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Hello Tlusebrink
You are on the right track! By doing these 3 things you will do extremely well:
1. Have a regular bedtime schedule. Trying not to sleep at other times. This alone is 75-80% of the work already.
2. Being NATTO, aka, not attached to the outcome, ie, not attached to how you sleep. Trying to create a distance between your thoughts and emotional well-being and acknowledge that many things your brain warns you about, especially about sleep, are way overblown and dead wrong. Over time this will get easier as you begin letting go.
3. Try your best not to research too much on sleep, or have too many questions because of over thinking and just accepting sleep as it is. I found sleep is basically just a numbers game. If I am up for 16-18 hours continously, then sleep is extremely likely to happen because sleep drive works a lot like hunger and accumulates the longer you go on without it. Best wishes.Hello
Your story is so extremely familiar and very typical of a person struggling to sleep. It almost always starts with a poor night, and then you begin to panic over it because of perceived bad outcomes like purported health consequences or having a bad day at work. This then develops into an obessesion and you end up trying countless methods to “fix your sleep” or “figure this out”. My advice is don’t go down this rabbit hole of trying the various fixes because there’s nothing wrong with you. Your sleeplessness isn’t the problem, but you thinking that there’s a problem, that becomes the problem in itself.Your most effective solution to break the cycle of insomnia is to always not react strongly to poor nights and continuing your normal bedtime routine, practicing non attachment, being non judgmental on how you sleep and a lot of patience. Ultimately you want to reach the stage where you have complete confidence in yourself agian. Normal people sleep well because they are confident of sleeping and having this confidence back is what you want to achieve. For most people with sleeping problems, they continue to have problems because they get impatient with the process and become frustrated with how long it’s taking. Don’t commit this common mistake! Just get into and out of bed at your regular times, don’t worry if you can’t sleep well initially, don’t track your sleep by clock watching or using sleep tracking devices, be patient and compassionate to yourself if poor nights happen (which is common anyway because everyone gets bad nights occasionally) and truly believe that your sleep will get back on track over time. This is how you will recover. Best wishes.
Hello Galina!
Thanks for sharing your knowledge and experience. You finally see the light in this! That saying rings as true for sleep as
for eating which is “sleep to live, not live to sleep”.Hello Edgar!
The best quick fix is do nothing. Challenge your deeply- ingrained notion that “you absolutely MUST sleep, by hook or by crook”. It’s perhaps your unwillingness or even stubborness to explore the other side that you can still do well despite sleeping less
and coupled with your impatience and frustration why results aren’t coming quick enough that you continue to run into trouble for years now?Hello Cindy
Just one word. WOW. Thank you for sharing your inspiring story. I guess everyone’s journey is slightly different but they all lead to the same place. Towards having that confidence of being able to sleep naturally again and that nothing you do or think can shake that confidence. As well as enjoying bedtime and sleeping again, as you so eloquently describe it. For me, I realise keeping a distance between my thoughts and emotions are key to my recovery and the realization that sleep is just a numbers game. Eventually I manage to keep my thoughts so distant from affecting me that they become fleeting (comes and goes) and sometimes I even laugh at myself for reacting so strongly before. I eventually came to realize that if I am up for X hours, then sleep is extremely likely to happen. I began letting go and trusting my body again. Congratulations on your newborn and I hope you find smashing success in your music career.Hello Chez,
If you can’t sleep past 6 hours, have you ever entertained the possibility that you actually do not need to sleep more than 6 hours per night? Well if you have eliminated some of the possible causes, those left behind become much more likely and if only one is left, then that must be one. Our sleep changes as we age and older people do need less sleep. Perhaps stop comparing how you sleep now to before when you were much younger? Ironically, one of the most effectively cures for insomnia is to stop seeking answers and becoming more accepting of your own body. Try it. Stop researching sleep, stop seeing the professionals and not caring how much or how you sleep from now on. Just have a regular bedtime schedule. Sometimes that can be the final piece of the puzzle, to give up completely. Best wishes to you.Hi! Martin is right about dreaming in the later part of the night when sleep drive is diminished. So what about dreaming, which is normal, that bothers you since you aren’t even having nightmares? Why aren’t you allowing a normal part of sleep to happen and fretting over it unnecessarily? Dreaming isn’t the problem here, thinking of it as a problem becomes your problem and you are starting to get in the way of normal sleep. If I told you that not dreaming isn’t normal and may in fact, hurt your brain by increasing your risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s, would you feel better about having dreams and therefore sleeping again? This is attitude you need to develop, by saying to yourself “There’s nothing wrong with me, just go back to sleep, nothing to solve here”. Dreams are a way the human brain removes wastes and consolidate memories by organizing them more efficiently. Think of it like disk defragmenting of your computer. All these is done to improve normal operation and efficiency of your machine. Trust your own body, it knows what it’s doing to keep you in good shape. I hope you found this useful and best wishes.
Hello Chez,
Sleep is always difficult if you keep trying to troubleshoot and solve it, like going to different doctors, constantly asking for advice, cures, tips and etc. Insomnia isn’t really the problem, seeing it as a problem becomes the problem. Keep it simple, always! Doing nothing is best, which is your best chance for a cure. The only simple things you need to sleep well are only two:
1. Get into and out of bed only at regular times, and not sleeping in or taking naps at other times even at weekends. This is 75-80% of the work already. Just figure out how much sleep you need (I recommend starting at 6.5 hours and then slowly extending that out in 15 min intervals by going to bed earlier while keeping out of bed time the same as your sleep duration improves)
2. Be patient and stop trying so hard so sleep. This is key and why so many people fail. It is often the impatience and frustration with how long it takes that make insomnia stickier. If you find yourself waking up too early, as most people do, even normal sleepers, just go back to bed, even to rest if you can’t sleep. Eventually you find you can sleep, even for just 5 mins and this becomes the initial proof that you can sleep. That 5 mins then develops into 10, 15, 30, 45 mins, 1 hour even 2 hours over time as your sleep confidence improves. Eventually you become so confident about sleeping that insomnia doesn’t bother you anymore and that’s when you are fully recovered. Best wishes and good luck to you.Hello Elizabeth.ca
It is often the impatience, and the frustration of how long it takes that make sleep issues stickier for a lot of people. Ultimately it is the start of giving up doing too much to sleep and the mental shift from seeing insomnia as a problem towards being okay with *any* amount of sleep that huge improvements start to be made. You may not even know when the mental shift starts but it often begins with caring
less, bit by bit, about how you sleep, besides that also setting a reasonable amount of time for sleep (6-8 hours) and most importantly a regular bedtime schedule that sets you on the path to sleeping well again. Good luck.Hello Hannah
Thank you for sharing. And that was a great podcast with Martin in youtube, I watched it until the very last minute eventhough I am fully recovered myself. The one thing you said that hit home for me, “…but I have to say over time, I do not remember when it happened, I did start to care a little bit less about sleeping… I didn’t do any tricking of my mind. It just over time, it just happened. I just started realizing.” Sleep problems primarily exist from an unhealthy obessesion over it and the overdoing of things to try to control sleep. Thanks for sharing.Greetings
You should get up at the same time each day regardless of how long you slept. This way you are able to build sleep drive so you get sufficiently sleepy at your regular bedtime. Your sleep drive depends on the amount of hours spent awake continously, ideally you want to go to bed after at least 16-17 hours awake. Best wishes to you…Perhaps it’s best to consult your doctor on this. I doubt anyone here can dispense medical advice without a physical evaluation. Maybe you have an underlying health condition that’s causing your sleeplessness. Good luck!
Greetings Jacob
I’m not going to write a long post because I’m giving this issue way more attention than it needs to. But briefly, before this, how were you sleeping and did you have the same “problems” you described like noise etc and yet have no trouble sleeping because you weren’t even thinking about it? If yes, then they are not the problem, your mindset about sleep is! In many ways than not, actively trying to solve something that is beyond your control becomes the problem. I’m sorry I can’t help you any further, I doubt anyone can! Best wishes to you.Greetings Dlupu!
5 years can’t sleep?? That is impossible, so you must mean not sleeping well for 5 years. Yet there you still are, alive and still able to come on here, type something and share your problem in a forum. What more proof do you want that not sleeping well can’t hurt you?? Forget about sleep and you will start sleeping well again, just get into and out of bed at regular times and stop obessesing over it, your cure is as simple as that! Your insomnia isn’t the problem, but you thinking it as a problem becomes the problem, get it??Greetings Hbhigg!
Excellent insight there. You are slowly getting there!
Insomnia is really not a problem. Seeing it as a problem becomes the problem. Realising this is the key to overcoming insomnia and build sleep confidence.Going forward, if you want to sleep more, get off any form of sleep tracking and go completely timeless where you don’t know how much you slept. This gesture is a powerful act of giving up control. Set it and forget it. You go to bed at X and get out at Y. What happens in between in regards to sleep you don’t care nor figure out anything about. Best wishes…
