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There was an excellent post about a young mum being 100% cured from her postpartum insomnia, which I think you can get some inspiration:
Best wishes and congratulations on being a parent.
In future, you probably won’t care.
You are only truly “cured” when these things don’t bother you. Not caring whether sleeping well or bad. You simply don’t care.The key to sleeping well is letting go of complete control. You can’t control when thunderstorms happen either or when or what woke you up.
Any lack of sleep will be recovered eventually. You will always get it back plus more!
Because any one night is not the only night you’ll sleep. You will sleep again next night, the night after and so on for decades. So plenty of opportunities for sleep down the road ahead.
When you eventually recover, you will never get enough! Eight, nine, ten hours and still feel you could sleep more. Because you feel so relaxed and don’t pressure yourself, that’s when the sleep keeps coming.
Also, I will stop responding to you, because I think I have said enough. Saying more won’t help any further. The rest is up to you. Good luck!
Dear Anni
Yes it sounds hard now but it does get easier as times goes on.
Allow yourself to feel the fear. Do not seek to escape anymore. Only then will you get used to it. Any fear, no matter how large, becomes less the more you get exposed to it.
In the end, you will realize it’s all just your own set of thoughts. All you’ve been afraid of, essentially, is just your own thoughts. Literally fear mongering yourself. That is one part of the recovery but the most important. The other part is the sleep itself, which is effortless. It requires nothing from you and needs no effort. Good luck!
It happens over time. It won’t go away immediately, of course. No insomniac is gonna wake up one day and discover the insomnia and fear is all gone, all by themselves. But it can happen slowly. Learn to let go bit by bit. Having the knowledge already puts you miles ahead. The next step is putting a game plan into practice.
My suggested game plan for you is like this:
1. Fix a bed time schedule of at least 6 hours. Get out of bed at the same time no matter how you slept. If you find you can’t sleep during the allocated bed time, always do what you did before your insomnia. Did you get out of bed when you couldn’t sleep before your insomnia? If you didn’t, then just stay in bed and try to get comfortable.
2. Spend the first one or two hours after waking up just letting your emotions flow. Fear, anxiety or whatever. Nothing is prohibited, allocate this time to allow you to feel whatever you want. You may also write your feelings down if you want. But this is the only time during the day you allow your emotions to vent. After this, get on with your day. Do your chores or whatever. Whenever sleep thoughts or fear creep in, acknowledge them gently but remind yourself that the time to feel any fear or sleep related thoughts is already gone so you will now focus on your day’s tasks instead and then get on with it.
3. Do not research sleep or try to fix it. There is nothing to fix. Get off forums like this. Try not to talk to anyone or think about sleep at other times, the only time you can do that is that one or two hours that you have set aside earlier. The rest of the time is for something else.Try this for a few weeks and see how it goes. Your fear will eventually go down over time and your sleep should improve. Good luck and best wishes to you.
Fear is common but this kind of fear is often conditioned. You have been “taught” to feel fear in this way from things you read, hear or see. But these info can often be wrong like fake news. When you were a child did you fear not sleeping? No. Because you have ZERO idea what sleep should be like, eg, it should 8 hours, continuous, deep sleep etc etc. When you were young, did you care what kind of sleep you got or how much?? No. Be that child again. Forget what you know now and just let everything go.
Let me ask you some questions:
1. Can your nose forget how to breathe?
2. Can your mouth forget how to eat?
3. Can your legs forget how to walk?
4. Can your fingers forget how to touch?
5. Can the sun forget how to shine?
6. Can the sky forget how to rain?
And so on and on…If you manage to answer yes to any of the above questions, then yes, you should worry about forgetting how to sleep and live a life of misery from now on.
Let consider another example,
If there’s a thunderstorm outside with heavy rain and strong winds, what do you do? Beat your chest, clench your fists and shout out to the sky, “WHY?”, “WHY ME?”, “WHY NOW?”. Does responding in this way help you at all? Or why wouldn’t it better to just accept it and move on instead, knowing that ALL thunderstorms will eventually pass and the sun will shine again? Sleep is just like that. Don’t complain about it. Take it as it is.Sleep works exactly like hunger. The more you are deprived of it, the more likely you will get more of it. That’s just logic. Will your body refuse to eat if it has been starved for days, in the same way will your body refuse to sleep in a comfy bed, if it has been starved of it for days?? Of course not. Then just let it be, there’s nothing much you can do about it either. And worrying actually makes it WORSE, not better.
Dear @Anni
You don’t know the context about other people’s insomnia. The real question here is have you gone crazy? Are you hallucinating? Then why are you still able to form sentences and express yourself here? And you claim to have insomnia for over a year already, sleeping 3 hours each night. During the year, have you experienced any of the stuff you are scared of? Well, if it hasn’t happened, what makes you think it will be likely to happen either, given your experiences so far is nothing of the sort. The question really boils down to: why are you scared of things that haven’t happened or may never even happen? Why won’t you only worry once it has happened and NOT before? If those things you are scared of NEVER happen, why worry now? Aren’t you shouldering the burden unnecessarily and make yourself needlessly suffer for no good present reason?
If you want to cure your insomnia, you have to stop being afraid of it. Have more insomnia to beat insomnia! Do the complete opposite of what you’re thinking you should be doing. Instead of spending more time in bed, spend less. Get out and do more. If you think coffee makes you sleepless, actually drink more. Show insomnia what you are made of. That you are a strong person and won’t be easily bullied. Nothing will grab you by the nose and make you go around in circles of fear like this insomnia is doing. Don’t let insomnia define who you are or what you are capable of.
Hello laura g!
I feel you because I and many others were there before. And @Bronte has already written a good response so I will not try to ply you with more of mine, which will be pretty similar.
My key advice to you is:
1. Your sleep window should always be min 6 hours, regardless of your average sleep duration. Getting out of bed at a consistent time each day is crucial.
2. Always default back to your pre-insomnia days. By that, I mean doing the same things or routines before you had insomnia. Because nothing is really broken. Only your thoughts about sleep have changed, physiologically it’s still exactly the same as before.
3. In insomnia, trying so hard to fix the problem actually becomes the problem. Resist the temptation to troubleshoot and fix things.Good luck to you and I wish you the best.
There is no such thing as a lifelong chronic “insomnia sufferer” imho. But there is such thing as a lifelong chronic obsession with sleep that it completely takes over your life and makes sleep as the main focus in everything that you do or think. But whatever you claim to have, it’s business as usual for your body. It will still sleep regardless.
Hello @Whiskers25
I do not know withdrawal from what exactly are you talking about? Sleeping pills?
From my “interactions” with my insomnia, I eventually came to realize there’s really nothing there. It’s all just a set of my own thoughts, fighting an illusioned or an imaginary enemy. Kinda like a cat chasing its own tail.
I eventually learnt to trust my own body, if I’m not sleepy, then it’s because my body just doesn’t need it at that point. At least not yet. But it’s come back eventually, it’s just a matter of waiting for it, and in the meantime, you might as well spend that time doing something enjoyable instead of worrying about it, because it really doesn’t matter whether you worry about it or not, sleep will still happen at some point, so if you chose worry, you would have spent that time unproductively and carried that worry quite unnecessarily over essentially what your own body decides what’s best or wants for itself. I also learnt to stop being petty and vengeful against my own body.
Of course, everyone’s different and as you have signed up for Martin’s course, he might have a better answer for you so I recommend you to seek his advice first and foremost. I wish you the best and hope you find your own liberation from your struggle soon.
Hello!
Welcome to this forum. Nobody seems to want to respond to you so maybe I shall say a thing or two.Pills don’t work. Earlier in my insomnia journey, I used them but they quickly fizzled out by the 3rd night so I came off them and never used them since. I later found out the dependence is purely just psychological and not physical.
It’s a blessing actually to not have used them long term. Because it allowed me to find natural sleep again. Anything that dents your natural sleep confidence automatically reinforces your insomnia. And taking pills is just one of them.
Good luck and best wishes to you.
Hey buddy
I found srt helped a bit. But it only helped to anchor my circadian rhythm so it’s not all over place as a result of falling asleep at 12am, 2am, 4am or some ungodly hour during my insomnia days. Once i fell asleep by a consistent time, everything else pretty much fell into place by itself.
I didn’t find stimulus control helpful at all. It increased my stress. I never got out of bed when i couldn’t sleep pre-insomnia so doing it while i had it was unhelpful. It helped reinforce the idea that wakefulness is wrong and must be avoided at all costs. I personally wouldn’t do it but i have heard it worked wonders for other people so I’m not in a position to tell what works for you. But always do what you did pre-insomnia. Because that is the state you want to return to.
So why were you sleeping on the sofa? And why weird you slept 2 hours there? You want to be in a state where there’s no bewilderment. Sleep is supposed to be natural and a result of being in a comfortable state and place and in a relaxed state of mind, so that can be anywhere and anytime and there becomes nothing to celebrate when you had a great night and nothing to despair over when you had a bad one either. You just become neutral and okay with either outcome. Good luck.
Hello @Janie
Thank you for your kind words. I may come across as irritating sometimes when I tell people the honest truth that their problem is almost always just an illusion. It is your mind playing tricks on you. Don’t waste any time figuring this out. Because it is just not worth it, as your body knows what it’s doing and it just cannot do it wrong. If your sleep was broken, there will be ZERO sleep ALL the time, not 2, 3, 4, 5 or whatever hours it is almost always getting. So the fact you are always getting some sleep and that doing srt or stimulus control involves nothing external, whatever you need to do to sleep is already internal inside you, you are not getting good amounts it because you have essentially been caught up in this self-inducing and self-perpetuating hoax perpetrated by your own mind.
There is almost nothing physical you can do about sleep except generating sufficient wakefulness by staying awake that induces sufficient sleepiness. That’s all there is to it. Since the problem is psychological, adopting a mental or philosophical approach is more appropriate in my opinion. Stop running away or fearing it. The world of insomnia is full of paradoxes. Examples include:
1. Doing less is more.
2. Having more insomnia to beat insomnia. Because more insomnia automatically = less time sleeping = more time awake = more wakefulness = more sleep drive = more likely to sleep. And the converse is true as well. It is cycle that repeats itself all over again and insomnia + good sleep are both stuck on opposite sides of the same coin. To achieve great sleep again, you need to have a bit of insomnia and so forth.So when you ask me, how do I achieve the calm wise step, I would say, when you know what psychophysiological insomnia is all about, that would be the most natural step to take. Because you can’t do anything physical about it and neither does worrying about it makes it any better either. In fact, it can make it worse. So just sit back, relax and let your body do its job.
A clear mind is everyone’s common origin. When we were young, we never thought about sleep. It just happened and we never worried about it. Unfortunately, where we’ve stumbled is because we are constantly bombarded by all that noise telling us what to do and what to expect and we constantly aspire to reach those expectations. In sleep, doing less is more. Doing nothing is the best.
Go back to basics. Go back to being the child you once were. Because ignorance is truly bliss. There’s no problem if you never thought there was one.
Hi Lemon! The words “will recover” still suggests an element of elusiveness. It infers there is much to do, it suggests something to achieve. To recover, you must think not of “will” but actually you are already there, you have actually already “recovered” because there never was a problem to fix in the first place! You just think that there is. If you can forget you have a problem, your insomnia will disappear. If you can forget about it, it’s no longer there. That’s the weirdest thing about insomnia.
Actually, your body doesn’t need to fix its sleep. It’s already always there. It’s you who need to fix your thoughts about it. Mindset is key. And effortless is the strategy. Best wishes zzz..
