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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.
