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Greetings!
Have you ever reasoned that you or your mind has warped this fear of not sleeping now into this fear of actually falling asleep? Since you go to bed to sleep, and you feel you are already sleepy, so how come now you are afraid of falling asleep because isn’t that what you want? Try to find the rationale in this, if any! Because there’s none and your mind has completely turned something into something else that doesn’t make sense. Going forward, try not fight the fear of bad sleep, accept that it’s going to take a while to settle down and that’s okay! You will eventually doze off at some point, it may be a bit longer than normal people for now, that’s understandable because you’ve lived with this fear for so long. Give yourself lots of time and patience. It will settle down eventually and then as you begin letting go, these episodes will happen less and you’ll fall asleep faster. Just try not to struggle, let whatever happen to happen or kinda expect it will be like this every night, in a way. Give yourself permission to rest in bed while giving time for your anxious mind to settle down and that everything’s fine and will work out eventually. Ultimately to get over insomnia, you have to stop fearing poor or little sleep. That’s how it works! Hope you find this useful and best wishes.Hi DK!
I didn’t use an alarm for my sleep at all when doing cbti. I did try once but I was always waking up before it and so I ended up lying there in bed, trying to sleep but at the back of my mind, i knew the alarm was going to ring at anytime and this anticipation just kept me from falling back asleep! So i stopped it and just relied on the birds singing outside my room as wakeup time. I knew the birds would be making noises around 6am so when i hear them, i know it’s around 6am. Early in the course, i would get out of bed around this time and later on, i refused to get up even after hearing the birds because I wanted to sleep more and I was always getting it! Now i get out of bed between 730-8 am, way past the time when the birds would be singing, I have absolutely no problems sleeping through all their noises because my body already got used to them. Now my bedtime is 11pm-8am plus a 20-30 min nap between 1-4 pm. I sleep fine like this, I don’t necessarily need to sleep in all that time; I am fine with just staying in bed not sleeping. I know 5-6 hours is already enough for me to function during the day, anything extra is just bonus and I very often do end up sleeping during my time in bed even if originally my intention was to just relax. Because I am so calm and relaxed in bed that I always end up getting sleepy. Best wishes to you!Greetings!
I am sorry to hear about your experience in your long post. Fortunately, as a recovered person, I can tell you there’s absolutely nothing wrong with you and there’s nothing medically wrong with your insomnia either! You are just in a state of confusion all along, instead of thinking not sleeping as a disease or problem, it is actually more likely to be due to being well or adequately rested therefore no issues here! You need to find ways to convince yourself in this direction otherwise you will continue to struggle indefinitely. Try to think back to times when you had little sleep but achieved a lot or had a great time because you wanted to be up and didn’t see not sleeping as a huge problem. Things like studying all night for an exam, taking a long haul flight or preparing for an important interview. Then your sleep recovered all on its own, didn’t it? In your dilemma, there’s actually no problem but seeing it as a problem becomes the real problem. Makes sense??In regards to relearning sleep, absolutely nothing to relearn here, because your body already knows how to sleep since you were born. This ability can never be lost therefore there’s no relearning required. Just keeping to a regular bedtime schedule is all you need. Think of sleep like hunger, after you eat, of course your hunger is less, sleep is exactly like that, you don’t need to relearn how to eat!
Be patient and continue educating yourself about sleep. Then when you start to see the bigger picture, you begin to understand how silly this all is. Best wishes.
Hello DK!
Sleeping a bit worse after some improvement is extremely common! This is a very clear sign of improvement and you are on the path to sleeping well. If you slept badly then of course good sleep comes due to the built up sleep drive. Similarly, sleeping bit worse after sleeping well is due the reduced sleep drive after sleeping better. In the same way your hunger is reduced or disappeared after eating, this is exactly the same thing with sleep. So everything is normal and nothing suggests your insomnia is coming back, but on contrary it actually means you are getting better! You will find your nights typically happen like this: bad – good – good – bad – good, the pattern just keeps repeating itself. Once you understand how this works, you will start letting go of control and then you slowly begin see permanent improvement. Occasional bad nights will still happen but you don’t react like before anymore and you don’t struggle as much. Try to remember the times when you didn’t worry about little sleep. Like studying the whole night for an exam, taking a long haul flight crossing multiple time zones or preparing for a tough job interview. After that, your sleep normally recovers on its own. Well this time is exactly the same, no difference. This difficult episode will pass as always and then your sleep will come back and hopefully you become immune to future insomnia as you now understand exactly what’s going on and sleep doesn’t develop into a major issue. Best wishes!Greetings Angeli!
The secret recipe is try less. Less is more! Then slowly you begin to realise this is not a “combat” at all, who are you fighting with?? Your own body? It doesn’t make sense. Sleep is something your own body decides all by itself, it has been like that since you were born, just like hunger and breathing. Let your body do all the work, because doing so many things to make you sleep like medications, meditations, etc actually tires you out more, but actually the most tiring is the mental struggle against an inexistent enemy, that is very exhausting! And still you don’t sleep after trying so hard! So just give up and abandon the fight, accept that this will be the way forward for sometime and by being very patient, your sleep will slowly improve. Best wishes!Hi DK!
when i was doing cbti, i would just get up and start my day early. So early wake up = less time sleeping = more wakeful hours during the day = better sleep at night.Now almost a year later, i dont do that anymore. I just go back to sleep whenever i wake up too early and can usually fall back asleep and sleep for another 1-2 hours. I also frequently take naps during the day as well, as i dont follow a sleep window and i dont care how i sleep during the night and i do whatever i want in bed (play games on my phone, watch YouTube or whatever). I am breaking almost every rule of cbti except the regular bedtime schedule and i still sleep great!
Greetings!
Doing sleep restriction is only to make you feel sleepy at regular times, it doesn’t guarantee sleep will happen. Sleep is entirely controlled only by your own body and nothing else except being awake long enough. Sufficient wakefulness is the only thing that makes sleep much more likely to happen. Everyone doing the course must understand this.Getting out of bed also doesn’t guarantee you will sleep either! So if you get out of bed only to make sleep happen, it can make it worse because you are trying so hard! Getting out of bed is meant for you to be okay with being awake, so it doesn’t matter if you get out of bed or not, the idea is to get the pressure off sleeping then sleep comes easier. Good luck and best wishes.
Greetings!
Nobody has any control over sleep and waking up, all of this is decided by your own body. Sleep also tends to get a bit “worse” as you start sleeping better, instead of thinking this is all bad, on the contrary these are all signs of sleeping better, not worse. Good/Bad nights are just opposite sides of the same coin so bad nights tend to follow good nights and vice versa. So everything is quite normal at this point. I wouldn’t be getting into all kinds of activities like meditating etc when waking up because this reinforces the idea that waking up is abnormal; I would just go back to bed to rest and eventually fall asleep. I also suspect the time to fall back asleep will get shorter as you progress along. Just don’t overreact to any waking up or bad nights episodes and you will do fine. Best wishes to you.Nah it wasn’t those pills that made you sleep. It’s your own body that made you sleep all this time, and you slept well after those nights of not sleeping and the built-up sleep pressure and not from those pills. It doesn’t matter what you think or worry about all day, your body will make you sleep regardless, with or without the pills.
Nah you won’t die from not sleeping due to severe anxiety. Sleep and anxiety can happen at the same time. Even if you wanted to stay up for days, your body just won’t let it, at some point you will crash to sleep
Hello!
This could be due to sleeping at irregular hours and sleeping during the day. From now on, just get into and out of bed at regular times regardless of how you slept on any night. Your body should respond within a few weeks to the new sleep window.Hello!
5.5 hours is too short, 6 hours should be the minimum. And waking up after 5 hours is normal, most people get up to use the toilet then go back to bed to sleep after that. How many hours do you usually sleep after taking ambien? Do you know the average sleep duration don’t vary much whether you take meds or not, because it isn’t meds that cause you to sleep, it’s your own body and it’s always been your body that made you sleep all this while. Sleepiness works based on the amount of time spent awake (16-18 hours are normal) and nothing else. I would go for the amount of time you slept when you took ambien, and then just always go to bed at regular times.Greetings! A stretch of good nights of oversleeping can cause an occasional insomnia which is normal and happens to everyone. If you stop making a big deal out of this, your sleep will get back on track all on its own.
Guys! There is nothing that can help you to sleep except sufficient wakefulness. So you need to stop going down rabbit holes of doing stuffs in hopes getting more sleep, because these are sleep efforts and they only dent your sleep confidence. Just go to bed based on number of hours you are awake, usually 16-18 hours of wakefulness is sufficient to generate 6-8 hours of sleep, provided you are very patient and not excessively worried. Waking up in between is normal too. Sleep is simple once you understand it, by not treating it as some mysterious black box that always needs to be deciphered.
