Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
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
The bad nights that happen after you think you have recovered is your “vaccine” to future insomnia episodes. They are a reminder that temporary sleep disruption can happen at any time and for no reason and that it is important to not over-react. Your insomnia is also a clue you are actually sleeping well! Because it invariably happens after a stretch of good nights, do keep that in mind, and bad nights are absolutely nothing to be concerned about.
Hello Chicca!
It’s assuring to note that as human beings, it’s perfectly normal to worry about anything and that outcomes in life won’t always go your way no matter how hard you try. Give yourself the permission to experience worry, anxiety or any unpleasant feelings, tell yourself that it’s okay and nothing to be ashamed about. Keep reminding yourself like this, “Yes, I am now experiencing anxiety, worry or whatever, but that doesn’t mean I cannot continue to do the things I love or be the person that I want.” Then try to put it behind you and proceed as usual. Such feelings tend to come and go.
In regards to your sleep, it is entirely in a league of its own, it is independent of your worries and everything else that’s going on in your life, so investing too much time and energy into it isn’t worth it. If you can’t sleep in bed while your husband is still awake, well why couldn’t you just get up and spend some time together? Watch a movie, have a chat or do something enjoyable together. Don’t wait for sleep, let it wait for you! Good luck.
The moment you give way to your insomnia is the moment you lose. You just cannot win if you keep doing it! Avoiding things won’t change anything nor guarantee you sleep well either, but you would have deprived yourself of the things you find truly enjoyable. Any connection you make only exists inside your head and is purely imaginary. And therefore any result you get is purely coincidental as well. I encourage you to go outside your comfort zone, stop protecting your sleep and then when you find you can still sleep in spite of it, you automatically debunk it. But then, like most insomniacs, you will start moving on to other things, like noise, husband snoring, rituals, sleepy teas etc etc etc. At some point, you are just going to have to confront yourself and ask “Well when will this nonsense ever stop??”. And it won’t because you keep on engaging in it. You just go on demonstrating to yourself that sleep is unnatural and therefore doing xyz is a must and SLEEP JUST HAD TO BE FIGURED OUT! Well good luck then. You just keep going in circles, your mind will keep playing games with you and sleep still elusive because curiosity, pondering and the fear that sleep is never enough is sufficient to keep you awake!
What an excellent share! Thank you and congratulations. This is what I always tell people who have sleep problems: make light of your insomnia and it will go away. Manage to forget about it and it ceases to exist. The best thing to do is plain nothing. Not cbti, no sleep restriction, no sleep diary, no stimulus controls, no rules basically. Really what everyone who doesn’t believe they have insomnia will do.
Pre and postnatal insomnia is really common so your story is relatable… If you go to the success stories section you will find plenty of mums who suffered like you did and are doing extremely well now like Cindy, who is a mother AND a musician, and she has plenty of insights to offer to new mums like you. For a lot of these stories, the underlying message is always the same: Don’t react, focus on your daily tasks and keeping your spirits up. As you journey through this, you will begin learning that your fears are way overblown, your insomnia can’t continue indefinitely, the longer you stay awake, the stronger your sleep drive gets, and that it is impossible to circumvent this despite your anxieties and worries. Worrying over it unnecessarily just makes it worse and will prolong your suffering, but YOU WILL ALWAYS GET THE MINIMUM SLEEP YOU NEED TO SURVIVE REGARDLESS OF ANY SITUATION. Good luck and congratulations on being a parent.
The final part of the recovery is when you have completely stopped tracking your sleep, stop obsessing over how many hours you get, or how “tired” you still feel despite sleeping X (or whatever) hours. Sleep becomes less and less of an issue, and you completely accept what sleep your body is giving you. At this stage, your pondering stops and you no longer seek answers or ask any more questions because you realize they do absolutely nothing.
The faster you let this matter rest, the faster you recover. You didn’t have insomnia for only 15 years either, because bouts of sleeplessness have always been part of your life from the moment you were born and will always remain a part of you until your last day. The last 15 years stand out because it was some moment that many years ago which triggered your brain to start paying special attention to sleep and that’s when all this efforts and monitoring of your sleep started going on. But of course, monitoring your sleep cannot and will not negate your body’s natural ability to sleep because this ability is separate and independent of thoughts. Thinking you are a bad breather or a bad eater will never prevent your body from breathing or eating because these actions are truly innate to your body in the same way as sleep is. Good luck!
There’s nothing to be creative about when it comes to sleeping. Your body already knows how to do it but your relentless dissatisfaction with it is what’s keeping you from sleeping! Forget everything you learn about sleep, the cbti, the rules etc. Set a get into and out of bed time and completely ignore everything else. Just give up the constant figuring out how many hours you slept and how many times you woke. Abandon the chase and ultimately the struggle! Return to basics and try going back to sleeping like when you were a baby. Has anyone heard of babies getting chronic insomnia at all? NO, because they have no concepts of such things and are not bothered with chasing sleep or results. Good luck.
I apologize for my intrusion but there’s something about this thread that I just had to speak out. There’s just too much detail about sleep here and all I read about are endless attempts to control it. Let me ask you a simple question: Aren’t you supposed to be enjoying yourself or do you want to embark on this trip just to SLEEP?? Haven’t you slept enough already while at home?
You can’t control sleep. Neither can you control when you wake up. Nobody does. The fact that you feel sleepy before your bedtime and not sleepy at some times even when you’re supposed to be sleeping is testament to this fact. Sleepiness just happens when you are up long enough. And waking up after sleeping for some time is entirely normal too! Because your sleep drive is getting reduced once you’ve slept. Getting stressed over this is futile and actually makes going back to sleep worse. Embrace the wakefulness. For people who recover, the time it takes for them to fall back asleep after waking up just gets shorter. Good luck to you.
Hello!
Feeling sleepy before your recommended bedtime? That’s so common for people doing sleep windows, so perhaps you could think about it in a different light and from another angle:
1. Feeling sleepy = shows your sleep is not broken and your body is perfectly capable of it because otherwise, how would you even begin to feel sleepy?
2. If there’s evidence your sleep is not broken, why do you even need to follow a sleep window? To prove what? Show your body that you can sleep? Well that’s like getting up and walking around to prove to your body you can walk perfectly fine, with no problems whatsoever. So why don’t you do that and walk around for every minute that you’re awake? Well, the reason is when you are already so completely convinced that there’s nothing wrong about something and you’re not obsessed over it, you just stop doing that anymore and in this example, people would rather sit down and relax and than try to show to themselves what they already know is true. This is exactly what you trying to do with a sleep window. You want nightly proof that you can sleep at specific times and you desperately try to achieve, build and keep the momentum by following a fixed set of rules. When you no longer need to convince yourself, you just give up and move on. This is what every insomniacs should aspire to return to. That perfectly innocent blissful ignorance of a baby who doesn’t care about these things, aren’t caught in it because of stuff they read or heard everywhere and where sleep just comes and goes as it pleases. Good luck!
Hi Sam!
I don’t use a sleep window anymore, my earliest bed time is now midnight which I happily oblige if I am sleepy by then and the latest 2am in which I climb into bed regardless of how wired I am. My out of bed time is anytime between 7-9am. I also do afternoon naps if I have the time and space for it. I stopped tracking my sleep and I have no idea how much I sleep. I seem to function fine like this, I might get sleepy at several times during the day but I take that as a sign my sleep system is in perfect working order and not because I was sleep deprived which I used to believe. My advice is only use a sleep window as a temporary crutch, because it is neither a sleep guarantee nor a sleep generator. Using a sleep window still won’t make you sleep more than what your own body needs! Thank you and good luck to you.
Hello @momup and welcome back! Haven’t heard from you in ages and it’s comforting to hear you are sleeping well.
Back to your queries, it’s quite likely your sleep will mess up a little bit. Hence it’s common to hear about people getting sunday night insomnia because they go to bed later and wake up later on the weekends compared to weekdays. But that’s life so the real question here is whether the weekend night life is worth losing some ZZZ over.
That said, it’s also impossible to tell how your body will respond to the new schedule until you actually do it. There is a chance you still sleep well on both weekdays and weekends despite the altered sleeping schedule anyway. Or even if you change nothing, you still get the occasional sleepless night. So why fret about it when you can’t control it? You should live your life as you want and not make sleep as the main consideration.
Hello Paul! You are already using the shortest sleep window and there’s really no need to change anything.
I think you have the wrong concept about sleep windows. It’s only there to help regularize your nights and keep your sleep consistent, but at no means, does it guarantee you will sleep. Obsessing over the details and asking too many questions is probably not going to help you very much. Your best sleep happens when you don’t obsess over the tiny details or wonder if you are doing it right. It is in letting go completely and letting your body take over.
In a way, your sleep window questions are like asking if you eat your lunch at 1pm, will you get hungry enough at 7 pm for dinner or do you need to eat lunch earlier so you get hungry by 7pm, or something along those lines. The answer is does it really matter? Does it matter if you eat lunch at 12pm, 1205pm, 1230pm, or 130pm or 2pm or whatever, are you so obsessive in getting hungry enough to having dinner at 7pm sharp?? When you start doing things like this for everything, you only create unnecessary hassle, inconvenience and disappointment to yourself. And when you don’t achieve your desired result, you begin to despair over it and think something has gone wrong somewhere and start doing different things in an attempt to “fix” it, when you really should just RELAX and let your body do its job. Your body just knows how and when to sleep in the same way as it knows when and how to eat, breathe, plus many other functions. Obsessing over details is pointless. You get sleep when you don’t think about it or even want it (think about those time how sleepy you got when you were stuck in a boring movie, a boring lecture, or just plain bored from doing nothing). People desperate for sleep and wait all day for it to happen just don’t get very much of it! Learn to appreciate the overall process and not the outcome, stop chasing sleep and take your time to appreciate the other things in your life. Hope you find this useful and good luck.
