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If you get back into a sleepless pattern after a period of “doing really well”, that usually means you are routinely overdoing it by oversleeping! Which actually means you are sleeping really well, and sleeping too long for far too long! That’s why your body is making you regurgitate back out all those good nights by making you sleepless again. In cbti terms, it is a cue you need to re-limit your time in bed again or if you are like me and don’t freaking care, continue to oversleep but stop complaining! Even you yourself admitted you were sleeping really well before this happened (sleeping well after your dad died even) so why are you not giving yourself credit where this is due and only start complaining when everything starts deviating from your expectations?? Why the bias here?? Get on with your life, you won’t always get what you want, nobody will.
Your issues are EXACTLY THE SAME as a year and a half ago! Go back and reread what you wrote and how I responded. Have you learnt anything since then or old habits die hard? Insomnia never leaves you, you leave the struggle with it.
Everything you do to try to sleep IS A PLACEBO. If you haven’t realized this, then you are missing out on a very important lesson. Everyone CAN and WILL sleep, the only question is WHEN. Taking pills or doing other stuff becomes discretionary, it alters nothing and the results become a mixed bag and are entirely random, any connection you then make only exists inside your head and does not reflect the true reality, which is THAT YOU CANNOT CONTROL SLEEP DIRECTLY. Effort is useless when it comes to sleeping, this ability is innate, you were born with it and remains with you until your last day.
Sleep doesn’t define who you are or what you are capable of. The moment you give in into a mental bully like insomnia is the moment you lose because you would have allowed it to completely take over your life
Parents are an extremely easy target for insomnia. If you have a fussy baby in your house, of course everyone in that household will have trouble sleeping! There’s no way around that so you need to be mentally prepared for it.
Other than that, Martin is gracious enough to share some very good suggestions on how to train your baby to sleep with minimum fuss. But ultimately, parenting is one in a lifetime joyful experience and I’m sure years from now when you reminisce on this, you would be far more grateful to have had that parenting experience than to catch just a couple more hours of ZZZ each night. Congratulations on being a new parent and good luck!
Or no activity at all and just staying in bed works too! The key is to the get the pressure to sleep off your chest for a bit
Everyone’s sleep gets lighter the more they sleep. What you described (light sleep, vivid dreams) is totally normal! What isn’t normal is expecting to get sleepier and sleepier the longer you sleep and as your accumulated sleep debt is getting undone. That is akin to getting hungrier and hungrier the more you eat. Does that make any sense?
You are already afraid of things that hasn’t happened yet and may never even happen at all. So you are basically fear-mongering based on what complete strangers are saying about their experiences. Well how familiar are you about these people? Do you know all of them personally or even interacted with them? If you have next to no idea who these people are, why do you pay so much attention to what they are saying? Do they know what they’re talking about? Have they done a polysomnography (sleep study) which shows they have been awake for days with ZERO sleep? Did you know that a lot of insomniacs actually underestimate how much they slept? Because they get confused between sleeping and being awake and many end up vastly overstating their symptoms. Once you begin to think something is wrong, you will go all out and find plain nothings to justify your fears! That’s just human nature.
Ultimately, if you feel forums are not the best idea or harm you, then what’s stopping you from disassociating? Please get off and stop going on forums to find answers. Whatever replies you get are unimportant because it still doesn’t generate sleepiness. Like I said, sleep is on a whole new league of its own, it happens independently of everything else, your body just knows how much it needs, there is practically NO WAY it can go wrong and therefore your intervention in any form is unnecessary. Sleep in some form will still happen regardless of any anxiety or worry, but you would have needlessly carried this burden over nothing and could actually make it worse because you have now given your mind something to worry about, when all it needs for a good night sleep is being at peace with yourself in conjunction with sufficient sleep drive built up over sufficient wakefulness. Good luck to you and I hope you find your relief soon.
The short answer to your question is no. What you describe is simply what people do when they lie in bed but aren’t sleepy and then they lie there for hours and hours, expecting to sleep which isn’t coming because they thought being calm means sleepy. No it does not, being calm doesn’t guarantee sleep either! The only thing that does is being awake long enough, there’s no way around this so if you want to sleep more you need to cut back first. Which means being awake more and sleeping less. It’s like draining and recharging your phone, don’t be surprised when your charge level isn’t going up when it’s already fully charged! You need to use the phone and discharge it first, of course. Simple observations like these will help you understand sleep more and how it works. Ultimately, why do you keep thinking being awake is a problem?? The problem with insomnia is that thinking there’s a problem when there’s none BECOMES THE PROBLEM.
Hello Pete!
Welcome and sorry to hear about your dilemma. Your story is much alike to another lady’s (her profile is tessishere) whose husband suffered horribly from insomnia like you now. They were practically at their wits’ ends, tried every remedy, saw every doctor they could and took whatever meds prescribed. However, nothing solved their trouble until they came to this forum and someone told them their relentless and frantic efforts to try to cure insomnia and escape from it was the cause why this went on and on with no respite. Suffering is not ended with effort, but with wisdom and empathy. I encourage you to check out her inspiring story and good luck to you.I think the two week course has been discontinued. Even questions from non subscribers won’t get answered by martin unless it’s about signing up for the paid version. With that said, nothing can really help you if you are still afraid of poor sleep and are extremely averse to it
I was a client of Martin and what I can say is if you can afford it, then do go for it. Martin is a good coach and gives great and reassuring advice. Other than that, I will also say that most of the hard work will have to come from yourself, most likely in the mental form. Doing the course involves nothing external, Martin will never ask you to take a pill, have any specific prerequisites nor guarantee any success so whatever people need to succeed, they already have it inside of themselves. I encourage you to view this insomnia experience more as a journey to be appreciated in the “fuller” sense, because insomnia is really a set of misconcepted thoughts. Insomniacs are really people who have become afraid of their own ideas about sleep, often erroneously. Once you realize this, then hopefully you start discovering new things about yourself and around you and then you find out where and why you have gone wrong and what you can do to get back on track. Good luck.
It’s really quite normal to feel dejected in the early stages of recovery. I was there and everyone who has been through this has been there. It’s hard to describe what I went through to get over it but a mindset shift is the key and very important. It invariably happens when you stop monitoring progress and chasing results. Quit obsessing over the end result, ie the sleep because it is not possible to directly control, focus more on the things that you can control like conducive sleep environment, reducing stress and most importantly, managing your emotions. A bad night or a string of them is not the end of the world because it is not the only time you’ll sleep! There’s plenty of opportunities to catch up down the road.
Think of it like walking. Do you need to walk every minute of your waking hours just to prove to yourself that you can walk? NO. You don’t need to do that because you KNOW and are already CONVINCED there’s nothing wrong with it so you’d rather sit down and relax. Well sleep is kinda like that. You are desperately trying to prove to yourself you CAN sleep, so therefore you create this unnecessary “marathon” for yourself every night, and then you set imaginary but completely unnecessary goals and put undue and unwarranted pressure on yourself JUST TO PROVE A POINT THAT I KNOW YOUR BODY ALREADY KNOWS HOW TO DO NATURALLY. Why? It’s like making yourself run a 20km marathon every single day just to prove to your mind that your walking is fine. And in the progress, you just get worn out and worn down, depressed, sad and STILL unsatisfied with what you get. Well at what point, will you be content? When will you ever be satisfied? Perpetual dissatisfaction only leads to perpetual and needless suffering. Just stop. Suffering is never ended through relentless effort but only through wisdom, empathy and compassion. Mostly to yourself. Learn to sit back, quit the goal chasing and just trust the process. Good luck to you.
Trust me, there WILL be nights you actually want to be up and sleeping starts feeling like a boring chore where you only want to do the bare minimum you can get away with. You ACTUALLY have other things in your mind other than just SLEEP.
Not easy to answer your question, but I will only say one word: Desensitization. And over time. People just get used to it. Your days will go on regardless of what you feel or think about anything. How do you know you WILL have nights of zero sleep anyway?? So if you are not sure, why even bother to worry now? IT STILL HASN’T HAPPENED YET! OR MIGHT NEVER EVEN HAPPEN. Couldn’t you only begin to worry when it actually does happen? No matter the situation, your body will always give you the minimum rest you need, so worrying about future outcomes beyond your control is pretty much pointless
