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Since you only just have insomnia, and as a former insomniac myself who has fully recovered, my advice to you are:
1. Immediately stop taking any form of medications for sleep. These never help and could make you get you addicted. Sleeping pills are extremely hazardous to you in the long term, both to your body and your sleep because they literally obliterate stage 3 sleep, making your sleep less restorative and you wake up feeling groggy which is worse than having never slept at all. Studies also show long term sleeping pills users have a higher chance of developing Alzheimer, dementia and a whole host of other problems. If you slept fine few days ago, then your sleep system is intact. Believe in yourself.
2. Don’t chase sleep by going to bed earlier. Actually the less you sleep, the longer you will sleep and the more restful that sleep is. Don’t go to bed based on what time it is but on how many hours you’ve spent awake. Most people generate 6-8 hours of sleep after being awake 16-18 hours. Since your insomnia is pretty recent, estimate the time you need to sleep based on your history and by fixing your get out of bed time, you get your bed time. Always get out of bed by that fixed time no matter how much you slept. Do not sleep in and do not compensate for lost sleep by napping or going to bed earlier.
3. Do not go down the rabbit hole of doing a ton of sleep efforts like supplements, modifying your daily routine specifically for sleep, or other useless stuffs. Sleep is natural and effortless. The less you do, the better. Even better, do nothing except fixing your bedtime and out of bed time!Your sleep should recover after a few weeks, especially if you keep your sleep schedule religiously because sleep is essentially just a biological process that everyone goes through after being awake long enough. Don’t be alarmed if you can’t sleep. It just means you are taking longer to fall asleep after sleeping really well. Sleep drive is a lot like hunger, it builds from not sleeping/eating long enough. The longer you stay awake, the sleepier you should get assuming you don’t get anxious from not sleeping. Understand it is just a process and there’s nothing more to it.
Good luck and we all here look forward to hearing your success story!
Being not afraid of regressing is a sign you have truly recovered. Eventually you reach a stage where you don’t care anymore, you will have become much less attached to the outcome. By saying “I guess the worst thing is that I won’t sleep.”, this shows you are getting there! Life is meant to be enjoyed, in this case, going on a holiday. So you’ll do just that and not let insomnia control you. Imagine these kinds of possible senarios:
1. You don’t go on holiday and still sleep badly.
2. You don’t go on holiday but sleep well.
3. You go on holiday and sleep badly.
4. You go on holiday AND sleep well!If you choose 1 or 2, you will ALWAYS lose something, i.e., the holiday OR the sleep OR in the worst case senario BOTH. If you choose 3 or 4, you will always gain something because you will have enjoyed your holiday and still have a good chance you sleep soundly. My point is you WILL always LOSE if you let insomnia control your life because there are no guarantees protecting your sleep will lead to sleeping well. Therefore always plan your life events with your personal enjoyment or gratification in mind, not sleep! I hope you choose 3 or 4 and do please enjoy yourself!
Hi Hhunter!
I can understand your situation and been through it on my recovery journey. What helped is being friends with wakefulness. There is no threat with being awake at night, you have simply conditioned your mind to perceive it as so. Read “The Sleep Book” by Dr Guy Meadows, in it he outlines a few methods on how to address sleep anxiety provoking thoughts. Basically, accept it and don’t fight it. When you no longer fear X, X has no control over you. Reward yourself by having something you really enjoy if you find yourself struggling to sleep. It may be ice-cream, chocolate or whatever. Show your mind it is okay to be awake. If you enjoy a challenge, even try daring your body to give you a difficult night! Show it you are not afraid because there is nothing to be afraid of, in all honesty. Be kind to yourself and practise self compassion. Imagine your kid telling you he’s afraid of monsters in the closet, what would you say to him because you know there’s nothing there! It is the exact same thing here, there’s nothing to be afraid of, it’s just sleep. In fact, studies have shown insomnia has no long term effects on your health or longevity. Enjoy your life the best you can and put sleep lower down the priority list. This tends to be a major problem with insomniacs. They try to spend lots of time in bed (sometimes 10-12 hours), basically almost half their lives being in bed and then even after all that, spend whatever hours being awake constantly worrying and obessesing about sleep. Have you realised how ridiculous this has become? Is that the way you want to live for the rest of your life? What a horrible way to live, you have let insomnia control you and your life. Tell yourself enough is enough! You will not put up with this nonsense any longer! You are a strong person, you must be because you are a parent and must have overcome even more difficult challenges. It is no different with this one. You can do this. Spend less time in bed, if sleep onset insomnia is an issue. Go to bed after being awake 18 hours continuously when your sleep drive is strong. Most people can fall asleep pretty fast after being up this long. Then when you’re comfortable, adjust that to 17, 16 hours. Find what works for you. Good luck!Hello Random!
You may be easily roused if you go to bed with a weak sleep drive. I too was woken up several times by my snoring in the early mornings when my sleep tends to be lighter and also the couple of times when I took sleeping pills to sleep. Go to bed with a stronger sleep drive, i.e., after you have been awake longer. Find that magic number that puts you into a deeper sleep when you hit the sack. Most people sleep for 6 hours after being awake 18 hours. Try 16,17,18 hours and find what works for you because everyone is a bit different.Your story really echoes a lot with mine but I did it in a lot less time, I got over my insomnia in just 3 months while you took years??? Most people don’t realise the journey to recovery is a lot less bumpy and much shorter as long as you develop the right mindset. Insomnia is really a mind issue so you really need to work on your thoughts and mindset if you want to find any relief. CBT-i works too but it is too academic and rigid to me and doesn’t address the mental aspect of insomnia, which is exactly what is causing and perpetuating sleep disruption for most people. Less attachment to the outcome and only going to bed when sleepy after staying awake long enough is all that it takes to sleeping normally again. Anything else including sleep medications are essentially useless and can even make it worse.
Hello Harvey!
Glad to hear you are continuing to improve. With regards to your wife, I can only say everyone is a bit different and that is why I encourage everyone to explore and experiment with their bedtimes to find what works for them. Some people might need 10 hours of sleep every night, apparently so with your wife, which is quite rare but most people get by with at least just 6. She must be a really good sleeper! In regards to your previous sleeping pattern, that’s called a biphasic sleeping pattern where you slept in 2 distinct phases. Nothing wrong with this sleeping pattern either, because if you try to calculate the actual amount of time spent sleeping (total time in bed minus time awake) before and now, it will be roughly the same, around 7 hours. You can’t shortchange your body with something as important as sleep because it knows and is keeping track of such things. You have simply conditioned your body to sleep that way by going to bed too early where sleep drive wasn’t as strong. What then resulted was a less restorative and fragmented sleep. Then when you awoke for 3 hours, you would have rebuilt that sleep drive again. Your body thinks you want it to sleep that way, because like I said, nature is flexible about sleep and your body may think you need to be awake at 12 – 3 am for some reason and that’s why it is behaving like that. By going to bed later after being awake longer, you are accumulating more sleep drive which then puts you into a deeper sleep, reconditions your body clock and strengthens your circadian rthym resulting in a new sleeping pattern. Going forward, I would encourage to keep your bedtimes as consistently as possible, within 30 minutes. If you need to stay up later for some reason, then keep your out of bed time the same if you want to stick to this sleep pattern. Do not sleep in and do not compensate for lost sleep, you might sleep less for one night but the effort will be worthwhile if you feel your current sleep pattern is worth keeping to.Hello Nadya
I’m reading too many sleep efforts and all I can say they will ultimately fail because sleep doesn’t respond to any type of effort, physical or mental except being awake long enough. Try going to bed later, spend less time in bed and doing less! Yes, less is more when sleep is concerned. By doing more efforts targeted to get more sleep, the more elusive sleep becomes. That’s the paradox about sleep. People desperate for more sleep don’t get it. You get it when you don’t want it. Read “The Effortless Sleeping Method” by Sasha Stephens. Sleep is not something you need to do a ton of things to get. It is not like going into battle to fight an enemy or into an exam hall to pass an exam. If you continue the struggle with sleeplessness, the sleeplessness will persist! Do absolutely nothing and give up the struggle by not caring how you slept. Only then will great sleep start showing itself. Good luck!Hello Harvey!
Great to hear you are sleeping better. I too discovered many things about sleep when I developed sleeping problems back in Aug. Now I considered myself completely recovered. What I now know about sleep is that it is just a biological process that inevitably happens after a person has stayed up long enough. And that’s all there is about sleep, really. Ahsolutely nothing else except just a biological process your body goes through. I found waking several times during the night is very common too! It is how you respond to them which makes falling back asleep easier or more difficult. Forget about the 8 hour sleep myth. No healthy person gets them, really, because nobody falls asleep for 8 continuous hours and then wakes up like someone flicked a switch inside their heads from asleep to wide awake. The human body just doesn’t work like that. It is governed by a myraid of hormones such as melatonin, cortisol etc which controls pretty much everything from sleepiness to hunger, mood etc. Because of the influence of hormones, there is a spectrum of sleepiness that everyone gets. Like I said, it is not a switch that gets flicked from sleepy to wide awake after you spent X hours sleeping. So inside every wakefulness there is always a bit of sleepiness and vice versa! Kinda like a yin-yang thing. So during sleep, there will be brief moments of wakefulness too. Sleepiness and wakefulness are two sides of the same coin. That’s why people can fall asleep at almost anytime, especially shift workers who need to work inconsistent hours. The duration of that sleep will depend on sleep drive, which then depends on, like I said, the amount of time spent awake. Nature gaves us this flexibility so we can forage for food depending on the season or to look out for danger guarding the community in coordinated shifts.It is very common and normal to have deep sleep in the earlier part of the night when sleep drive is strong and drifting between lighter and
REM sleep towards the morning where wakefulness and dreams will get more pronounced. You may also get lots of morning wood in the early morning and that is very normal and healthy too! Once you have fallen asleep, your body completely takes over and you then go through all the stages of sleep in the same way your body goes through digestion after having your meals. Both processes cannot be consciously controlled. I would like to end this post in wishing you continued success in your journey of self-discovery about sleep although you may not discover anything new other than what you already are experiencing now, because sleep is really passive and no amount of effort, mental or physical, can alter it.I will reproduce the contents of the article here. I don’t mean to plagiarise any of the material but simply to benefit the sufferers here to take comfort in the fact that sleeping 6-7 hours is very healthy! So here goes:
Study Ties 6-7 Hours of Sleep to Longer Life
Research suggests that adults live longer if they get six or seven hours of sleep a night rather than the accepted standard of eight hours.
The research is based on a nationwide survey of 1.1 million adults. It found that those who slept eight hours a night were 12 percent more likely to die within six years than those who got 6.5 to 7.5 hours of sleep. The increased risk was more than 15 percent for those who reported getting more than 8.5 hours or less than about 4 hours nightly.
The participants were ages 30 to 102. Few reported frequent insomnia, which was not associated with an increased risk of death.
”Additional studies are needed to determine if setting your alarm clock earlier will actually improve your health,” said the lead author, Dr. Daniel Kripke, a psychiatrist at the University of California at San Diego.
The study was published in the February issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry.
Sleep experts said the research had several flaws. The study was not designed to look at sleep’s effect on longevity. It relied on patients’ recollections of their sleep habits and did not ask if they took naps. It did not look at the quality of people’s sleep or whether they felt drowsy all day.
Dr. Phyllis Zee, director of Northwestern Memorial Hospital’s sleep disorders center, said participants who got little sleep or slept eight hours or more may have had medical problems that would explain their increased death rate.
A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 15, 2002, Section A, Page 14 of the National edition with the headline: Study Ties 6-7 Hours of Sleep to Longer Life.
I experienced my first sleepless night at the end of Aug 2020 and was back to sleeping normally by Dec same year. What I actually realise now is that I had beaten insomnia way earlier, perhaps by Oct but I was still chasing and chasing sleep before realising I had hit the end of the road in my recovery in Dec. Most people who have insomnia don’t realise this. The end of the recovery road is much shorter than most people think and that they may actually be there already. Do not chase that 8 hours myth because most people don’t actually sleep for 8 hours continuously and that 6-7 hours are pretty much more normal. Studies show too that people who sleep in the 6-7 hours are in the sweet spot, as reported in the NY Times, under an article titled “Study Ties 6-7 Hours of Sleep to Longer Life”. Look up the article in google, read it and relish in the fact that more is not better, in fact it may be more detrimental to your health.
5. Try laughing. What about laughing at your insomnia?? Be creative when your mind presents you with a sleep worry thought. Repackage that thought as Mr. Bean dancing around hilariously, as a kitten chasing its own tail, as a reindeer pulling Santa around, or anything that’s really funny and therefore, less believable. Be playful with your own fearful thoughts, but doing so, you show them they don’t control you.
Hi there!
What do you mean sleep naturally? Are you currently taking medications to sleep? By definition, every healthy person is a natural sleeper with the exception of extremely rare familial insomnia cases. The difference between all sleepers is just whether they are having normal or disrupted sleep.Oh yes, that is very typical of recovering from insomnia and is a good sign that things are going really well. The reason you are regressing is because you are sleeping really well! Naturally your sleep drive is getting reduced and because of this and you are recovering from being sleep-deprived. I went through this as well. I too got out of bed when I couldn’t sleep within 20 minutes and it was super counter-productive. Getting out of bed got me super anxious and made awake for at least 2 hours more while if I just stayed in bed, I would have drifted back to sleep in much less time. That is just my personal experience, everyone is different. If you are not anxious about being awake in bed, just stay in bed like I am. Or for normal sleepers for that matter. Normal sleepers don’t get out of bed every 20 minutes, they just stay in bed. I now allow 8.5 hours for sleep, I find I can sleep straight for 6-7 hours, before getting up the first time to use the toilet and going back to bed. The second leg of sleep is usually lighter, often drifting between light and REM sleep and comes in intermittent bouts. I discover my minimum sleep duration is 6 to 6.5 hours before my body will wake me up without fail. Any sleep I get after that is considered bonus to me, which my body doesn’t really need but is giving me anyway, because: 1. I am completely relaxed and not anxious at all. 2. The ideal conditions for sleeping are present namely being in a cool, dark room and getting really comfortable between the sheets. Sleep is no longer some mysterious black box to me, I discover it is the staying awake long enough that is putting me to sleep pretty quickly and unfailingly every single time, not what time it is when going to bed or taking any sleeping medications or doing any kind of sleep efforts like the so called relaxation/breathing techniques, the sleepy teas or the apps designed to help calm/relax you in bed. I got rid of them all and went from sleepless nights to sleeping really well now! Sleep is a paradox, the less effort you do to sleep and the longer you stay awake, the better it gets!
Hello
You are alloting more than 9 hours of sleep, which is way too many for a person of your age (I assume you’d be in your sixties). Most people your age would do fine with just 7-8 hours. If you want to sleep really well, paradoxically, the solution is sleep less. When you sleep less, you spend more time awake thereby building up your sleep drive. Sleep drive works exactly the same way as hunger, they get stronger the longer you go without sleeping/eating.Hello Sandra,
I think you are confused between taking longer to fall asleep and not being able to sleep? I also went through that myself, and I blindly followed the CBT-i technique of getting out of bed whenever I couldn’t fall asleep within a certain time and when that happened, I would always get anxious about not sleeping and a poor night would ensue. Now, I just stay in bed no matter how long it takes me to fall asleep, I always fall asleep in the end, but just might take longer and that’s just because of having slept well the night before.Hi Sandra,
The classic yo-yo sleeping pattern is very common for someone who is recovering from insomnia, I went through it myself and now considered myself cured. The reason you are having “poor” nights after good ones is because you are sleeping too well from your good nights! When you slept well, naturally your sleep drive is less for the following night and you then find it harder to fall asleep. How many hours are you alloting for sleep each night? If it is more than 8 hours, you might be oversleeping on your good nights, and this combined with the anxiety and surprise why the good nights can’t be repeated consistently, often sets you up for a subsequent “poor” night. Try reducing your time in bed and find what works for you. Most people only spend 7 hours in bed and are sleeping for 6, because regular awakenings throughout the night, of which most people won’t even remember, could take up an hour or more of their time in bed. I still find it harder to fall asleep occasionally, this is often when I’ve slept more than 8 hours the previous night, so when I go to bed at my regular time, I’ve been up less than my usual 17 hours to generate that 7 hours of sleep. But I don’t do stimulus control of getting out of bed anymore because I am no longer anxious about not sleeping in bed, I just stay and relax in bed, very often without fail, I would find myself drifting off to sleep. This is now my typical “poor” night. Just taking longer to sleep after sleeping really well the night before! Try it and see it solves your yo-yo sleeping pattern. If you can condition your mind to not get anxious about being awake in bed, then just stay in bed and you may find yourself drifting to sleep like I am.
