Just dont focus over those few days where you slept little but focus on the long term like a few weeks or a month out. You might find you actually slept more than you think. And this is the problem with many people, dramatizing those bad nights while forgetting to give yourself credit to those good nights. And here’s the thing with sleep: You sleep really well if you don’t constantly obesses over it, endlessly striving to achieve X hours per night like reciting a mantra (8 or whatever). When will the lesson ever be learnt that your body is the one that decides the amount of sleep it needs and not you or what your brain is telling you based on what you read or heard?? People can sleep and function really well on 5-6 hours of sleep (can you believe heart and brain surgeons can actually perform highly complex and life-saving operations on just 5.5 hours of sleep)? Treat sleep as if your appetite, you instinctively eat when you get really hungry and likewise, you just go to bed when really sleepy. And that’s how nature intended it. Do things based on how you feel and not on what time it is. So stop saying to yourself that you must be in bed sleeping at 10pm, and you need to sleep 8 uninterrupted hours every single night because that’s ridiculous in the same way you don’t eat the same amount, same food at the same exact time every day. Sleeping and eating isn’t going to make anyone feel good if they constantly overdo them by overeating or overspending time in bed when they should be out and doing exciting, enjoyable activities that give meaning and purpose to life. Great sleep isn’t about the numbers, it is about the quality of that sleep (conversely less time for sleep = more restful deep sleep whilst spending more time in bed = lots of light, broken and unrestful sleep) and the quality of daily life in your wakeful hours. Don’t stay in bed waiting for sleep to happen, just get out and enjoy life! Sleep is something your body takes care of all by itself, and that constantly worrying about it is a complete waste of your time and energy.
Hi Phoebe
It may sound ironic but the best sleep remedy is actually doing absolutely nothing, being completely easy and relaxed about your sleeping hours and spending less time in bed, not waiting for sleep.Hi Alex!
How long have you been doing cbt-i? From my experience, i dont think you should do that for more than 2 months. After all, cbt-i is only supposed to help make your nights become more regular, increase sleep confidence and dissipate sleep anxiety, and it seems to have done its job for you. After that, hopefully the subject should improve their sleep further as their confidence increases and their anxiety abates. Do you still have a huge amount of sleep anxiety with dented sleep confidence? Because here’s the thing about cbt-i. It is not meant to be used as a tool to generate sleep forever for anyone, which is what you are trying to do here. After cbt-i, everyone should have a really relaxed bedtime schedule and nobody wants to follow a set of sleep rules forever, really. Have you ever explored what happens if you just continue to use your extended sleep window despite the initial setback and you feel you just had to go back and restrict your window? Just try it with no expectation of any outcome. Allow 6 hours in bed, you may or may not have as good as a sleep efficiency with a more restricted window but the key is really trying to “see” what the other side looks like once you’ve allowed yourself to potentially sleep this much. Imagine how the New World, the American Colonies and now the most powerful country in the world, the USA, would have lay undiscovered if people back then didn’t want to explore beyond their horizons and still thought the world was flat. Or if you still unsure stick with the 15 min increments for few weeks and try to resist rolling back because you want to “protect” your current sleep. Be brave and take that step forward, it might make all the difference to you because you may start discovering that you actually *can* sleep, even for 5, 10 mins and then that develops into 30,45 mins, 1-2 hours, it happened like that to me and I am sure almost everyone else here has a similar experience. Stop using cbt-i as a “tool” to sleep because it really isn’t! The best sleep remedy is actually sleep confidence and a very relaxed approach towards sleep, not a rigid, inflexible one.Hi and thanks for sharing your story. I guess everyone’s a bit different in the path to recovery. But whatever helps them to overcome their fear of sleeping poorly is going to be helpful. I really encourage everyone to be funny and creative about their circumstances. Make jokes and be light hearted about it. Dress up your fear/anxiety in different mascots and watch how funny they’ve become. For example, dress them up as a santa reindeer and going ho-ho-ho all the way for entertainment sake. Or as Mr. Bean taking an exam in an exam hall, that was really funny. And for those who like to do gym and martial arts, paste a piece of paper with “insomnia” written on it onto a punch bag, then have your fill of punching, kicking, knee-ing and head-butting it. Or if you enjoy shooting guns/rifles on a target, paste “insomnia” on it then shoot at it. Then when you go bed and your brain asks you “What happened to your insomnia/sleep anxiety?”, you could say “Well I shot it” or “I beat the crap out of it today, it’s probably too injured to bother me now”. Laugh at your own insomnia and start making it less scary! Because if anyone’s ever watched the film IT, it’s all really inside your head, only you can make it as scary or harmless as you want it to be. In the end, that fear is just made of air, it’s really nothingness!
Hi!
If sleeping is what you want, so how come you get aroused when you are just about to drift back to sleep? Doesn’t this sound a bit ridiculous to you? Shouldn’t you just allow sleep to happen naturally and effortlessly? I think at this point, it would be better to just face your fears head-on and not listen to any music, videos or podcasts any more and just lay in bed and try to get comfortable. Accept that you might or might not sleep. But whatever the outcome, it’s fine to you. The magic of sleeping comes when you try less to sleep! I think watching videos or listening to podcasts have developed into a sleep effort at this point. Just stay in bed and enjoy the silence and serenity of the moment. Who knows, you are probably more likely to fall asleep if there’s some sleep drive left and there’s nothing like music or videos to distract you any more. Best wishes!Greetings!
Someone posted a very similar question here few months ago. He would go to bed at 10pm, frequently woke up around midnight, cant sleep until 3am then would sleep till 7am when he would frequently snooze his alarm till he got out at 8. The remedy was quite simple, just go to bed later. In his case, midnight. For you, I think 11pm would work. You only sleep 7 hours on average so a sleep window of 11pm-6am would be quite appropriate. Just try going to bed at 11pm and get out at 6am for a few weeks and see what happens. Be patient as your body will need some time to adjust. Best wishes and good luck to you!Hello Alnav!
I can completely relate with your experience because I went through it all myself. I probably can’t talk you out of your anxiety now, I doubt anyone here can. But I guess this is a phase that most “insomniacs” will have to go through in order to get over it. For me, I just started becoming less afraid of sleeping less the more often they happen as I kinda settled into that narrative “god it’s the same old shit all over again, alright cmon now, show me what you’ve got this time” And it’s always the same. I guess you could say I got bored by it. I don’t know when the mental shift started, but it happened and I just became desensitized over time. Then I started discovering the way to sleeping great is actually sleeping less. My sweet spot is between 6-7 hours, actually people sleeping this amount is very healthy and live longer than those doing 7.5-8 hours according to a NYTimes article. I had hit both ends of my sleep journey, so to speak. When I slept 5 hours, I woke up very sleepy, dazed and would be sleepy all day. Conversely if I did 7-8.5 hours, I would also wake up tired, fatigued and lacking energy all day plus I couldn’t sleep at night. So now I only sleep 6-7, I found I slept more deeply and woke up feeling refreshed and energetic. I guess for many “insomniacs”, the real lesson here is that you sleep your best when you actually sleep less. Has it ever occurred to you that you might need less sleep than you actually think? That it is your lying in and occasional oversleeping that keeps those sleepless nights coming back. The average sleeping duration for the normal person is actually only about 6-6.5 hours. So if you had 7-9 hours days wedged in between, you are probably more likely to experience sleepless days down the road. All this is just a way that your body is regulating itself, so that over the longer timeframe your average sleep duration stays pretty much the same. Nothing is actually wrong with getting 4 hours if you were routinely sleeping more than you actually need to start with.Hi!
Since you sleep during the day, what do you do at nights when you are not sleeping? Are you taking naps?You said you average 4 hours per night, over how long have you arrived at this average? Have you maybe missed out on some days where you slept for 6,7 or more hours that you failed to account for and perhaps only choose to fixate on those days where you slept much less and are stressing over this?
So if you choose to fixate on this 4 hours average, what is it about 4 hours of sleep that stresses you much? I will put the question to you in another way. How many calories per day do you eat? 2000, 2500, maybe 3000? So let’s say you only ate 1800 or 1500 per day for a week, would you stress too much about it? Or let’s say you somehow convinced yourself you have to breathe 300 times/minute, eat 10,000 calories per day and you became convinced something horrible is going to happen to your health if you don’t, that you can’t function at all, ask yourself do these concerns have any rational basis at all? Because here’s the thing about breathing, eating, peeing, pooing and sleeping, all these processes are controlled by your own body, it decides what’s enough and it’d be quite ridiculous and even dumb to worry about such things and trying to actively control them. Just let them be!
If there is no concept of time, you don’t know what time it is, only going by sunrise and sunset, and everyone just go to sleep when really sleepy and wake up when they have enough, will insomnia then exist at all? Will anyone know how much they slept? Answer is no in both cases, because they let their body decide how much is enough, just as naturally as breathing and eating. It is when we try to force ourselves to sleep X hours, saying to ourselves that we must sleep between 10pm and 6am or whatever timetable we set ourselves, that we need to do things to sleep like CBT-i, ACT, taking pills or whatever, that puts us in a sticky situtation, because we are trying to take control away from our own bodies which decide such things, that is not only impossible but also silly and futile. I hope you get the message. Go back to basics if you have to, sleep when really sleepy, eat when only hungry, because that’s how it’s supposed to be! Accept that if you can’t sleep or eat at a particular time, then it must mean you just aren’t sleepy or hungry at that moment in time. But they’ll eventually come back. Best wishes!
