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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.
Dreams are a normal part of sleep, if you want to sleep, then you have to accept all that comes with it with no prejudice.
Hello Steve!
My initial experience with insomnia was due to a health reason. Previously I had many nights with little sleep, on and off, but they never bothered me because sleep didn’t show on my radar so my sleep always went back to normal. Then because of a health scare, I didn’t sleep for 24 hours and that was the first time sleep became an obessesion and I thought this was extremely serious and I could die from it. Long story short, I now realise nothing can be further from the truth. Nobody can ever forget or lose the ability to sleep, this thing is hard-wired inside everyone, just that you may or may not be aware of it. Sleep works exactly like hunger, if you are deprived of food for a long time, then you naturally just get hungry. Likewise you go on for long time without sleep, for normal people this is around 16-18 hours of continuous wakefulness, you just naturally get sleepy. Everything is entirely regulated by your own body so trying to actively control it is pointless and even stupid.Put it this way, do you try to control your breathing? Do you tell yourself you must breathe 200-300x a minute because you are somehow convinced you become deprived of oxygen if you don’t? No, it is pointless because your body does this for you! This is exactly what we are trying to do with our sleep. It doesn’t matter. Your body will make you sleep if it really needs it, if you don’t then it must mean:
1. Your body is well-rested and doesn’t need it (6 hours is enough for most people),
2. You are too worried and stressed over something, in this case, getting poor or little sleep. Even in this instance, your body will still make you sleep enough to keep you alive, so worrying about it is not only futile but also completely needless and unnecessary.To get over this, you have to stop fearing poor sleep. And you can only do this when you become aware that sleep doesn’t really affect the quality of your day. Insomnia is also very much an obessesion about sleep, and the entire thing feeds off the attention, when the attention stops, it just dies. Best wishes.
Hi Flight11
Very common part of the recovery journey! Which typically starts as a fear of unable to fall sleep, then this slowly warps into getting scared when falling asleep too! Isn’t it ironic? First you are scared you can’t fall asleep, now you are scared of falling asleep. Be rational with yourself, isn’t sleeping what you want so why are you stopping it now? Laugh at yourself, think how silly this all is. Then accept it and be patient. Tell yourself it is okay, it’s all part of the journey to sleeping better, you’ve made progress and accepting that this ‘fading out’ can happen several times before you finally doze off as you let go of the struggle. As you slowly get used to them, they should happen less. Best wishes to you.Greetings!
This is a common fear among many insomniacs, a fear that your health will get damaged and you end up dying but absolutely nothing can further from the truth! You give your body way less credit than it deserves for its ability to fall asleep. Because the human body is hard-wired for sleep, you can’t damage or alter it in any way even if you wanted to, even if you somehow managed to survive a nuclear blast, your sleep system would still be very much intact and robust. Challenge yourself! Try staying up the whole night, you might get through one night but the second or third night would be impossible, your body’s need for sleep is so great you would crash right into sleeping almost immediately, and you WILL sleep standing up or hung upside down, it doesn’t matter. So this fear of not sleeping is absolutely false, it’s just you being unreasonable and trying to control it when you don’t need nor have any reason to and can’t because nobody can control sleep. It’s a natural phenomenon that just happens. So just get in and out bed at your usual times or a bit later, never modify your current sleep patterns by going to bed earlier or taking medications, you will find that you can sleep, all this fear is way overblown and has been a hoax all along. Best wishes.Greetings Steve!
Everyone gets occasional sleep disruption whenever they encounter a major life event, such as moving to a new place or starting on a new job. This is completely normal! Then when event passes, your sleep usually gets back on track by itself. If it doesn’t, this usually means you are getting caught up in this insomnia trap, unwilling to experience some sleep disruption and have made this into such a big deal that your entire day becomes engulfed by it. Just stop playing the game. Accept and expect that you will have some sleep disruption and it’s okay. Don’t make sleep your focus in daily life. Do things that you enjoy and not because you want to make sleep happen. Take on that new job, don’t read before bed if you don’t enjoy it. Play games, watch movies or do whatever interests you. Just stop making sleep a goal in life! Good luck and I believe you will slowly get back on track as you begin letting go. So many have left the struggle because they stopped controlling and obesessing about sleep, and you can do this too! Best wishes.
