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Hello Jacob
What is your age? Are you a retired person? Older people above 60 tend to sleep less. Most people sleep for around 6 hours anyway. If you are waking up after several hours of sleep, it just means your sleep drive is less because it’s been depleted after sleeping. It is also very normal to have lighter and rem sleep as the night goes on. This part of sleep is characterized by more frequent awakenings (most people get up to use the toilet), a lot of dreaming going on and if you are a young male, lots of morning erections too! Nothing can restore sleep drive except wakefulness. When you wake up in the early mornings, are you anxious/edgy/frustrated?Hello Jacob
What time do you get up every morning? Are you frequently sleeping in, snoozing your alarm and/or getting out of bed at irregular times? As someone who recovered totally from insomnia, I must stress getting into and out of bed at REGULAR times is very important. That alone is 75-80% of the work. The other is right mindset, aka, self confidence (believing you can sleep) and spending less time in bed if necessary to build sleep drive. Normal human beings need at least 16 hours of wakefulness to generate 8 hours of sleep. Try to figure out yours and calculate are you going to bed after at least this amount of time spent awake? If not, you must first establish your out of bed time and always get out of bed at this time, regardless of how sleepy you are or how you slept. Try to initially spend at least 18 hours awake continuously then slowly reduce that to 17, 16 hours by going to bed earlier in 15 min intervals, while keeping your out of bed time the same. Keep doing that until you arrive at your desired sleep duration. When doing this, be patient and persevere even during bad nights because your body will need time to respond to a new bedtime schedule. There will be bad night(s) after a string of good nights, not reacting strongly to them and sticking to the plan is key to success. Good luck!Hello everyone
Thank you for your kind posts and I am flattered. I am just sharing the universal truths about sleep. If yo have the time, do please check out the video “Cure chronic insomnia with the effortless sleep method” by Yousquared in Youtube, based on the book “The effortless sleep method” by Sasha Stephens. Short 10 min video but full of very useful info on how to get over your current dilemma. In that video, the 5 key mistakes most “insomniacs” do are:
1. Asking your doctor for sleeping pills or being given some by doctors who absolutely don’t understand sleep.
2. Trying really hard to sleep.
3. Calling yourself an “insomniac”, which reinforces the idea that there’s something wrong with you.
4. Endlessly researching for a cure and trying one tip after another.
5. Believing in false statements.Hello TIA
If you want to sleep well, my advice is get off sleep monitoring or tracking of ANY kind. It won’t help you to sleep better in future and whatever tracking purportedly done, whether accurate or not, is already past. It causes unnecessary anxiety because you then try to “DIY” stuffs and that starts you down the rabbit hole of doing endless sleep efforts and chasing sleep. Just trust your own body. It knows what it’s doing. Sleep is really passive, it doesn’t respond to effort of any kind, mental or physical. The more you obesses over it, the worse it tends to get.Hello Anmareta
I did the course for the full eight weeks. I was sleeping better on week 1 already which got me excited but I kept adjusting my sleep window because I was chasing sleep. The thirst for further improvement made me regress a bit by week 8. I had one completely sleepless night in week 8 so I was like, why is this happening all over again? Only then, I realised I was still anxious about sleep, was doubting my own ability and still doing quite a bit of sleep efforts like all those breathing/relaxation/yoga exercises, downloading a ton of sleeping apps on my phone and organising my day around the insomnia. I now realise where I went wrong, all that stuffs I was doing was only reinforcing the insomnia by giving it too much attention and by doing other stuffs I was actually hurting my own confidence. I now think of sleep as just a biological process, which to me, happens after being awake for 16 hours and waking up during the night is normal. As I removed the efforts one by one, my confidence steadily improved then my sleep improved even further. Now I have complete confidence in myself and know my body will let me sleep after being awake for 16 sometime 15 hours and haven’t had a single sleepless night in months. I go to bed expecting to sleep and always get it, sometimes even more than I wanted. For me, sleep is all about confidence in yourself, if you believe and think like a normal sleeper, then you will sleep like one.
Hello Jaran!
Sleep inertia is the initial grogginess upon awakening in the morning. Everyone gets it and it usually goes away within a few minutes or shortly after exposure to sunlight or any lights in the house. If you are sleep deprived, it hangs around for longer.My sleep has improved further since I wrote that post. I am now sleeping straight for at least 7.5 hours per night and can sleep up to 9 hours, if I just refuse to get up from bed and stay in. Hang in there. You will get there as you dismantle your misconcepted beliefs about your sleep one by one, until you are completely doing nothing for sleep, are sleeping great and your confidence to sleep naturally is absolute. To the point that you even laugh yourself silly for actually doing all that stuffs just to sleep! All the tools you need to sleep well are already within you. It is just misplaced in the midst of all that “falsehoods” spinned by your brain telling you something which is absolutely false but which you amazingly chose to believe. All you need to do is put an end to all that noise and unleash the natural ability within you again. Good luck!
Hello everyone!
As someone who’s completely recovered, I can tell you sleep ability is all about self-confidence or a lack of it. If you think you can’t sleep, are abnormal, are unlike other normal sleepers or need to do a ton of things like taking meds, then you won’t sleep. The story you tell about your sleep is self-fulfilling. Normal sleepers are able to go to bed and sleep because they are confident of it and expect to sleep, therefore absolutely nothing to worry about. Then falling asleep becomes natural and effortless. This is what everyone with sleeping problems needs to work towards at, regaining that confidence. Therefore anything that undermines that confidence like taking meds, and endlessly seeking so-called cures are counterproductive and will needlessly prolong the recovery. A complete lack of effort towards achieving sleep, staying awake for the sufficient amount (16-18 hours) and developing an optimistic, carefree attitude towards how you slept and feel during the day will work wonders. In my worst, I could go for 2 days without sleeping, now I’m doing 7-9 hours every night and wake up feeling I could sleep more!Greetings!
So only sleeping badly for a month? Now is the perfect time to nip it in the bud, before it and problematic thoughts start creeping in and become more entrenched. Your insomnia is caused and perpetuated by nothing else but your misconcepted perceptions about sleep and therefore how you think and perceive sleep. The best thing to do after bad night or nights, is always nothing. Don’t react to it and it goes away usually. Just keep to your regular bedtimes and your sleep should get back on track. Don’t try to fix anything, and this is key! Otherwise, you go down the rabbit hole of trying endless stuffs and when they don’t work, that’s when bad thoughts will start flooding in, and you begin believing you can’t sleep normally, aren’t normal, or something is broken with you. The more you buy into these thoughts, the worse your insomnia gets! They become self-fulfilling. The key thing to recover from insomnia is to build confidence that you can sleep all on your own, and the only way to do that is actually doing nothing for sleep! Then when you start sleeping all on your own, your confidence improves and then better sleep happens, your confidence improves some more and then you sleep better and better! Insomnia is nothing but just a set of bad thoughts inside your head spreading falsehoods which you actually believe! That’s it. To recover, you just need to disbelieve them and prove them all wrong. Good luck!Greetings!
I really don’t think wearable sleep tracking is useful to you in any way. It just gives you your sleep history which is already in the past, nothing you can do about it and does absolutely nothing to help you sleep well in the future. On the other hand, it could give more butterflies in the stomach. Because if it says you slept less, you get anxious over it. Then when it says you actually slept more, you get anxious either because you start developing questions and what-ifs senarios. So when will the lesson ever be learnt? Nobody ever sleeps well from obessesing over it. Truly giving up control over sleep means no clock watching, no sleep tracking of any kind and absolutely not caring how you sleep.Greetings!
I do remember I had a similar episode like yours where during my drifting off to sleep, my thoughts and dreams kinda merge together and I couldn’t figure out when the transition actually happened. It’s like my thoughts started developing a mind of their own and began turning into stories all by themselves. I also remember getting scared of this transition because I was scared of getting bad or weird dreams (I once watched a video about Jamal Khoshoggi’s murder then early that next morning, I dreamt I was the one getting butchered and cut up like Jamal), but eventually I grew out of them over time. Now they don’t bother me anymore, I just my mind wander on its own, then inevitably would begin dreaming (thereby falling asleep) effortlessly without the need to monitor when that transition occurs because there’s no need nor any reason to. Now when I wake up, I don’t remember what I dreamt about anymore when previously I used to have really vivid dreams that could wake me up with my heart pounding. I think what you now need is to just relax and let everything fall into place. Hope you find this useful. Best wishes!Greetings!
Your experiences are a normal part of the recovery. You have by now gained greater confidence in sleeping on your own but still not 100% confidence, and perhaps still having that fear of regressing. All that is normal. Your goal is to reach absolute 110% sleep confidence where there is no shred of a doubt inside your mind that you can sleep unaided. When that happens, you know you are recovered and that’s how all normal sleepers sleep too. By then you realise all that empty talk inside your head trying to scare you with sleepless nights are completely rubbish. Keep going and you will get there.I recommend you go to success stories section and read how others dealt with their sleep anxieties. Basically stop the fighting, stop avoiding bad nights like the plague, stop the struggle, really and truly giving up control over sleep. Practise as much acceptance as you can instead of avoidance. Always be kind to yourself, be non judgmental about how you sleep on a particular night. Start every night on a fresh page with optimism and confidence. Try not to be too attached to the outcome. Treat sleep not as an achievement where you must sleep X hours, but more as a process which you have no complete control over which you can make more likely to happen once you know you are awake a sufficient amount (at least 16 hours). You can do this, so many people have overcome their sleeping problems and absolutely no reason why you can’t either. Good luck.
Hello
Yours is a very typical story. When you’ve made progress, it becomes completely natural and humanly to want to protect that progress made so far plus the relentless drive to make further improvements becomes all too enticing. Your mind will come up with a million things that it thinks could affect your sleep and will keep asking you to take care of them. You then go down the rabbit hole of trying endless sleep efforts, as your mind bombards you with thoughts like “what if I do this or that” , “was it the melatonin that made me sleep well” and the list goes on and on. Then before you know it, you fall right back into that dark, bottomless pit of insomnia as you become completely consumed in your obessesion with sleep. My advice is to always ignore those thoughts and the temptations to try different things, and to accept whatever outcome you get. You can listen to your mind, acknowledge those thoughts but do not fight them because it is futile (you can never win a battle against your own mind). Just choose to do absolutely nothing. The key is always acceptance with whatever your mind presents you with. Accept whatever thoughts and outcome you get, so over time, you train your mind to not focus only on results and outcome, to become less attached to them. Then as you sleep better, your confidence will improve and thoughts have less power over you until you are not bothered with them anymore. Then comes the point where you know you can and will sleep no matter what your mind says. That’s when you know you are truly recovered. When you’ve recovered, you may even laugh at yourself when your mind tries to scare you into believing that you can’t sleep because you know it’s completely false. Building up your confidence is key. Good luck!
