Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
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.Greetings!
Unfortunately, anxiety is not something that typing away on some forum like this one will help resolve. Most people will only truly get through it by willing to experience it, inviting it, expecting it or even welcoming it as they become more adventurous. This is the basis of the Claire Weekes’ method. Then slowly over time, they just get desensitized by whatever they are anxious about and they no longer fear their fears. By then, they start realizing these fears aren’t real threats at all and it’s all just being a state of confusion. Your brain has mistaken a false threat such as believing you have lost your ability to sleep which is completely 100% false with a real one, like encountering a real tiger. Best wishes and you can do this too!Hello Boylston
I think getting more sleep would help. Try sleeping in. Or taking the occasional naps. In general, relax your bedtime rules. Even better, start having no rules. This is how I sleep now, I sleep whenever my body lets me. And now I don’t get sleepy before bedtime, I sometimes even stay up later than usual. Stop making sleep a goal in life. One thing I found out about my sleep, it is easier to fall sleep at the end of the sleep window than at the start so getting up later might help. But this almost always means you will become more alert further into the evening. Best wishes!
Hello and greetings!
At this stage, I wouldn’t get caught up in the finer details. 6 good nights then one not so good night, at this point, ask yourself, is it imperative you must have 7/7 good nights? All you need to know is that your body can sleep. And I will add that good/bad nights are just opposite sides of the same coin, so it is normal to get an occasional difficult night after a series of good nights, that is completely normal and happens to everyone! I think once you understand this, you begin to let go of the struggle, start living life again and not let sleep hinder you anymore. Best wishes!Greetings to you.
Unfortunately sleep is not something that anyone has any control over. Your current sleep pattern may have something to do with aging as people do sleep less as they get older. What you could do is try to strengthen your sleep-awake cycle by going and getting out of bed at a consistent times. Resist the urge to nap at other times. Try this for a few weeks and see if your body responds favorably. If it doesn’t, then allow less time for nocturnal sleep at night plus take a midday nap to get you through the rest of the day. A greater frequency of older people do tend to take naps too so like I said, this may be due to aging which unfortunately you can’t do anything about. Whatever the outcome, I wish you the best and thank you for participating in this forum.Greetings!
Usually that happens when trying to sleep with a weak sleep drive. A.K.A not sleepy. Try to go to bed after 16-18 hours of continuous wakefulness. Or when you are really sleepy, such as difficulty keeping awake, head nodding off, eyes really heavy. Keep to a
regular bedtime so you get sleepy by the same time each
night. Best wishes!Greetings!
Are you anxious or worried because you can’t sleep? If you are, then that’s quite possibly the reason, it’s that worry over poor sleep that keeps you up!Or, if you aren’t, then your body just doesn’t need that much sleep anymore. Think about it for a moment. Sleep is when our bodies repair itself and also when we make ourselves most vulnerable to any attack. So ideally, the body will only make anyone sleep just enough. Or in other words, sleeping time is down time and it’s maintenance time only. If you sleep less than you used to, it simply means your body just doesn’t need that much anymore. It may be because you have taken so well of yourself, by eating well, keeping a healthy weight and cultivating healthy habits.
Try to pay less attention to your sleep and go by how you feel about yourself and during the day. People usually sleep their best when they don’t think much about it and therefore not chasing it. When it comes to sleep, it’s often thinking that there’s a problem that becomes the problem! Good luck and best wishes.
Greetings!
What racing thoughts are you talking about? About sleep or something else totally unrelated?Greetings!
Great to hear that. If you really do just 2-3 hours of sleep per day, it would be almost impossible to concentrate on anything during the day, and you would be crashing to sleep almost anywhere, even standing up. It would also be extremely difficult to not take naps and a lot of people just give in.Could you at least learn to trust your own body? Leave sleep all alone to your own body. Because it knows how to sleep, much like it knows how to eat and breathe to keep you alive. Then as you start letting go of control, you sleep better and longer and then the occasional difficult night(s) would creep in, you’d have an occasional difficulty falling asleep at start of bedtime and the sleepiness way before bedtime would start disappearing, all this is normal! This is a sure sign of sleeping well, just as your appetite eases after eating. Go along the path of “there is nothing I need to figure out or solve about sleep anymore, because the “problem” is beyond me or maybe there really isn’t a problem at all, it’s all just me and my active brain making groundless and baseless accusations about my sleep and my body, therefore everything I am trying to do is a complete waste of time and effort.” Good luck.
Greetings!
Unfortunately nobody here can help you with your anxiety, the best way to deal with it is by the Claire Weeke’s method, basically allowing yourself to tolerate it, not fighting it and slowly getting desensitized over it over time because you begin to realise there’s really no danger to you at all!Hello Julie!
It is quite impossible to go on with just 2-3 hours of sleep per day indefinitely so are you napping during the day? Stop the naps if you want to have a healthy sleep drive at night! Also try to lengthen your sleep window by going to bed earlier or getting out of bed later, so you don’t get too sleepy earlier in the evening and no sleeping outside that sleep window! I suggest to allow a 6 hour sleep window at least and slowly add to that to as you sleep more. Best wishes.Greetings!
There is no such thing as “the strongest arousal system” until your sleep system is compromised ?. Your body will always win, and you *will sleep* at some point, no matter how hard you try. Sleep works like this: you sleep bad for one night, you’ll almost certainly make up for it the next night or at most the night after. Your sleep system is completely self-regulating with a built-in fail-safe mechanism, absolutely nothing can change or damage it. So it is futile to worry about it too, and quite dumb as well because there’s *nothing* you can do!
