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Hello everyone!
As someone who’s completely recovered, I can tell you sleep ability is all about self-confidence or a lack of it. If you think you can’t sleep, are abnormal, are unlike other normal sleepers or need to do a ton of things like taking meds, then you won’t sleep. The story you tell about your sleep is self-fulfilling. Normal sleepers are able to go to bed and sleep because they are confident of it and expect to sleep, therefore absolutely nothing to worry about. Then falling asleep becomes natural and effortless. This is what everyone with sleeping problems needs to work towards at, regaining that confidence. Therefore anything that undermines that confidence like taking meds, and endlessly seeking so-called cures are counterproductive and will needlessly prolong the recovery. A complete lack of effort towards achieving sleep, staying awake for the sufficient amount (16-18 hours) and developing an optimistic, carefree attitude towards how you slept and feel during the day will work wonders. In my worst, I could go for 2 days without sleeping, now I’m doing 7-9 hours every night and wake up feeling I could sleep more!Greetings!
So only sleeping badly for a month? Now is the perfect time to nip it in the bud, before it and problematic thoughts start creeping in and become more entrenched. Your insomnia is caused and perpetuated by nothing else but your misconcepted perceptions about sleep and therefore how you think and perceive sleep. The best thing to do after bad night or nights, is always nothing. Don’t react to it and it goes away usually. Just keep to your regular bedtimes and your sleep should get back on track. Don’t try to fix anything, and this is key! Otherwise, you go down the rabbit hole of trying endless stuffs and when they don’t work, that’s when bad thoughts will start flooding in, and you begin believing you can’t sleep normally, aren’t normal, or something is broken with you. The more you buy into these thoughts, the worse your insomnia gets! They become self-fulfilling. The key thing to recover from insomnia is to build confidence that you can sleep all on your own, and the only way to do that is actually doing nothing for sleep! Then when you start sleeping all on your own, your confidence improves and then better sleep happens, your confidence improves some more and then you sleep better and better! Insomnia is nothing but just a set of bad thoughts inside your head spreading falsehoods which you actually believe! That’s it. To recover, you just need to disbelieve them and prove them all wrong. Good luck!Greetings!
I really don’t think wearable sleep tracking is useful to you in any way. It just gives you your sleep history which is already in the past, nothing you can do about it and does absolutely nothing to help you sleep well in the future. On the other hand, it could give more butterflies in the stomach. Because if it says you slept less, you get anxious over it. Then when it says you actually slept more, you get anxious either because you start developing questions and what-ifs senarios. So when will the lesson ever be learnt? Nobody ever sleeps well from obessesing over it. Truly giving up control over sleep means no clock watching, no sleep tracking of any kind and absolutely not caring how you sleep.Greetings!
I do remember I had a similar episode like yours where during my drifting off to sleep, my thoughts and dreams kinda merge together and I couldn’t figure out when the transition actually happened. It’s like my thoughts started developing a mind of their own and began turning into stories all by themselves. I also remember getting scared of this transition because I was scared of getting bad or weird dreams (I once watched a video about Jamal Khoshoggi’s murder then early that next morning, I dreamt I was the one getting butchered and cut up like Jamal), but eventually I grew out of them over time. Now they don’t bother me anymore, I just my mind wander on its own, then inevitably would begin dreaming (thereby falling asleep) effortlessly without the need to monitor when that transition occurs because there’s no need nor any reason to. Now when I wake up, I don’t remember what I dreamt about anymore when previously I used to have really vivid dreams that could wake me up with my heart pounding. I think what you now need is to just relax and let everything fall into place. Hope you find this useful. Best wishes!Greetings!
Your experiences are a normal part of the recovery. You have by now gained greater confidence in sleeping on your own but still not 100% confidence, and perhaps still having that fear of regressing. All that is normal. Your goal is to reach absolute 110% sleep confidence where there is no shred of a doubt inside your mind that you can sleep unaided. When that happens, you know you are recovered and that’s how all normal sleepers sleep too. By then you realise all that empty talk inside your head trying to scare you with sleepless nights are completely rubbish. Keep going and you will get there.I recommend you go to success stories section and read how others dealt with their sleep anxieties. Basically stop the fighting, stop avoiding bad nights like the plague, stop the struggle, really and truly giving up control over sleep. Practise as much acceptance as you can instead of avoidance. Always be kind to yourself, be non judgmental about how you sleep on a particular night. Start every night on a fresh page with optimism and confidence. Try not to be too attached to the outcome. Treat sleep not as an achievement where you must sleep X hours, but more as a process which you have no complete control over which you can make more likely to happen once you know you are awake a sufficient amount (at least 16 hours). You can do this, so many people have overcome their sleeping problems and absolutely no reason why you can’t either. Good luck.
Hello
Yours is a very typical story. When you’ve made progress, it becomes completely natural and humanly to want to protect that progress made so far plus the relentless drive to make further improvements becomes all too enticing. Your mind will come up with a million things that it thinks could affect your sleep and will keep asking you to take care of them. You then go down the rabbit hole of trying endless sleep efforts, as your mind bombards you with thoughts like “what if I do this or that” , “was it the melatonin that made me sleep well” and the list goes on and on. Then before you know it, you fall right back into that dark, bottomless pit of insomnia as you become completely consumed in your obessesion with sleep. My advice is to always ignore those thoughts and the temptations to try different things, and to accept whatever outcome you get. You can listen to your mind, acknowledge those thoughts but do not fight them because it is futile (you can never win a battle against your own mind). Just choose to do absolutely nothing. The key is always acceptance with whatever your mind presents you with. Accept whatever thoughts and outcome you get, so over time, you train your mind to not focus only on results and outcome, to become less attached to them. Then as you sleep better, your confidence will improve and thoughts have less power over you until you are not bothered with them anymore. Then comes the point where you know you can and will sleep no matter what your mind says. That’s when you know you are truly recovered. When you’ve recovered, you may even laugh at yourself when your mind tries to scare you into believing that you can’t sleep because you know it’s completely false. Building up your confidence is key. Good luck!
Hello Kelly
Keep going! Ultimately you want to replace the words “I hope” to “I know I can” or “I just can so I’m not worried anymore”. Best of luck.I see that you are a client so maybe it’d be best to refer to your coach on how to address those issues. I have also written extensively and nothing has changed since then. It is your mindset and thoughts that’s keeping you up, refusing to give up control over sleep, refusing to experience discomfort and refusing to accept nothing less than a “perfect sleep”. Your worries always remain regardless of how you sleep anyway, so why bother anymore?? Over time, you start to realise the futility of it all and you give up trying or controlling, that’s when you start sleeping really well! It will take time to remove deeply ingrained thoughts and behavior. Remain patient and committed!
Hello Connold!
The thing about anxiety is the more you try to escape it, the more hold it has over you. The whole thing then spirals out of control and you get caught up in the vicious cycle. Look up Dr Claire Weekes and her method for treating anxiety disorders. Basically stop escaping your fears and confront them head on. Sometime even challenge them by saying “Is that all you got??” Over time, you get accustomed to them and are not afraid anymore.Are you sleeping at regular times? Getting into and out of bed at regular times are crucial for sleeping well, especially the getting out of bed! Normal human beings need 16-18 hours of wakefulness in order to generate 6-8 hours of sleep. So if you have had a disrupted night and you then compensate for it by sleeping in and/or going to bed earlier the following night, you run into problems of not sleeping or having fragmented sleep. From now on, just get up of bed at the same time every day regardless of how you slept. No sleeping in, naps or going to bed earlier. But you can go to bed later just not earlier, whatever the time you went to bed, always get up at the same time because that’s how you get the 16-18 hours of wakefulness to generate sufficient sleep drive to fall asleep and stay asleep. Just do this for at least several weeks and your sleep will improve. Stop any clock watching and go completely timeless. Resist the urge to track or monitor your sleep.
You will find after sleeping well, you find it taking longer to fall asleep or you may wake up earlier than you want. This is normal and to be expected. Ignoring them the best you can will help your sleep improve further with time. Utimately you reach a stage where you have absolute confidence in your ability to sleep and sleep great, like all normal sleepers! Be patient, persevere and try to be non judgmental about how you slept for a particular night. Good luck!
Hello Connold!
Your story is so very normal and you are not going crazy. You are just overreacting to a natural phenomenon. Nobody knows why hypnic jerks happen, but they frequently occur during times of intense fatigue or heightened arousal, as in your case. Normal sleep happens like this: slowly, slowly then all at once, before you even know it. It’s kinda like being in an airplane during landing, very rough when it first hits the ground, bounces off then hits the ground less roughly again then everything just smooths out after that. Go to youtube and research hypnic jerks, there’s plenty out there including one by Martin Reed. Good luck. Once you start not reacting so strongly to them, your sleep will get back on track. Good luck!Hello Kelly!
You are doing fine, in fact you are doing very well because it shows you can sleep without aids. What you need now is building self-confidence in sleeping on your own. At this moment what is your level of confidence? Do you think these statements are true to you? “I’m not a normal sleeper, I’m not like everyone else.”, “Other people can go to bed and sleep, I just don’t or I’m unsure.” If these ring true to you, then it’s your mindset that’s keeping you from sleeping. It’s only when you reach the stage where you are 100% sure of your sleep ability, you start sleeping well again. Continue doing your cbt-i techniques of going and getting out of bed at regular times as you build your confidence. I recommend you go to youtube and search for this video “cure your chronic insomnia by effortless sleep method” by yousquared. A lot of universal truths about sleep there in that short 10 min video.You are a critical junction of the recovery path and building confidence is of utmost importance. Therefore don’t go down the rabbit hole of seeking cures, trying endlessly to find “something” else other than your own ability. That will only take you further deeper into the hole of insomnia as it undermines your own confidence. The story you tell about your sleep *will* eventually come true. Therefore if you don’t believe you can sleep unaided or are unsure, it becomes self-fulfilling.
Do only these two things:
1. Continue keeping to a regular bed time schedule.
2. Stop trying so hard to sleep = being okay with wakefulness = building self confidence = believing you can sleep on your own.You will start sleeping more as your confidence improves. Be patient and persevere. Good luck!
Hello Bee!
Great to hear you’ve made progress! You are finally experiencing true natural sleep which is surely better than 8 hours of drugged sleep. I read your post and the thing is this: *The story you tell yourself about your sleep WILL come true*. Which is exactly what’s happening in your case. Go to youtube and search for “Cure chronic insomnia by the effortless method” by Yousquared based on the book “The effortless sleep method” by Sasha Stephens. It is just a 10 minute video but is full of the universal truths about sleep. Ultimately you want to get to the stage where you have complete confidence in your ability to sleep, much like every normal sleeper. Keep going and you will get there! Good luck!Very good video on youtube on insomnia based on the book “An effortless sleeping method” by Sasha Stephens. Search “Cure Chronic Insomnia with The Effortless Sleep Method” by YouSquared. Only 10 mins long but full of universal truths about sleep. The ultimate clutch to get you sleeping and indeed also for everyone else is to “believe in the ability to sleep, all on your own”. All recovery paths no matter how different they look will take you to this place eventually.
Hi Sophia
Very typical story of a path toward recovery. I told you after sleeping well, you will find it harder and taking longer to sleep at first or you might wake earlier than you want to. All these are manifestations of sleeping well because of reduced sleep drive. Just continue the regular getting in and out of bed at consistent times, and personally, I wouldn’t get out of bed when I cant sleep, I just lay there and let sleep catch me. Good luck.
