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Hello…
People who have sleep anxiety and trouble sleeping like yourself typically share an identical recovery path. So your case is not unique or uncommon. The most important factors to sleeping well are always:
1. Go to and get out of bed at consistent times with no sleeping in between. Start by allowing 6 hours and slowly increase that once you feel ready.
2. Develop the correct mindset. I suggest you read the success stories section to find out what other did. This is very important because mindset determines your behaviors and attitudes.Like everyone else who has gone through and overcome insomnia, you can do this! Good luck.
Hello
So sorry to hear about your condition. You need just two things to sleep well again:
1. Go to and get out of bed at consistent times. No sleeping in between. Start at allowing for 6 hours then slowly increase that once you are sleeping more and feel you are ready.
2. Develop the right mindset. Go to the success stories section, learn how others dealt with their problems and ultimately how they got out of the vicious cycle of insomnia. Things like letting go of control, not caring how you sleep and being non jugdmental about your sleep. Very very important. You must have the right mindset because it is what shapes your behaviors and attitude towards sleep. Good luck! Everyone can overcome insomnia including you.Hello Anne-Claire
What an excellent insight and so very inspiring. Insomnia isn’t always a bad thing, if anyone is willing to look at it from another angle, not only do you get over it, it also teaches you some very important things about life in general. Things like acceptance, letting go of control, patience, perseverance and ultimately, compassion not only toward oneself but also toward others. Keep on inspiring!Thanks for posting. You should enjoy your time awake and not feel like you are being forced to do something if it isnt something you enjoy. There is no fixed rule for what you can or cannot do in bed or out of bed when you cant sleep. Because nothing can generate sleepiness or cause you to fall asleep except being awake long enough which builds sleep drive. Good luck!
Hello Sophia!
Great to hear from you again and that you are sleeping better. What you are going through is extremely common to everyone during this part of the recovery, thoughts like “What if my insomnia comes back??” The answer is always acknowledgement and acceptance whatever your mind wants to tell you about. Worried you cant sleep because you neighbour dog keeps barking? Accept. Worried drinking too much water before bed causing you to go to toilet more often therefore affecting your sleep? Accept. Your mind will come up with a million excuses of how your sleep will be affected. Your response: Whatever man, I accept these thoughts. Just accept whatever your mind tries to warn you about. Never fight or try to escape from your thoughts because this is what your brain is wired to do, keeping you safe from any potential threats like not sleeping. You cant avoid your thoughts but you can choose whether to believe it or not. Do you have to believe every single thing your mind keeps warning you about? Well, no because most of them are likely future events and who knows what can happen in the future. You live in the present moment so try to enjoy your day as much as you can, do things centred on your personal enjoyment and development, not sleep. Tell yourself you will deal with any sleep disruption WHEN it happens, not before, IF it happens. But you are much more likely to sleep if you follow the rule of allowing enough wakefulness before going to bed so these thoughts and the associated anxiety will start become fleeting (pops into your head then pops back out again because you pay less and less attention to them) then disappear completely. Then if you do sleep poorly occasionally, which is normal because everyone gets poor nights once in a while, continue your day as if nothing happen and be non jugdmental about it. Your sleep should recover the next day if you do nothing. You are doing great and slowly getting there. Hope to hear about your success story soon! Keep it up!Hello and greetings!
The choice should based on your preference. Between the two, do you prefer one over the other? Then take your preferred choice because in reality, what you do if you can’t sleep has no effect on your sleep at all and therefore is of no consequence. The idea is to take your mind off sleep and the associated anxiety because most people with sleep problems often get anxious when they can’t sleep. It also helps condition the mind to not view night time wakefulness as a threat and by spending most time in bed actually asleep rather awake helps rebuild that bed-sleep association. As a recovered person, I am personally tell you it isn’t what you do or don’t do that makes you sleep or not. It is usually the fear or anxiety of not sleeping that is keeping you up. Once you conquer that fear, whatever you do don’t matter anymore and you will find yourself waking up less, taking lesser time to fall back asleep if you do until you don’t need to leave the bed anymore to never remembering you ever woke at all! Good luck and I hope you find your way out!Hello and thank you for sharing your post. As I read it, I couldn’t help but wonder why you even need to do srt in the first place?? I think the main culprit of your 3 am awakenings is your weekend sleep-ins! You could have eliminated that and then continue going to and getting out of bed at consistent times *every day*, including weekends and the result might have been very different.
How much can you recall how your sleeping pattern was before srt? Try adding up all your sleeptimes for the entire week, including your weekend sleep-ins then divide that by seven to get your average daily sleep time. Add 30 minutes to that and that is the amount of time you should allot for sleep. By fixing your out of bed time, you then arrive at the earliest time you should go to bed. Develop the habit of going to and getting out of bed at regular times and eliminate all sleep-ins and naps. Do this for a few weeks and see what happens. Then whenever you are ready, you can slowly allot more time for sleep by going to bed 15 minutes earlier while keeping out of bed time the same. Keep doing that very gently until you reach your desired sleep duration. Good luck!
Hello Monica,
Your mindset and possibly poor sleep hygiene such as going to bed much earlier and/or getting out of bed at inconsistent times could be the key reasons you are stuck in this. Go to the success stories section and find out what others did and the kind of thought work that went into their efforts which finally freed them from their dilemmas. Mindset is very important here. You must have the right mindset to finally free yourself from your struggle with sleep. Essentially you may need to do the complete opposite of what seems logical when confronted with this problem. Spending less time in bed, stop chasing sleep and stop saying “I need my sleep, or else etc etc”. Desperate, frightened people desiring more sleep won’t sleep. You get it when you don’t want it, ie, being more willing to spend more time awake and not being afraid of not sleeping anymore. Everyone’s journey is very similar but learning what others went through may shorten the learning curve a lot as long as you are open to lesson and willing to tolerate some discomfort during the journey. Good luck!
Great story! What makes it even better is giving back after recovery, to help and inspire others on their journeys towards a better place where they find relief and sleep much better. Thank you for sharing.
Hello
I am sorry you experienced a poor night sleep. Everyone gets them once in a while. Not going to write a long post here but all I can say is you can only get out of your insomnia by developing the right mindset. It is the key to everything as mindset determines your attitude and behavior towards sleep. Read the success stories here and find out what they did or more importantly what they thought to get past their insomnia. Everyone has what it takes to overcome their insomnia and you too! Good luck and may you find relief soon!Hello Carissa,
It’s great to hear you are making some progress in your sleep after following CBT-i techniques. During this stage, it is very common and very human to want to protect your progress so far and you will find yourself going all out in making attempts to protect future sleep. My advice to you is please DON’T. I caution you against taking these steps, because you are starting to obsess over sleep and are falling back into the hole of insomnia by giving it more attention. Remember insomnia feeds on attention and obessesion. Before you had sleeping problems, did you already have your pet? Yet you still slept fine, didn’t you? So your pet isn’t the problem, your obessesion over sleep is. It is when you have given up ALL efforts and truly not caring how you sleep anymore that you start making further progress. When you reach this stage, you begin to realise that night time sleeplessness isn’t a problem anymore, being more open to and willing to experience sleeplessness. Then you start sleeping really well! That’s when you know you are truly recovered. Good luck!Hello Anna!
It is very very normal to have multiple awakenings in a night. Even normal sleepers have it, in fact it’d be abnormal to not wake up during the night at all, otherwise you’d be in a coma! X isn’t the problem, your reaction to X is! You have simply conditioned your mind to perceive waking up during the night and dreaming as a threat, that something’s wrong and needs to be “fixed” when they are a normal occurrence and nothing to fix at all. You become hyperaroused when this happens, and confusion between asleep and awake states often occurs when you have hyperarousal and sleep drive happening at the same time. It is kinda like driving a car with the emergency brakes on. For normal sleepers who are not hyperaroused, they typically wake up then fall back asleep right away, frequently forgetting they even woke. Try to accept these awakenings as much you can, realise it’s not abnormal and in fact very common, especially in the early mornings when REM sleep is more prevalent. Deep sleep tend to occur early during the night when your sleep drive is very strong then progresses to lighter and REM sleep towards early morning, where dreams and awakenings become more pronounced. Another reason for this is you could be going through menopause or are pregnant or just given birth as hormonal changes during these periods affect sleep too. Otherwise, what you are going through is normal and not reacting vigorously to them will give you the best chance of reverting to normal restful sleep again. Good luck!Hello Michael!
I don’t think listening to other people’s stories about their sleeping problems is going to help you in any big way because insomnia feeds on your attention and obessesion with it. In fact, it could get worse when you hear about horror stories and you then start to panic over it, thinking something’s broken with you. The best course of action when dealing with any sleeping issue is to do nothing about it, make no attempts to “fix” it and continuing on your current sleep schedule (getting into and out of bed at your usual times). That’s it! Good luck!Hello.
Would like to add that sleep works a lot like hunger, they both build up the longer you go without sleeping or eating. The normal period of wakefulness for most people is about 16-18 hours to generate 6-8 hours of sleep, provided you are not anxious or worried or doubt your own ability to sleep unaided. From now on, just go to bed based on the amount of hours spent awake continuously and not what time it is, you can try 17-18 hours at first and then slowly reduce that to 16 hours by going to bed earlier in 15 minutes increments while keeping your out of bed time the same. Keeping to a consistent bedtime schedule is paramount to sleeping well, the most important of which is your out of bed time. You must get up from bed at the same time every day regardless of how you slept because this is how you can get that 16-18 hours of wakefulness in a 24-hour day which then produces the sufficient amount of sleep drive needed to fall asleep and stay asleep for 6-8 hours. Once you understand sleep and how it works, it gets pretty easy. Good luck!Greetings!
Occasional bad nights are very common and normal, even to people who purportedly “never” have sleeping problems. The difference is reaction to them. Some people just shrug it off and never think of it then their sleep pretty much go back to normal, while others start to get worried and then go on an endless exercise of remedies to “fix” the problem like taking melatonin, sleeping pills, going to bed earlier all of which only makes the problem worse. The best course of action after having difficult nights is always do nothing. Just go to and get out of bed at your normal times and that’s it. This is the only way to get out of the vicious cycle of insomnia and/or prevent yourself from getting into one in the first place.
