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Hello there,
I am a graduate of Martin’s course and I sleep great now! What you are experiencing is very normal and I went through them as well. The idea of CBT-I is to get your sleep schedule back on track because most people with sleep problems got into very erratic sleep patterns by falling asleep at different times as a result of taking meds and/or their anxieties. Over time as you progress, you will start adopting a much more relaxed approach towards sleep where you go to bed only if sleepy. Getting up at a fixed time is key. I discovered nothing generates sleepiness more than staying awake long enough. By sleeping and waking at certain times ensures you only go to bed after being awake for at least 17-18 hours. Basically what is sleep? It is just a core biological process that happens after a person has stayed awake enough, for normal people that’s usually 17-18 hours, then that person naturally feels sleepy and goes to sleep for about 6-7 hours. Think of it like breathing, which is another core biological process. The body takes care of it all by itself and there’s no intervention required at all. Sleep, just like breathing, is effortless. Do nothing except sleeping and waking at fixed times as well as adopting an open and accepting attitude is all that is required to sleeping great again. If you can’t get to sleep at a certain time due to various reasons, such as staying up for work or other reasons such as having guests over, which is normal for all human beings anyway, then try to wake at a fixed time if you want to keep your sleep intact. Try not to compensate for lost sleep by sleeping in too often. I now go to bed after being awake for at least 16-18 hours, I fall asleep EVERY single time this way. I have absolute confidence in my ability to sleep and I even take short afternoon naps occasionally and I still sleep great at night!
Hello there, I experienced the same thing you did. Your sleep window may be too short. Are you currently sleeping through all of your sleep window? Spending much of the time in bed asleep? If so, it may be time to increase the time you allow for sleep either by going to bed earlier or waking up later.
Hi Martin and Scott,
Thank you for your feedbacks. I have now completed the 13th night of my 8 week course. Last night was my first “bad” night after 12 nights of sleeping reasonably well as it was the first time I had to implement stimulus control because I woke up after about 1.5 hours of falling asleep and couldn’t get back asleep as easily as before and I had to get out of bed as it was getting uncomfortable. But even with this, I still managed to get a total 5+ hours of fragmented sleep, which I considered to be a “good” night compared to before. I could sense my sleep getting a little disturbed again, maybe because I had a string of better nights, and I was finding myself unintentionally napping more during the day. So now, I have resorted to chewing gum to keep myself awake, especially since my family like to take long drive trips and I am travelling along as a passenger. I am getting a bit worried about my bad night but try to calm myself down that a bad night is not going to ruin everything and that this is a long term improvement strategy and what happens in one night is non-consequential. So I will submit my sleep diary for the 2nd week after tonight and see how it goes.
Hi Edgar, thought I would chip in and share my thoughts. Try going to bed later but wake up at the same time every day, this is even after u had zero sleep the night before. Building your sleep drive is key to overcoming your anxiety over sleep. I would construe all of your efforts like going to bed early to try to force your body to sleep when it is hyper-aroused, taking V, all of these are sleep efforts which are counterproductive because sleep simply cant be controlled. The more sleep efforts u take, the less likely u fall sleep because that then makes u think more about your sleep and when u cant sleep, the more aroused u get and this feeds into the vicious cycle that keeps u awake. Personally for me and many insomniacs, the mistake we made was going to bed too early when we just weren’t sleepy or think we were sleepy when we were just fatigued and then try to fall asleep with our minds just not in the mood for sleep. From my experience, if u are truly sleepy, u wont have any space inside your head to be anxious about anything, instead u would be quite calm and most likely fixated on going to sleep and u could just fall asleep watching tv or playing your phone. This is the real feeling of sleepiness. Try going to bed later, that helped me break out of the vicious cycle and with bedtime restriction, made my sleep get back on track. Good luck.
Hi Jess,
Do u remember if u were dreaming when u said u were in stage 1? Or having vivid images? How can u be sure what stage of sleep u are in? Are u wearing some kind of device to sleep that tells u that? But if u are dreaming, it is definitely NOT stage 1.
Hello there, I certainly can relate with your experience. I too had good nights where I slept 7 hours then would crash right back into sleepless nights where I got 2 or none. I would encourage u to stay committed to the course and give your body a chance to adapt. Some people started seeing results rightaway and some took months, everyone is different. I had insomnia for just under a month, so when I started bedtime restriction and cognitive therapy where I changed my mindset about my sleep, I started seeing results almost immediately. I am now into my second week of therapy and am able to consistently sleep at the start of my sleep window. It could be your insomnia is chronic so that’s why your body needs time to adjust. Be patient and u should see improvements down the road.
Hi Kimmy, yes I used to have that too due to an unpleasant dizziness condition which was triggered when I lay down in bed to sleep and turned my body to the right. Dreading going to sleep is quite common, people with PTSD have it all the time due to recurrent nightmares, especially soldiers who have gone through a lot of mental trauma. The good thing is it can be treated 100%! Once the trigger causing the fear of sleep is removed, most people are able sleep normally again. However for me, the sleep disturbance continued even after I cured my health condition because I hadallowed it to persist for too long until my brain had started associating sleep with the unpleasantness. Luckily for me, after implementing CBT-I techniques, I am now no longer fearing sleep, the anxiety over going to sleep at night still visits me but it is getting much less now as my confidence over falling asleep improves. The main thing about insomnia and/or sleep-related anxieties and phobia is that it can overcome successfully with the right techniques and guidance. Martin’s sleep aid course is one the best out there and this is coming from a guy who has had insomnia and beaten it. I highly recommend that you try it! Good luck!
Hello Sally! Well you’ve come to the right forum and we all here can relate with the problem that you are having. I would highly recommend that you try Martin’s sleep aid course which is evidenced-based and proven to be highly effective for treatment of acute and chronic insomnia, based on principles of CBT-I. I have read stories and seen podcasts of people who suffered insomnia for decades and were finally able to overcome their sleep problems after following Martin’s guidance. Try it, you won’t regret it. I wish I could tell you more but don’t want to overload you with too much information but the basic concepts are that: Sleep is a completely natural and innate ability. You will never lose it and it is failsafe. You just need the right guidance to help you find it again. Harnessing this knowledge, you will be implementing strategies such as restricting sleep time to drive up your sleep pressure which in turn, overcomes all other concerns or anxieties to help you gain confidence in consistently falling asleep again. If you have seen Martin’s videos in Youtube, you will find he ends each video with “You CAN sleep”, but to me it’s more “You WILL sleep”. I personally have tried them and they work 100%! I started seeing results on my first week itself and am now well on my way to putting my insomnia episodes behind. I am lucky I didn’t have insomnia for too long, just 2 months suffering from it, so I am very relieved to finally see light at the end of the tunnel. You can too! Good luck!
Hey Edgar and Angel! Yes Insomnia is beatable! I am glad both of you are in the process of putting this ugly episode behind your lives and sleeping better. I too developed insomnia 2 months ago after a brief illness and now on the mend. I too have been sleeping almost like I used to for past 6 nights while implementing sleep restriction, but I did experience more frequent awakenings than usual. However, I do find myself falling asleep pretty quickly after these awakenings so I guess I am doing fine. The anxieties about sleep do come back once in a while, however, not as bad as before. I also find myself experiencing moodiness and slight depression due to the lack of sleep. But I fully expect my mood and depression to go away once I start sleep better.
Hi Edgar, I totally agree with your answer. In general, people should be doing all that (eat healthy, no smoking, no alcohol, regular exercise) even if they sleep fine. But I’d imagine it’s a lot worse if an insomniac were to do all those things. However, insomniacs are probably much too obsessed about their sleep to be enjoying things like eating rich foods excessively, or drink excessively etc.
Hey Jaybird, it’s good to hear you are sleeping soundly again. It shows cbt-i really works! Sleep drive is an extremely powerful tool in enabling sleep, more powerful than any sleep meds out there. In regards to your earlier wakening, I would probably attribute that to a lowered sleep drive as you have been sleeping so well, the body feels there’s no need to go on sleeping beyond what it feels is more than adequate rest already. How do you feel when u wake at the earlier time? Do you feel rested? Have u been taking naps during thebdaytime? I would try to cut out all sleep outside the sleep window or u can do more exercise to tire yourself out and hopefully make u sleep that extra hour. Or u can reprogram the body to fall asleep again in the sleep window u allow it, but that means u have to redo the srt all over again and let sleep drive do the job. If u are wishing to “force” the body to wake at a certain time or ask it to sleep beyond what it feels is adequate rest, I think that’s not gonna work. As much as u cant control falling sleep, u cannot control what time u wake up naturally also.
The short answer is no. There is no evidence chronic insomnia causes major health problems. There are people who have had it for decades and are still otherwise healthy but they could have ended it much faster if they had done the cbt-i techniques for insomnia
Some things that I am doing that might be helpful when doing the cbt-i, I ditched the sunglasses and actually go out when the sun is up by as much as possible to let the eyes do the talking to the brain that it is daytime. Go out as much as possible under the sun without the sunglasses. Your eyes may be uncomfortable with the glare but this is much better than no sleep! At 6am, normally it is still dark at my part of the world, so I would turn on all the white lights inside my house to simulate this effect. At night, while waiting for the sleep window, turn off all the lights, tvs, phones, tablets one hour before bedtime and sit alone quietly in a dark cool place to again let the eyes do the talking to the brain. Get up and pace around to prevent falling asleep while waiting. I used to listen to an audio book while waiting but stopped this after I found the voice too annoying. All these really helped in falling asleep fast.
Sleep will come no matter what you take, or don’t take or are tapering off whatever meds, as long as you go on for long enough without it. If you increase your wake time, your sleep drive increase in proportion until it becomes so high it overrides everything else and you just go to sleep regardless of what you have taking. Just don’t try to sleep inside a lion’s den or inside a sauna with the thermostat turned up to max and you should be able to sleep if you accumulate a large enough sleep drive.
Hello everyone, I am also a new paid member. From my understanding, the more measures you take to try to go to sleep or to force yourself to go to sleep when it just isn’t your time to sleep yet or when your sleep drive just isn’t high enough, the more elusive it becomes. Sleep is a completely natural ability of the body and mind in unison. Sleep is almost completely free from any man-made interference, yes you can take pills or supplements, but these only act to throw your body’s sleep cycle off balance and perpetuates the insomnia by making you fall asleep at inconsistent times. The key here is consistency, you need to get asleep reasonably quickly for a long enough length of time for the mind to begin recognizing the cues you are nudging it to, via the “sleep window” which is set to fit your schedule or lifestyle. If your anxiety levels are so high which makes sleep hard, you can eventually overcome that by increasing your sleep drive via “bedtime restriction”. The key is to maintain this sleep drive enough for the next night to fall asleep quickly again, you must establish this pattern consistently, over time, the mind “learns” to fall asleep again confidently, thereby reducing sleep-associated anxiety so that it takes less sleep drive to fall asleep. That is really the essence of the CBT-I program.
